iti) i i ff % 9) Bes fi he et WEN Tha hie Re Me ORL Ott OS Set Vas Pari ThA PEL An, St i tN Veet Tater eho Wh) yy An Mey Ng: ad THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY 910.9 B4Ge eek * ‘ rg *} ~ me a A Sis BR 43 Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. U. of I. Library _ ‘THE LITTLE WORLD By STELLA BENSON I POSE = LIVING ALONE « TWENTY THE POOR MAN’ ° PIPERS AND A DANCER THE PIP TLE WORE BY STELLA BENSON joew Bork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1925 All rights reserve d CopyRIGHT, 1925, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1925. Printed in the United States of America by J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK A £ Y3 : ea The sketches and articles in this book are nearly all reprinted from newspapers and magazines. I have to thank the Editor of the Star for encouragement in reprinting the greater part of them, and I am indebted to the Editors of the Nation and Atheneum, Country Life, Woman's Leader, South China Morning Post and the New York Bookman for their courtesy in raising no objection to the republication of the rest. 5906059 Vevtile | TOP RIR te beta ANA PPC Digitized by the Internet Archive © in 2022 with funding from University of Illinois Uroana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/littieworld00bens CONTENTS PAGE ‘TRIPPERS Beer ME he fect) COR AD ae rameter ae ee ance I Seat UNHARITANTS |. s. sitcl Nata ee aun & ieee 6 MS ATES FU cs) o's APSR pae muletetiee EO Tue States II sibs: |) eA Di gE OM peRnEE NG MD Ge eee etek C) SEATARHSUA ELS e015 0) 0. haat ae Sa gree ae oe REIN TES FEV oN ey es Vi gd arcu Retna repent Mee g RESOAT ES OVA et ek We. ath dil SMU a ray ep uel cae SEs et Lio (as ay iting Uke Ure On) ot i aR ana ETL USS iN Rae UE RTA ame. A CY DELI NY Yen Manita—Macao—HoncKoNG . . . . - ~~ 39 EIST Ota dh Lo, Ded pi cad rN ELEC LE TOURNEY: 0.000) ab lh cura ai Dette te ot tain 8 EB CEs 4 5 a a | EY Hie Mee, Wists Peg | WI MEMORIA cgi is) ol) Leathe oh RTE ihatg re Te el NO Rechte ge 5 AR Merle th St Gd ELL I CCRC AT Lat oan AMA OR ao OES a EO aT Ri fa OLp ARMIES AND OLD EMPERORS. . . . - -~ 73 BREA WO SE RIVER) 31 497 as oan eke, oh iis itice: 76 vii viii CONTENTS PAGE PSDIA LS VT) (rei ecco ve. oo ea ey hee eee i TL BPD ERNUL Reel os ek ast Oe en en er ORS PRPDYA PLL it ere hah een teks kel dat Means | ee ENDIAC LV a ujke nes) bet: sk ce Peee CERES Dae cet MURR OTATESAOGAINGL 5 Zils ce ee een ie Deven neen ita SD HRPSTATES AGAIN (LL (3). See eo Shean ote SHES DTATES ‘AGAIN’ [LT iu) eet ae eee ee ae SHE LOTATES: ‘(AGAIN "TVA th. ee oe ae ree ee ee ee ‘EHR STATES! AGAIN V7, G5) wth e tiie hall coins Sane (GROGRAB EDV 5/2002 ia EN Sh ise MRS AO ee rome tat ae ANGELSIN THE RED SEA 4 ii. calle eee) ean Seine ORT te PICNICHING ADEN | ths O08, Ne) Crue all a: nn WuNNANED (oo eee See ee a ee Eee YUNNAN II A ee eae Erm ET LCA Ae Ra ee igh g War BTS MEN NANOLLD ') 36 Evel Rew ule He aMI emer 60 fe nee name se ak IONNAN ULV: 010) cu vised Bevueylw tae amenee | oo ofl (SR ee coca PS YCERIENTAN V0 CTR EET PaO R SRS (come Oma, a0 en ea ONENTA NE FVD 0) 6 an oan ortdine ce 9 ae MUNNAN “ViIT.. 5:5 (80S ee neh nice cio)" a ea ee a PiGS' ANDAPIRATES {10)/\ Su Sa eee cas en eee EEA MOT if ENS A It Sn ne le ln Journey In: Inpo-CHINA }/0 1.00) edad weep ered en . Y . a4 | eh 7.4% Mi e Lay 7 MH ‘g i ; r ‘THE LITTLE WORLD — ¥ 2 Tit. he ‘ i“ « my e i} ary : aE - , » a ~ o> i Be. ~ a? 7 , ~ — — Ss 4 es eee lt. = THE LITTLE WORLD TRIPPERS N Tintagel Cove the sea is as luminously green as though it had a light beneath it. The rocks above water are like leopards, streaked and spotted, and beneath the water they are like pale tremulous green ghosts. There is another ghost sometimes in the water; sometimes it comes to the surface and becomes a seal. The seal looks nervously this way and that; it looks outward first at the safe sea and then inward at the beach all flowered with the jumpers of charabancers. When it sees the jumpers it dives hurriedly and only reappears now and then to confirm its worst fears. The broken indented outlines. of King Arthur’s Castle comb the mists which stream in from the sea. The Castle crowns a high solitary rock and there is only one way on to the rock. It is a steep way, only to be followed by nimble trippers in single file. This is a piece of pretence history and concerns the nimblest trippers of all. Being history it points no moral except the obvious moral that it is wiser to be born within earshot of Piccadilly than without. I 2 THE LITTLE WORLD The nimble Piccadilly trippers were four in num- ber and they got up at four o’clock on the morning of Bank Holiday. One carried a large bowl of Cornish cream; one carried a sack of saffron cakes, one a crate of pasties and the fourth was armed to the teeth. They were desperate persons and their names were Mirabeau and Mirabel, Justin and Justine. They belonged to the most subtle and insidious type of tripper. Justine and Mirabel wore neither orange jumpers nor bandanas. ‘They were plain-clothes trippers and they were not only des- perate but exceedingly supercilious. There is a very small old lady who keeps the keys of the castle. She knows a great deal about trippers—she laughs at them but I do not think she finds it necessary to despise them. She is a Resident and Residents shall inherit the earth. She did not know enough to suspect the four super- trippers, Mirabeau and Mirabel, Justin and Justine. Armed with the key they filed along the steep sloping ridge that leads to the castle gate. Perhaps the ghost of the fair bridge along which Lancelot rode still hung upon the air above their heads but, as a support for the feet of trippers, that bridge has gone. One must climb down now, down almost within reach of the springing applegreen spray, almost within earshot of the drumming of the sea in the caves below the castle—and then up again towards a sky patterned with white cag Mtouds and with a changing design of ai bail a « Ff » eS, 7 TRIPPERS 3 When the time of day changed from faery time to human time—that is to say, at about nine o’clock —there was a roaring sound that at first was like a little seed of sound planted in the air but presently outgrew even the chanting of the sea. And along every road—from Newquay, from Clovelly, from Bude and Bodmin, from Plymouth and the two St. Columbs—from further afield still, I think—from Kilburn, Walthamstow and the two Tootings, from Birmingham and the raucous streets of Liverpool and Glasgow, from New York and Philadelphia and the bald yellow cities of Illinois—came the charabancs, carrying hosts of the most innocent and terrible enemy of all, massing for the last spoiling of the castle. ‘‘Trippers,” said Mirabeau, as he balanced the last of a row of quartz- and crystal-shot boulders on the brink of the precipice, “devour the color of the sea and bring the sun of the suburbs into the green dark of caves. Even fine weather is dull because they prayed for it in church yesterday.” ‘Trippers,” said Justin who, with muscular yet refined movements, was driving stakes across the door in the machicolated wall, “are the last proof of the first fall from grace. Nobody tripped before Adam and Eve fell—or, in other words, before the first conducted tour was made from the first garden suburb.” __ Mirabel was stacking provisions in a little cave _under a bank of thyme. She said, “I hate trippers 4 THE LITTLE WORLD senselessly. I hate their women because their blouses are thicker and more vivid than their skirts, because their skirts dip behind and because they lie in gross lumps upon the thyme with their hats awry. I hate the men because their coats are not Harris tweed yet pretend to be and because their shoes are the wrong brown. [ hate little children with chocolate round their mouths and no handkerchiefs. I hate them all because they play gramophones in places where not even music should intrude. I know well that everyone has a right to the air that blows over the peacock sea—even if some people breathe that air through sticks of peppermint rock. I admit I am a tripper myself; I come from far to see things I have heard of. To eat lotus in a Chinese temple garden or bananas on Blackpool pier is the same thing—I know it. But I am I and only I have rights.” Justine said nothing but she covered with her — revolver the leaders of the long line of trippers — filing up the path that grooves the first boulders — at the foot of the castle rock. The leading tripper was a woman in a striped blouse and flounced skirt; she was inadequately corsetted yet very warm. Two little girls followed her; they wore thick red dresses with low waists and lace collars; their cheeks bulged with bullseyes. Behind them came a man with a fat cheerful nose and a curl on his forehead; — he wore his cap back to front. As Mirabeau and Justin set their shoulders to the + TRIPPERS 5 first balanced boulder, Justine pulled the trigger and Mirabel unfurled their banner in the misty hes ae The police from Launceston, sent for by a dis- tracted Parish council, found the four supercilious super-trippers after the siege was broken. They lay in the King’s Chapel on the summit of their strong- hold—the four silly crusaders. They lay in a row with their sneering eyes shut and their knees crossed —like other crusaders. Their souls were shaking hands with King Arthur and his knights in Paradise. ‘Come in, adventurers,” cried Arthur, ‘“‘trippers all, come in.”” And when he had shaken hands with Mirabeau and Mirabel, Justin and Justine, he turned with outstretched hand to the other trippers asthmatically filing up the quartz-shot path to Para- dise. There was the hot woman, striped and sticky as a bullseye; there was the imitation motor cyclist with his cap the wrong way round, and there were the little girls with remnants of chocolate clinging to their very eyelashes. ‘Come in, come in, adven- tures all...” OLDEST INHABITANTS THINK of starting a simple but expensive memory course for inhabitants of the prov- inces of over eighty years of age. Oldest inhabitants seem to be always culled from our rural popula- tion. One very rarely meets a Londoner who re- members Piccadilly Circus before Mercury—(or is it Eros?)—alighted there, or Kensington before Barker’s arrival, or the Underground before it knew Pears Soap. Londoners have either short memories or short lives. My memory course, there- fore, will advertise for its public in the provinces only. ‘The advertisements will be headed ““TOO YOUNG AT SEVENTY?” Pupils will be ex-. pected to commit to memory simple incidents con- nected with the Napoleonic Wars—including the reports current weekly of Napoleon’s execution in the Tower—-; the first journey of Puffing Billy— tickets obtainable from Thomas Cook’s grandfather and Son’s great-grandfather—, and the laying of a wreath on the grave of George IV by the secretary of the Upward and Onward Society. A cheaper line for juniors will embrace the Crimean War, the first penny stamp and humorous anecdotes about aunts in crinolines and uncles on 6 OLDEST INHABITANTS ; boneshaker bicycles. Those who wish to specialize in having spoken with the son of the man who was the first to spread the news of Queen Anne’s death or having been dandled on the knee of the great- grand-daughter of the barmaid who served the last drink to Ben Jonson, may do so at a higher rate. Everyone is a potential Oldest Inhabitant—more or less consciously. Throughout the War and the Peace and the drought and the strikes—even in the dim days of Suffragette trouble or the first motor cars—you could see budding Oldest Inhabitants go- ing about with pursed lips thinking, ““By Jove, won’t it be fun to tell my great-grandchildren this . . . My, won’t they gape. .. .” As a matter of fact, great-grandchildren never gape; they walk away when reminiscences begin. Indeed at the present time nobody walks away more quickly than I do. But I cannot conceal from myself the fact that the day must come when I no longer walk away but, on the contrary, am walked away from. However it is fortunate that Oldest Inhabitants do not have to depend on their great-grandchildren for the necessary half-crowns. As long as a jour- nalist is left alive Oldest Inhabitants will never find themselves without a public. I myself mean to out-reminisce the most ardent reminiscer. Already, while yet most of my care- fully stored copy is shared with every man in the street, when nobody wants to hear my air-raid ad- ventures, when nobody will admire me for drinking 8 THE LITTLE WORLD sugarless coffee in 1916, when, in a word, every- one knows far too much—I am beset by temptation. Everyone is; that is why so many of us go to America now and it is also why so many Americans are coming over here. They can still nail our attention by means of anecdotes of Prohibition and we can still raise a thrill in the States by lying about bombs. But these triumphs are too easy for me. I find that as the years pass my tendency is to have been actually and actively present at every great event in the world’s history during the last twenty-five years. Yesterday my friends might have heard me men- tion that I had seen the first aeroplane that flew at Aldershot, lived in the same world as Tennyson, Gladstone and Dan Leno, watched on the Barbary Coast the first scenes of the tragedy of Prohibition. Tomorrow—or, more accurately, in the year 2000 —there is no saying what my friends may hear me mention. By then I shall have looped the loop with Cody and Count Zeppelin, I shall have heard Ten- nyson recite the Idylls of the King to the Fabian Society, I shall have shared with Gladstone at Delmonico’s, N. Y., the last recorded cocktail in the States. ‘That was the year of the drought,” I shall add triumphantly, “the year when all the best people could be seen going down Piccadilly in aertex-cellular lounge suits made by Mr. Mallaby Deely. . .” I shall really believe it. The mind’s eye is a docile organ. OLDEST INHABITANTS 9 If all this should not come true of me, then no doubt it will be true of you. Nearly all of us are really counting on becoming Oldest Inhabitants. We all have our little pet lies laid by in lavender. THE STATES I Y friend and I had come—walking and bor- rowing ‘‘lifts” alternately—up to this moun- tain village in New England because there was a house there that had once been hers and because she | wanted to revisit a place she remembered and loved. But the place didn’t smile in the same way as she remembered—places never do—her own late house was empty of hospitable successors and the village had forgotten her. We broke into the empty house and stayed in it for a night or two, finding some marooned cans of pork and beans in the larder. On Sunday we went, on an impulse, to church, seeking distraction. [he impulse had seized my friend immediately after she had washed her hair, and church saw us arriving, she with towelled shoulders and a handsome disorder of dripping yellow hair down her back, I in smock, breeches and a little sat-upon hat. I remembered church in my English youth—Sunday hats .. . tight shoes squeaking up the aisle—and hoped that the Almighty would prove ~ to be more democratic in this His Own Country. | He did. The minister vaulted from his dais to © to i a Sate at wae Pe THE STATES II welcome us and, taking one of our hands in each of his, drew us to a front pew. “Now which of you plays the harmawnium?”’ he said tous archly. “Our organist has failed us.”’ “She does. She’s English,” said my friend, in consequence almost ceasing to be my friend for the moment. ‘‘Now isn’t that just fine,”’ said the minister and drew me out of the pew towards the harmonium. Now I have never tried to play the harmonium, but on the piano, the guitar or the penny whistle I can play ‘Abide With Me” or “Sun of my Soul” rather effectively. Unfortunately, as this was a morning service, the shades of night could not be expected to bear out the spirit of these hymns, but the minister, on being informed of my musical limi- tations, said that this was not really very important. So after a moment of silent stage fright during which I could hear no sound but the regular drip- ping of my friend’s hair on the back of her pew, I began, intending to play a few preliminary staves of the hymn, solo, as they do in all the best abbeys and cathedrals. The congregation appreciated this intention, but the minister did not. He began Abid- ing With Me from the first note, leaving the con- gregation to burst into tongue two lines later. There was a terrible entanglement of sound which indeed _ was never unravelled before the end of the hymn, for I could not make up my mind which to follow. I returned to my pew without waiting for an encore. ’ 12 THE LITTLE WORLD But the minister forgave me. He inserted into his sermon a generous and hearty testimonial to England and the English. “A nawble race, the English,” he began and leaned over towards me for confirmation. ‘‘Isn’t that saw? ... Empire, I believe, does not neces- sarily spring from imperialism ... dawn’t you agree with me? .. . and now that we are all en- gaged in the greatest international conflict in history, dawn’t you think we ought... .” These appeals were addressed directly to me and, since I had never taken part in a sermon before in this way, I hardly knew whether I was right in re- plying, ‘Indeed I hope so .. . yes certainly ... no doubt you are right,” etc., etc. I now think that © the questions were simply rhetorical, though they did — not seem so, and that a gratified silence was all that was expected of me. After this scene of humiliation we decided to seek oblivion in departure. Hearing that a train left its terminus eighteen miles away at sunrise next morn- ing, we determined to walk all night and catch it. We took two blankets from the linen cupboard — of the house in which we had been making an un- authorized visit, a lantern, and a horrible cocktail — made of the dregs of a whiskey bottle mixed with those of a brandy bottle. (The cellar of our un- known hosts was lamentably low.) We thought — that this mixture might at least save our lives in an emergency. We wore the blankets as ponchos. eS YS Ss SO RAY s Rs WHITE MOUNTAIN MOONLIGHT THE Lisp wat SOR Rt ea | | WOMERSITY AF Hiiois =. x 4 ‘ THE STATES 15 “At least,’ said my friend, as we set off in the bright moonlight looking like two ambulant bolsters, “we're safe anywhere. Dressed like this we needn't fear that we shall fascinate the licentious peasantry.” Nothing happened to us. We walked all night down empty frosty moonlit roads. We strayed four miles out of our way and found ourselves among the great fantastic buildings of a deserted iron foundry. Huge pale towers and halls seemed to have been built by an extinct race of giants. One imagined that they were only reconstructed on the remembering air when the old moon shone full. For a time we could find no one, not even a ghost, to set us on our way again, but presently we found a soli- tary post office, and our clamor woke up a tolerant postmaster who came out, dressed in a childish night- dress, and showed us our path. The moonlight at last was strangely replaced by a clear frosty dawn, and as soon as commonplace daylight stripped the far valleys of mist and mys- teries, we saw our train standing, puffing urgently, a thousand miles away, as it seemed. So we ran. We ran downhill for the whole thousand miles. I thought I should never breathe again. The poncho and the frightful cocktail somehow induced me to break out into a violent cold sweat—a thing I had read about but never experienced. I froze and dripped simultaneously. I was sure that death must follow this effort, but still it seemed worth it if we could catch that train. A car passed us and 16 THE LITTLE WORLD answered our wavings and entreaties for a lift with “Git out the road.” We reached the depot as the tail of the train disappeared round the bend. Twenty-one miles of violent endeavor wasted. Defeated and robbed of pride we threw ourselves on our backs in mid-platform. The depot men stood round us, eyeing our disguise, scarcely believing their eyes. The driver of the car that had passed us came and said, ‘‘Werl . . . wurn’t that too bad. I ses to meself, ‘Ef I knoo who them two females was I’d take a chance and givem a lift to the depot.’ . . . But you sure looked so queer and I ses to me- self, ‘One can never tell...” The innkeeper of that village was a jewel. He gave us quantities of brandy—at five o’clock in the morning—he boiled hot baths with his own hands. There was no train that day and we slept under six quilts each till the night. But when we sought to pay our bill the landlord said, “Aw werl ... I dawn’t take money from fawks that looks as ef they hadn’t got enough of it.” We nearly missed the next train in our efforts to induce him to compromise. It NEVER could make any impression on Ameri- can newspapers. ‘They never hailed me as a contributor, even as an interviewee I cut no ice. What I hoped were the subtler intricacies of my THE STATES 17 character seemed to be always missed by inter- viewers. ‘She Hit London Cop”’ was once printed under my photograph to give point to an interview in which I had given rein to my opinion on the Feminist question. The truth is, we English are not dramatic enough; the English affectation or art of understatement makes absolutely no appeal in America. ‘The essence of American art and wit is’ overstatement. Studying the most serious news-organ of San Francisco, streaked with comics, spotted with movie darlings and murderers, patched with eye-stretching domestic secrets like—HUBBY NEVER COMES HOME TILL BREAKFAST SAYS FAIR PLEADER—, I used to remember the sacred sheet upon my London breakfast table of long ago, reti- cent, unsmiling, scrupulously unlocal, innocent of large type, hiding its light under a bushel of re- fined advertising, leaving nothing outside for the superficial eye but the triple mystery—birth, death and marriage. .. . American papers are meant to be read in one minute by people who have only two minutes of leisure during the day and spend them in an ele- vator on the way to the office. They have to atone for their garrulity by an extreme concentration of snappy news on their outer pages. For instance, the democratic American, wishing to know which of his social superiors is in town, can master at a glance this information in type three inches high at the 18 THE LITTLE WORLD head of an outside column—GEE THIS IS GREAT SAYS WOOL-KING HOME FROM — WILDS. Whereas the democratic Englishman on a similar quest would probably go all the way from Mornington Crescent to Elephant and Castle before he found the following treasure buried in the insig- nificant masses of the Court Circular; Mr. and Mrs. Marmaduke Woolley have returned to their town residence after a visit to the country. Or again, the~ belligerent American hungering to stretch his lungs once more to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner —in which exercise he was so prematurely inter-— rupted in 1918—may be gratified by this six-inch statement; WAR WITH SO-AND-SO INEVITA- BLE, without troubling to lower his busy and patri- otic eye to the tiresome postscript in the smallest” possible lettering—is opinion of Mayor of Minx- ville. g The American newspaper often consists of as_ much as half a column devoted to international af-— fairs, an immense auto section, a financial section, a movie section, a society section showing Native — Sons and Daughters of the Golden West in sepia attending each other’s weddings, and a scandal sec- tion describing the deliciously immoral practices of — minor European princelings whom no one ever heard of before. These scandal supplements inspire and excuse such opinions as that with which one of my_ pupils in a California university once began his essay; All foreigners labor under crowned heads in e THE STATES 19 dirt and immortality. There is also, in a well-con- ducted newspaper, a woman’s section, a supplement devoted to the private affairs of the Prince of Wales, a baseball section, a supplement for the in- struction of our kiddies, and a Love Supplement (the illustrated story of the Love of Goldlashes and her Soldier Boy Throughout the Ages). Above all there is the Comic Supplement. One of the most uniting elements in the United States is the Comic Supplement. Every city has its newspapers; no city reads the organ of any other city, but the comics are common to all respectable newspapers and one may help to Bring Up Father anywhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Father is the angel of America, Maggie Jiggs stands for devil. Father has a very much greater and more loyal band of followers than has the President of the United States. What Father says—goes. _ I have only once known the comics to miss their mark, and that—I am ashamed to say—was in a certain neighborhood peopled by a little English colony of ranchers and miners at the feet of the Rockies in Colorado. I lived there for some months doing odd chores for a kind old English couple. { loaded alfalfa or delivered butter and eggs in the ittle mining city five miles off all day, and at night— ‘ince the shack was only a two-room one—slept com- ‘ortably and healthily on the porch with snow lrifting over me. But at meals and in the evenings ve had heart to heart talks in the little hot cramped 20 THE LITTLE WORLD kitchen-livingroom; we discussed the Comic Supple- ments—from a moral standpoint. “She didn’t ought to ’ave clipped ’im one on the jaw ... A woman’s a woman, meant to love, honor, and obey, and there ain’t no excuse for a woman, be’aving like that . . . Oh yes—I know ’e provoked ’er, men can be a sore trial and that’s a fact—but still . . .” In the presence of any great natural phenomenon such as Niagara or Bringing Up Father, it becomes at once apparent how incurably man suffers from inadequacy—and perhaps the English more.than any other race, on account of their craving for cold moderation in words. I once made an expedition up a Rocky Mountain with these same ranching compatriots and some neighbors who were miners. There was a view—east, of the prairie,—west, of the white peaks; there were, at our feet, fantastic sloping rocks of a rare true rose-red. When we saw these things we all looked ashamed as if God had been mentioned. ‘Then we said, ‘““My word, I can see Harrison’s shack quite plain. And there now . if I can’t see the pigstye be’ind it. See that little speck? That must be the ’og that ’e looks to kill come Saturday... .” But we soon turned from that to a discussion of a Royal Prince’s mar- riage. And I must say that not one of the Americans about us on that mountain top seemed to be writing odes or praising God. THE STATES 21 Americans travel as tourists, we travel as money- seekers. But—and here is the strange thing—we all come home at last as poets. The poet in man is only articulate when his thoughts run home. The American on the beautiful other side of the world forgets liberty and George Washington and remem- bers the good ground on which he once set his feet, the deep shadows across his canyons, the cactus on his warm foothills, the steep ladders of sunlight on Fifth Avenue. And the Englishman, bound by the chains of property in the shadow of alien moun- tains, forgets the dust kicked up by the charabancs, forgets the high income tax, seeks reminders only of the little poetic things of England—he who needs no reminders; he asks for news of the primroses in the old woods, he speaks stammeringly of sweet williams ‘in misty village gardens, of skylarks on the downs, of the friendly golden fogs of London, short days and early candletimes and robins singing on Christ- mas Day. Ill ARRIVED in San Francisco alone on Christ- mas Eve with five dollars in my possession, knowing no one. I went to a rather expensive hotel in Oakland—no hotel, bad or good, was, prac- tically speaking, within my means so I might as well choose a good one. I remember that my first difficulty was the bed. 22 THE LITTLE WORLD There was, as I saw at a glance, no bed in my bed- room. I concealed my surprise—I have a horror of seeming insular. ‘This was evidently a Cali- fornian peculiarity—bedless bedrooms—and I must make the best of it. I opened the wardrobe to hang up my hat—and the bed, which was one of those very patent labor-saving beds and had been trained to stand up on its hindlegs in the wardrobe when not in use, unfolded with a crash on my head. I did not feel financially justified in eating the hotel’s Christmas dinner. So I bought some biscuits and a bar of chocolate and went out to the Golden Gate beach. There was a cold swift mist leaping to shore over the tall barrier of the wintry breaking waves. The sun was thickly wrapped away in dark red-gray clouds and the sands looked pink and more ethereal than the sky. Three dogs were very kind to me, teaching me to throw sticks into the sea in the San Francisco way. They and I sat wagging our tails in a cold but cheerful row sharing biscuits (which they called crackers) and chocolate, and re- membering other Christmases. A seagull joined us and proved to be a biscuit-maniac. It ate till it could hardly bend its neck. But when I gave it a piece — of chocolate, its beak fell. A look of intense re- proach came into its round eye; it hurried to the sea _ and spat the piece of chocolate into a retreating | wave. It was too deeply offended to rejoin me and | the dogs. But we didn’t mind. All the more Christ- | mas dinner for us... . | be. THE STATES 23 IV EING alive at all is an incessant shock and, I B think, all the best lives are melodramas. Nevertheless in the course of every life the shock must hang fire at times. And in the construction of the melodrama there must be flaws, long-deferred entrances, maybe, on the part of the hero or heroine, or tardy exits on the part of the comic relief, or too much dialogue on the part of everybody. Moments between shocks are very hard moments to bear. To work one’s way round the world is to be often gloriously surprised and often exquisitely uncertain and often futureless. But even so, there are mo- ments when one is only too sure... . These lapses, I remember, seemed especially fre- quent in the life of an editorial reader to a Cali- fornia publishing house which concentrated on scien- tific works. In California I tried to be a University coach, a lady’s maid, a collector of overdue bills for an irascible firm, a salesman of boys’ books— and, last of all, an editorial reader. The last was the best-paid, the most comfortable, the most digni- fied—and the most dreadfully sure . . . Or so it seems to me now. I remember editorially reading a zoological book named, with extraordinary candor, the Boring Isopod. This Isopod, the author stated, could bore even rock and, personally, I can well believe it. And, as it happened, my intimacy with the Isopod = 24 THE LITTLE WORLD was interrupted by an earthquake. I had never ex- perienced an earthquake before. I had always sup- posed that a quake was a weakness on the part of the earth and that the feeling would be one of floppy giving way. On the contrary, the feeling was inde- scribably tense and energetic, as though the gods clenched their fists, as though titanic muscles were contracted suddenly. The office and the Boring Isopod and I were gripped, lifted, and let go. All the eucalyptus trees outside bowed and drew a hiss- ing breath. For several days the awakening shock of that earthquake stayed with me; the adventures of the © Isopod sang themselves to me like a saga. Being alive was strange again. And when this feeling died away, having waited expectantly without result for a repetition of the helpful phenomenon, I took the matter into my own hands. I approached an aviator and, having pressed ten dollars into his hand, said, in effect, “Sir, be an earthquake to me.” He replied, ‘“T’ain’t enough, ma-am. You can’t get nothing worth-while for ten bucks . . .”’ Ten dollars, how-— ever, was all I had. I told him that I was a writer and would boost him to the best of my ability in re-— turn for a satisfactory shock. (And so I did. On ~ my recommendation, probably hundreds of readers — of the London Star made a note of the name of © Roland S. Thomson.) He complied. In his com-— pany, mounted upon a Curtis biplane, I ricocheted — from one pillar of the Golden Gate to the other, t THE STATES 25 I turned upside down over San Francisco and saw the skyscrapers hanging like chandeliers over my head, I pounced upon cowering Alcatraz Island like a hawk upon a rabbit, and skipped facetiously over the whistling masts of ships. I was absolutely terrified. At any rate I suggest these homely remedies for what they are worth, to a world surely suffering— at least in parts—from a very confusing lack of war. Earthquakes, to be sure, should be taken with care and cannot always be resorted to in moderation. But there is always a Roland S. Thomson available to everyone who possesses ten dollars and a select public. The only drawback is that one can only once enjoy a thing for the first time. Even a shock can become sure .. . Still, a fertile mind will easily evolve equivalent forms of shock. If the worst comes to the worst, there is always the Electric Eel at the Zoo. I should like, by the way, to witness a meeting between the Electric Eel and the Boring Isopod. V OU’RE some stoodent,’’ said the doctor. ‘“You’ve most always got a book in yer hands. What’s that—Saturday Evening Post? Dandy book that. I do a g’deal of reading myself.” “Aw Doc,” said the bandaged girl in the next bed. ‘‘J’ever read the Rosary?” 26 THE LITTLE WORLD Soure Lireadsit., “Gee, what a book . . . Gee, I cried till I was sick to me stomach. Tck tck . . . Poor guy went blind. . . . Gee, she was a peach. . . disguised her voice an’ all . . .Tck tck . . . You know, Doc, I guess I’m crazy but it’s a fact I take a book like that as much to heart as if it was reel life. You know what I mean, a reely good book like that. Gee, didn’t seem like it was just made up. ’Member that Duchess . . . and the mansion? That’s what I call a reel true book any “You said it, lady,” said the doctor, but I was the ward’s prize stoodent and he turned again to me. “J’ever read a book called ‘Decameron’ by a Wop? It’s got more meat in it than most of the punk that a lotta white men write, let me tell you. Care to have me loan it you? Lotta women wouldn’t stand for it but you’re a stoodent. Some- body told me you write books as well, is that so? Well, say, it’s bin an interesting talk we had and— do you know what—you’ve inspired me to write a book meself . . . Bin in my mind for years but I’ve never gotten around to making a start. Yes, ma-am ... The subject’ll be Cirrhosis of the iver aie, | JAPAN I HO was it who first sailed across the Pacific? I have an idea that it must have been Thomas Cook & Son because—(if I remember aright )—-Thomas Cook discovered Australia and— probably—Son discovered New Zealand to match. Dear Thomas Cook . . . his office is the world, and somewhere in his ledgers, I know, lies hidden the secret of real adventure and of eternal youth. Look at Son, for instance. Ever since history began he has been as elusive as Love and has never yet made the mistake of achieving a name of his own or grow- ing up. I may be wrong but I imagine that Thomas Cook was among the first to evolve from slimy and primeval chaos and—directly he was dry—began distributing granite tickets for trips up newly arisen mountains. And when Son was born, he brought into the business that priceless asset which has been the essence of Thomas Cook’s prosperity—the spirit of search for impossible things. When I think of Thomas Cook I am proud to be an Englishwoman and when I think of Son I am proud to be a Daughter. 27 28 THE LITTLE WORLD Great as should be our admiration for people who go anywhere now for the first time, we should re-— member that at least they have newspapers to take off their hats to them and say thank you. ‘The — original Tourist Fathers of blessed memory had, as — a rule, nothing but a gratified conscience and a royal snub to look forward to. After starting across the Pacific myself I found less difficulty than before in realizing the intrepidity ; of those first travelers. I traveled on the smallest — and dingiest Japanese passenger ship on the Pacific © —yet I realize that its discomforts can be nothing © to those surmounted by the first climbers up and ~ down that mountainous swell. I imagine easily how © those early great waves must have hungered for the © bones of their first challengers. Even for my bones ~ they hungered to such an extent that they broke one. By the time I had reached Honolulu I had actually ~ a broken shoulder in addition to scores of minor wounds acquired by contact with walls, floors, fun- nels, masts, stewards, and any fellow passengers harder in texture than myself. One wave actually threw someone else’s fried egg and a carving knife at me along the whole length of a table. The question of the food of the pioneering tour- — ists is one which I can hardly bear to contemplate. — A minor liner’s food is like the conversation of some people I know; it starts with an almost hysterical © brilliance, all treasures are produced extravagantly © during the first outburst. And after that—corned * f JAPAN 29 beef . . . canned tomatoes . . . very weary eggs _, .. The eggs on board my ship were so tired that _it was no surprise to me to find them one day posing on the menu as “Boiled Eggs a la Religieuse.” Nobody dared to eat them under this ominous name _but I understood, I sympathized, as I try to sympa- _ thize with all weary yearning souls. Indeed I thought the idea particularly beautiful. Since therefore the Pacific—even today—is an ocean conspicuous for its lack of grocers, depart- ment stores, dairy-farms or other modern conven- ences, my brain reels when I think of the tourists who traveled in a pre-canned-tomato age. I should like to know what were the fears— probably courageously secret fears—felt by the first adventurers who did not even know the world was round and that—at any rate—Piccadilly Circus was always remotely ahead. Anything was possible in a world so inconceivable and so cruel. Myself, look- ing at that cynical, sliding sea, I think I know what form my terrors would have taken. For at first the sea battled with us ¢s though defying our chal- lenge, and later it ran ahead of us, mocking us . . . “Have your way then, fools, sail on, sail on . . .” and last of all it was suddenly terribly smooth and terribly pale under a blind black sky. A great wind for a few hours beat the sea absolutely flat; here and there a few hairs of spray went up like steam. Behind the squealing of the wind we could hear the flaying rain and the sea hissing like an aroused 30 THE LITTLE WORLD dragon. And still the sea was level as the water of a great waterfall, just above the edge. And I know that—if I had been the first traveler—I should have been sure then that this was the great Edge of the World, and that over that edge the doomed taut sea and my little silly doomed ship were falling, » shrieking, hissing, down into a chaos of nethermost stars. It was almost incredible to find that imagined terror past when the influence of the wind upon the sea made itself felt at last. The ship, no longer spellbound, swung and kicked healthily in a radiance © of flying spray and stars and phosphorus. Yet still, it seems, adventurers set sail to unknown ports. There was a man on our ship who turned aside on a new journey and will never come home to Japan now. He was Japanese and he died in the steerage on New Year’s Day while most of the crew and nearly all the passengers were dancing drunk. The sailors danced on the lower deck, singing high, metallic, unending, unbeginning songs and beating their hands in time to their dancing. ‘To this rather heartless sound the last sad adventurer began his new journey. Next evening, as the moon dispersed the clouds accumulated by a stormy sunset, the body of the traveler, with leaden weights at his feet, was given © a lonely farewell feast on the deck. A little table was spread with rice and fruits, and all the Japanese fellow voyagers of this man who had no friends a JAPAN 31 filed passed his couch of honor one by one and sa- luted him. At a little distance a Portuguese priest, uninvited but well-intentioned, read the Christian burial service on the chance that a few stray blessings might thus be lured out of the generous moonlit spaces for the benefit of so forlorn a pilgrim. The moon, besides preparing for the traveler a white _road up the sea, threw stars of silver broadcast on all the waves. These, I thought, must be the spirits of other men who had died at sea, assembling to shew this newcomer the way. And indeed, as he slipped over the edge—over his ultimate edge—all the spirits gathered gladly round him and, as we left the place behind, we could still see a great starry crowd about it. I was glad that a goodby so ex- quisite should have followed an end so noisy and so friendless. Only, when I saw Fuji standing on a cloud as we came into Yokohama, I was sorry that anyone who had loved that—as every Japanese loves Fuji—should die out of sight of it. But Fuji, after all, is another story. Japan is a fair story even the first word of which cannot be told by me. For I arrived in Yokohama with only about ten dollars plus a ticket to Hong- kong. It was sleety midwinter in the height of the Spanish influenza epidemic and I had a broken shoulder. To come, a2 woman alone, from California to Japan has the effect of a heavy fall. In California women, though not—as I think—essentially inde- — ~~ 32 THE LITTLE WORLD pendent, are socially precious. In Japan they are trash. In California a woman becomes almost tired of being supported in and out of public vehicles as though she were fainting, of having kerbstones’ and puddles pointed out to her as though she were blind, and of having packages a few ounces in weight snatched away from her as though she had stolen them. In Japan, on the contrary, you may try—in spite of one arm in a sling—to carry two suitcases and a typewriter at once, be swept into gutters by jinrickshas and at the same time be bitten by a horse with a straw petticoat and a red and yellow orna- ment on its spine but no manners— (Japanese horses dote on the flavor of women)—but no true Japanese will notice you or help you at all. Except that a policeman will probably choose that moment to ask you in Japanese for your passport or, failing that, for the date of your grandfather’s first marriage and for your reason for being in existence. If, in reply, you recite the two or three Japanese remarks you have learned—a request for hot water or for another boiled egg—the policeman is not mollified but says, “No spik Inglis,” and repeats his demands © in a much fiercer voice. On the whole in Japan you realize that you have committed such a social error | in being born that you instinctively acquire the habit of apologizing for being present or absent as the case may be, or for being trodden on or bitten or anything. ; ' | Once I committed half of a real crime, the other ¥ 4 iw { JAPAN 33 ‘half being committed by another member of my con- -demned sex. She and I were passing the outer gate of the Mikado’s palace in Tokyo when two motor | cyclists in uniform, riding furiously abreast, charged past us shouting something that we took to be merely the usual police maledictions. But they were fol- lowed by more loudly cursing outriders and we then realized that we were sharing the responsibility for ‘some unusually offensive crime. Turning to our ricksha-men to appeal for advice, we found that they had retreated to the side of the road and were there prostrating themselves reverently. The flaw in ‘their patriotism, however, was the fact that they had left us in the middle of the road, rolled up in rugs in tilted rickshas, I, helpless with horror, and my friend, with blasphemous giggling. I do not know who was the Japanese royalty who now began to pass us in several carriages and four, I only know that his progress was marred by the necessity of an unprincely detour, a slight but hideous ‘bending in the august straight line of his route, to ‘allow for the mushroom-like sprouting of two fe- males in derelict rickshas in his path. I am sure that only concern for dignity and the royal horses saved us from being driven over. I went to a Geisha show in Yokohama with an Englishman. I went feeling like an empress because the show was called into being for my benefit; I came away feeling less than the dust. At the door of the house we were received—or rather my com- 34 THE LITTLE WORLD panion was received—by a flock of little twittering women who clustered round him, removed his shoes, and conveyed him affectionately into the house. He was treated by them exactly as a California woman is treated by men. They indicated to him the joints a en in the mats in case he should fall over them and the © ceiling in case he should knock his head against it. Now and then a new twitterer, after a profound reverence, joined his escort. As for me, I was left to remove my own shoes in the company of the ricksha coolies, and pant behind the procession, pad- — ding unloved on frozen feet. Finally we reached a room furnished exquisitely with emptiness. The walls, which were sliding screens, were of gold paper — in black wooden frames; The handles by which the — screens were moved were black silk tassels. There was nothing in the room but a bowl in a corner, — containing a gnarled dwarf cedar and another bowl in the middle containing glowing charcoal. The — human inmates were decorative enough for any — room. They were two little dancers aged, as they indicated to us on their fingers, thirteen and fifteen years; their faces were very brilliantly and crudely — painted; their hair was caught in wide black loops — by vivid pins; their kimonos seemed to lack no pos- sible color; their obis—or wide sashes—were tied behind in puffed exaggerated bows, and each one carried a fan stuck in her obi over her heart. These two little flowers—like Moore’s sunflower—turned their faces to one sun only. ‘They settled my com- © ) | a al a. | 4G ef § dow a } i : JAPAN 35 -panion on a cushion embroidered with a pheasant, _and brought in a low table beautified with delicate bowls of food to be placed before him. As an after- thought and at my companion’s request, they posed -me on a lesser cushion embroidered with a mere frog. They danced for him. Their dancing was a sort of sleepwalking; their minds did not seem to take the slightest interest in what their feet and hands and delicate little bodies were doing; their cold small eyes looked out of their painted faces without inspiration or enthusiasm. Later they took a certain interest in me as though in a curious animal. They pulled my hair gently to see how it worked; they cooed with surprise while experimenting on it with Japanese pins—an experiment to which bobbed hair does not conveniently lend itself. They felt the materials of my clothes with industrious impersonal hands, untied my sling, opened my handbag and, finding a tobacco pouch and cigarette papers in its unladylike depths, demanded patronizingly to be shown how to roll. I cannot help feeling glad that when my soul was, in the beginning, classified as female and given to an underling angel to be disposed of on earth, it Was not fitted with a Japanese body. I cannot think that there would be very much left of that soul by now. A Japanese husband, I am told, when introducing his wife to a man friend, says, in effect, ‘‘Sir, this is ny little nuisance.” The friend replies, “On the 36 THE LITTLE WORLD contrary, Sir, she is more beautiful than a flower.” The lady listens to this cancelling out of opinions; she bows humbly but her eyes, I know, are cold and neutral. Her body bends; her hands serve always; her lips are ready with apology—and what more could any man desire? While my money lasted and on the proceeds of a couple of newspaper articles and an “Interview with Stella Benson,” I managed to go to Kyoto and back. My only happy moments in Japan were spent in the tangled shadow of trees and temples in Kyoto and during a day on Lake Biwa. We returned from Lake Biwa by an underground river, I remember, in the light of bland paper lanterns and to the sound of echoing chanteys from unseen singers hauling their way up against the splashing tinkling dimmed current. Z I came back to Yokohama with my ticket to Hongkong as my only asset. I went to a Russian refugee hotel to await a ship and there was over- come by Spanish influenza. The rare persons who occasionally attended to me did so wearing masks like demon dogs. After a week I managed to reel on board a China-bound Japanese ship and there fin- ished my attack in the orthodox way with the lung complications that were worn by the best people with influenza that year. If I had not clung with a desperate firmness to the brass rail of my bunk, I should have been repatriated at Kobe. But luckily there was a coal strike which delayed us, so the JAPAN 37 quarantine officers allowed me to wait and see. Also ‘someone had given me a little japonica tree in full ‘flower and a tiny Japanese garden of old twisted trees and gaudy fairy bridges in a box—and these things always drew the attention of Japanese quar- antine men away from me. A flower is a part of all the best business in hand in Japan—a much more important part than is a woman. II HIS is the story of a curious little conversation | in the (late) Grand Hotel, Yokohama, with a kind, tipsy man whom I had met at a dance. During my last two days in Yokohama, when I could just stand after my attack of influenza, he came and fetched me each afternoon in a ricksha from my miserable Russian hotel to sit in the Grand Hotel and sniff the perfume of cocktails and health and wealth. My arm was still in a sling, my face no doubt a hollow and ashy green and, as the sun went down, caution prompted me to get home to bed before the chill of night began. , “Sit still,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know it’s seven o'clock but I’m not going to let you go home. I want tosave you. Do you really think I don’t know what’s the matter with you? Do you really imagine you can go about with your arm ina sling and your face that color and your determination to get away dy yourself at a fixed time every afternoon—and 38 THE LITTLE WORLD continue to hide from your friends what you’re suf- fering from? . . . My dear, morphia’s an enemy that speaks for itself. Now, now, nothing you can say can deceive me—you see I know that protests are symptoms in themselves . . . My dear girl, you needn’t be afraid of me, I’ve known drugtakers ——— before. I loved one . . . I spent all my fortune in trying to save her and at last, on a doctor’s advice, I sent her home. . . . Well . . . she drowned her- self from the ship . . . For her sake, you must let ~ 9 me help you. . The story.of his love was, I happen to know, com- pletely untrue. It was part of the damask of ro- mantic fiction with which he covered his rather pur- poseless and sad life. I never saw him entirely sober — or entirely unromantic. But all his fictions were kind and dealt with kindness. He died in the Club — bar in the Yokohama earthquake and I am sure that © death interrupted him in one of the gentle rambling lies he so often told about the ideal life that he had never achieved. I hope he had a wrapt sentimental - listener like me for that last lie. He was almost — always just sober enough to feel the need of that. MANILA—MACAO—HONGKONG | | HERE are three ways of occupying an alien | place—first, to absorb, second, to be absorbed, third, neither to absorb nor to be absorbed. _ Manila is a vessel filled with oil and water. The Filipinos remain extremely Filipino. As for the Americans—one hundred per cent is a figure that admits of no modification. Manila has a sort of illusion of siege attached to it. The camp of America is pitched outside the con- fident sunny walls of the old city. The traveler first sets foot in a raw impermanent-looking area and could for a while believe himself in some West- ern township. You may see a bald red trail labelled Twenty-Something Street. You almost ex- pect to see the sign so expressive of the glowing Western spirit—DRIVE SLOWLY, CON- GESTED BUSINESS DISTRICT—erected hope- fully in a wilderness of scrub and sand. ‘The traveler toils across acres of imported America towards the hotel which rears itself, indecently opu- lent, above a waste of junk and lumber yards and gray hot grass—and suddenly, like the first pioneers in California, he meets the challenge of the old world again across the desert—here is Spain again, 39 40 THE LITTLE WORLD Manila, girdled with her golden wall and crownec with a romantic sun. Americans and Filipinos, as it seems to me, liv together in fifty per cent liberty, forty-nine per cen equality, and one per cent fraternity. Politically, ; great deal is said about brotherhood—personally almost nothing. ) I arrived in Manila during the Carnival. Bu the buildings erected for the occasion had beer burnt down the night before my arrival. Merry makers were pathetically trying to make merry the smoke among the ashes. I do not know wha) a raw or uncooked carnival in Manila may be liki but this one which had been “‘tried in the fire” wa: literally refined by the process. I was astonishec at the self-conscious politeness of the occasion; at atmosphere of I-can’t-talk-to-you-we-haven’ t-been-in troduced prevailed. People went laboriously maske and dominoed in select and well-chaperoned parties: it seemed that men poured confetti with feverisl caution over their aunts and sisters. Groups o virtuous business men and their overstitched wive stood watching through shocked pincenez a handfu of young new Sammies who were making so bold a to dance with some pretty Filipino girls. The girl wore their national dress—wired gauze at the shoul ders, high Elizabethan ruff behind the head, loope complicated skirt. . . . The Americans wore thet national dress... . : As for Hongkong, that grave and misty tilte MANILA—MACAO—HONGKONG 41 ity, it makes no claim at all to a spirit of equality. t is a solid lump of England; from waterside to eak-tip the little funicular carries Anglo-Saxon ivilization up and down. The average Hongkonger as a tendency to address all Chinese in a throaty one of authority as ‘Boy.’ He is quite sure that o show respect to “these natives” “lowers British restige.’ So Chinese Hongkong has acquired a oul that only answers to the name of Boy. Only he congested attached city of junks and sampans, noored and swinging with the tides at the island’s dge, is true to its own vivid and unsanitary convic- ions. ‘The little red and gold prayers flutter at very vessel’s mast and stern to protect the water ity from the march of civilization. The city of Macao is old, but it seems older than ts years. Here, I think, you have China victorious. Portugal lies drugged and asleep in the arms of -hina. The empty shell of Portuguese taste is there, he colored plaster walls, the low corrugated red tile oofs, the quiet gardened convents, the churches full fa vulgar and ardent daylight . . . Yet the city eemed to me almost wholly Chinese at heart. The road calm masks of Chinese women look down on he streets through carved bars and trellises that eem made to frame much more radiant faces; the unt eccentric shapes of papayas and bananas fill he squares and gardens instead of roses and olives; he churches are deserted except for a few little ranquil Chinese matrons, trousered and sleek, with _»on\to theiz;shoulders. And fire, born of a Chinese 42 THE LITTLE WORLD their babies strapped, in big colored handkerchiefs, sun, has devoured the cathedral except for its facade) which stands stark and stricken, with sunny space! as much behind it as before. The Chinese temples stand, their ferocious porcelain skylines bristling with dragons and dolphins, their dusty and slovenly altars presided over by absent-minded but com. placent Buddhas. And the Chinese fan-tan dens) stand—are encouraged by the Portuguese Govern: ment—and there you can go and take rather monoto- nous risks with a spare dollar and watch the China. man as he best loves to be—with his head bent over a board on which all that he has lies in danger . . Only when the shadows of the big African soldiers cross the door does it seem as if Portugal opened an indolent eye, ey | HONGKONG | HENEVER I go to Hongkong now, tall fashionable young Chinese and Eurasians lean across chemists’ counters, hurry from inside garages and bound into my cabin in the guise of hotel touts—to remind me that once I taught them certain branches of scholastic knowledge. Both they and I forget now—and perhaps never knew—ex- actly what knowledge they succeeded in acquiring from me. In the days when I was working my way round the world I thought myself lucky to be en- gaged to teach a class of fifty boys in all branches of human knowledge—(except mathematics) —for a hundred and forty Hongkong dollars a month. I lacked not only degrees, diplomas and all neces- sary knowledge, but also the voice and address of the teacher. I had a very noisy and robust-spirited class but to its credit let me say that no boy ever actually defied me. If any boy had been unkind to me on a hot day I should have cried; I don’t mind confessing that now. ‘The boys, in spite of a pen- chant for pea-shooters and cribs, were in the main extremely kind to me and [| think that was because my teaching did not tax their brains, and my disci- pline was so erratic that it demanded an almost 43 44 THE LITTLE WORLD paternal tolerance on their part. The ages of my: boys ranged from ten or so—in the Eurasian half of the class—to twenty-three, in the Chinese benches—_ but all alike were strangely soothed by my ‘‘method.” I treated them exactly like a kindergarten. A lesson in hygiene, for instance, would be accompanied— and, I firmly maintain, enlivened—by sketches on the blackboard representing such subjects as a microbe— in a facetious top-hat—carrying a little portmanteau labelled Typhoid, tripping up over a Smell called Per- manganate of Potash. History and Scripture also: lent themselves to illustration. J am sure that these. ‘‘twopence-colored”’ lessons hooked on to inattentive Chinese minds more firmly than did the “penny- plain” of some of the more experienced teachers. ~ Scripture was my worst difficulty, since to my gen- eration, I think, the Bible is rather a sentiment than a conviction. Most of the stories are hard to teach —from the school point of view—as true, and still harder to show from my own point of view as the wild and lovely things they are to me. It is difficult) to look on our old-remembered and insidious Bible as a new and sudden study, in any case. And it is dificult to cope conscientiously with the response of fifty skeptics to Western “‘superstitions.” Legend is a thing that the carriers of Western civilization have carefully drilled the Chinese to view with suspicion in their own history and lore. Such a message, once preached, can never be unsaid. Such a serpent, loosed in the garden of lovely and un- HONGKONG 45 likely and half-forgotten things, turns upon the hand that freed it. “But that only superstition, marm, didn’t it?” ‘Such a fire can dry up the watery triumphs of Noah and, in the clear light of that fire, all glories and stories—the angelic checking of Abraham’s fanatic knife above the neck of little Isaac; the excellent close bargaining with God for the preservation of Sodom and Gomorrah; David’s schoolboy victory over Goliath; the business successes of the dreamer, Joseph, and the poetry that intruded into the efforts of prosy Moses—all these look cold and lifeless. ‘Superstition ...no... yes... but anyway beautiful and amusing ... Well, [Il shew you how David looked, perhaps, saying goodby to his few sheep in the wilderness . . .”’ _ The blackboard, a bridge between fact and fancy, ‘was our refuge. _ When I first mentioned to my class that I wanted ito be in my turn instructed in the ways of Chinese ‘restaurants and Chinese theatres, there was a sound of reproach in fifty voices. “Oh, no, marm, you didn’t could like such thing. Chinese theatre too much superstitions. Bi I had to assert my authority, such as it was, and finally Ng Poon Wong, a hitherto carefree creature, the noisiest and most intelligent in the class, under- took the dreadful duty of bearleader. There were two bears to be led, myself and an inquiring sailor. About one-tenth of one per cent of the personnel of 46 THE LITTLE WORLD the British Navy is occasionally willing to lower the British Prestige to this extent, if I may say so with- out shattering England’s faith in her toatl bulwark. Ng Poon Wong ordered us a dinner. Scarled with embarrassment at our conspicuous gaucherie, he watched us knock pigeon’s eggs on to the floor with chopsticks, he watched us dip each mouthful into all the wrong little condiment-saucers, he bowed sadly to us as we drank his health in a blend of . methylated spirit and cheap scent. And, being: Chinese, he kept his word under difficulties—he tool us to the theatre. We were the only occidentals there. Next to me. sat a contemptuous Chinese duke (or something) | with a little skull cap and a fine brocade robe which : he drew away from accidental contact with my vul-— gar taffeta. The third and fourth fingers of his left hand wore fingernails longer than the fingers themselves, yet, although much hampered by this. aristocratic disability, the martyr took snuff without ceasing out of a little jade bottle with a coral’ stopper. Up and down all the aisles of the theatre | walked men with little towels in cauldrons of hot water. On being signalled to by members of the | audience, these men threw the steaming screwed-up towels over scores of heads with perfect aim. The recipient of a towel wiped his face, his shaven head, his naked breast and his arms with it and then, with strength renewed, flung it back to the cauldron to bd HONGKONG 47 ye re-soaked and used again. I watched fascinated, trembling for my own hat, but I never saw an acci- lent in this towel air-service. Above us the gallery was fringed with the soles of the bare feet of the nore plebeian audience; scantily dressed vendors of sunflower seeds pushed about among our knees; the arm between each two chairs was flattened to form a ‘ittle table on which constantly replenished cups of ‘eafy tea were balanced by kind but dangerous men who swung spitting boiling kettles about with loud shouts that drowned the drama. Indeed the drama seemed to be the last thing considered in a Chinese theatre. / Of the large stage, about one-twentieth was re- served for the performers. Right centre, the troupe’s washing was being hung out by a large and voluble company of amahs to drip upon the actors’ neads. Left centre, half a dozen supers undressed suddenly and went to bed. Two little boys raced on scooters up and down the back of the stage. All the members of the cast who were not at the moment acting stood about on the stage dressing desultorily, discussing the weather prospects or the price of rice with the orchestra or with members of the audience at the back of the hall. The orchestra itself seemed bewilderingly tele- scopic; at one moment it would consist of at least four gongists, six tea-trayists, two bagpipers without the bags and a dozen flautists, all playing indus- ‘riously without reference to one another or to any 48 THE LITTLE WORLD score. At another moment half the performers— or sometimes all but one—perhaps in the middle of a top note by the hero, would suddenly go away to have a drink. The hero, looking only slightly silly, after a surreptitious reproachful glance at the empty orchestra benches, would finish his song bravely! alone. There was a jazz man, however, who played) about ten instruments at once with different toes, fingers, elbows and knees. He remained faithful) throughout, apparently because he was playing in his sleep. In front of the orchestra were three chairs, Sometimes these, according to Ng Poon Wong, rep- resented mountains, sometimes a double bed, some-: times a sacred grove of bamboos, sometimes the Em- peror’s palace, and then again, sometimes they were: unexpectedly admitted to be three chairs and people actually sat on them. Between these versatile chairs and what might have been the footlights—only there were no footlights—a space of about ten feet: by six was sacred to about six actors and about twelve property men. The property men seemed to find the actors very much in their way. Ng Poon Wong told us that they were invisible—‘‘You don’t can see all those helping man’”—and we were glad to know this, for, had we believed the evidence of our own eyes, we should have thought the useful fellows rather inade- quately dressed for classical drama. In spite of their negligent look, however, they kept the drama HONGKONG 49 ogether. They bristled with little tickets describ- ng the varying roles of the three chairs; whenever in actor wanted to die or to kneel before a superior, he nearest property man produced a little mat; vhenever anyone started on a journey—sometimes ls many as seven times round the chairs or, on one yecasion, up one end of the row of chairs and down he other—a property man stuck a large pointed hat ypon the traveler’s passive head. The property men sept the actors supplied with horses or, in other vords, little bamboos decorated with red tassels, vhich were stage shorthand for horses. Directly a nandarin was given one of these, his legs began to ‘risk about of their own volition, so to speak, leaving iis dignified upper manners unimpaired—and the nost incurable occidental could then see that he was nounted. _ As for the story, it was an edifying one about a man who was almost too faithful to his grand- nother. His life’s work, as he saw it, was seeking yamboo shoots for the old lady’s table. The emperor ent files of emissaries round and round the chairs 70 summon the hero to a high position at court, but the filial creature would not go. At one time a demon tried to tempt him—but here the action be- tame too frank for comment; suffice it to say that the demon was a lady and that Ng Poon Wong chose this moment to begin explanations. “She want marriage ...” he said, but I fancy this was an overstatement. Even this danger the hero escaped. iv / 50 THE LITTLE WORLD Finally’ the grandmother herself, not in the least. grateful for this fidelity, tired of bamboo shoots: and probably thinking only of the separation allow- ance, insisted on her descendant’s acceptance of a well-paid job at a great distance, and so the poor fellow span three times round in agony, seized a horse from a property man who was scratching his head with it, and rode away with an aggrieved frou. frou of silk petticoats. All the actors were men, but, whether they were enacting men or women, they all chanted their parts’ in strained falsetto voices. They were at first stiffly. encrusted in gorgeously embroidered robes, but, as the evening wore on and became hotter, these robes became unpractical. By the end of the play most of the performers were naked down to their middles, except for decent cascades of false beard and false hair. Property men came with hot towels and scrubbed each artist down back and front at inter- vals, without, of course, interrupting the action. Every actor carried his discarded robes on his arm, to remind us that he still possessed them. The performance closed with a fighting ballet. A very nimbly jumping person wearing the mask of an ape, and another, rather less athletic, dressed as a tiger, each with followers to match, fought intricate) and ingenious battles, jumping under and over one} another, clashing weapons in rhythm and chiming challenge with challenge, following accurate figures that suggested sanguinary country dances. After an HONGKONG 51 jour or two of this we left the performance still losing and no doubt it continued to close for the est of the night. The gongists and the tenor and Ito tea-trays were just settling down to their work, he flautists had been out-crashed. It seemed there ever was a night so silent as the night that greeted Is outside with a kind winking of stars entangled vith the climbing lights of men; never was a sound 10 blessedly little as the sound of the bare running ‘eet of the ricksha men and the lapping of the moon- it water amid the broad sleeping cities of sampans ind junks moored along the wharfside. THE LITTLE JOURNEY T was morning when the ship slid out from under the eaves of Hongkong. Hongkong is like the great shadow of a Chinese temple upon the sky; its summit is nearly always ruled straight by a high horizontal cloud, its slopes have the optimistic con-. cavity of temples and only lack a titanic dragon and a curled lion or two to make the temple suggestion complete. At night, so absurdly is Hongkong tilted, it loses its outline; the lights of the Peak climb $0 high and the stars so low. But it was morning when my little ship deftly ex. tricated herself from the tangle of shadows and. ships in the harbor. Between the tawny junks, the low gray battleships with decks like petrified forests, | the dark rusty tramp steamers, the hooded sampans_ on which the Chinese water-coolies with their women’ and their babies and cats and flowers live—between | this and that my little ship picked her way. | My fifty Chinese boys in three motor launchd had come, partly to wish me well and partly for the pleasure of disobeying orders. In a cloud of white pyjama-ed boys, I had alighted on the surpra little the and now—Goodby ... goodby . goodby . . . I could hardly see them, sO forioall 52 a THE LITTLE JOURNEY 53 did they urge their purring boats—each boat the tip of a feathered arrow of spray—in figure eights about the slow course of my Chang-Shing. I saw them at last like little frantic water-beetles beneath the upraised heel of tall Hongkong. And at last Hongkong itself was dim and the verystallized beads and loops of silver cloud blew ‘across the great harbor and obscured the faces of ‘the gaunt hills of the New Territory. | When Hongkong slipped over the gray-glass rim ‘of the sea, the Chang-Shing seemed all alone like a ‘guest at a strange deserted feast. A great company of remote islands stood about her and, without wel- ‘come, watched her pass. I have never been so much jalone on a ship before; the ways of globetrotters ‘have been too much my ways; men and women have ‘been between me and the sea. I have criminally Jassociated ships with little sentimental affairs, with the autobiographies of traveling salesmen, with ‘thwarted Grand Slams in No Trumps, with beef tea vand cheap scent. The Chang-Shing carried only indigo and—by courtesy—me. She was only smart In comparison with some of the junks. And, per- haps in order to shew herself to advantage, for the first two days of her voyage north she rolled snort- ing proudly up the rough ruts of a plunging avenue of junks. Chinese fishing junks are like skeletons in crinolines. Their tattered matting sails are stiffened with bamboos like fans; wreathed about ‘their figures are red paper prayers, fluttering to | 54 THE LITTLE WORLD catch the attention of the heedless gods. Often) these junks are tilted forward, stern high and bows) awash, as though the vessel contemplated diving. | They swung at anchor, jealously guarding their little | claims in the sea, each claim staked out by a hedge’ of flagged bamboos floating upright. | China, with hills dull red or dunes bleakly whith ran by us to the west. There was never a sign of life. on the coast and, at night, never a light. We passed’ a lighthouse on the third day; white and sophisti- Se it sprang up in a lonely dreambound world. | A man waved from it. Could he be a man and’ not a god? How terribly the sea must count to’ himttiey. “You an’ him can have the sea for me,”’ said the skipper, who was from Dundee and, like most sail at ors, believed that he wanted to settle down. said rather prettily that all he would want to see “t the sea for the rest of his life would be a “wee far seelver edge . . .”” He talked little of the immedi ate sea; his stories, which held me spellbound over a lingering mango or lichee in the tiny saloon, dealt with adventures only occasionally amphibious— tigers in the South China hills, quarrels and hot nights in Indian ports, mine-laying in the North Sea in wartime, the pursuit of gold in Australia by oné Weather-r-r beaten Br-r-rown, the occasional illicit relief of Port Arthur during the Russian War, the first voyage of an apprentice round the world in é sailing ship thirty years ago. Sometimes the tall THE LITTLE JOURNEY 55 urned on typhoons and pirates but these things are o common they rarely produce a new yarn. Every sland talks of one typhoon until the next stops the alk; every river-mouth echoes with the monotonous loings of pirates. One of the most powerful trade inions in China, that land of perfect trade unions, is he pirates’ guild, they say. Most of all the skipper ind the mate and, on occasions, the pilot and the irm’s agent, loved to tell very small vague stories bout other sailors, stories which everyone but the ‘and-lubber knew. Their minds were a network of yames. “Then there was McKay—d’you mind what tis bride said when he found her mither in the lair- der? And Guthrie who called for carrots—in yhanghai . . . and what was the tale of Fair-r- jguson an’ the centipede?’’ One never appreciates he greatness of Scotland until one goes to sea. _ The Chang-Shing dared not touch at so sophisti- ated a port as Shanghai, but one evening at sunset, m_a sea of glazed crimson, she passed the mouth of he Yang-tse river. The perspective of the clouds ollowed that of the river and there was a great eather of wine-colored cloud rooted, as it seemed, nthe sun itself; the tip of the plume hung low over yur mast. The river withdrew into a low confusion of ulls and into that confusion the sun sank down alive. _ We ran into a fog that night and the Chang- shing rent her soul and mine with cries of warning 0an apparently empty world. But the fog was like he curtain between two acts, for when at noon next 56 THE LITTLE WORLD day it was drawn up before our sight we were i northern seas and the great square-sailed junks tha traveled across our sight were of a new and mor austere shape. ‘The coast was clearer, fiercer an more scarred. Wei-hai-wei broke the outline of th cliffs and we could see the bulls of the British herd a rest—the dark formidable outlines of the Chin Squadron—and a mother-ship of submarines wit her frolicsome young. And at Wei-hai-wei, thoug we did not put into harbor, a large number of passer gers alighted. They were courtesy passengers lik me, a great company of the most incorrigible lanc lubbers, most unsuitably dressed for a sea-voyagi Finches, jays, pigeons, little tentative flautists nami less to me, smooth gray-crested dandies with scarli throats, a couple of sparrowhawks—lion and lam alike they had been sitting for the last twenty-for hours in agitated rows upon our rigging. The trusted me to a certain extent, though not to tk point of eating crumbs which I spread out for ther They combed the deck for worms all round my chai The seagulls laughed raucous nautical laughter + this innocent invasion. But the passengers kne’ what they were about. As one bird they diser barked at Wei-hai-wei. ] We reached the port of Chefoo late on our a night. All next day, while coolies, dyed bright bl: with indigo, piled into lighters the oozing sacks f our cargo, the skipper and I explored the st- stricken sordid city of Chefoo. It seemed to me- | THE LITTLE JOURNEY 57 after Hongkong—a city baked and caked in squalor. The men beat the ponies, the boys beat the dogs, the yabies tortured the lizards. ‘The streets seemed full of dark men with faces contorted with anger and oodies full of the power of making anger felt. The shurches—of which there were plenty—looked on decorously, feeling, no doubt, that here was copy for endless sermons. _ The Yellow Sea is really very yellow, as yellow isa desert. Junks looked as though they had lost cheir way and run aground. _ A pilot, full of wheezy jokes, came on board and nserted the Chang-Shing into the Pei-ho river. Two Chinese mud forts, long proved futile by naval zuns in the Boxer rising, still keep up the pretence of guarding that narrow mouth. The Chang-Shing gnored them and began feeling her way up a water- way which is like a puzzle founded on a tireless repetition of the last letter of the alphabet. ‘The sarth was no less golden than the sea; the world, ‘upped in a glittering pale horizon, was like an orgy of golden wine. Villages were built of yellow earth; -ven shadows were yellow; there was no color but vellow in the eyeless streets of the softly-moulded illages. There were graves everywhere, cones of rellow mud varying in height and perfection of ymmetry according to the importance of the occu- vant. It is a promotion to be dead in China and ) he choice between one crumbling mud house and | nother i is a very small choice. The cities of the 58 THE LITTLE WORLD living and the cities of the dead are not divided. Movement in the land was chiefly provided by the salt-mills; like merry-go-rounds at a home fair they’ span and span, lacking only music and gaudiness’ and laughter. Sometimes mudcaked babies ran) across a mud beach to throw themselves down in the. golden wave caused by the Chang-Shing’s passing. | In that wave the moored fishing boats stirred un- easily; they were like dragonflies asleep; their nets were stretched on quivering bamboos at the tops of: hinged masts. | Once, as the fringes of the smoke that overhangs’ Tientsin began to shut out the sun, there was music beside us and I looked down into a fishing boat on its way home from sea. In the bows sat the mu- sician, singing softly and vagrantly to a long-necked guitar; in the stern his partner had unbraided his waist-long blue-black hair and combed it slowly with) luxurious fingers. A tawny little boy in a single blue garment propelled the unhurried boat in time to the song. And then the city and the end of the journey) invaded us. PEKING I IYNTIL I went to Peking and met the Chinese f | dragon, I never cared for curly-haired heroes. _ always thought them artificial. But the dragon, rou can see, hasn’t a spark of artifice about him; here is sincerity in every curl of him. Probably he ries hard to grease the kink out of his hair, to the ecret regret of his mother. But there is nothing uperficial about that kink—the ineradicable tend- cy comes out even in his marcelled spine. _ Lalways liked lizards and now I have transferred ay more mature affections to dragons. I cannot de- ermine exactly what the popular feeling in China owards dragons is. I cannot guess offhand what ort of reception would be accorded to a dragon vho suddenly walked in by the Hatamen Gate and, fter calling at the Legations as a gentleman should, vent to cool off in the moat that surrounds the ‘orbidden City—that moat in which the little yellow lazed dragons that fortify the skyline are reflected mong the pink and white floating lotuses. I do not uppose that the Peking camels would shy so whole- eartedly at such a visitor as they do at a simple ‘ord car. 59 6o THE LITTLE WORLD | Sometimes you do meet a dragon in the street, walking vicariously on the legs of dozens of little boys. It has a band in front of it consisting off few trays and a bass wheeze, so you can see that if has admirers and that they do their best to give ii pleasure. Yet this dragon always looks to me thirsty and dissatisfied. Its tongue hangs out. I always used to attribute this to the music, but now I am informed that the purpose of this procession is tc lure dilatory rain out of the sky. But I repeat that if you are a dragon you canno) count on public opinion in China, even if you wall occasionally not without honor and have pom-pom) stuck into your hide by means of toothpicks. Only the other century, the Chinese authorities found ¢ stray dragon about ten miles out of Peking. They probably charged it with being without visible mean of subsistence, but really they suspected it of worl swallowing—a vice peculiar to dragons. A dragor that has got the taste for worlds—like a sheepdo that has started eating sheep—can never be cured This particular dragon was practically caught red handed. So the authorities came up behind it whil it was asleep and built a big pagoda on its head am a little pagoda on its tail and so pinned it dowr They did not try the well-precedented pinch 0 salt on the tail—the Chinese are a painstakin race. I go and look at that dragon sometimes. Th coarse grass grows up his steep breast now, his pre PEKING 61 | le is lost in granite boulders; twisted and crouching ines with silver trunks cling to his ribs. But still uthority does not trust him, still the two heavy agodas hold him down, and their bells, swinging in he wind, invoke the aid of heaven in a good work. \nd I admit that he is obviously not to be trusted. _ know that he lies awake all day and all night, a irisoner forever, thinking of the worlds he hunted nd of the worlds he caught. _ [have a picture, embroidered in silk, that shows ae the dragon when he was young. He is curly and the and metallic and he hunts a gold world across lack space. Gold is always the color of worlds on he wing; we all know that after we have hunted and aught one or two. But the dragon never learned auch; he never knew why a thing that is gold when unted should be ashes when caught. My silken icture shows him hollow-eyed and starved, dizzy vith the spinning and splendor of untasted worlds. o he was caught and there he lies. ‘The gentle veeds grow over his eyes and it is as well perhaps hat he cannot see what I can see today—the great palescent bubble of temptation blown anew every pring. He cannot see the banners of springtime in he great valley or the golden shining of the far oofs of the Forbidden City. _ There he lies, bewildered, with cold ashes on his ongue. And he wonders where the goodness of ‘ood hunting goes, and whether hunting disappoint- rent is better than not hunting at all. 62 THE LITTLE WORLD II USINESS as Usual,” the inspiring Anglo. Saxon war-cry, obtains. I sit in my hospital office in Peking—in my capacity of X-Ray assistant —-side by side with a skeleton, and try to keep as cool as the skeleton looks, in a temperature of 106, and listen, with the characteristically subtle ex. pression of the ignorant, to incoming rumors of war. Everything connected with the great half-built American hospital for which I work is now deco: rated with the Stars and Stripes for moral protec. tion. The primitive carts carrying out earth from our excavations to the outskirts of the city fly Olc Glory from their mules’ collars to prevent eithe army from commandeering them. The earth-stainec thin-queued men on their shafts look upon them) selves now as American citizens; they wave to w’ like brothers as we heave by in flagged rickshas. 5¢ ubiquitous is Martha Washington’s design in flag just now up our hutung that I began to feel that | was remaining safe by means of false pretences ani bought a very small Union Jack, which I tied to th fingernail of the dragon over our gate, to sugges to any loot-seeking band that might pass that th British Lion also had a paw in the matter. I have one dread and that is to see the Forbidde City at the mercy of shellfire. The propert —— PEKING 63 brought by Chinese neighbors to us for protection is mostly tawdry and poor, but I think I shall gather ithe yellow and blue palaces and the rose-red walls and the dragony watch-houses and the great tented igates and the lotuses together and carry them home reverently to keep in a scented and sunlit place till the danger is over. _ I write this in a temple outside a western gate ‘where my English host and hostess live in great friendliness with priests and in the sound of the ‘hoarse low temple bells. And as I write we are undergoing a call from the Chinese colonel of the ‘barracks opposite. Behind his fan he talks urgently ‘and here and there wisps of the conversation are ‘translated for me. He has no heart for war—there ‘is, indeed, no heart and no sentiment in this war ‘at all—at least for subordinates. There is no patri- ‘otism involved, and it is difficult to risk one’s life ‘with enthusiasm in a political quarrel the solution ‘of which can bring no peace. The colonel’s outlook ‘is detached. The rebel, he says, is the better man in this war. There is no question of loyalty, for neither combatant is on poor China’s side. Indeed ‘to the impartial eye both factions seem to be in the ‘position of rebels. One rebel, however, is counte- manced—though unwillingly—by Government au- thority, and the other is not. The uncountenanced is the finer spirit, one gathers. Uncountenanced ‘rebels generally are, of course. 64 THE LITTLE WORLD iil HE war round Peking, which has been theo- | retically raging for some weeks, has become more prominent. In fact I have stumbled over the thing and barked my shins, or, in other words, caught a cold by fleeing in the middle of the night from an army. After communications with the outer world had beén cut last week and newspapers had petered out, we men-in-the-street of Peking rather lost touch with the war. We heard hourly that someone was running away from someone else, often that every- one was running away from everyone else in all directions. Sometimes Tuan Chi Jui was pursuing Wu Pei Fu in the direction of Tibet with every hope of getting there, as it seemed, and sometimes Wu Pei Fu was spilling Tuan Chi Jui over the coast into the Yellow Sea. We became quite callous about the war. It seemed, to say the least of it, childist for two armies large enough to know better to rur | about so quickly in such hot weather. : So, in the afternoon of a very hot day, after thi , word has been given—as afterwards appeared—ti shut the city gates, I traveled, all unaware, in i ricksha to a friend’s temple about five miles toward _ the Western Hills. Nor did I know anything more— as romantic novelists say—except how red was chil sunset on the red thirsty fields and how kindly th stars looked down among the temple goldfis PEKING 65 through the leaves of the scarlet-flowered creeper that drapes a great tree in the courtyard. No, I knew nothing more until two o’clock in the small hours when we all awoke to find ourselves in the act of being rescued by a gallant compatriot in a Ford car. Tuan’s army, it appeared, nimble as usual, was now running in a disorderly mood in our direction. _ Our rescuer had spent three hours fawning upon the city gates, trying to find a sesame that would open them and allow him to come out and warn us. Finally the officer in charge, wearied by seeing the blunt obstinate nose of the Ford pressed against the gate in his charge, let out the rescuer on con- dition that he return within the hour or else forever hold his peace. ' Our dressing was much sooner done than said, and a band of fugitives, eight strong, squeezed into the Ford four-seater. I sat on the folded canvas hood at the back and I saw a hedgehog cross the road but not a single army running in any direction whatever. Each of Peking’s gates is done in duplicate, so to speak; there is an inner and an outer gate. The outer gate that night looked austere and beautiful in the dark socket of its archway in the great wall. The gate was a dim Chinese red and it was studded with bolts and big nails. There was no guard out- side, no greeting but the gate itself, and that was like a final and absolute NO. Our red-plumed Legation servant who had been clinging to the mud- ~. 66 . THE LITTLE WORLD guard throughout, wailed through the crack of the gate. Far away, from inside the inner gate, the guard replied in two snorts and a hiccough which, being interpreted, meant, it appeared, that the gate was closed for the duration of war. The importu- nate Ford turned its bright embarrassing eyes on the gate and tooted in the starlight while Chinese repartee flickered up and down through the crack. And at last we could see all at once that the crack was wider and then a soldier’s face over a blank shining paper lantern appeared in the opening. So we got back into Peking. I had only two regrets at the time—first, that we. had left my friends’ dog—a most charming -Eurasian—and their parrot at the mercy of the. looters, and second, that we ran over a Chinese dog on the way in. The army fulfilled expectations and reached our village that morning. I wonder what the parrot said. Those were my only two regrets at the time, but. next day I had many more, for the wounded ar- rived in our hospital. All day there were limp still figures on stretchers outside our X-Ray room, wait- ing for examination. I sat in the dark room under a spark of red light | taking notes as to the position of the bullets as the examining doctor announced them. Some of the soldiers groaned like wild beasts, some never opened their eyes, some chattered hysterically to the at- , ' PEKING 67 tendants about their experiences, some cried when ‘they saw the inexplicable apparatus or when the great screen slid down as though to crush them, some indicated their wounds with their beautiful thin fawn-colored hands—as though their wounds were ‘not visible enough. They seemed so detached and ‘so entirely without niches in the world, so aloof from one another, so much like hurt animals, that it seemed almost strange that they should have names to file and should remember their own ages. They were like ghosts passing through the flushed twilight of the X-Ray room, they seemed to have no past and no future. They were the ruins of a lost army, their leader had forgotten them. Rumor had it that their general, escaping on an engine from the scene of his failure, had driven right through his army, over the living bodies of those who had failed with him. Many of them had lost their youth and their future in his service—but failure has no friends. Collectively, experience seems to teach them nothing, and though these have fallen and been for- saken, others fight on, for no ideal, for no cause, for 10 reward, for no reason. IV WAS riding home towards Peking under the _& eaves of the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven. ?eking is a maze of walls. The Chinese mind loves 68 THE LITTLE WORLD walls. A truly chaste Chinese village, however small, counts itself undressed without a high wall | buttoned up to the neck. | In the space before the opposite wall of the Temple of Agriculture, a great crowd had built it- self into an amphitheatre about a clear level place. “What thing b’long there?” I asked the mafu. “B’long number one piecee look-see,” instantly replied the mafu, who is an optimist. Anything | that several thousands of his fellow countrymen | were coming to see must be a number one look-see, | So we stood waiting for the show until the mafu, — having made enquiries, announced with increasing — satisfaction, ‘“Bimeby wantchee makee dead five | piecee man.” Every face I could see at once seemed to me hid- eous, every smile fiendish. I set Woodrow, my pony, to try and struggle against the crowd towards the Chienmen gate which reared its guard-house safe and sun-tiled at the end of a long seething perspec tive. But the current was massively contrary to my| course; there was a slow glacier of humanity com- | ing and coming to see the show. An eager turbu- lence was abroad, the crowd, in comparison with the ordinary Chinese crowd, was rough; a series of jovial spirits thought fit to tease and strike Wood- row as he waded through, making him plunge and protest. Our flight was therefore very slow, and it seemed a long time before I could even pretend that I was out of sight of that ominous cleared PEKING 69 space, bare except for a squad of Chinese soldiers waiting for their work and a line of American sol- diers waiting for their amusement. - Presently along the broad road from Chienmen a growing growl of angry voices came to us. And then soldiers appeared, clearing a path through the crowd. The faces of the soldiers were con- vulsed with anger and effort; with the flat of their h ‘bayonets they were hitting the heads and shoulders ‘of the packed mass of men and women in front of them. Woodrow and I were carried away by an ‘eddy in the crowd almost into a booth at the side of the street. __ A passage was cleared and five mule-drawn carts came along the passage. ‘They were the same type of carts as those that carry rubbish away from the city’s activities to oblivion. The drivers, crouched on the shafts, had no light or interest in their eyes. On each cart there were four sullen-looking soldiers, and one condemned man with his arms and knees bound. ' The first was either drunk or in an ecstasy of bravado; his head hung back, swinging from side to side, his eyes were tightly shut and he was singing in a piercing cracking voice that sometimes became a scream. ‘The other four victims were fixed in various attitudes of terror and hopelessness. The third had his head bowed between his tense knees and, as he passed, the anger of the crowd found suddenly increased voice. A hoarse and sickening 70 THE LITTLE WORLD unison of reviling filled the air and seemed to re- bound from side to side of the street. Whatever those poor thin half-paralyzed boys had done, the crowd, in so lifting up its voice, hideously overstated its grievance. Even the action that followed the roar—an attempt on the part of men in the crowd to break through the guard and reach the prisoners | —seemed more healthy than that horribly unani- mous cursing. | The five carts went by, and a sixth cart, carrying most suggestive properties for the show. And then came a line of Ford cars, spruce and eager and exasperating as insects, filled with Am- erican and English men and women who had at last | found something in Peking interesting enough to draw them away from the little tables in the hotel | lounges. And the nearer I came to the city gate, | the more swiftly did the crowd pass, hustling in| rickshas, heaving in blue-hooded Peking carts, run- | ning on foot—running—running—running—drag- ging its faltering babies, urging its crippled pin- footed mothers and sisters, beating its donkeys, straining, cursing, all for fear lest it should be late’ for the show. | a — nS Vv INNER at the Grand Hotel ended in a resolve to drive in rickshas to the Temple: of Agriculture by moonlight. In four of us the! PEKING 71 feast had induced a mood that made such a resolve, ‘at one o'clock in the morning, seem perfectly nat- ‘ural. But not prosaic. No passage through Peking in dancing rickshas down the soft dusty roads, in the filigree shadow of the carvings above the shop- fronts, in the soft light of paper lanterns, in the ‘sound of cymbals and flutes from the theatres— .could ever be prosaic. In the moon-patched temple garden the illusion of tremulous ecstatic possibilities still held. By moonlight surely the old emperors would walk again ‘to the sound of the drums down the white shallow steps of the temple to turn again the first furrow of the Imperial year with a plough drawn by dragons... . _ “Good Lord,” said Robin, “‘S’quite spooky. . . ”’ _ And after a moment he said, ‘“‘You’d almost think there was a light in that temple... .” After an- other moment, ‘‘By George, there is a light in that temple.” feats the moon .. . surely.” _ But the moon, tonight, had a voice, a thin waving silver voice. Was it the voice of the dead herald of an awakening dead emperor? There was a yel- low growing light in the temple. Were there banners moving in the light? “Oul say . . . I’m damned if something beastly isn’t going to appear. Let’s get a move on.” The voice followed our rather tense retreat across the splintered puzzling shadows of the garden. 72 THE LITTLE WORLD “You’d almost think it was your name, Robin, that the voice was calling. . . ”’ “Robin. ... Robin. ... Robin. . ..”’ It seemed a little starved, crazy, wandering jew of a voice, trailing between stars. There was no sense to it. Let the damned old emperor put his hand to his plough again if he must and leave our Robin alone. Robin’s white fixed face was turned over his shoul- der towards where the imperial glow pulsed and expanded behind the screens and the pillars. Cham- pagne, he thought, had never played him such a trick before. “Robin... Robin... Robin...’ No human tongue could so spin out the syllables. Yes, *uLeiswca lin pamerws eae enchanted feet led us towards the temple steps. His incredulous, — The glow in the temple grew and grew—and _ burst into reality. Emperors ... dragons... banners . . . shades of forgotten ceremonies of springtime. . . ‘Hullo, there you are,” said the friend with the. lantern, “I was just looking for you. . ._ I thought © Dd. I heard you say something about coming here. . . OLD ARMIES AND OLD EMPERORS | HE last war in North China being over and | the next war not having begun, the gates of _Peking once more opened tentatively to the world. I took advantage of this interlude to go forth with two or three donkey-loads of friends and other essentials to see the Great Wall. - Even against the evidence of my own eyes [ can- not believe that the Great Wall of China is built of solid ordinary stones laid one upon the other. Rather it seems moulded out of the stuff of which ‘the mountains themselves were made long ago, when ‘the world was plastic and empty of all save possi- ‘bilities. There never was so sinuous a thing as that wall built by men, I think—so sinuous and so aspiring. It disdains valleys, always it seeks the ‘highest and steepest edges, throwing itself into wild ‘extravagant loops to avoid low or commonplace levels. No angle appals it. As we walked along the broad way that runs along the top of the wall from watch-tower to watch-tower, the steps often became so steep that we had to hold on with our hands to the tangle of morning glory and larkspur and campanula that now takes the place of the dis- consolate armies that used to man the wall. 73 74 THE LITTLE WORLD I always somehow take for granted that those | weather-beaten far-flung old armies were disconso-, late. I think it is pretty safe to assume that the Y.M.B.A.— (Young Men’s Buddhist Association) | —was not then what its equivalent is now. I tried to look down with a long-forgotten soldier’s mind’s | eye at the far yellow-patched plain of Manchuria — from one of the steepest angles of the wall, and it seemed as if my heart missed its foothold, so to. speak, and reeled on the brink of a spinning fall— down into the little walled town that guards the pass hundreds of feet below. It was a shock of’ relief to look over the edge of the wall and see no precipice—only the friendly grass and the wild flowers and the sheep cropping the roots of the wall. close beneath. We walked a little way down the paved camel road from the wall. The road is more ancient than the wall itself and, though still the supercilious. camels occasionally pad into Manchuria along its broad crooked stones, it is moribund as a ea now. The railway has killed it. | We patronized that same railway in spite of its | crime. We boarded a pig-train and sat on its step — with our feet dangling over China. Pigs are far more valuable than immortal souls in China, hence we traveled to Nankow much more quickly than | does the daily express. From Nankow we rode three hours on dancii donkeys, through sunset, dusk, and dark to the ; OLD ARMIES AND OLD EMPERORS 75 greatest Ming Emperor’s tomb. By starlight we ‘reached his tall and austere gateway and in a corner _of his outer hall we supped by candlelight. He was a silent yet splendid host. On every side he shared with usthe immense and sombre feast of which he had dreamed. By starlight we could not see the heads of ‘the great pillars of the hall or the chequered and peacock-colored ceiling; we could barely see the dra- goned outline of the side-pavilions in the courtyard. _ But inthe sunrise light as I unrolled myself from my blanket, I could see through the carven marble balus- trade the dragons and sea-waves of roofs awakening and disentangling their lines from those of the old gnarled trees that stood about them in an orange light. I wonder if the Greatest Emperor, when he im- agined that tremendous skyline and those deep glowing arches and those strange shrines, ever re- ‘membered how little and forlorn a thing would lie beneath that thunderous magnificence. Did it seem probable to him that the pale and brittle bones of ‘a man could be the seed of such a flower? __ As we rode away along an avenue of tall stone ‘monsters, the other tombs stood humbly round the valley, taking their cue from the tomb of the Great- est Emperor—or perhaps only the vainest. Great and small alike, they sent after us across the gold-red heads of the kao-liang, the shimmer of their rippling yellow roofs, the royal glance of a silenced yet unfading order across a world un- faithful to its allegiance. THE YANG-TSE RIVER OR a week I breathed gold air. For a week my eyes were attuned to the light on a golden” river with rose-red ripples, running more and more fiercely as the days went by. Literally I bathed in © yellow, for the bath-taps of the ship, connected apparently direct with the Father of Rivers, pro- — duced daily nothing but an opaque mustard-colored — section of whirlpool into which I plunged optimisti- — cally and from which I emerged feeling that at least _ I had tried to do my duty as an Anglo-Saxon. The Yang-tse, a monster of temperament, was © enjoying that autumnal irritation from which many _ of us suffer as winter draws in sight. Even during | the comparatively peaceful journey up that stout and | plebeian section of the river from Hankow to | Ichang, I could not look at and realize the speed and _ passion of the water without feeling a slight contrac: | tion at the roots of my hair. After we left Ichang | and began thundering up the gorges I will not dis- | guise the fact that my hair stood straight on end, | quivering a little at the tips as we curtseyed in a. whirlpool or bounced from precipice to precipice, — only missing actual contact, as it seemed, by an inch — or two. 76 THE YANG-TSE RIVER hi The rapids are plaited streams of yellow foam; their voices are various but always angry. Among the rapids the whirlpools build their nests—round deep nests lined with dark golden glass and frilled with a pale cream-colored lace of foam. To fill up the precious space between the rapids and the whirlpools, strange ominous convex flowers of golden water boil up to the surface. Water, as we were all taught at our mothers’ knees, finds its own level, but the Yang-tse does not. It is super-water and scorns levels. Its whirlpools are as deep as craters, its rapids dig out abrupt val- leys and pile up high tablelands of water to com- pensate for the valleys. Often at the feet of the cliffs on either side there is a sudden drop, or step down, in the water, and then a river within a river, much lower than the rest, divided from us by a per- manent wave, and traveling absurdly the wrong way. Sometimes the junks were able, with their transparent, broad-shouldered sails spread, to fol- low the course of this rebel stream against the direc- tion of the main river. More often they were pulled by dozens—scores—of trackers. _ The trackers, sometimes in bright blue, sometimes in nothing at all, were strung like gay beads across the breast of the cliff, strung on a long string, one end of which was slung to a junk’s mast. We sel- dom approached them closely enough to realize their humanity against their enormous backgrounds, to hear them chanting, to see them straining and 78 THE LITTLE WORLD slipping, bent, with their heads as low as their) knees. But we could see more clearly the down- coming junks, for they took the middle of the stream and followed the will of the water. They swerved. and span and plunged their bows into the water,| their high golden sterns kicking and heaving. And we could hear the chanting and the shouting of the rowers and see the orchestral gestures of the leader, who danced and cursed amidships, directing their, rowing. Nobody is master of these wild waters. As our captain often remarked—“It’s all a matter of joss... .’’ Only the great yellow cliffs dare contra- dict the river, and they often suffer for their daring.) Through the clefts in the shattered clifis you can see perspectives of mountains, heather-red and patched with woods and precipices. One village, divided in| two by circumstances, flattened itself on two ledges connected by a ladder—two niches in the immense bald surface of a cliff. Up one sheer cliff a trail of niches seemed as faint to us as the track of an insect on fine sand. Legend claims that an attacking army cut those niches under cover of secret night and appeared, in a formidable halo of incredibility in the midst of the unsuspecting little enemy towr on the brow of the cliff. Legends blow about thi noisy air of the river. There is a temple like 7 painted and enamelled toy at the head of a long shady flight of stone steps askew—and the bells o that’ temple, it seems, ring of themselves whei THE YANG-TSE RIVER 79 there is a fire among its little huddled attendant villages. Another temple has a bow! which used to be filled with rice in answer to prayer—until a greedy devotee brought a barrel to replace the bowl, and thus rebuffed and checked forever the kindly hospitality of God. ' Every night men from our ship swam to shore with a rope which, helped by our searchlight, they made fast to rocks and stakes. The most beautiful night was spent at Wu-shan, the guardian town of the longest gorge. To one steep bank of the river clung the little templed town of Wu-shan, its lower houses on stilts ankle-deep in the swift water, its upper houses turning curved roofs upward to the sunset. A slender pagoda was outlined against the dale bronze mountains. Over a finger of the river 2 one-spanned bridge, humped like a caterpillar, sprang, and, from the summit of this bridge, a tiny square guardhouse looked down at its reflection. Behind the other bank of the river the sun sank ‘n gold and rose. And the carved black outlines of a horned temple, steeply built, leaned against that sky. There was a tangle of old trees cut out of the near edge of the sky and a guardian griffin ° threw out its proud chest in the direction of Wu- shan across the river. There was war in Szechuan—if you could call it war, for there were no posters about war. No pic- ‘ures of strapping heroes encouraged those who elt neither strapping nor heroic to find out what 80 THE LITTLE WORLD tonic war could do for them. In Szechuan war ad- vertised itself; one saw the war and one saw the heroes—which was unfortunate from the point of view of those who deal in war. Even the losers advertised the war. I watched them go, in proces- sion but not in triumph, face downward down the river, threading their forlorn way through the plaited rapids, pausing indifferently in the quiet reaches where the water enfolded them like gold silk. I saw the less fortunate losers come to seek the protection of the mountains, the wounded slung painfully on poles carried by unfriendly coolies forced into service, or riding on bleeding and ex. hausted dying ponies. ‘The unwounded also car- ried significant news of the glory of war; their sunken eyes saw nothing, their faces were like crum- pled paper, they wavered on their feet. Only those of the vanquished who escaped first were strong enough to revenge themselves upon a cruel world. Like locusts they paused in their passing and where they paused desolation entered. When I first saw the steep villages opposite Chungking, they stood in calmness and isolation among their ricefields. The blue smoke oozed do- mestically through the old thatch of the huts; under the eaves of the little shrines the joss-sticks bowed down among their ashes before the small golden | faces of the gods; the clamor of the children in ir- responsible village schools was mixed with the plain-. tive drums of the temples; the flooded ricefields in THE YANG-TSE RIVER 81 scimitar and serpent shapes were dyked one above the other up the slopes at the feet of the mountains and, across and across those narrow fields, like slow _barges, the drooping buffaloes pulled ploughs through the water. The ploughmen sang; only their sunburned upper halves showed above the water and those upper halves were made the more grotesque by hats as big as cartwheels. When I saw those villages last, they were. haunted; they were very silent; the children and the bells were not heard. No longer did the buffaloes ‘work for their singing masters in the fields; their “masters were themselves now slaves and beasts of burden. All countrymen—even the old men and ‘the little boys—who had not been quick enough in finding places of concealment were caught and driven ‘away before the bayonets of the army—itself a ‘driven and hunted thing. I saw the peaceful men of those villages standing with blank dead faces, ‘roped one to the other in long strings, waiting for their burdens. I saw them with backs bent under igreat loads, staggering before their captors, beaten ‘or prodded with bayonets when they faltered or fell. ‘I saw one man-hunt that seemed to me like a night- ‘mare. Across the river the victors were coming ‘into Chungking; the firing was incessant; we could ‘see a little fluttering blue cloud of townspeople run- ning ineffectually up and down at the foot of the city wall; every boat that dared to cross the river “was surrounded by little abrupt fountains where the 82 THE LITTLE WORLD shots struck the water. High above our heads stray. shots mewed and whined. Up the steep bank on our side of the river the last fugitives of the de-| feated army were slowly making their way; they seemed hardly conscious of being i in danger, they were beyond panic, they went in little reeling groups and said no word, they were too weak to hurry. And I watched one who turned back towards the river; he could not carry even what remained to him of his possessions; he must seek a slave. A group of river boatmen, leaning from the sterns of junks moored to the shore, were arresting the flight of the dead soldiers floating downstream and taking from them boots and capes. Towards these coolies the exhausted soldier walked in uncertain curves; his chin was on his breast. Without seeming to look at the boatmen he made his way towards them _with a blind purpose. Without seeming to look at him, the boatmen herded nervously together and retreated to a further junk—and a further and a still further as he followed. There was silence| among them and no hurry. Any one of the boatmer could have knocked the soldier down; he seemed tc hold his rifle quite without purpose. On thé furthest junk, the soldier, still, as it seemed, withou! raising his eyes, chose a man and drove him off As far as I could see or hear there was no threa and no protest. With the irritating detachment of Europeans it it China I went to buy a pen in Chungking while thi THE YANG-TSE RIVER 83 victorious army was at the city gates. Most of the shops were shuttered; most of the townspeople stood listening like frightened rabbits at the doors of their bolt-holes. One shop let us in to review ts stock of pens, and while we were there a most strange and stormy sound of running bare feet came ap the listening street and a crowd of terrified citi- rens ran by, making no sound except the soft whis- rering sound of their running. The proprietor of he booth in which we were ran a barrier across ) 1is door and disappeared. We sat down unobtru- ively in front of the little altar at the back of the -yooth. It seemed as if the street outside had fallen lead after that rush; the little bannered, crooked, unnelled houses compressed their lips and stared _ lankly. _ Finally two small soldiers of the advancing army ame up the street with their bayonets pointing them on. Their faces were fixed in gross apoplectic ap- <0 = ee ee eee alled expressions; they did not look to either side. _ When they had passed, the street, after some mo- ients, relaxed. We made our way to the river ate. It was shut, but by mingling with. some op- ortune retreating cavalry, we found our way out. Je sat on the mud shore among the neutral crowds © beggars. I remember I had a bag of sweets and, a offering some to a little naked beggar boy, was rf tarly smothered in a charge of applicants for more. ith other fugitive civilian citizens we rather dis- onsolately reviewed the probabilities of getting 84 THE LITTLE WORLD across the river before the fighting should begin.) Every junk, every sampan, almost every plank, was commandeered by escaping soldiers. All the boat. men were hidden. We fawned upon the powers of darkness; we tried to step unobtrusively into the soldiers’ sampans as they left the shore; we talked richly of money. Not money but a chance of life was the only currency in Chungking just then. Wherever we went groups of Chinese civilians watched and followed, hoping that wherever Brit, ish arrogance might lead the way, they might fol. low with safety. But they were disappointed. We were rather ignominiously rescued by an English” man in a motor boat. And as I looked back at thi less fortunate refugees left without friends upot| that filthy shore, I was sorry to look so insolenth sateinis ' The firing began then and, I think, by the tim the moon came up there were no losers left i) Chungking to regret their loss. From the mountain some of them looked down at the flames dancin about the city of their failure; the others went fac | downward down the river and never looked up, ¢ lay where they had fallen about the city gates, ri lieved at last of the horror of being hunted throug | those blind and twisted streets. The war in Chungking provided cover for tt smuggling of opium on board our departing shi Almost every Chinese passenger and sailor had | hand in this. The chief officer spent the first di petri THE YANG-TSE RIVER 85 | ‘ ‘of the return journey in sniffing his way from cache to cache. He was a keen-nosed man and by even- ing his cabin was overflowing with confiscated opium in every form. ' When we tied up that evening, half a dozen Chinese soldiers came on board to welcome us and at the same time to say that any opium we had on board would be in turn welcome to their officers. Our captain, with Western terseness, took out his watch and gave his visitors one minute to disappear in. At the end of the minute, he explained, he pro- posed to blow the alarm syren for a crew from a neighboring British gunboat. ‘The poor soldiers spent their minute uncomfortably in wondering whether a beating at the hands of English sailors was preferable to a beating at the hands of their own opium-hungry officers. At the end of the minute, the syren squawked and one of the sol- liers, feeling that something must be done to pre- serve the dignity of Chinese arms, stepped forward ind, with a neat snakelike gesture, stabbed our Chief Gngineer. The engineer did not at once realize vhat had happened to him; he was stabbed through he muscles under his arm. He was able to join in . shout of warning to us. For there we were, an ‘xasperating superior British audience, standing na bovine ring round the scene of the poor soldiers’ lilemma. The soldiers, noticing their public situ- ition, became more and more annoyed with the 3ritish and all their ways; they climbed quickly back 86 THE LITTLE WORLD ‘nto their boat and, with another dramatic gesture, turned their revolvers upon us—upon us—a little gentle herd of inquisitive globetrotters, armed only with cameras, field-glasses and Mosquitol. I never in my life saw such a sudden and com plete slump in Anglo-Saxon superiority. Personally I jumped about thirty feet to the other side of the deckhouse. The deck became a tangle of respect able British citizens, dignified but one short secon¢ before, now intertwined with Chinese stewards be hind the flimsy canvas deckchairs. But no shot wa fired. The searchlight, that most rude and discon certing weapon, turned its eye upon the enemy. Th squawk of the gunboat’s syren was heard above th roar of the river. The soldiers, standing in thei released boat and with their revolvers still pointing! as it seemed, at my fifth rib, were snatched away b- the eager river. They dwindled like an unnaturi dream in the unwinking glare of the searchlight. | INDIA I "TWAHIS is the thing that I remember best about | Ceylon. Along the road beside the sea to the salle Face Hotel, little naked boys lie in wait for he rickshas. “They keep pace with you, their lit- le fat feet fly like windmills and beat the ground wo or three times to every stride of the ricksha aan. When they grow up they will be ricksha men oo, but at present they make that noble calling a ttle ridiculous. The ricksha man rebukes them but hey cannot be snubbed; they must do their stunts efore they admit defeat. ‘Is a lung way to Tippe- erry ... good-bay Luster Squah ...” Won- erful to be able to carry such a true little thin voice n such twinkling frantic legs. Yellow flowers are hrown in your lap to show that the stunt is over. hortness of leg will tell in the end. They fall ack and the ricksha springs forward in renewed ignity. I have always suffered from diverted attention. Mf the two distinct general compartments of my und, the one into which the sun most rarely shines 3 the one reserved for soul-stirring impressions. 87 88 THE LITTLE WORLD The other compartment, filled with little curious happenings connected with everything or nothing, with spiders and spaghetti, boarding house Keep- ers and beetles, puppies and Prime Ministers, is constantly in use, with the blinds always drawn up. While it is possible, I am told, to absorb the Taj Mahal, hold it for a time in the heart and then give it back to the world as a sonata or a sonnet, delight can be found at the same time in the beetles and the lizards and the tourists that wriggle in and out of its crannies. I suppose that noble people, on see. ing the Taj, concentrate entirely on the sonnet department and walk about on the lizards and the beetles and the tourists without noticing them. Yet in my case, I must confess that if a monkey and ‘ minaret were competing for my attention, 4 monkey would almost certainly win. My memory of Akbar’s tomb at Sikanderabad 1 thrown out of perspective by the intrusion of a tre: in the garden which was quivering with the presenc of a great many peculiarly charming gibbons. The had gray velvet coats and black earnest faces. On realized suddenly that there were hundreds of liv gibbons to one dead Akbar. From every loophol in their great green fortress, their kindly perplexe faces looked out between black hands parting th leaves of the tree. I do not think I shall lightly forget the T: | Mahal. It stands on the horizon of my memor like a tall cloud with an opal glow on it. But INDIA 89 more can I forget the expression of the gharry horses waiting outside for the tourists. There is some- thing about gharry horses that reminds me of the agonies of sympathy I went through as a child at the village races, when I saw the milkman’s little fat worthy pony lined up for the start side by side with the squire’s thoroughbred exquisites. ‘Not a chance, not a chance—yet it’s preening itself, it’s imagining how it will look with the blue cockade of honor behind its ear. ‘After all,’ it’s thinking, ‘stranger things have happened. ..’” And still, now I am grown-up, when I drive through the streets of Calcutta listening to talk about the paci- fication of Islam and now and then making a keenly ntelligent comment like, “Great Scot, but that was Mr. Lloyd George’s fault, wasn’t it . . . ” all the time I am looking at the faces of the gharry horses. They are vulgar, necessary little horses and nobody fastidious admires them. But they wear blue bead aecklaces just behind their ears and they trot with an industrious and wistfully hopeful look as if they were saying, ‘Well, what price these darn thorough- dreds and Rolls Royces now? I’ve got my beads on...’ And they smile at each other—rather i forced, tentatively boasting smile—when a buf- falo goes by. ‘Poor old‘slowcoach . . . no beads fomhim. .. .” ' Of course there are also the sad members of the eef family to be sorry for, but there is seldom nuch life or vanity in their eyes. Though of course go THE LITTLE WORLD bulls were the heroes of my visit to Benares. The holy bulls stand at Benares street corners, horn to horn, eating sacred marigolds which they have no intention of paying for and cynically discussing the passing pilgrims and globetrotters. They come and go at no man’s orders; they are the tigers of that jungle of temples. Holiness crowns them—yet you can see they think nothing of holiness. They wear expedient holiness for the comfort of it, as the medieval popes used to wear it. On the steer crowded bank of the Ganges, priests dance anc howl and gash themselves and lie on beds of spike; and mix their hair with mud—and the imperiou smooth bulls watch them passionlessly, saying oni to another, ‘““There—that’s what comes of takin things too seriously. . . ’’ On the opposite banl of the Ganges there is nothing and nobody, becaus of the legend that anyone chancing to die on tha side is born again as an ass or a woman. But th bulls probably warn each other that any bull wh dies in Benares risks being born again as a mat For they alone in Benares do not follow and cr after death. At the edge of the river the pilgrim bathe; they dip and they cry out and dip agair the holy glitter of the river wraps them away froi everything but prayer—prayer that some day deat in this holy place may crown their pinnacle of hol ness. Sometimes they are so importunate that th¢ succeed; among the thousands of pilgrims, of who, so many are old, there are always some who fir INDIA QI Jear death on the edge of the brown water. And these, after lying in state on pyres among flames on 1 ledge of the riverbank, are given to the river itself -o carry away and seal with holiness. ' But death is not the river’s only blessing. A bull and I leaned on a wall and watched a marriage 'n the water. A man and a woman knotted their robes together and dipped down side by side, and as they dipped a little boy priest threw marigolds over them. ‘‘Waste of good marigolds... ” yrumbled the bull. But I pointed out something ‘hat I knew would annoy him more—a cow, in the distance, being revérently bathed in the holy river dy a peasant and his wife. The bull tossed his aorns. “Good Lord,” he snorted. ‘‘A cow—a fe- nale cow—what are we coming to? I thought [India was sound on the feminist question at el Cows in India occupy the same position in society us women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle race owing to the anxiety of nan to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told that she must occupy a Place Apart—and indeed, so far Apart did her place prove to be that it was oractically out of earshot. The cow in India finds ler position equally lofty and tiresome. You prac- acally never see a happy cow in India. Nobody zast of Suez, of course, ever dares to say anything 92 THE LITTLE WORLD even remotely carnivorous to a cow, yet there is something in her luminously myopic eye and in her: cheek grooved by a perpetual tear, that suggests | that her life is empty of delight. She must know: that she holds half India’s politics in the hollow of. her hoof; like our mothers, she must have been con- stantly told how incalculable is her indirect influ’ ence on her country’s destiny—yet she is humiliated: and unsatisfied. ? And oxen... Seeing them crawling moodily’ along, buried from stem to stern under an out.) rageous superstructure of dry goods, the weight of which seems to bear more heavily on their necks, than on the waggon wheels, one cannot think that) they derive any real pleasure from the knowledge) that no orthodox Hindu would eat them. It can give them no more than a passing and superficial” pleasure to feel that their masters revere them enough to carve elaborate freehand curves in their hides. The ox must often reflect bitterly on the fact that the gods, after starting well by setting his family on a pedestal of sacred tradition, should have spoilt the whole thing by giving him a hump. That hump is the undoing of the Indian branch of the beef family. Nobody could possibly see that hump without wishing to fit a yoke in front of it. No other physical feature has ever been so obviously designed for the use of industrious man as is the hump. Divorce the hump from the yoke and where is the use of it? The crows, to be sure, are in the INDIA 93 habit of using it as a vantage point on which to stand while surveying the rest of the animal in search of ticks—but this can hardly be said to constitute a raison d’étre for the hump. No, if you wear a hump you have to crown it with a yoke, and if you wear a yoke and have a heartless yodelling master sitting on a shaft all day, pulling at a string that is threaded through your nose and beating you on a sore place on your buttock—where is the fun of be- longing to a reverend family? You might just as well be a common lay buffalo. Yet, with all this, anyone can see that the buf- falo is a long way behind the ox in the social scale. There is no compensation for being born a buffalo; he has no lofty traditions at all—and he knows it. The only legend in his family connects him bluntly with Sin. You may often see rude caricatures of his homely and unlucky figure ramping in and out of Hindu pictures in company with headless bodies and bodiless heads and demons and women and other attributes of hell. Even this doubtful sport is, one fears, purely legendary; no’ decent self- respecting demon would ever condescend to ramp with a buffalo. The buffalo knows that; he knows everything about himself; he has no illusions—you can read that in his eyes. The yoke wedged under his horns prevents him from looking round to see what a poor figure his partner is cutting, but he needs no reminder—he knows. He knows that he and his partner and his mother and all his family 94 THE LITTLE WORLD are the plainest and least dainty creatures on the face of the earth—with the possible exception of! the wart-hog. Even when he was a calf, his mother used to contemplate him dubiously. Many people have loved cows and even poets have mentioned! them, but nobody has ever loved a buffalo. You could not love or respect a creature which, dur- ing the whole course of evolution, has never decided whether to be a bald or a hairy beast. After earnest study of the faces of the buffaloes on Chowringhee,| I cannot even say that they have beautiful souls. Of almost anyone hopelessly plain, it is pretty safe to) say—‘‘Yes, not exactly pretty—but how code hearted ...”” Not so of the unfortunate buffalo, No heart or soul shines out of his eyes at all; they are matt eyes, anguished, but not poetically so. Sometimes buffaloes are seen sitting like desert islands in ponds, or, better still, in running streams with miniature breakers surging against their bleak headlands. At such times a faint smear of tranquil lity, so to speak, may be seen by the keen observer | on the horny surface of the buffalo’s eye and in the twitch of his sad unstarched ear, but there is nothing | at all radiant about the tout ensemble. Sometimes — the water is so deep that only a mudcoated nose _ and a few eyelashes are seen above the surface. In| this pose the buffalo is seen to best advantage, but | even so, no one but a crocodile would bother tc look twice at him. | The buffalo’s only attempt at vanity or individu INDIA 95 ality is expressed in the cut and angle of his horns. ‘Most buffaloes wear their horns with pessimism ‘and without chic. But some try feebly to imitate ‘tthe brisker angle affected by their neighbors, the ‘oxen. I once saw a buffalo with one horn up and one down; the effect was original and almost waggish. I saw another whose horns made an al- most perfect circle above his yoke, and the tips over- lapped. If that buffalo had been mine I would have tied the tips together with a pale blue hair-ribbon. And then all the other buffaloes on Chowringhee would have seen it and smiled at last, saying, ‘“There zoes the one member of our race whom somebody ‘oves.”’ ' A buffalo fainted at my feet once. I heard a joise like a train gathering steam and realized that 't was the stertorous breathing of a fainting buffalo. ‘ts attendant was beating it but it was past minding hat. I went into the Army and Navy Stores and isked what facilities they had for reviving fainting vuffaloes. The military gentleman at the door said, ‘None.’ He seemed a little ruffled. Nevertheless, ‘fter some argument, I re-emerged at the head of ' file of coolies carrying the Society’s fire-buckets. “hese we emptied on to the buffalo and forced a ew drops into its drooping mouth. It revived im- 1ediately and proceeded on its way, saying to itself, No, nobody loves me . . . even when I faint I m made a fool of on the public streets by stray emale novelists .. , ”” 96 THE LITTLE WORLD All social functions are distorted for me by my eye for the domestic lizard. Every room in Cal- cutta has its lizard, a pale, languid, fawn-colored creature with a throbbing throat, who meditates on vertical or upside-down surfaces and occasionally expresses his conclusions in a very loud unexpected voice. The lizards eat the insects in the rooms, but the one in my bedroom was rather a slacker. He refused to tackle an enormous spider, like an animated eight-legged horse-chestnut, which inso- lently made its home on my lizard’s beat. I do not know how the lizards of a house apportion the various rooms, but I think that drawing-room lizards are selected for the loudness of their voices. Often at a party, when I think I have been listen- ing to my hostess complaining of high prices, I find myself replying to a remark by the lizard. A sport- | ing lizard with a good figure and a well-wielded | accurate tongue can hold my attention against any | rivalry. And even when my mind wanders from that it is only in order to devote itself to the thin | didactic wailing of the kites above the roof or the | hoarse cursings and drycleaning operations of the | gray-hooded crows outside the window or the hys- | teria of the brain-fever bird—‘‘So there, so there, so THERE ...” When I was trying to be af- fable at a garden-party once, a kite swooped down and removed a rather valued sandwich from my, plate, knocking my hat awry as it did so. Evidently even the kites know how much undue attention I INDIA 97 pay to the world that is really theirs rather than ‘mine. So they have no reverence for me. [went on a Christmas visit to eleven elephants in Rajputana. I had never met an elephant as man to man—or elephant to elephant—before, except of course in the Zoo where they are rather con- sciously exotic. But there in the jungle in Rajpu- tana, nothing was allowed to be exotic—not even the jewelled Maharajah into the radius of whose immense hospitality I was accidentally swept. Our gorgeous camp, which had a hint of old leisurely pretty battlefields about it, the glittering turbaned soldier at the door of each frilled and painted tent, the huge tall waggonette drawn by two trotting vamels, the cramped, mazy, romantic ways of the sastle, the little yellow capital city of the kingdom— hese things were not exotic—boxed in, as they were, vy that clear burning sky and that infinite round 1orizon. Large bald-faced wistful monkeys stood yut conspicuously against the low yellow wilderness hat—in Rajputana—is called the jungle; blackbuck ind nilghai frequented the near horizon unashamed; ackals sat as publicly as dogs in the shade of shriv- lled shrubs, and as for the peacocks and the king- shers and the hoopoes, they took upon themselves he duty of flowers in that sad unbounded garden. So that when, for the first time, I motored to a leet with the intention of watching falcons and _ tame lynx bring hares or tigers—(and what ot)—to my feet, it did not seem fantastic to find 98 THE LITTLE WORLD myself surrounded by a high wall of benevolent elephant faces. I don’t know anybody else with such a humorous face as an elephant; each of its little eyes is set in a wreath of smiles, and when it lies down to let you mount—forelegs straight out forward, back legs straight out backward—it is a sort of idealized Fatty Arbuckle. I chose my mount for the hunt, a small merry ele- phant with a kind of antimacassar painted in scarlet on its brow. I climbed on to its obligingly recumbent form by means of a ladder and sat on a canvas pad, holding on desperately to the waistbelt of a liveried minion who sat astride of the elephant’s neck wield- ing a bi-dent—(if there is no such word as bi- dent—why not?). My elephant had a playful way of trumpeting through a madly agitated trunk when » it was either bored or excited. The sound was rather like changing gears on a Ford car and the. result was that passers-by were soaked to the skin. The field consisted of about forty guests, some | mounted on horses, some on ponies and some on — elephants. The elephant contingent was sub-divided into Olders and Wisers, sitting in furnished pavilions on tall, slow elephants of the super-dreadnaught | type, and Youngers and Silliers like me, who took the destroyers’ part in the fleet, rattling up and down on the saddles of little rampageous elephants-. made-for-two. There was also the Maharajah, carrying a handsome eaglelike bird on his wrist, a large number of minions, carrying hooded hawks, INDIA .99 and an oxcart carrying an irascible-looking blind- folded lynx. The oxcart hurried industriously after the hunt but always arrived too late, to the increas- ing annoyance of the lynx. Whenever the hawks were released, the whole field cheered loudly. Perhaps this well-meant en- couragement disconcerted the hawks for, although the ground was knee-deep in game—hares, part- ridges and deer splashing on all sides from under our charging feet—the birds either glued themselves to the sky or else flew straight to the highest tree in sight and sat on it, moodily putting their feathers in order. Nearly all our time was spent in luring sulky hawks from trees by means of false decoy- oirds flapped about the ground with string. The slephants were much more keen, running heavily after every hare they saw and trying to soar after the soaring partridges. My elephant nervously anrooted and stuffed into its mouth young shrubs is it thundered along, trumpeting breathlessly be- ‘ween mouthfuls. I was sorry that no hare was iporting enough to allow itself to be caught by these neans. | _ Trying to forget its empty bag, my elephant led he stately procession home at sunset through the ittle yellow sandy town that is the capital of our Maharajah’s kingdom. In the torchlit booths the itizens bowed and blessed the procession in slow ingsong. The proud prudish faces of the camels eemed to boast of their gaudy burdens as they 100 THE LITTLE WORLD passed us; little dusty children, naked except for silver anklets, asked for alms in high metallic voices - and, outside a temple, two fierce urgent bells rang | one against the other. I watched the elephants in lighter vein next day, | running a race. Their riders were mostly nervous | amateurs who knew no word of elephant language and saw no difference between Hut and Hell. (If. this should meet the eye of an elephant, I hope,he will excuse my spelling, which is purely phonetic.) © The elephants smiled in a long row but, smile they i never so wisely, they entirely failed to grasp the. theory of the entertainment. They thought that they were taking part in a kind of royal musical ride and when, at the sound of the pistol shot, they moved forward with serene dignity, not even the babel of shrieks and curses from the amateurs on their backs could induce them to fall out of line. In a perfect row they started; in a perfect row they, proceeded very slowly along the track, pensively. waving their trunks to keep one another in step; in a perfect row they breasted the tape at the other end. And then they all sighed happily, satisfied to feel that they had done their duty. It was the most impressive race I ever saw. | II ENGAL’S Legislative Council—her Ship of State, for the first time manned by Indians was launched by the Duke of Connaught in Febru INDIA 101 ‘ary, 1921. Among other Calcutta women I had ‘permission to witness this historic ceremony. Never- ‘theless, though I and the other women put on our most ceremonious hats or saris and flourished grass- ‘green passes, the authorities decreed, on second ‘thoughts, that the occasion was too historic for the ‘eye of woman. Women come to India, I understand, either be- ‘cause they are married to empire builders or because they want to be. They are expected to learn to play bridge well, to dance well in the manner of about five years ago and to know what to wear at the races. To take an interest in India is, on the other hand, most unladylike. A nice woman may’ go so far as to say sometimes, ‘‘My dear, I’m sim- oly terrified of these fiendish revolutionaries and things, I sometimes think they'd like to blow us all ap in our beds.”” A kind of imperial district visit- ng is also permitted and one may hear a Perfect uady talk about ‘My little Thursday Ranees,” to vhom she teaches leather work or basket making. 3ut to find a woman going further than this, or to lear her admit that she has come to India to see ‘ndia, will make any well-brought-up empire builder lush. The younger he is, the pinker he blushes. India is the only country I ever visited where he young are truly Victorian. Young people in ndia still talk of chaperones and minxes and not- uite-of-our-class-my-dear. They share with their eniors their confusion and dislike at the mention of 102 THE LITTLE WORLD Epstein and Women-in-Men’s-Professions and Ber. © nard Shaw and sitting on the floor and the Labor . Party. There are no Youngers and Silliers in India to worry the Olders and Wisers. Everyone remem- | bers Kipling. The only adventure left is a flirtation © with someone else’s husband or wife and these flir- tations seem always to be quotations from Kipling— deliciously shocking. Perfect Ladies are everywhere — found being shocked at other Perfect Ladies on grounds that would make King’s Road, Chelsea, — smile. Nearly everyone in India simply adores reading or drawing or music or pokerwork or just Art. But) the men are too busy Keeping Fit in the intervals. of empire-building to indulge themselves in their delight. And the women—“Of course, my dear, there’s nothing I should like better but I have a houseful of servants and a kiddie to look after and then one simply has to go to the club in the after- noon—I tell you I never have a second.” | And this from men and women whose youth has found them in one of the most fantastic countries in the world. ; Women were therefore allowed, on the occasion — of the opening of Bengal’s first Indian Legislative Council, to sit and look as charming as possible on the stairs, to see the pretty uniforms, to curtsey to the Duke as he arrived and to listen to a far-off beelike sound which was the noise of the Ship 3 State being launched. — INDIA 103 _ The launching of a ship is usually marked by the reaking of a bottle of wine, but over Bengal’s ship hey broke casks of honey. Everyone spoke afta- ilities, the atmosphere was sticky with sugar—even ye banished women could grasp that. Where do he optimists go when their speeches are done? eople only seem to hope in public. _ It goes without saying—except in the papers, there nothing goes without saying—that the Duke f£ Connaught opened the Council in a way that jus- fied the loud applause that even reached us in ur exile. But I was haunted all the time by the ossibilities of an impossible dream—of another ind of opening of a democratic council. What if ais Indian Parliament—representing, it is said, ae voice of India—had been opened by the voice- tss Indian, if a little thin dust-colored peasant, aosen on the Unknown Soldier principle, had stood 1 that hall—the hall being empty of pretty soldiers? Te would have thrown out his arms, (I dreamed), nd cried, “This is my voice... At last I have ound my voice. . . .” It was, of course, a silly dream, for the affair vould not have been half so pretty without the uni- orms. And there would have been no occasion for ie Perfect Ladies to wear their best hats. I remem- ered putting on my best hat a week or two before 1 order to go and see Mahatma Gandhi. It was yst on him—in fact I found that he had only ac- orded me the interview under the impression that 104 THE LITTLE WORLD I was aman. He treated me as a saint might treat an uninstructed cherubim.» He was very gentle and tired-looking; his nearly white hair was cropped on a high narrow head. His chin was bowed upon his breast and he looked upward at me out of sunken eyes over a ridge of brow. He talked to me in extremely accurate, almost forensic, English and did not at all want to hear my comments. If he, in his white homespun, looking with eyes that did not see politeness, had opened that council, I think our sweet words would have fallen on dumbness and our pretty hats and uniforms and French dresses would have dissolved in sombre Indian dust. A few days later, wisely disguising myself, not, this time, as a Perfect Lady, but as the Press, | found my way into the Council hall again. This time I had a commanding view of a waving field of turbans and fezzes, diversified by some examples of the British national head-dress—the bald spot on the top. Sir Shamsul Huda, the President, the Portia-like effect of whose clothes was rather contradicted by his fine gray beard, was obviously suffering from the natural doubt of the débutant. In this feeling he was evidently not alone for, from beginning to end, the proceedings were like a game of which nobody knows the rules. One or two Englishmen had evi- dently been poring over the Encyclopedia at the Parliamentary Procedure page, and helpfully flut- tered from minister to minister, from member to — INDIA 105 member, explaining sometimes what should be done but more often what should not be done—generally after someone had begun to do it. Whenever a member asked a question, a minister rose to explain why that question did not arise, on which all the members’ faces fell. There was a natural desire to debate matters which did not lie within the province of the Council but had already been set- tled by the Government of India. The Council was verbally feeling its way round its boundaries, _and much precious tongue-power was wasted on the process. The first division in the life of the Council was taken on a question of salary and was a great suc- cess as a diversion. One or two members actually skipped with suppressed giggles into the lobby. To me, one of the most noticeable things was the immediate division between youth and age. It is, apparently, a fact that all parliaments automati- cally take this formation, even on the first day of their lives. And in all parliaments the old men _ always seem to have the power on their side. Per- \ haps this seeming is their compensation. III NEVER got a job in India—unless lying in bed in hospital, writing desperately sprightly ar- ticles for newspapers, can be called a job. But I 'was very well-befriended, and able, at times, to 106 THE LITTLE WORLD give a rather feeble imitation of a Globetrotter in India. The nine Delhis have almost all been looked. at by me. In Delhi and in Agra I have stood in’ the flowery starry net of light that lies on the air. inside the filigree marble screens and windows—: those thin lace veils of interthreaded stone. I have pitied the poor hermit of Fatehpur-Sikri who, for a successful stroke of magic wrought upon a queen, - was gratefully punished by having his darling lonely hill encrusted and pinnacled with a king’s city, and | his body, which must have loved to lie upon grass | and flowers, buried at last in a marble and mother- : o’-pearl shrine. I was introduced to another mir. : acle—Monsieur Clémenceau, as he arrived at a station after a tiger shoot. He looked old and cold. but proud. “I have shot two tigers,’ he said. | wrapping himself jerkily in a big shawl. The Indian | who was his host said, ‘‘I have shot a hundred and five.” “But... when one is eighty . :-. tym tigers . . .”’ said the old Tiger looking for a mo- | ment, in spite of his little smile, snubbed like a child. ' He cried out for his manservant as though he were calling his Nannie, and wanted many things done | immediately, all at once. “One of the tigers he shot,” | said the Indian, “was already But we did not want to hear and the old man pulled his shawl up i round his ears. I made a little wandering slow journey through | Eastern Bengal to the edge of Assam with Cornelia — Sorabji who is nearly a fairy but cannot be a Perfect INDIA 107 Lady, since she commits the unladylike mistake of »working for and loving India. On the Brahmapoo- ‘tra River the crescent fishing boats lay like new ‘moons on the water and between them and the sand- -dunes the dwelling boats floated, square and ma- ‘tronly, with a prosaic noise of clucking hens and ‘whooping babies, under square-shouldered sails ‘drawn together at the foot like great honey-colored fans. The little plaited houses on the shore had humped roofs like the backs of whippets, and the mango trees, blossoming, always seemed to have the -sun on them, even at twilight or at dawn. I remem- ber the velvety stammering music of a flute played ‘by one of the Indian peasant travelers to an accom- paniment of lapping river-ripples and the distant ‘voices of hauling fishermen. , I took another river-journey. The Sunderbunds look like a bath sponge on the map, between Cal- -cutta and the sea. Clans of primitive Indians, who have scarcely heard of, and almost certainly do not jappreciate, the blessings of British rule, live among those steamy ravelled waterways. Tigers do very »well too; the tigers of the Sunderbunds have brought ‘the name Bengal to the fore in the tiger world. Yet -I do not know how man or tiger can grow to normal _size in those jungles. The low brush is everywhere so knotted and knitted together that one would imagine nothing larger than a mouse could penetrate ‘it. I dare say, however, that there are tunnelled _Tuns through the jungle, invisible to travelers on the 108 THE LITTLE WORLD waterways—probably fat low bold runs for the tigers, carefully avoided by the tall clever runs of men and—apart from either of these two—very slender cautious haunted runs for the deer and de- fenceless delicate things. Monkeys, at any rate, need only the air and a few swinging upper twigs for their traveling. There were Frenchmen on board our little ship who fired at the monkeys. They fired at everything they saw but, fortunately, they scarcely ever hit anything. The monkeys, fired on, lost their heads like children, screamed, threw up their little hands, sprang wildly about. A solid mass of public opinion on our boat decided against any more firing on monkeys. Yet no one was sorry for the crocodiles except me. The crocodiles lay asleep on the gray mud banks. Little buttonhook smiles of peace and complacency curled the corners of their mouths. But our Frenchmen fired at them. A crocodile, I am told, cannot be killed except by a shot through a special soft bit of skin at the throat. But I dare say even Achilles could be worried by a mosquito on any part of his invulnerable body and certainly a crocodile can be very much shocked—1in its sensibilities at least—by a rattle of shots against any part of its carefully armored figure. Most painful to me was the sight of the rude awakening, the dreadful change from tranquillity to fury, on the mobile features of the hit crocodile. It started to attention, coughed out a terrible oath, opened its mouth—which was, if I TIGER—TIGER ... > ‘ - o" i pas ps on ra - = felon *2 sf ws Co j a at ba | ee . pee Fre ad fy F ; o a = 7 vw ' ; ‘ al Bhi a (2 7 St 8 is XbA Sa titled ae ; iM ; _* . ‘ye. it eT OS Ba A PON TT ee gee Tek ee Pare: al re oT INDIA III may so express it, curiously full of mouth, as thickly cushioned as an armchair and only unobtrusively frilled with teeth—and, with fishlike agility, whipped itself quickly into the water. Its first intention obviously was to attack us and revenge itself. But after a few seconds the size of our steamboat made an impression and the crocodile, after flouncing and splashing about in disgust, submerged to sulk. There was, as far as I was concerned, one tiger in the Sunderbunds—and indeed it is still there, as far as I know, for no shot from our boat touched it. I had great difficulty in seeing the creature at all. On the cry of “Tiger, tiger . . .”’ I looked smartly about for something burning bright in the forests of the night. I thought I should see a splash as blatant as a sunflower against the gray thicket and gray mud. There was nothing. I was within a wink of seeing absolutely nothing at all. All I can swear to was a hinted cringing shape as low—it seemed— as a dachshund and in a much duller shade of brown. It moved into a dim place, stood for a few seconds and then, when the firing began, dissolved like butter in a pan. After a few days we reached a village which is connected by an amphibious light railway with Calcutta. By train my friends were obliged to re- turn, but I stayed behind, intending to take the next boat home and see more tigers. As soon as train and friends were gone, I directed Lars Porsena, my servant, to make enquiries. He discovered that there 112 THE LITTLE WORLD and that there was either no dak-bungalow or el it was out of repair. There were no sahibs or me But I found one as I was walking disconsolately along the mud shore. He was an engineer and of course a Scot. He was talking to an Indian river | captain who wore balloon trousers, a kind of fez and a very pretty little jade-green sleeveless jacket. They were at that moment setting off to navigate back to Calcutta a broken steamboat for repairs. “She has no lichts,” said the engineer. “There’s no beds in herr cabins. She has a leest and lm a wee thing doubtful but what she might turra turrtle,” but he kindly took on board a cratefull of chickens for my consumption, and so we started. The whole plan depressed Lars Porsena. He did not like me to sleep on a table in a dismantled cabin, He did not like me to darn the engineer’s socks by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. He felt that British prestige suffered by the fact that hot wate had to be brought to my cabin in an old Yellow Cling Peach can. We lived on chicken that had barely ceased to breathe, and whiskeys and sodas. If my appearan had not made the crate of chickens necessary, the engineer would, I suppose, have dispensed with half of the menu. A music-hall joke justified! We told each other the stories of our lives; we whi INDIA 113 ‘all the tunes we knew to each other and he offended ‘me by calling old ballad-tunes “heem-tunes.”” Every -evening—since we had no lights—we tied up to the ‘shore and hung our one lantern out. The cries and howls and roars and chatterings of the forest ‘seemed very close. But we never saw a tiger. We ‘saw glades lighted and shadowed with deer. They had delicate triangular heads like flowers on the thin ‘upright stems of their necks. They watched us pass ‘with an alert reproachful stare but they never fled, ‘because we—fortunately—lacked guns. One night we had to tie up within range of the ‘stray waves of the sea. The crippled boat heaved ‘with a sort of imbecile exaggeration. The Scot ‘stood thoughtfully about, feeling her pulse, and re- marking that we were not more than a few minutes’ swim from land and that the crocodiles often missed ‘their man. He was an excellent and careful nurse ‘to the poor boat in his charge and he triumphed at last, bringing the invalid safely into Calcutta. Calcutta was like a steaming kettle, hissing with ‘the voices of kites and frogs. An accurately levelled ceiling of white mist was suspended above the broad Maidan, slung between the white domed Memorial and the big business buildings. At the river's edge the cargo ships coughed and cursed and boasted, but for the moment, as I crossed the Maidan, I did not envy them. I was just home from my own little odd ‘voyage and would not have exchanged it. 114 THE LITTLE WORLD IV HE Pundit and his second wife came to tea. The upper part of the Pundit’s body was — “foreign style’ except for the very small neat turban that surmounted his large aggrieved brown face; his dark alpaca coat was a tribute to the truly British rite of five o’clock tea. But his legs were draped in loopings of spotless white cotton beside which the trousers of Imperial Britain looked constrained and bourgeois. The Pundit’s second wife was nearly thirteen years old. She held the hand of her stepdaughter—her senior—very nervously, but this consolation was in- termittent, for whenever anyone spoke to her or looked at her, both her hands must be disengaged and clasped before her thin little nodding nose in an attitude of prayer. The plea—Don’t hurt me— shone through that little polite gesture and was her only reproach to society or comment on her lot. She wore a rich wine-colored sari and, as she sat looking extremely small on the sofa beside her large English hostess, her little tinselled beaded feet trod nervously upon each other. She would not eat or drink; she only bobbed and prayed when dishes were offered to her. The Pundit, who was perhaps thirty years older than she was, sat opposite, looking critically at his second wife. It was his intention, he said, that she pee INDIA 115 should be a woman of the world, not a pardah nashin. He wished her worldliness to be achieved within the year, for he intended to take her to England almost at once and expected her to be able to entertain his friends and take her proper and _assured place in the world. It was time, he said, that Indian women should help their husbands in the social obligations and duties that the Empire _ demanded of prominent men like himself. He in- } tended to engage a competent lady secretary, an _ Englishwoman, to instruct his wife in the necessary ‘worldliness. We all looked at the Pundit’s wife and -her hands sprang together and her quivering chin jerked down on her breast as she caught the look. Our hostess rose and found in a drawer an Indian ‘doll, looking rigidly and brazenly from beneath its | gaudy sari. The Pundit’s second wife forgot to pray before _taking the doll into her arms. ‘‘Ai ai,” she said, arranging its robe, ‘‘Ai ai, ai ai.” She would have thought her own enthusiasm very coarse and vulgar if she had stopped to realize it. Perhaps the Pundit thought that she was not quite living up to her own important position for he ‘looked quickly away from her and said, “Dolls like _ these are often made by Indian families to accustom | their young daughters to the meaning of marriage. First a man doll is given, then a female doll and finally, one by one, young dolls, In this way inno- cence is instructed.” ai...’ she was saying in a most secret voice. AN taal ng? 116 THE LITTLE WORLD His eecone wife was feeling the doll’s face with a finger like the tiny brown frond of a fern. “Ai | MW de THE STATES AGAIN I ‘TN England, after three years, I tied the knot of ‘the rather humble ravelled thread of my jour- neying round the world. I got married and spent six months of arduous leisure in a carefree re-visiting of that America I had once crossed with suspense and with much count- ing of pennies. Ignorance is the impetus that pushes all travelers from their starting points. We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That 1s why we come back. From the furious tourist who discovers too late that the daily delivery of the Morning Post is scarcely ever achieved in foreign lands, to the square-jawed traditional hero who finds himself alone without ammunition face to face with an exasperated tigress, we all find that, in making ourselves the guests of strange lands, we reckon without our hosts. We are more likely to imagine our sensations on first seeing the Taj Mahal than to anticipate the inconvenience caused by the eating ELZ 118 THE LITTLE WORLD of our trousseaux by white ants. It is, of course, a happy thing that we have optimistic imaginations to make fools—or, in other words, tourists—of us all. | At least it is a happy thing for hotel-keepers, hungry | tigresses, white ants and what not. But it is, I find, , a doubtful honor to be more of a fool than anyone else. Nobody but a true fool tries to cross the Unita States in a Ford car in the middle of winter. Fools in a minor degree do it fairly often in summer but | the fools who cross in winter are the princes of their kind. We are converted to this doctrine now; yet, with our folly and forty-six hundred miles safely 1 in our past, we are rather proud of bein princes of our kind. There are several highways across the North American continent and this fact alone fools tray-. elers. Highway is a word with an easy and com. fortable sound to the ears of all but those who have | already motored across the States. Actually the use of the word in this connection is an act of faith and, very beautiful. It means that some day Ford-. errants, or their successors, will be able to run sing-' ing without changing gears on a road like a taut. wire stretched from the sunrise to the sunset. Let, us not dwell on the disappointing fact that, by that. time, all the transcontinental fools will be inefh-. ciently using aeroplanes, and the only improvement: will be that they will fall into airpockets instead of | bog-holes and so end their folly and their difficulties | THE STATES AGAIN 119 ‘once and for all. At present, however, the highway ‘is very inadequate as a way and can hardly be called high. The winter route must be the most southerly ‘possible, and on the “Old Spanish Trail” the Conti- nental Divide is only six thousand feet high. Mostly ‘the trail burrows in swamps like a mud-turtle, ploughs its way humbly through deep unstable sands, or explores the edges of dead inland seas and slow ‘red rivers. _ These are the states through which we passed: ies, N: J., Pa., Del., Md., D. C., Va., N. C., S. C., Ga., Ala., Miss., La., Tex. N. M., Ariz., ‘and Calif. I hope this is perfectly clear. ' Humility is the first thing expected of a Ford owner. It is the last thing the Ford owner feels. ‘We have never before owned anything that ran on wheels, but now that we own a Ford called Stephanie, Pierce Arrows and Rolls Royces are nothing to us. Believe it or not—on a good road we can pass every known make of car except a Ford, and nothing but a Ford ever dares to pass us. ' Stephanie is the newest model; her voice is like that of the nightjar in midsummer; her profile is Grecian in its exquisite simplicity. She hails from Connecticut and bears her state nameplate under her chin and at the nape of her neck. Homesick natives of Connecticut State constantly come up to her and, patting her lovingly on her hot muzzle, say, ‘‘Say, sister, I’m from Connecticut too. What's your 120 THE LITTLE WORLD hometown?” Then Stephanie regretfully and wit! an acquired British accent has to confess that she ha: naturalized as an alien. Although so young, Stephanie has seen a grea’ deal of life. She started from New York, and wher she started we scarcely knew one knob on her figuri from another, and the uses of almost all knobs wer! hidden from us. So we hired a man called Al t¢ drive us down to Philadelphia explaining the knob psychology of Stephanie as he drove. Unfortu nately Al proved to have an important engagemen which dragged him from us just as we approache the outlying suburbs of Philadelphia and threw hin into the New York train. We still had twenty mile to go. Stephanie sat smiling like a black devil wher her faithless driver had left her. Since I had spen a longer time in the front seat than S. I noy dubiously assumed the responsibility of driving. i Ford, we had been told, was fool-proof and I wa certainly a fool within the meaning of the act. © knocked a few knobs about—Stephanie moved . Proudly hopeful that we were so far in no way dit tinguishable from the hundred million (or so) othe Ford owners in the United States, we drove t Broad Street. We did not know the way to Radne —our destination—but Broad Street looked a pu! poseful—almost a fool-proof—street. Rain streake the windshield; all the outside world was a-dazzl and a-squirm seen through the glass. The darknes and the lights and the polished road were splu ae THE STATES AGAIN 121 tered in our confused sight. But still we moved successfully. Something was wrong. I had committed a crime. Stephanie had committed a crime. Everyone in the world was shouting at us. Two policemen were running towards us gesturing insanely, each shout- ing something different out of one corner of his mouth. “Say, where was you raised?” “Say, can’t you see the sign?” “Say, when you gwineter wake up?” _ Stephanie had suddenly fainted and, as she did so, the position became dreadfully clear. In docile obedience to some nod, beck, or wreathed smile from a policeman, all the other automobiles going up and down Broad Street had stopped. Alone, Stephanie had proceeded innocently across an oasis of for- bidden ground and now had fainted upon a tram- Jine, so that trams from two directions were blocked. Everyone in the world would be late for dinner. ‘Nothing would move again. The block by now ‘would be miles long. Back, way back, in Baltimore, ‘in Washington, in San Francisco, in Honolulu. . . (people would be held up, cursing Stephanie. The ‘business of the United States would be at a stand- (all. There would be international complications— another Great War. : “Well say, what’s eating you? Step on her, can’t you?” ‘What do I step on, for God’s sake ?”’ : 122 THE LITTLE WORLD I stepped on everything. I tore everything from — its socket except the handbrake which I left gripping | Stephanie’s vitals. Yet Stephanie awoke to the fact | that she was fool-proof. She moved in a series of appalling spasms with a loud grinding noise. We were safe in a side-street before she fainted again. © Collecting our fluttering wits sufficiently to take off — the brake at last, we rolled for two hours about the wet trackless wastes of suburban Philadelphia, try- ing to find a way to Radnor without crossing cruel — Broad Street again. By a miracle we fell over Radnor in the dark. ... ) We know knobs better now. After that Stephanie took the matter into her own hands and we could — only sit in turns at her steering wheel and admire — her spirit. She loved to leap ahead at thirty or forty — miles an hour and once, passing a stout, road-filling — Cadillac, she skidded in soft gravel and bounded from the road into the virgin forests of Maryland. — Only a very solid object can stop a highly-strung — car like Stephanie when her gasoline is up. In this — case it was the trunk of a fallen tree, combined with — the frenzied entreaties of her driver, that reminded her of her duty. She sustained a cracked windshield — and a sprained headlight and had to put herself into the hands of a Ford surgeon. Great minds, it is said—and said far too often— ~ think alike, and Stephanie found herself continually arriving in the same cities as Marshal Foch, who was at that time touring the States, receiving the — THE STATES AGAIN 123 freedom of cities he probably intended never to visit again, and accepting swords of honor which it is hoped the League of Nations will never allow him -touse. He had everything America could give him -—except a Ford. We saw him often, making shift with a Pierce Arrow, whistling up excited main- ‘streets, pressed in with a full measure of compressed military minions. I admit we never managed to pass him—but then in the South no one ever passes anyone. Everyone is stuck in a bog all the time. Upon the roads of North and South Carolina and _of Georgia it is at least an esthetic pleasure to get bogged. The roads are the only vivid things in the South. The color of gumbo is a dazzling rust, sometimes a bright vermilion. Gumbo is of a glue- like consistency, most useful in its proper place—no doubt it would mend china or weld iron or add body to chewing-gum; as the foundation of a highway, however, it would disconcert a stronger character ‘than Stephanie. There are always two ruts on a gumbo road. They are two feet deep or more, yet a hardy Ford can flounder along them at a spanking three miles an hour, until it meets another Ford floundering along in the opposite direction on the same pair of ruts. Everyone then alights from both Fords and sinks irritably into knee-high gumbo. _The drivers argue for a while and then he of the _ Strongest character blithely helps the more pliable party to heave the latter’s Ford into the bottomless 124 THE LITTLE WORLD outer gumbo. Then there is weeping and gnashing of teeth until a cynical passing mule consents—for a consideration—to haul the unfortunate out. There is none of that romantic brotherhood-of-the- road stuff in the Carolinas. There are tears in the air of that country in the winter, in spite of the persistent laughter of the negroes. The thin woods brood like rainclouds; the cottonfields are desolate and dripping, and untidy tufts of dirty white cotton still cling to the plants. Cotton was an unappreciated crop that year and on all the waste places of the plantations were great bales of unsold cotton rotting in the rain. One saw cardinal birds sometimes—beads of flying fire—but they seemed to have no song. The only cheerful voices were those of the negroes; whole villages of negroes, it seemed, had nothing to do but laugh in cracked foolish voices. ‘They laughed when they fell off their mules or when they went to church or when their buggies had to capsize in the ditches to make room for Stephanie or when they sold us new- laid eggs or asked us to what church we were affili- ated or gave us wrong directions with expansive gestures. Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana are swamp states and all their trees are bearded with Spanish moss. ‘Trees so festooned are, I suppose, to South- erners, as genial and domestic as ivied oaks are to us. But I think that this grisly gray lichen is one of the most mean and furtive-looking inventions of nature. ( ie es mn ih MW SPANISH MOSS i — ae by, =: ate ON akan eae E a f ~~ THE STATES AGAIN 127 My heart sinks now when I remember it; it seems to me the banner of a weeping land. ‘That is the South that stays in my mind; New Orleans did not dispel the impression, nor brisk Atlanta nor scho- lastic Athens high on a sunny hill. Even the memory of a two days’ wait for the Mobile ferry at Daphne, a sunny windy village with a generous and radiantly humble little inn under great live-oak trees, a place with a silver beach sloping to the jade-gray Gulf of Mexico at its feet—remains an isolated memory. New Orleans, as we saw it, could be simply de- scribed as a wet place surrounded by water. Stephanie almost became an amphibian after she ‘set wheel in Mississippi and Louisiana. She did not like it—and Stephanie is one of those who never suffer in silence. She had a hysterical trick of stop- ping dead with a horrifying coughing noise on the gangplanks of ferries at an angle of forty-five degrees. This she did in order to make her drivers appear fools in the eyes of ferrymen. We became familiar with the meaning silences of ferrymen as Stephanie settled down—a sheer derelict—upon ‘their gangplanks. After an awkward silence the ferryman usually said, ‘‘Say, yu hevn’t bin driving a Ford very long, I lay, hev yu?” We then blushed deeply and said, “I guess there must be something wrong with a sparkplug or what ie... The ferryman would then change his gum into 128 THE LITTLE WORLD the other cheek and get into the driver’s seat of Stephanie, who at once, with a guttural roar of malicious amusement, slid faultlessly into her allotted place. Sometimes the ferries on the way to New Orleans © are quite sophisticated and have crews consisting of as many as two men and have funnels with real smoke coming out of them. Sometimes they are as primitive as Ed’s ferry. Ed’s ferry was a wooden ‘flat’ towed by a limping gasoline launch along the channels of a desolate and malarial swamp in ~ Louisiana. The launch contained Ed, and, on the > flat, Stephanie and we were enthroned. Ed was a colored gentleman who wore a bowler hat and a shiny serge ‘‘gents’ city suiting,’ now worn from blue to mauve. He earned, on his own admission, — about twenty dollars a day but was nevertheless — aggrieved, apparently because he was obliged to get out of bed to ply his indolent trade. Fourteen miles. \ ! we trailed limply after Ed along an airless stream © lined with swamp grass fifteen or twenty feet high. © All the big trees in that dubious land were dead— killed, it seemed, by the spectral gray moss which © hung in long wreaths and loops from the gray brittle branches. ‘The trees had roots like snakes, writhing unhealthily in the black bog. The smaller — trees had but a few more hopeful but fading leaves. — There was nothing green in those sodden forests — except the traylike leaves of lilies on the water and — sometimes little low palms like hands among the tail | THE STATES AGAIN 129 -rushes—like hands outstretched for the departed light of the sun. We saw nothing alive for two hours and a half except some cranes and a hunter with a dead racoon on his back. When we parted from Ed he gave us a pass for another ferry. He said he “didn’t care to write,” so we wrote our own pass and, at Ed’s dictation, forged his name. _ Another colored gentleman drove us about New Orleans, up and down the old French quarter that must once have been so gay and is now so papery -and squalid. The plaster is peeling from the friv- olous old walls now, the trees are overgrown, the _turned-back jalousies have lost their hinges and their _trimness and their green French insolence. Jackson | Square, where the first—but insufficiently advertised _—Declaration of Independence in the United States took place in 1768, when the French returned, _ without thanks, a Spanish Governor to Spain, still retains a certain faded stateliness, but its arcades, filled with dead rusted cannon, are boarded and _ railed up now. _ Although of course the ubiquitous Maréchal Foch was still dogging the steps of Stephanie, and the city Was gay with flags in spite of the rain, New Orleans seemed a drooping old widow of a city. Its glory seemed a glory of yesterday and was as meaningless _ today as rouge on an old cheek. There were millionaires and movie palaces and skyscrapers and oyster bars and bootleggers and 130 THE LITTLE WORLD Creole dancing dives; there was “uplift,” as a result | of which no fewer than five “probes” could be counted on the front page of one newspaper—every | scandal reported with helpful completeness. There was a city park with improved Greek architecture init. And the old Spanish fort, a crumbling mound | of yellow-red brick, crowned with tipsy-looking old. cannon, was now the centre of a “Fun City” with a | switchback and popcorn booths and a Great Wheel. and nothing lacking that could possibly help to keep” an old Spanish fort in countenance. These things were like a gaudy veil upon a fine dead face. When the elect of the city die in these days, they go to the bristling cemetery of which an acre or two is, one gathers, doubly consecrated for the use of millionaires. The tombs of the millionaires, our guide assured us, cost anything up to a quarter of a million dollars. He pointed out that they were real elegant and that some of them were lighted up by electricity every night to match the movie halls and the all-night dives outside—so that, even in the dark, God might not overlook the fact that there were millionaires waiting there to: whom expense was no object. Every traveler moves in a world of prophecies, and we were told by nearly everyone we met that we should never get out of Louisiana into Texas. There were stretches of road that were vouched for as impassable and their names will always bring back to me the feeling of desperate and black de- THE STATES AGAIN 131 fignce with which we approached them. A great ‘many of the country people in Louisiana are French ‘and those we met had very small hearts and very ‘hungry purses. The roads were said to be deliber- ‘ately kept impassable by the French farmers near them. The farmers stood with their mules all day near bog-holes that could have been filled in with a ‘couple of cartloads of stones and a little good will. ‘Like vultures the farmers flocked to devour the dere- lict cars in the holes. They haggled for their price —five dollars a pull—before they would hook their chains. Hats off to thrift. But in the end we crossed over into kind sandy ‘Texas and left prophets and profiteers behind us for a while. ' The desert met us quite suddenly beyond San An- tonio. Suddenly there were no more sugar planta- tions, there was no more tobacco; suddenly the trees disappeared and horizons sprang out of the stran- gling swamp—strange mountains with flat summits liks martello towers. The prickly pears were of all shades of red and green. The hills were of pale rock covered with a low leafless scrub. Our Ford’s wheels were set sometimes on white boulder-ledges, sometimes in the waters of little clear gay rivers which impudently crossed our path and were inno- cent of bridges; mostly we ran uneasily on sand. There were bump-gates across the trail to keep one tancher’s steers from another's. A bump-gate is opened by the car itself—with some damage to the 132 THE LITTLE WORLD mudguards. You have simply to collide with one | wing of the gate with exactly the right amount of force. If you bump too hard the other wing of the _ gate spins round and damages your back mudguard; - if you bump too tenderly nothing happens, the gate | remains shut. The secret is a simple one when once — learned and I consider it curious that no steer on record has ever been able to defeat the ends of man | by mastering it. After a thousand miles of traveling over acsollt partly through deep soft sand, partly over naked ~ rock, partly through shallow arroyos, always along a trail defined only by more or less meagre ruts and by stumps and stones blazed with the colors of oy trail, Stephanie developed nervous breakdowns. Ford of her aristocratic temperament might wall suffer from such experiences. There were times when she had no cozy gasoline-smelling garage to sleep in at night, when all night long she had to stand, the centre of a very amateur camp, and listen’ for the scream of the coyotes and watch the shoot- ing stars leap from one horizon to the other; there were times when even the horizon might be known by heart without looking, and when destinatifal never seemed to come nearer, even after days of travel. In parts of Texas only one design in Tan tains is turned out; the slopes of these standardized eminences are all at one angle and the summits are as flat as though cut out in paper with one stroke of the scissors. Both mountain and desert are cov- THE STATES AGAIN 133. ered with one neutral color and there are no sur- | prises—except the cowboys. ' When I was about ten I was so unmaidenly as to announce publicly my intention of marrying a ‘cowboy. Years have brought me reticence and the ‘sad discovery that all ideals are very shy game— yet years have not changed my enthusiasm for the ‘heroic genus about which the arts of Messrs. Bret and William S. Hart(e) are built. The cowboys are the real flowers of the desert. Those of the ‘ordinary public who have seen the movies may ‘clothe the cowboys of their secret romances forever ‘in the bright colors that used to constitute their gala ‘wear. At a rodeo in California six years ago the _ cowboys proved themselves capable of wearing with- ‘out a trace of bashfulness scarlet shirts, orange ‘neckerchieves, yellow sombreros and crimson wool chaps. Cowboys on the everyday desert, however, favor protective coloring—unless they are Mexican. ‘In any of the rather dust-colored little towns of southwest Texas—towns that are flung upon the desert without apparent reason, blown, one would “say, to their locations by the indifferent desert wind ‘that blows nobody either good or ill—the cowboys ‘swagger up and down in modest leather or sheep- skin waistcoats and flapping leather chaps; their only touch of fantasy is shown in their high boots, ‘stitched in floral designs, and in their tall broad ‘desert-colored hats. Gorgeous colors are out of fashion, even on holidays. At a rodeo in El Paso 134 THE LITTLE WORLD all the splendor was concentrated on gold- and silver-studded saddles, cuff-bands, and belts. The end of a rodeo always leaves me vowing that the thing is as cruel as bullfighting and that I will never witness such a conflict again. The begin. ning of the next rodeo, however, finds me seated eagerly on the nearest available bench, busy per- suading myself that calves love being roped from a_ distance and tied in knots, that bulls enjoy the feeling of having their necks twisted by bulldozers until their — legs fail them, and that it does young men good to fall crashing from the upper air into which they have been shot from the humped backs of frantic bronchos. © Cowboys are a sort of madness with me because J they seem to belong so slightly to today. A cow- boy’s swagger is as much part of his equipment as it was that of the soldier of fortune of yesterday. There is nothing damping to me about the fact that: | their swagger is largely self-conscious and deliberate. | 4 All that is in keeping with their old splendid swash- | buckling role. The fact that in these days they occa- | sionally arrive—in their characteristic cloud of dust i —not on a broncho pulled up from a full gallop at the door, but in a Ford car, is only slightly disap- pointing. A Ford, a cowboy’s Ford, can jingle, can prance, can be jerked, foaming, to its haunches. | Ford or broncho, the cowboy glitters still in a halo 7 of spurs and boastings and sixshooters. i We heard a cowboy at Sonora remarking—in | order to be overheard—that he drawed the line at © THE STATES AGAIN 135 nothing but horse-stealing. His neighbor obviously thought that this would make an almost Sunday- school impression on the public so he hastened to add that he himself was not above riding a horse he ‘‘didn’t know the owner of.” ‘They watched our faces. All their talk was swagger and they were quite certain of our credulity and admiration and of that of the young lady chewing gum behind the counter of the “caife.” _ Young women in the West simper to match the ‘men’s swagger. Sombreroed beauties who ride -gloriously from one adventure to another have never been seen by me in the Western States—indeed | know no Western girls who can sit a horse at all. As far as I have seen the young generation of West- ern charmers, they seem to be exclusively indoor. Pioneering was mother’s job. With rouge, rolled silk stockings, near-silk jumpers, hobble-skirts and silly pretty little city toques, they outrage the enor- mous desert skies; on high French heels they totter along remote boardwalks; with servile squeakings and chaste gigglings and nudgings they ensnare the simple cowboy hearts that we have believed that only: the free, the untamed, the primeval, the trick-eques- trienne female—(like us in our movie mood)— could ever charm or deserve. Shall mincing subur- ban morals, small-town graces, city smirks and wiles, seduce our interesting rogues? _ It is most disheartening for those of us who try so hard to be good yet attractive to see how easy it 136 THE LITTLE WORLD is for rogues to make good their effect. We good mild persons who powder our noses and pin our hopes to marriage with a God-fearing breadwinner —we are inheriting and devastating the earth. We have invented Disarmament and Prohibition and the Girl Guide Movement and Higher Thought—and still one splendid lie, one fantastic coxcomb, can make us all look fools. At the joining of three exotic lands—Texas, New Mexico and Mexico proper—here perhaps will be the last stronghold of swagger and sombreros. Surely for a long time yet Mexico will be naughty, will be uninfected by the spirit of the movies and of ice-cream sodas and of Harold Bell Wright. Juarez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, opposite El Paso, has, it is refreshing to «learn, ninety-seven saloons and one soda-fountain. Stephanie went into Mexico. Indeed she broke down in the soft sand of a Mexican street. There is more provision for the reviving of men than of motor-cars in Juarez, and Stephanie, having fainted for lack of gasoline, had difficulty in finding a garage to supply her. Her drivers, on the other hand, had difficulty in walking a step in any direction without being offered stimulants. Mexicans may be backward in many ways; their adobe houses give no hint of progress or hygiene, the children in the streets are hardly cleaner or less forlorn than the pariah dogs, soldiers slouch along — as furtively as thieves, the solitary visible policeman SAJUARO THE STATES AGAIN 139 of Juarez droops, limply yawning, against a hitching post all day with his uniform undone. But in tak- ing advantage of the opportunity presented by the proximity of an enormous thirsty neighbor like the United States, Mexicans have not been at all slow. Nobody seems to think of the border of Mexico now as a lawless region which wise men avoid; on the contrary, the very mention of it makes the average mouth water. I should not be surprised to hear that quite a considerable percentage of the hundred million inhabitants of the United States is making discreet inquiries of real estate offices in search of properties as near as possible to a land so richly flowing with milk and honey—to put it rather euphemistically. It is possible that this trend of “hundred per cent Americans” towards the Mexican border may have a civilizing missionary effect on Mexico. But it is not very probable, if one may judge from two days ‘spent between saloon and saloon among American civilizers in Mexico. The desert shewed itself more and more austerely to us every day. Sometimes the deep soft sand en- trapped us and we had to work really hard to escape. The desert was never flat, never so simple as it looked, never bare. Fantastic mountains surrounded us always and cactuses became more riotous and more incredible as we crossed New Mexico towards ‘Arizona. In Arizona occurs the culmination of the ‘erescendo of cactuses. Sajuaros are everywhere; 140 THE LITTLE WORLD they point at the sky in such numbers that broad hillsides seem like steepled cities. The sajuaro must be a standing joke among the more conventional kindly fruits of the earth. The fact that it stands more or less describes it—an upright green corru- gated hirsute thing with a waist-measurement of perhaps fifty inches. It is waist all the way down. It looks like someone who has lost his hat. It stands anywhere between twenty and thirty feet high. Sometimes the more imaginative sajuaros produce one or two absurd little crooked fingers, corrugated and hairy like the main stem, pointing idiotically this way and that. I have often felt that by stand- ing up to a sajuaro and insulting it and then stabbing it through and through its fat green ribs till the tip of one’s quivering blade came out the other side, one would have all the thrills of being a murderer without its disadvantages. There is a fatter and even sillier cactus that sits at the feet of the sajuaro. It resembles those round cushions on which some people sit by the fire in drawing rooms. It cannot, however, be used for the same purpose, since it is very prickly. ‘There is a brown cactus like a splash of rigid snakes, and there is another which pathetically tries to beautify itself by wearing a few thick stalkless yellow flowers on its angular and whiskered knuckles. But the sajuaros command the scene and, when [ think of them, I am again waking up at dawn, lying on the sand, facing a crack of rising sun behind the square-topped mountains, and THE STATES AGAIN 14! the long simple shadows of the sajuaros lie across the lilac-gray slopes. One night, on a switchback mountain track, fif- teen miles short of the next town, gasoline ran short. There was some gasoline, to be sure, in Stephanie’s tank, enough to carry us for miles over a flat road. . But gasoline, even in a fool-proof Ford, must sub- mit to the laws of natural science, and, when a tank is tilted insanely backwards up grades that only an aeroplane could calmly tackle, gasoline simply will not flow forward. We stuck in a dry river bed. With a take-off from soft sand, Stephanie could not be induced to surmount the high very steep bouldery bank on the further side. We had been warned _ never to camp in dry river beds. A shower in some distant high valley might make such a camp a death _trap. But Stephanie vowed she would camp no- where else that night, unless gasoline was supplied. I had an idea.’ I know now from whom that idea came but at the time I wafted thanks for it in the wrong direction. I had noticed that gasoline always floats on the surface of water. I thought, “If we fill _our tank half full of water, the gasoline will be _ lifted up to the level of the pipe and so we shall be saved.” Perhaps I shall not be believed when I say that to a certain point this idea worked. Stephanie, with her spirit thus uplifted by water from a pool of the river, reached the top of the bank. And there _ she died. Among the cactuses on a tiny plateau a tinker had 142 THE LITTLE WORLD made his camp. He had two donkeys and two little idiot sons. It was what is called a family of “white trash” traveling from Kentucky to the State of Washington. But trash though the tinker might be, he was not unfriendly to us—offered us the use of his fire—(firewood in cactus country is hard to find)—offered us bacon, mumbled mildly to us. — Screened from the light of his fire by steeples of © sajuaro, we unrolled our blankets, and only woke next morning to see the tinker rattling away with his donkeys and his kettles and his little cackling boys. We asked him to get help for us when he should reach town, but the vacant look on his face did not encourage us to hope. So S. presently set out on a fifteen mile walk, and Stephanie and I sat hoping we might see a bear—at a reasonable dis- tance. Nothing, however, happened for some hours and then a car, carrying S. and some strangers from Montana, arrived. “Why look who’s here!”’ said the chief gentleman from Montana, speaking out of Stephanie’s diges- tive organs. “You got water in yer tank.” We said no word. “Tt’s these gararges—they’re all as slick’n crooked as they can be these days. If a guy looks a bit green these gararges’ll hold him up for his bottom Cent x) i! y ee We said no word. The kind man from Montana let the water out of Stephanie’s tank and gave us enough gasoline to a ee THE STATES AGAIN 143 take us to the next town. He left us still green but grateful. Even more green and more grateful than we gave him to suppose. The town of Benson—(grand old name)—came next to the town of Tombstone—and all on the way to Death Valley. This ill-conceived sequence seemed to us like a disturbing hint from a better _world—almost as alarming as angels calling. We _ decided to pass through Benson and Tombstone with faces averted; we swore that we would not even buy _a pint of gasoline or a sardine in either and that we _would shun Death Valley. For ten days I had been -a wreck owing to some accident in the middle ear, caused by constant jolting, which left me so violently giddy that I could at no time stand without support and sometimes could not even sit upright. At a hotel in El Paso we had been refused a room, prob- _ably because I gave the impression that I had already called at all the ninety-seven saloons of _ Juarez. Deming, New Mexico, in spite of the _ ninety-nine per cent purity which inspires its boosting slogan, found me reeling and rolling still. As for the really beautiful steep rusty city of Bisbee, Ari- - zona, its high vivid mountains whirl and swing upon my memory like great waves of the sea. I was con- vinced that if we stopped at Benson, near Tomb- stone, I should die. To have one’s name coupled with a tombstone was the same as to have one foot in the grave. We tore through Tombstone; we burst through Benson. Tombstone tried to lasso 144 . THE LITTLE WORLD us in the noose of a strange strong icy wind. We turned up our collars and drove on. Benson tried. to hold us in a bog. We overcame the bog. Both tried to threaten us by means of a most ominous low red smokey sky. We refused to be impressed. And then—this in the southernmost desert seemed the ultimate surprise, the most refined form of treachery —snowflakes were seen to fall and vanish on Stephanie’s hot nose and the next minute a blizzard had wrapped us up. Our purpose was snatched out of our hands and whirled away on the giddy white choking wind. We tried faithfully to drive on. We. did drive on until we were two Lot’s wives. And then we had to give up. In fact we had to make such) an effort to get back to Benson that Benson for a. while became a hope instead of a fear. ‘That, it seemed to me, was the wiliness of unescapable fate. We spent the night in Benson in a house of gloomy smells. I brooded on death—ah, it was cruel, I seemed so young to die . . . I remembered various flaws in my will. My life, I now saw, had been full. of errors and imperfections. I slept feverishly, listening for the rustle of wings. I awoke absolutely. cured of all ills. We paid the overcharges of the landlady like a happy ransom. I could hardly eat. my fried egg for singing—and it was a bad one. Stephanie almost lost heart on the border of Ari- zona and California. There was no limit to the. demands that were put upon her, and the imprint of her terrible experiences will never be erased from) | | 4 | | } THE STATES AGAIN 145 her countenance. She reached California a prema- turely aged Ford; rheumatism and asthma were among the least of her complaints; at one time she actually became delirious, her horn began to blow by itself and continued to make itself heard in sense- less ravings for a distance of about twenty miles. ‘This sad condition, so unlike that of the sparkling ‘and frolicsome young Ford who left Connecticut ‘two months before, almost brought tears to the eyes ‘of her drivers. But nobody could wonder at it. In the space of the last ten days of the journey, ‘Stephanie was wrapped in snow, drowned in floods, parched on a ninety-five mile stretch of desert so ‘bare and comfortless that, according to one in- ‘formant, even the “‘jackrabbits carried their lunches ‘with them,”’ and, in the end, cooled and diamonded ‘with spray from a pearly sunset sea. | Crossing from Arizona we almost lost hope. At ‘one moment, if an obliging aeroplane had offered us a lift, we would have abandoned Stephanie and ‘accepted. The Colorado River had flooded miles ‘of roads about eighteen inches deep in water. The water devilishly concealed the lapses in the road and.one day we only traveled eighteen miles— working hard from sunrise to sunset, wallowing out of one muddy crisis into another. At every mud- hole we had to wade back and forth to the nearest point of dry land with our kit in order to lighten the car, we had to chop sticks and, bending double, elbow deep in opaque water, thrust them under 146 - THE LITTLE WORLD Stephanie’s spinning splashing wheels. We had lost our tire-chains in a bottomless mudhole. Also we had another loss. Money in an inner coat pocket is safe enough in circumstances that permit a man to stand dry and upright as his Maker intended him to stand. But tip that man in and out of a Ford foundering in floods, load him with wet kit-bags, bend him like a hairpin, bereave him of hope and: dignity—and where is that money at the end of the day? Where indeed is it? We had nothing now but a few dollars which I found, sodden, in my breeches pocket. Would a pigskin case of green- backs and Cook’s checks float? I waded back a mile, barefoot on the soft slimy mud beneath the water, to see if money could float. But money is specially designed to be elusive. It either rolls or sinks. S., disabled by short sight from joining in the watery search, stripped Stephanie to the last. tin of corned beef, building a castle of kit-bags, coats, cameras, cans and pans on an island in the flood. The money was nowhere; there is nothing so. thoroughly lost as lost money. Poor S., waiting gloomily for my return, sitting in the re-loaded car, had to bear further injury. A Ford-full of cowboys ploughing through the water, having passed me kneedeep in flood and despair ‘“‘way back,” stopped to tell S. what chivalrous America thinks of mon- ocled Englishmen who sit in dry ease in opulent Fords while their wives wade barefoot behind. Poor S.’s protests were not understood except as a further THE STATES AGAIN 147 aggravation. The English tongue as we understand it is not spoken in the enlightened West. _ Ah, chivalrous America . . . Arriving that eve- ning at a small cheerless hamlet, cold, soaked and ‘exhausted, we stayed in a room full of holes through which the draughts whistled. ‘The place was cold as —chivalry. We were soaked, shivering, and sad. One hole in the floor shewed us the store beneath and to the store we went to sit on the counter by the stove and seek sympathy. We told our host and the assembled cowboys of the loss of our money and a kind of auction followed, the chivalrous cow- boys and storekeeper haggling for the highest pos- sible proportion of the lost money to be paid to the finder. When this generous rivalry had reached its most expensive point, two or three sympathizers went off to look for the money. Whether they found it or not, only they can tell. We never saw it again. ' The remaining cowboys sat in a row on the counter, eating bananas. and—with a chilling effect of bathos—discussing the various makes and prices of cowboy clothes. I asked them if I might sketch them. They were as much pleased as flappers, and they meticulously called my attention to the par- ticular glories of their outfits. “They were so anxious to watch the progress of the drawing, and at the same time to maintain their noble poses, that they almost broke themselves in two. Each man thought the drawing of his neighbor ‘“‘dandy”’ but each was 148 THE LITTLE WORLD ashamed of the portrait of himself. One man was much offended to find that his mustache was not perceptibly included in the group. Next morning as we started through the floods again a cowboy rode splashing after us to ask if he might have the sketch of himself for his mother, But it was deep in a kit-bag; we were English and unchivalrous and we had had eneugh of submarine unpacking. Although we had now almost no money we had the first gesture of a stroke of luck. We found a beautiful new tire—no Ford’s property but the lost| darling of a Pierce Arrow. It filled nearly the. whole of Stephanie’s seating space. Perhaps a large | reward would be offered—enough to take us to San Francisco. Perhaps the millionaire owner would | never think of it again and we—after a decent inter- val of uncertainty—would turn our treasure into gold. At any rate there was a kind of perfume of | relief about that tire. We drove proudly up to the | next garage. ‘‘Anybody missed a tire?” : T Naty) a one, sister. It’s a dandy one, too. Worth money.’ ‘Tf nobody claims it or reports it, d’you thinks we could sell it? Weve lost nearly all our money.” ‘Sure you could sell it . . .” But we couldn’t, for next morning it was gone. The garage mechanic said he had given it away toa man. “I guess he was the owner all right.” We. THE STATES AGAIN 149 guessed he wasn’t. There was a terrible scene. We had built hopes on that tire. The shock of the fall _of our hopes made us tremble with rage. The ga- ‘rage man said, “See here, stranger, let me tell you, you gotta lot to learn about America . . . us big- hearted Westerners, we don’t want no money for ' doing a neighbor a good turn...” But this ro- coco pedestal was easily demolished. ‘There was nothing for us to do except frighten the man and _ make him look a fool, and this we did with a whole ‘heart. He had stolen our treasure and our last “hope. In a moment he offered us money to say no more. He was really frightened when we refused and left him, the word sheriff on our lips. But we had no time to seek justice. We must hurry to Los ' Angeles, racing with our shrinking resources. There can be few experiences that equal the _ journey across the desert from Blythe, on the Colo- _rado River, to Mecca, on the Salton Sea, and thence across the San Gorgonio Pass into a plain brimming _with orange groves, bristling with palms and the _ languid spires of eucalyptus. From the desert one descends into the red mouth of a canyon which winds darkly and grotesquely through mountains. At every turn of the trail— which is nothing more than the sandy bed of an _ old dead river—one thinks that one has fallen into _atrap of the gods. There is, it seems, no way out— _ yet suddenly a narrower passage still, at a sharp _ angle, catches the seeker’s eye and leads him on. 150 THE LITTLE WORLD And so one gropes incredulously until one comes out abruptly into sunlight and into sight of a great view of the dead salt sea, two hundred feet below sea- level—a leaden-bound lake in ashen banks of alkali. And behind it the tall snow mountains leap into the sky. | Los Angeles is a sophisticated city; it has no eccentricities and no heart. It is approached. through oil fields that tower in skeleton groups like. thin enormous dead forests. There could be no charming adventures in Los Angeles, I think, even in. that crimped silly suburb Hollywood where they. turn out adventures readymade for the consumption of those who have none of their own. Yet there was treasure for us in Los Angeles—treasure of a kind. We sold the fag-end of our insurance back to its. issuing company for some useful hard dollars. And so—San Francisco at last, that kind odd northern California that smiles among mists and flowers and honest winds between the hills and the sea. | Of those forty-six hundred miles now there is— nothing, it seems, left to us. The miles are packed in concentrated tabloid form in the speedometer of Stephanie and in a couple of diaries which we shall | perhaps never look at again. The print of our tires, the charred ghosts of our campfires, are buried | deep in sand and lost now. The things we do run_ out like water or sand between our fingers. Truly. travelers are fools to open their arms so wide and to possess so little in the end. THE STATES AGAIN 151 II | HESE are some of the little midges of seeing and hearing that are caught in the spider-web ‘of my memory at the end of that struggle across a continent. Henderson, North Carolina—‘Health Hustle ‘Henderson”—reached on Thanksgiving Day. I re- ‘member noticing at dinner how full of secret under- ‘standing the restaurant was, what an undercurrent ‘of meaning flowed beneath each order, how effective were desires that never found expression, and what ‘suggestive-looking liquid substances were brought by waiters in opaque glasses and cups in obedience to ‘cries for innocent things like milk, coffee, lemonade ‘with a dash of maple syrup . . . As strangers we ‘knew no passwords and as aliens we had no excuse ‘to Give Thanks. Late that night on our landing ‘we fell over the powerless form of one whose thanks had been given in full measure, a hundred per cent American for whom the claims of God and the Pil- ‘grim Fathers very logically took precedence of the ‘decrees of Mr. Volstead. I remember the first time we camped, near Grover, South Carolina. A soft rain fell on us through the branches of a little wood and the light of Stephanie’s headlights cut dramatically out of the blackness of the wood branches and twigs and leaves hung with beads of rain. The frogs roared in the rain, and on the distant road we could hear 152 THE LITTLE WORLD the voices of ordinary domestic people going home. We felt like a very important secret in our iron strongbox of rain and the shouting of frogs—our safe, clamped with the jointed steel bars of trees. I remember King’s Mountain City’s welcoming sign. ‘‘Go slow and see our city, go fast and see our, jail.” And the sign in a grocer’s store in Georgia, iELE you spit at home, spit here, make yourself at home.” I remember that in Montgomery, as we toppil a young man threw his arm affectionately round! S.’s shoulders. ‘“‘Say listen, you need a raincoat,” he said. I thought him an unusually kind and confident weather-prophet, perhaps a professional Greeter employed by the city council of Mont-. gomery to welcome strangers and warn them of the vagaries of the local weather. But S. was more suspicious; he drew himself up haughtily; this, he suspected, was some idiom new to him and had almost certainly an insolent inner meaning. ‘““What’s the joke?” said S. coldly. ‘‘Joke—not on your life. I say you need a raincoat—’s’plain American. I k’n let you have the best raincoat on the market—the Nevermind Mae | dollars’n worth four times as much . . .”’ | I remember the daughter of the ra landlady at Richmond, Texas. The daughter was a heartless but faultless pianist, an interpreter of Chopin and Mendelssohn after a style which those compen could scarcely have foreseen. For she played them THE STATES AGAIN 153 with perfect fluency—but always jazzed. She could / not conceive of an unsyncopated rhythm. We were _happy in Richmond, Texas. There the badlands, at last, were no longer swamp and damp sugar-cane— _they were red prairies, like a sunset pressed and ‘dried in a big book. I remember camping on Christmas Eve near iSonora, Texas, and ranging along a stream-bank in search of firewood, disturbing a row of little ‘turtles so that with one impulse they dived from their log, pricking an accurate neat line of perfora- tions in the water. We had our Christmas luncheon in the shade of a great prickly pear with crimson and golden discs. ‘And as we cooked our Christmas bacon on sticks in ithe flame, a big furry animal with black horizontal ‘stripes from gray shoulder to ringed tail, crossed a ‘near space, at a lumbering shortlegged run, its heavy ‘coat swinging on its back. - I remember a dirty kind hotel in Balmorrhea— ‘(a name which somehow sounds like taking the ‘name of Queen Victoria in vain)—and the deep ‘cavey lake of Phantom Springs, just outside Bal- ‘morrhea, and the embarrassing stare of the over- dressed prudish black furry cattle as we bathed. I remember sitting nearly all day in a garage in Los Angeles while Stephanie was being overhauled, having an argument about God with some very pleasant intelligent mechanics, ex-cavalrymen from the Philippines. 154 THE LITTLE WORLD I remember being stuck for want of gasoline at , night on the top of a high California mountain road | and being found by a very good Samaritan who was . short of gasoline himself but gave us enough to enable us to reach the long downward grade down | which we could slide on our own weight. Not con- | tent with this, he followed us conscientiously in his | car to make sure that we reached the valley safely. And at the bottom of the hill I remember the Holy City, headquarters of some cult called the P. C. D. W.—the meaning of the initials is secret. — They sell rose-jam there and texts and fantastic pamphlets praising—if I remember rightly—man above God and woman above man. But their theories, which were locally reported to be sub- versive and dangerous, did not spoil their coffee and their kindness in the night to stranded aliens. I remember the almost unbearable excitement of driving at last up the drive of the best of friends between orchards in the Santa Clara Valley, which — is almost more lovely than home to me. Yes... they haven’t gone to bed yet . . . look at the light . . » look at the log fire . . . he’s reading aloud to her... Now they've heard us . . . They’ll won-' der... Now they’re running out... Iil E got stuck in a bog in California, four of us in Stephanie. It was a particularly black and pervasive bog and after three hours of splashing | THE STATES AGAIN 155 ‘and wallowing among levered planks, we reached _ dry land looking like the submerged tenth. It was late and we went to a little wooden inn in a Spanish village. When we had knocked for some time, the / proprietor awoke and opened the door. “Rooms fer de night ... sure step right in _...” he raised the candle to our lamentable be- _bogged faces. “Ahyuss ... werl ... dat’s as it may be... step right out again, folks, you k’n - sleep on de floor in de annex, ef you want... _dere’s five udder colored coons dere—jazz enter- ' tainers—dey’ll make room fer you.” And so they did, and sang very sweetly over their breakfast next day, too. IV | HE Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in | Arizona is the only object in creation that can- not possibly be coldly or superciliously seen. I wonder, in passing, whether the word creation can _be properly used of the Canyon. Rather it is an interruption in the order of created things. Here is a desert, as flat and everyday and conventional as any desert can be; it is moulded in cream-colored sand and spotted with chaparral and low trees and 'white poppies; mirage lakes shimmer in gold and blue on its horizon. As a desert, in fact, it is ag- _ gressively orthodox, the eye travels serenely across 156 THE LITTLE WORLD Arizona towards equally serene Utah, when sud- denly—Good God, what has happened? There is no desert—the desert has fallen through the world into hell—there is nothing but blue air perforated. by blood-red towers. Gashed by chasm within chasm, the world crashes down, from midday into twilight, from twilight into night. The desert is betrayed; it is revealed as no dese at all, but the broadest mountain peak in the world; it is slung up under the sky more than a mile abot sea-level—and here the cords of the sky have broken, the desert has fallen. There is nothing higher except the sky; in the chasm the peaks and the pyramids, the pillars and the towers and the: terrible scarred temples, though four or five thou- sand feet high themselves, never dare to rise above the rim of the tall false desert. | Here is the calm level of Arizona, and thirteen miles away, on the other side of chaos, Utah takes up the calm line of desert again as though eternity had never intervened. What an inconceivably, ridiculously large snare. for the feet of men the Canyon must have seemed: to the first pioneers. ) Shorty was an exquisite desert dandy with a very broad Mexican hat, yellow shirt, leather sleeveless. coat, black neckerchief, flaring leather chaps buckled with silver, and high prettily stitched boots. Once in his hands we put ourselves on the hoofs of mules, and so we descended into the Canyon. Di- | ‘ } THE STATES AGAIN 157 rectly we had slipped over the rim it seemed as if— death being certain either way—it would be both quicker and cheaper to jump on foot over the 4,000- _ feet cliffs. But Mommer robbed us of the expres- sion of this thought. She was an elderly lady in a feathered picture hat and divided skirts, and she screamed without ceasing. Not one of us dared /murmur in competition with Mommer. Shorty christened her so. He was unmoved by her screams and addressed her with facetious coquetry. When —since she refused to move—he roped her mule to his and dragged her away, someone at the tail of the party shouted, “What about the Rape of _the Sabines?”’ ‘To Mommer we owe our dignity _ during two hair-raising days. Our mules are the heroes of the story. They walked firmly and modestly down practically per- _pendicular places, rocks fell upon them, paths gave ‘way beneath them, the thousandfold echoes of _Mommer’s braying made their ears twitch—yet they walked tranquilly on air and clouds and unpropped 'shadows, meditatively chewing dry thorns. Now _and then Shorty, who rode ahead, would turn and whistle. At once we would find ourselves joggling In ignominious and terrifying haste towards him, ‘like sheep after a shepherd, like trucks after an engine. Our stirrups, hanging, as it seemed, paral- ‘lel with the mules’ necks, clattered about their _ cynical ears. The mad angular shapes of the peaks within the 158 THE LITTLE WORLD Canyon rose, and their colors were intensified, as we sank. ‘There were scarlets and crimsons and blood-reds and plum-purples and cream-yellows | and blinding whites, all built up in an infinite ar- rangement of buttressed horizontal lines. There was a radiant glaze of flowers at our feet and there were patches of snow poised like angels on. the tips of stone needles far above and behind us, — Finally there was the river, set in an ultimate night. dark cleft of which only the lips were visible from the rim. i No horizontal lines here, no reminders of the work of men’s hands, no scarlets or gay yellows, no flowers. We rode down into shadow, into a geo- | logical whirlpool of still wild shapes and lines. At. the foot of those stormy cliffs, far from sunlight and flowery silence, far below the feet of the fantastic | red cathedrals and obelisks and pyramids, the Colorado River roared. ! Between rapids it runs as smoothly as though under glass and only the little errant sticks on its. surface betray its frightful swiftness. In the rapids — there are tall dragons of water, they toss their. golden manes and wings, and never bow their heads. | There are deserts of smooth indrawn water between ~ these crested waves, there are varied levels sepa- | rated by deep hinted rocks and by scarred ridges of yellow foam. The geography of this dreadful king | dom of screaming water never changes. THE STATES AGAIN 159 We slept in a camp at the foot of an olympic ‘conception of the Flatiron Building, New York City, three thousand feet high and done in carmine ‘red. _ Next day we rode twenty-three miles, fifteen ialong the edge of the dark cliff that leans over ‘the river—yet still ourselves four thousand feet below the rim. Glimpses of the ghostly pale river shot up, as it were, through gashes in the cliff. Now ‘and then, where a rare cool stream made a little oasis of grass and clover and bright poplar trees in ‘the waste of sandy chaparral and cactus, we paused and straightened our creaking limbs. About us the pinnacles and peaks were like cactuses in stone. Even Mommer was silent as we climbed towards _the rim again by a new and even steeper trail. To tremble, one felt, might disturb the superhuman -balance of one’s mule. ‘The trail was threaded like a cord through niches and little tunnels in the sheer cliff. The blue shadows of sunset pursued us; as _we rose, the drowning wild Canyon sank into a sea of blue shadow. It seemed outrageous to find—after our tense _and dreamlike two days among huge striding col- -ored stone shadows—tourists on the rim in tight _ skirts and city suits, still cackling through telescopes, still buying ‘‘postals,” still thrilling with delicious alarm at the loud war-dance of the sophisticated and peaceful Hopi Indians who live opposite the 160 THE LITTLE WORLD hotel. Even Mommer had a halo of gorgeous ex- - perience. Even Mommer was withdrawn behind - the veil of a remembered miracle. And though we) too might wait our turn at the telescope, though we too might spend hours turning round the ‘dumb. waiter’ that displays picture postcards, though we - too might sit on Navajo rugs, thrilling as we dodged | the whooping swoopings of naturally peacefully in- clined Indians—yet we were aloof, it seemed, upon a pedestal of yesterday—nobody could mistake us for tourists. . . | ‘Animals and primitive people always know. ’’ we said to ourselves. For Joe Yellowfeet, the most active Hopi Indian, shewed himself a friend. of ours. He honored us often by shaking hands. with us while still gasping from his war-dance. | Sometimes we met him and his relations with ver-. milion stripes across their noses, with red feathers sticking up round their heads like a park fence and swinging down their backs, with beaded buckskin coats and frilled leather trousers and heavy moc. casins. At other times we found ourselves bowed to by exquisite young men in tightwaisted jazz: tweeds, and only after a momentary check recog-| nized the handsome if rather flattened physiog-. nomy that distinguishes the aristocratic Yellowfeet | family. Rightly are Indians known as the vanishing race. Joe, like most other fine wild animals, knows how to vanish by taking refuge in protective coloring. pe THE STATES AGAIN 161 V HE San Francisco-Chicago train made us conspicuous by stopping especially for our benefit in the middle of the night. On the platform there was no lamp, but a ray from one lighted shack dimly shewed a sullen Indian face—a face in- _'spired by no eagerness to help us to lift our prop- erty out of the train. But still in our minds was ‘comfort and tranquillity born of the advertisement that had brought us here—a promise of a hotel with twenty-four bedrooms and a regular motor ‘service to Acoma sixteen miles away. ‘The soft ‘obstinate darkness of the desert must be a mistake, we thought—a misprint upon our minds’ retina; ‘cups of hot coffee and rooms full of good beds beamed serenely in our hopes. “Aw say...” sympathetically said the lady telegraphist in the lighted shed. ‘‘Who’s bin hand- ing you that speel? There ain’t no hotel anywheres this side of Albuquerque. There’s a shack with an Indian dame in it but her man’s away and she’s ‘scared of strangers. You can’t get to Acoma to- ‘morrow neether—’nless you hike. Well say, ain’t feeetoo bad...” She was a kind woman but had no power over cir- cumstances. I have often wondered what her life ‘was and what she ate and whom she loved—appar- ‘ently alone by a little lamp in a black desert. We found the Indian dame’s shack, a blacker 162 THE LITTLE WORLD incefinite mass in indefinite blackness. We knocked till the house shook, and after a long time, in a crack of the narrowly opened door, a woman appeared, wrapped in a red blanket, her thick plaits of black. hair hanging forward over her crouching shoulders, She was afraid of us. Her fear gave us a kind of bandit feeling and I put my foot in the crack of the door. This frightened her still more. ‘No. room, no room... twenty man here... All bed snlifup een | After cooing like doves for a while without effect, | we pushed in. We selected the cleanest of the dirty. bedrooms. | Once we came into the light the woman was hyp- | notized by S.’s monocle. I don’t know whether it made us seem more or less dangerous than she had expected. But it conquered her. | So at least the night was negotiated. But even. the kind light of day, making steady torches of. the bleak yellow mesas and polishing the pale sur- face of the desert, could not bridge over the sixteen. miles to Acoma. Acoma was a place we had come. far to see. Could we telephone to Albuquerque for acar? The kind lady in the depot shack was lamen- tably replaced by two very unamiable Indian men with faces like irritated horses. They would not even take their feet off the table to shew us how the telephone worked, A ring at the telephone only produced replies in an unknown tongue. Vague memories of Fenimore Cooper did not supply us. THE STATES AGAIN 163 with the aboriginal translation of—‘‘A Ford car, please, and look sharp about it... ”’ | We returned disconsolate to our Indian hostess. There was a smart little Dodge car outside her door. In the house were Gilbert and Beebo eating fried eggs. They introduced themselves. Both, T think, must have been partly Indian. Beebo was dressed like a cowboy—except for gentlemanly gaiters; Gilbert wore a dainty check suiting and seemed to be a traveling salesman. To us he sold nothing—except the only thing we wished to buy, a sight of Acoma. It was good, after the hours of despair during which our feet had almost taken root in the desert sand, to feel wheels going round beneath us and to see the mesas coming closer. Good, but not com- fortable. Rocks, cactuses, dry river beds, dead coyotes, acres of tangling chaparral and bottomless sand—all these were no obstacle to Gilbert and Beebo. _ Mesa Incantada—the enchanted mesa—was on our left, and Beebo was ready with the story. The ‘mesa towered above us, a coffin two hundred feet high; it had no slopes, only vertical cliffs holding ‘up a flat plane against the sky. But once there was ‘a way up, Beeba said—only nobody knew how long ago. Indians, it seemed, remember everything but dates. There was an Indian tribe up there, a ‘very prosperous tribe, since no one could reach ‘them to beat them in battle. But they were beaten 164 THE LITTLE WORLD all the same. An earthquake destroyed their stair- way. They were imprisoned two hundred feet above the world—starving, with all the kindly col. ored world at their feet. ‘‘“Acoma folks say their ghosts and their devils yell around up there on dark nights,’”’ said Beebo. ‘Dunno if it’s true. Anyways, I often hearum. . . ” ‘Some guy climbed up there one time and there was their houses, sure ’nough, and their dead bones.” Gilbert added. Acoma is built on a mesa just the same shape, but it isn’t a cofiin, for Acoma lives and thrives. The Dodge car drew up at the foot of a long dune of sand blown against the yellow cliff. The flat lit- tle yellow houses of Acoma look like machicolations on the top of a donjon keep. A social impasse checked us at the foot. We all wanted to climb up to Acoma, we all had suitcases. Might innocent paleface suitcases in an open Dodge car dwell fora few hours safely alone among prowling Red Indians? | “Bury ’em,’’ suggested Beebo and this we began to do. But, glancing up, we found every cliff knobby with the heads of surprised Indian onlookers ob- serving this strange paleface rite. So we left the suitcases looking rather silly, up to their middles in sand, the cynosure of all Acoma eyes. The sand-dune, leaning at a steep angle against the mesa, made heavy climbing. We sank calf-deet at every step and were glad when we came to the THE STATES AGAIN 165 niches cut out in the cliff, each foot-niche supple- ‘mented by neat hand-niches, which made climbing ‘comparatively easy. At the top of the cliff Frank awaited us in his ‘capacity of Acting Governor of Acoma. Frank had the rather horselike flat-eyed look characteristic of his race. His heavy black hair was not shingled—it swept his shoulders. On his head he wore a broad sombrero, and on the rest of him blue dungarees. His wife was very stout and wore a light chemise and the two long plaits of her hair. The other ladies of his family, in colored blankets, were bent forward under the weight of babies strapped to their backs—bent forward so that their black plaits swung free before their breasts. _ Frank led us most courteously round the village of Acoma. The houses had three storeys, arranged in three steps as children might pile wooden bricks —a short brick on a long brick and a little cube brick on the top of that. Each storey housed a family. To reach Frank’s house we climbed a lad- der to the first floor and found ourselves in a little front yard; here we were faced by another little nouse flanked by ovens like beehives. By another tadder we climbed to the roof of that house and found an even smaller front yard and even smaller house—Frank’s house. Frank’s wife was dainting black squirls and squiggles on roughly shaped baked white pots. The little cubic house was beautifully clean; the beds were niches in the 166 THE LITTLE WORLD mud wall with Navajo blankets in them; there wer W windows with splintery foggy mica panes in them > On the walls hung the family jewelry, chains o: roughly wrought silver and turquoise. Hanging on the wall, too, were Frank’s robe of office—z dainty thing of cherry-red tulle—and a walking stick that had belonged to Abraham Lincoln Lincoln had seven walking-sticks and he gave one tc each of the self-governing Indian pueblos. Frank took us to see the church, which dates back to Spanish times. The Spaniards when they first crossed the desert left a priest behind with order: to save Acoma’s soul. Beebo told us that the people of Acoma did not at first appreciate the necessity of having their souls saved. Indeed they pushed the priest over the edge of the cliff. He was, however, carrying an umbrella at the time, having imported cautious European habits into a country where it only rains about once in forty years. The umbrella unfurled and the priest, cling. ing to the crook and no doubt congratulating him. self on his forethought, floated so slowly to desert level that the astounded citizens of Acoma were there to meet him when he landed. There they were, lying on their noses in honor of the miracle. The priest might have formed a limited company for the patenting and exploitation of the parachute —instead, he built a church. It is as if Sir Isaac Newton had merely eaten the apple and praised God for it instead of discovering gravitation. At THE STATES AGAIN 167 ‘any rate there is the church in Acoma still, a yellow ‘mud church with towers like ears. And it is evi- dent that the repentant converts gave of their best ‘effort good measure, for only Indians could have designed and executed those mud gargoyles. The ‘results of the priest’s flight, therefore, endure to ‘this day, for, ever since, a priest has visited Acoma regularly to conduct mass—and ever since, no doubt, the police of Acoma have removed umbrellas from their criminals before pushing them over. “For if folks don’t act right,” said Beebo, “they ‘push ’em over, same as then.” “All Acoma folks very good,” insisted Frank with a deprecatory smile, as he exchanged glances ‘with a demoniac gargoyle. GEOGRAPHY ORTH AFRICA, close up on the starboarc side, was made of shadows, and there wer little towns drowning in the shadows. The tide o1 the lonely ochre cliffs went up and down with no body to mark its changes. In the coves ther were little white beaches where no baby had eve set spade. Any unknown little-visited land acros a few miles of sea is very exciting; every shore, seei so, means to me a fine but impossible hope regis tered in that part of the brain that makes fine bu hopeless plans. “If ever I have a home it will b among pale inhuman beaches like those; if ever have babies, they shall slide on teatrays down sand dunes that have only been trailed before by reveren_ warm winds; we'll find strange berries among th gray shrubs that veil those mountain sides; we watch extraordinary little animals on the pockett yellow alps near those summits, and we’ll go hom in the evening through an uneven pale-pink villag to a heavy tea in a wide Moorish house with thick cool, plastered walls... ” ) The glamorous band of sea is a barrier acros. which thoughts of climate, mosquitoes, servaly troubles and sanitation cannot come to me. 168 GEOGRAPHY 169 There is a crying need for imagination-geography in our schools. ‘The text-books of that lovely science would be silent on the subject of exports and imports, principal bays and capes, watersheds and the mileage of rivers; such details as flora and fauna would have other and more adventurous headings and names. All the feelings of lands and seas would rise like a scent from between the pages. As it is, few people know or love geography. ‘Soldiers and sailors, of course, walk about the world ‘on chunks of geography; they become expert in spite of themselves, and often their knowledge exhales ‘that essence of the feeling of the far paths they have followed—that glory of very-far-away that I call ‘imagination-geography. But of the women and civilians on board our P. & O., a good many were not aware what continent lay enity south of us— (poor Africa, one would have thought that by now it had done enough to make its mark)—hardly any- body but the captain knew when we were looking at Portugal and when at Spain; we passed Cape St Vincent without being able to find out what hap- pened there and why and if so who won; we mis- took Gibraltar for an island and no doubt some of us insulted it by calling it Crete or the Crimea or St. Michael’s Mount... . At least we all know something about Malta now. The very babies now on board will wake up and cor- rect the teacher when Malta is mentioned during 170 THE LITTLE WORLD future geography lessons. They will not remember the exports and imports but they will see again the hooded women and the goats. Valetta is like a beehive from the sea. Except for a few steeples, turrets and cupolas, there is nothing to interrupt the closebuilt curve of the steep hill-encrusting city. Horizontal lines, built into pyramids, dominate the whole island of Malta; all the houses are as flat and square-cornered as bricks. There is scarcely any color but cream-gold in all Valetta. It was a national holiday when we arrived. The Maltese have a long memory—they still, it seems, make merry over the semi-miraculous raising of a siege in the sixteenth century. In the yellow shadows of the diving narrow streets the towns- people were rejoicing; banners were strung across the narrow chasms of the streets. Each gay per- spective was stoppered at the far end by blue sea. The church bells rejoiced; they rang as urgently as firebells. Only in the great church of the Knights. of Malta it was quiet. There was so much color there that one hardly missed the sunlight. But outside one was dazzled again. The women, hooded and mantled in black, sat on the church steps, and they alone were serenely shaded from the sun. Their great hoods were stiffened so as to lie—a horizontal yard of starched black—on their heads. There was room for a baby or two in the generous shade. The cloaks of the women hung curtained! GEOGRAPHY 171 from this broad winged hood. Faces look beautiful so shadowed. | The milkman of Malta is the goatherd; the goats carry their milk themselves. The goats rustle along the rocky pathways and along the narrow steep streets and across the wide places on which grind- ‘stones stand like prehistoric petrified mushrooms. ‘When a customer appears the goats stand patiently browsing on dust while the goatherd milks into the -customer’s own vessel—which is generally a demo- bilized beer or whiskey bottle. | We mounted a frail-looking cab drawn by a sad /horse with a very long plume standing between its ears. We drove to the Hal-saflieni Hypogeum simply because we wanted to know what it was. _ We found catacombs said to be nearly five thousand ‘years old. Behind a man with a lantern we filed _ down a winding stone stairway and through a long _tangled series of dreadful caves. There were red paintings on the very low domed ceilings—or per- haps they were only stains of blood from the lacer- ated skulls of tourists who forgot to stoop. Dark cavities, like murderers’ snares for doomed inno- cence, were set between squarehewn pillars. There was a wide well in which the water was still sweet. There was an altar ready, even now, for sacrifice. There were the skull, arms and ribs of a five- thousand-year-ago man, buried in an_ upright position. Seven thousand skeletons were found in the catacombs. 172 THE LITTLE WORLD After about twenty minutes in the fierce gaping - maw of the island, one was convinced that one. would never see daylight again. And then, into one of the sepulchral shafts, daylight struck and, looking upward, one saw the shell of the prim in- nocent Victorian villa which for generations has stood all unaware above this dark secret. Gener-' ations of respectable persons admired those wall. | papers, leaned from those window-frames, passe tamely across those gaping thresholds, while all the time beneath their feet the pagan old altar waited, hungry for sacrifice, waited among the bones of seven thousand men. ANGELS IN THE RED SEA HE Red Sea was red-hot. What wind there was moved at the same speed as we did and ‘counted for nothing. We wandered about pur- ‘suing ghosts of rumors of breezes as sceptically and ‘as conscientiously as members of the Society for ‘Psychical Research. The ghosts had always been laid by the time we arrived, and, in honor of their memory, we sat and hated one another. A cube of hot sticky Red Sea was confined in a canvas tank on the lower deck; the tank was designed to hold three thin passengers or two and a half fat ones, but we crushed irritably into it six at a time. We hated one another yet we could not escape from our fellows. I invented a crowd of harassed guardian angels in the bows. Every passenger—even every un- blessed steerage passenger—was represented in that company. The angels of the officers, of the stewards, and of the Lascars, if they existed, had their quarters elsewhere. The guardians of the children were never seated for more than twenty seconds before, with a murmured, “Excuse me,” they hurried away to meet some urgent need. The guardians of the few good were sleepy and com- 173 174 THE LITTLE WORLD placent. Old Mrs. Purey’s angel, indeed, was never in demand at all, except when his charge dropped a stitch or mislaid her spectacles. He was immensely stout, and affected the philosophical, innocuously epigrammatic manner common to those on whom the world makes no claim. ‘It must be the heat,” said Young Taylan angel, who had shocked, innocent eyes. ‘I can’t) keep my man up to his standards at all. He’s hold-, ing Mrs. Wellington’s hand now and I can’t find a trace of Mabel on his conscience. Yet when they parted at Tilbury .. .” He hurried away again) towards the Abaen tee deck. | “Tt’ll be hotter yet,” giggled pretty Mrs. Wel-) lington’s angel. “But Mrs. W. and I have been this way seven times and we’re acclimatized. Young Taylor hasn’t made any impression on us, I need hardly say. Nobody has since—well, we must amuse ourselves somehow ... ” “Quite right,” agreed Mrs. Purey’s fat angel. ‘““Hlappiness is a duty. Some people put happiness on and off like a robe. It should be rooted within, like bones.” | Bennet’s angel laughed abruptly. He had a white sour face and, like Bennet himself, carried a little flask. “Happiness...” he said. “A duty? We. worked that out twenty years ago.” He sipped from his flask. ‘Yes, happiness, as you say, should be rooted warmly among the tired bones...” | Tetherton’s angel was obviously accustomed to IN THE RED SEA ANGELS THE 0 UEDERATY OF ILLINOIS Pt se eS = ~ - = ANGELS IN THE RED SEA 177 ementary military life. “Oh, that method wesn’t pay,” he said, and he had caught from his sbaltern, Tetherton, the throaty guilty manner of ae trying to uphold high principles of which he is chamed. “Tt’s a man’s duty and all that, if you know yaat I mean, to keep decent and fit and what not . especially before natives.”’ The heat wove trembling coils of air between te ship and the burnt, corrugated coast. The still et touched one’s lips like fever. Young Taylor’s angel reappeared irritably in font of Tetherton’s. ‘“‘Hasn’t your man got any- ting better to do than annoy mine? It isn’t funny, tough it seems to make Mrs. Wellington laugh. Ye can’t help it if our Adam’s apple is a little tominent.” His temper flared suddenly. ‘Don’t yu see that he hates himself enough already? You take him feel al] Adam’s apple in Mrs. Welling- tn’s sight. Oh, yes, he’s forgotten Mabel now— ¢d your man can only make silly jokes . . . ” “Oh, well, my man’s only ragging. Can’t you sind a little fun? It’s hot and we must work our cergy off. Come along with me and settle things.” Mrs. Wellington’s angel giggled again. ‘But ‘aylor is simply a sketch, isn’t he? Anyway it’s to hot to be kind.” “It'll be hotter yet,’ said Mrs. Purey’s angel facidly. “How glad I am that my old woman knits ‘ much. She is rising to heaven on a lifeline of 178 THE LITTLE WORLD heather-mixture wool. But if I were you, de: I’d run along and give your Mrs. Wellingten hint.” “PfE . . . as if she couldn’t look after herself! The ship rolled a little in the slow blue sea. | rim of white ran up and down the parched unvisit| beaches of Arabia. A couple of whales in the d. tance flung up light fans of spray. A great noise } hot babies crying drearily haunted the air. Behiil that noise there was, it seemed, a soundless ro: of heat to deafen hearts. A sensation of dreadf excitement was poised on the deck. | Tetherton’s angel came back, limp with sulle. ness. “It really is your job,” he said to Mrs. Wi lington’s angel. “I can’t control my man while yo; woman eggs him on.” { Taylor’s angel followed him furiously. “Cd your man off. Call him off, or there'll be murde Stop him grinning with his gums like that. We’: cleverer than he is, though we never went to scl Mabel loves us . . . Call your man off.” “Oh, stow it—it’s oat fun,’’ shouted Tether angel, whose face was scarlet. ‘Does the silly ai imagine that Mrs. Wellington ever had any use f! him anyway ?”’ The heat jerked their features and limbs a surdly. They jostled each other like furious ch: dren as they ran back to their charges. Mz, Purey’s angel suddenly looked alarmed. ‘WI . .. why ... she’s stopped knitting . . . "GBH ANGELS IN THE RED SEA 179 yaddled away. Soon all were gone except Bennet’s «gel and Mrs. Wellington’s. “TI simply must go and watch the row,” said Mrs. Vellington’s angel, after fidgetting for a little while. 'm not going to interfere, of course. J’m not to fame if they choose to make fools of themselves. -|believe they’ll murder each other before night.” Before night. There was a great brass wall of ay to climb before night. Bennet did not need his angel. He had found pace of akind. He was asleep by the door of the lr. A sunbeam, refracted through an empty glass, («plored his crumpled figure as the ship rolled. For i long time Bennet’s angel sat watching the sea. like fairies over a troubled city, the flying fish vrang from the eaves of the waves and flew with ‘lilt till they slipped down distant white chimneys ¢ spray. In pursuit of the ship came the dolphins, » near that one could see the trembling steel ‘rength of their bodies, as they curved themselves— jut as bows—in the air. _Perim was in sight. A gag upon the mouth of ae dead Red Sea. A scarred island crushed with zat. A terrible sleek island enclosed in a brazen ust of heat, as a more fortunate island might be aclosed in a shell of trees and flowers. The round \l-tanks watched the sky with an insane stare. ' Mrs. Wellington’s angel came back. ‘Oh, my ear, Taylor and Tetherton had a fight. I knew vey would. ‘Taylor said, ‘I'll kill you for that,’ 180 THE LITTLE WORLD and Tetherton danced about squawking, ‘Kamera’ and with his toe unhitched Taylor’s deck chair j that Taylor sat with a bang among the ruins . 4 Oh, my dear, I thought we’d have died . | looked so comic. And they fought andl thd angels fought and—what do you think?—M), Purey let her knitting drop and upped and box! Taylor’s ears—you should have seen her old ange} face as he pulled her off. The knitting fell into t) sea. Three of the flappers are in hysterics ail the captain says he’ll put Taylor in irons. And ty Mrs. W.’s gone down to her cabin all of a dithy She’ll be joyful and excited over her old letters f: the next hour or so—pretending it isn’t true th: the man who wrote them died at Ypres... What’s your man doing?” | ‘Still asleep. Still asleep.” The island of Perim passed slowly, and, behil it, the charred mountains of the mainland revolve, moving in and out of clouds. The polished sea t+ tween the ship and Perim was scratched by the fii of sharks and pocked by shoals of leaping fish. And suddenly the wind and the world came in) that hot void. A terrible doubt seemed dispelll by the gay wind. The cords of presentiment ail doom slipped from the strangled throat of the dz. The air was clean of cries and of the drumming heat. A cool crown of serenity clasped the for heads of the angels as they returned in quiet grou}. “The hand of the heat has let us go,” sal ANGELS IN THE RED SEA 181 nnet’s angel, rising a little unsteadily to meet tem. ‘We were prisoners. We are free. Good- eae “Why—where are you going?” “I’m taking my man home.” “Home? But isn’t he due to land tomorrow at iden?” “Land? What is land to him now? I’m taking tm home.” PICNIC IN ADEN DEN was on fire—at least, every sense bt the eye told one so. If one shut one’s ey flames seemed to crackle against one’s quiveriy skin, but in sight, there were only yellow fork| mountains like flames trembling against the bras) sky. In several Ford cars we drove through Adi and the hot breath of the fiery mountains roar! about us. | We were undergoing a picnic, in search of} breeze. It was our duty to go first to the tanks all then to the oasis. Residents in Aden consider thr tanks very interesting. Probably all the inhal- tants of Aden go up on Fords or camels to look t their tanks every day, and congratulate one anoth: on having stuff like that to look at in a place whe: it never rains. Every time they have a bath thr swell with pride, I expect. And now and then, } very great occasions, they drink a little water ; a great treat. The camels, I am sure, do not “yr pathize with the demonstrations of enthusiasm t the tanks’ edge. Camels, it is said, drink only abct three drops of water a month. They have t? faces of typical prohibitionists, you can see. Th look like traditional schoolmarms; they carry et 182 PICNIC IN ADEN 183 eads at an angle that suggests sour prudishness; aey compress their long hare-lips; their bulging yes are forever shocked and frigid. All goods and ehicles in Aden, except the ubiquitous Ford cars, re carried or drawn by camels. Probably Fords ave to appeal to them too sometimes, when they reak down on the steep hills. Camels would en- oy those occasions. They would enjoy saying, “I old you so.” You can see they are always shocked ecause the Fords wear no fur. ' The desert around Aden imitates water; on all ides imaginary water shimmers. Water seems to ave flooded the pathetic golf-links of baked, blade- ess desert; far-off native villages seem to stand in akes among their silvery reflections. There is no vater really, and its semblance only intensifies the dare. The hot wind dries up the mockery of coolness. - Our faithful boiling Fords are assembling at their lestination. Here, in the oasis, fainting trees are Ylanted in the sand. There is a summerhouse. There is even an embryonic Zoo—for this is a vleasure resort. We drape ourselves limply about he cages of the three gazelles (of the kind “I iever loved” )—four dog-faced baboons and a por- ‘upine. A heroic steward has kept a piece of ice ilive all the way from the ship; it dies now inef- ‘ectually in tepid ginger beer. Why have we come? [he porcupine looks at us in surprise and shrugs ts shoulders with a cynical rattle of quills. There 184 THE LITTLE WORLD is distant thunder. In Aden I believe that you ¢; distinguish the rainy season from the dry seax by the fact that, during the former, distant thund can be heard twice a week. The weaver-birds’ nests hang by long stror threads from the branches. ‘The nests are qui round and exquisitely woven; their doors, pierce at a downward angle, escape the sun and cat the air. Weaver-birds, in natural pride, strut abo giving little lectures'on their art. But we are tc hot to be instructed. Shall we go back to the ship? At least it couldn be hotter. We remember the ship sentimentalh there was once a corner, aft of the deck-tennis ne where someone once felt a little breath of air. W reach the quay; the ship looks like heaven, so ta’ and pale-summited upon the lapping cool wate her decks capped by awnings, the shadows of hi feet churned by diving-boys and boats full of ostrit | feathers. ‘“Have-a-dive ... Dive-for-shilling ... Loo lady, very fine feather only fifteen rupee...” | is a hot clamor, overloading the fainting air. Pe haps our oasis was cooler after all. Surely th weaver-birds’ nests were swinging a little Gy Have we fled from the only breeze in the world? YUNNAN ' I UV UNNAN is a forgotten province, a piece of China mislaid by the world. Yunnan has jeclared itself independent, but I do not suppose the world heard the declaration very clearly. You rannot get to Yunnanfu, the capital of Yunnan, trom the China side, without riding for a month or jo on a donkey, and somehow revolutions and declarations cannot be very impressive when made dy places to which the approach is so humble and so cedious. _ But there is a quicker way to Yunnanfu—you have to leave China to find it. From Hongkong you take a pig-boat to Haiphong, in Tonkin; from Haiphong a little harum-scarum French train car- ries you up for three days towards the sky. You must spend two steamy and fleabitten nights in lit- tle primitive inns. The first day you wriggle like a worm through close wet jungles of bananas and bamboos and oozy palms and snaky creepers. The second day your train cleaves red-wealed moun- tains. And on the third day you follow a red river along plumed ravines. The river is a little disciple 185 186 THE LITTLE WORLD of the Yang-tse. On its face I could see, in little, all the tricks and fantasies the Yang-tse had first shewn me—the glaze of intense swiftness on vivid | water, the cream-filled bowls of the whirlpools, the frozen wave that hangs over a rock in mid-rapids, | the different levels and contrary impulses of tor- tured water. The river has done the work of a genie for the French engineers who built the rail- way, it has moved mountains, it has carved deep gorges, it has bound beetling rocks together with - the roots of trees on slopes so steep that a bird in the crest of one tree can sing to a mouse burrowing - in the roots of another. The train fears rocks no more than it stops for a bird’s singing; it simply) takes advantage of the work of the fairy river, oc cupying itself irresponsibly in leaping from side to. side of rapids by means of thin hopeful bridges. Yunnanfu has a big forty-mile-long lake the color of a dark pearl. Along the high side of the moun- tains that border this lake goes the train, freed at last of its dependence on the river, through orchards and, at last, across a broad well-cultivated tableland pricked with poplars—to arrive at Yunnanfu, a common, crowded railway station | | ee et ee der a low dull sky that hides the mountains. Yunnanfu is an independent city, even its climate _ —at over six thousand feet up—scorns compromise. The city must be sought, it will not welcome you. Outside the walls one may find all the things that never need to be sought—a club, a French-Greek | 1 mn CFs ae ” y “¢ , 0, rf ic _ ’ Fg: ww OAR 2 | rT . » at \ [Hs LA OG) bl Jamey BY.< eat feet 2 Lf am Sy o — a '\ ————— 1 TRIBESWOMAN, YUNNANFU THE Lignany OF The CRVERSTY QF ULLndis YUNNAN 189 otel, cocktails, hospitable men who make jocosities bout “the ladies.”” But at the gate of Yunnanfu ne enters a China that is difficult and rare, and one oes not easily leave it again, for it is a great city. t must be very great, for it contains half a con- inent. In the city everyone in the streets should be cooked at as intently as oneself is looked at by sveryone. For in Yunnanfu every citizen is charming othe eyes. The tribeswomen are gaunt and hand- ,ome; their dress is as gay as lanterns in the narrow shady streets. The typical woman wears a faded nauve or rose-red tunic, bright blue or green trous- srs, white ankle-puttees, and pointed curved embroidered shoes, mounted on thick short extra soles like pattens. She is Lo-lo, not Chinese, so her feet are not bound. On her head she wears a blue square of cotton as a hood and, balanced askew on the top of the hood, a tiny-crowned, big-brimmed straw hat which is kept in position by a silver chain buckled under the chin. Her baby sprawls crablike against her back in a big gaudy handkerchief; its little hands and feet, with silver bangles on wrists and ankles, dangle at the four corners of the hand- kerchief; its placid sleepy dirty face, against the nape of its mother’s neck, is framed in a fierce- eyed, whiskered tiger hat. The tribespeople of Yunnan, of whom the Lo-los form the majority, are despised by the Chinese. The Chinese call them dogs and profess to believe 190 THE LITTLE WORLD that, when they wear kilts, it is to conceal thei tails. But, remembering cities of Yunnan, on seems always to have seen Chinese sitting on chair looking at nothing, Chinese lying on beds smokin opium, Chinese looking on at quarrels, Chinese ric ing nervously on led ponies—and Lo-los alway working. Especially the short sturdy women o the P’u-la tribes, swinging their kilts as they strid in groups on bare strong shapely legs, their ros weatherbeaten faces bowed under great loads—d not deserve the patronizing sneer of the Chines city woman, trussed in gaudy figured satin, totterin on helpless crushed feet under her crimson and ye low deep-frilled umbrella of false modesty. On the air of Yunnanfu rings nearly always th clanking of prisoners’ chains. Everywhere ther are prisoners, ankle chained to ankle, repairing th cobbled alley-ways, carrying loads of earth or can of water, cursing and prodding the slow oxen an buffaloes which draw waggons whose wheels ar never round. Nearly all the real work of the cit runs to the wretched tune of chains. The men ar mostly brigands serving the ends of a rare justice If all the brigands in that district were at larg there would be no room to move upon the moun tains, so the authorities have to step in now an then to relieve overcrowding of the foremost loca industry. Once in the early morning I was ache b the marching clank of little treble chains—and ther ‘ i ep THE LiQHAn? OF THE EERO OF LOIS YUNNAN | 193 vere the baby brigands shuffling by, of any age from even to fifteen, thin and in rags, ankle dragging yore chained ankle, but all chattering shrilly. _ A funeral is a far gayer thing to meet. There vas one at which the dead man’s pony assisted, all Jone up in white paper frills like a ham. The male mourners, each laboriously supported by a coolie ind a staff rosetted with paper flowers, though ap- yarently quite cheerful and well, were swathed in white and wore on their heads superstructures like rows of white croquet-hoops springing from brow to nape. The widow, though in orthodox white, must walk unsupported, like the pony. Behind her came a crowd of gay chattering women in their brightest and best satin brocades, tight trousers and embroidered peg-top shoes. But even if there were no citizens in Yunnanfu, there would always be the chance at every corner of meeting very strange strangers—at this junction of caravan routes from Burma, from Tibet, from Western China or the North. Outside a booth I met a traveling priest. He was very tall and wore a flippant Dolly Varden type of hat, tilted forward, bent down in front and up behind—or rather the brim of the hat was Dolly Varden, the crown was absent. ‘The space where ‘the crown should have been was occupied by the priest’s own shaven skull rising neatly through the hole and encircled by a blue band, a rudimentary turban. The man wore an immense quilted coat, 194. THE LITTLE WORLD | not in the least ragged but exquisitely patched al over in white and various shades of blue. Ever his shoes were neatly pieced together of little blu and white shreds. He carried a tall staff and ¢ begging bowl. In contrast with that huge jig-saw man, all the crazy street—a-dazzle with gold sign and swinging lanterns and lintels painted with birds, and eaves alive with dolphins, and dark “ | houses guarded by elephants and walls watching witl one hot red cyclopean painted eye—all looked sud denly sane. In Mengtsz, Yunnan, halfway between Yunnanft and Tonkin, we came to live. In Mengtsz I find myself settling down domestically for the first time in my life, going to market as though I were al housewife in Putney, S.W. On ponies and on foot, in buffalo carts and ox carts, with or without captive pigs, ducks, chickens} foxes or leopards, everyone is coming into Mengtsz market through the dark gate that pierces the thick wall of the city. Tribespeople have come for miles from the remoter mountains, some loaded, some carrying nothing more than a couple of onions and a persimmon for sale. The tribespeople have wrinkled, humorous faces, some of them have fair hair and gray eyes, the features of most look more Western than Eastern. Some of them look like little Greek soldiers in their lilting kilts. Some wear wide leather bands, thickly studded with sil- ver, round their heads; some have broad blue em: i | La] : 7 (ea y as, Ay \ \ TRA | 1 \ \{ \ * \\\\ Ws L ReAb te See Veal eee im 8 Se te Wa cS SS Te 3 2 ‘i F de } i . NS \\ ; f' y :) VY ‘ . Kags : ff wmiansyl | y AAAY pie /¢ i (Ese Vl A (il, ea Ly A iit \\t Cay 4 . S sae Uji ii Ss t : TRIBESWOMAN, MENGTSZ i Beis biy ee an ETRE ee Bt Bh: URE Mili Ay ALY j i | ‘ : THE Lignadty OF THE. UEVERUTY UF HLUMaTs YUNNAN 197 broidered sunbonnets and aprons caught with silver buckles at the shoulders; some have their own thick hair bound with silver cords and silk into a big turban from which a cascade of hair escapes over each ear. Some wear enormous dark-blue turbans, tight jackets with sailor collars and striped sleeves and—hitching up the hem of the jackets behind— curious mid-Victorian bustles. Some wear black and scarlet strappings picked out in silver on short sleeveless tunics, and these look much more military than do the soldiers who slouch about in dirty gray cotton uniforms on thin bandy stockinged legs. The Annamites move in the crowd, immigrants from Tonkin on the heels of the French. They always wear chestnut-brown or black with a touch of scarlet or applegreen, and their black turbans are very neat and close under their huge balanced straw hats. A respectable Annamite woman keeps her teeth enamelled black, and the smile on her rather pretty pale face is thereby made atrocious, like a gash. There is hardly room to move in the market. Only the buffaloes by sheer weight can make room. The buffaloes crawl in long obstructive strings through the cramped streets; they look at nothing, they turn aside for nothing. Housewife from London, S.W., and Lo-lo chief alike may find them- selves trundled ignominiously along from behind by those broad blunt horns. The buffalo’s head is 198 THE LITTLE WORLD wedged into his yoke, so perhaps he cannot take ar intelligent interest in the world, and perhaps the cart that he draws, with its two massive sections of untrimmed log for wheels, is rather like a Jugger naut car and bumps his poor tail if he pauses tc consider the claims of other marketers. The dogs are all out marketing; they lay in stores and never pay their bills except in the bruises and sores that result from kicks and blows. Nothing that cannot speak is gently treated in Mengtsz. The chickens, alive, are hung up by their feet and groan hoarsely in unchickenlike voices; the carp gasp desperately in parched masses; the limbs of the ponies and donkeys bleed and tremble beneath great burdens, and some ponies walk on deformed ankles, the hoofs being turned up in front like skis, But children and old people, though very much in the way on such a busy day, are always loved; little babies are strapped on the backs of their tired shrill mothers, and older babies are carried on proud fathers’ arms. ‘There is a ragged beggar carrying on his back his very aged mother—a knotted gray dreadful figure in an aura of fluttering rags and gray hair; her brown bare skeleton legs point stiffly for- ward from beneath her good son’s arms. ‘There is a blind beggar who crashes his bleeding head against the cobblestones as he shrieks for alms, another who twines the bony footless stump of his leg round his neck in order to earn a copper from us. Once a door was opened and a dead man, in rags, YUNNAN 201 was thrown into the road. He was picked up by two men who rammed him rudely into a sorry broken packing-case. ‘They carried the case away between them on a pole, the dead man’s toes shew- ing through a crack. At an eating-booth the car- riers stopped and left the wretched coffin in the streaming gutter, with pigs scratching themselves against it and cabbage-stalks floating in and out of it. In every booth all the time there is a great clamor of bargaining. Groups stand blocking up the street about the trestles on which are stacked rolls of cotton strips, Lo-lo ribbons, pale unhealthy-looking meat, mats, rough gray-green pottery, bamboo brooms, twisted straw firing, cloth shoes for men and tiny silk flowery shoes for women, persimmons and bananas, straw hats as big as tables, elaborate paper kites in the shapes of dragons, butterflies and birds. Even the feeble little displays of rusty nails, lids of cigarette tins, corks, broken saucers and shreds of rag are not neglected by the public. Noise is nine points of business in Yunnan and each cash is worth half an hour’s irate argument. From behind a screened doorway comes the in- congruous sound of a harmonium. Two mission- aries and probably a couple of converts are opening their hearts in song. The tune to which their praise _ is set is a London street song with the pace altered meen, Eliza, Eliza Jane... ’’ A crowd of _ soldiers stands outside, idly revolving the mysteries 202 THE LITTLE WORLD of foreign eccentricity. The clamor of the market is martyring the missionaries’ music. But I had come to Mengtsz market in the hope of seeing ‘‘pirates.”’ Pirates so far inland sound ; | { } absurdly amphibious, like the stories of eels crossing deserts. But in Mengtsz brigands are called pirates; it is a peculiarity of the place, just as Bath Buns are a peculiarity of Bath. Pirates and all naughty men must often reflect happily that they give almost as much pleasure in the world as pain. They give constant joy to those of us who have enough dramatic sense to enable us to enjoy the presence of only semi-serious danger. How many mild parents at home in Tooting or elsewhere have their breakfasts occasionally spoilt | by such information from their traveling kin as— ‘The pirates here have captured six innocent women | and children and are holding them for ransom. As for me, I have mislaid my revolver but the Lord’s or, ‘As I write I can hear on the verandah the snarling of a panther hungry for blood,” or, ‘In my bath this morning what should will be done... ”’ ” I find but a puff adder coiled round the soap .. . The possibility of thus electrifying the dear ones we have left behind us is what makes globetrotting really worth while. So I went to Mengtsz market, looking for pirates. I understood that pirates, like all other harassed providers for censorious households or messes, would take advantage of market day. I Se Fe ae ee eee YUNNAN 205 thought that I should stand side by side with pirates haggling for eggs or feather brooms, as it might be at Barker’s during a sale. I intended to write to my family with a telling pretence of indifference, “The pirates were so tiresome at market this morn- ing. They don’t mind how they put prices up. Vulgar ostentation isn’t the word. I heard the chieftain of the Skull and Crossbones band buying chickens for four dollars each and, my dear,—noth- ing but skin and bone. He walked away with eight skewered on his two-handed sword... ”’ There were no pirates in Mengtsz market. But they had come through lately in an impressive pro- cession, wearing cloaks and big turbans and curious old rifles and cartridge belts, riding high on tall saddles on their hurrying ponies, with their feet in the ponies’ manes. They had come through to the sound of deep gongs answering one another all down the line. But they did not wait for market day. They were, as it happened, earning an honest “penny, protecting some favored merchants’ goods from other pirates. So they crashed and rattled past our gate and crossed the valley in a long dwindling line. We felt as if gods had visited us. II UR valley is speckled with villages. No one lives in an isolated cottage in Yunnan, it seems; all the peasants’ huts are so huddled and 206 THE LITTLE WORLD cramped together that every villager must be able to hear his neighbor eat. A tight wall always binds all the compressed mudhouses together. Our valley is divided into uplands—on which the graves, the memorial pillars and the worn stone lions stand as thick as the flowers—and lowlands— ricefields under water. But over highland and lowland alike, over foothills and mountains and marshes, is spread a net of villages; those among the rice-marshes are like islands, those among the graves like humble mausoleums. From village to village the little busy paths run—dyked up between the absurd puzzle-sections of the ricefields—worn down in the tall flowery grass of the high grave- yards. And most of the villages 1 in our valley now have the prints of our ponies’ hoofs in the soft earth, within their walls. There is the village at the crossroads, huddled round a great evergreen tree in the shade of which carved stone tablets shew who subscribed to the construction of the rough cobbled road, and who built the high humped bridge that makes so much ado about so small a stream. There is the big sad. village that is so nearly deserted and bears upon its walls ominous white handprints to shew that a plague has passed over it. There is Ta-t’oun, the disreputable Mussulman village where men do their marketing armed with heavy old rifles and beautiful daggers with chased silver hilts and sheaths. The complexions, the features, and the fierce wide eyes YUNNAN 209 = the villagers bear witness to those invading fore- ithers from Turkestan whose religion and tradi- ‘ons they still uphold. There is Shih-li-p’u, a vil- ge of temples. In one of its temples the stair has cumbled away, but by climbing the wall we found an upper room some restful paintings represent- grather overdressed persons on fat piebald horses itting one another’s heads off. The optimistic ex- ressions of the severed heads while still in mid-air ‘as a lesson to us all. In another of Shih-li-p’u’s mples a nun in a close black-hooded cap and a ark tunic and trousers tended a light at Buddha’s et and refused to notice our presence. The omen and little girls of Shih-li-p’u all wear a cur- us Lo-lo head-dress, a pointed cap with a widow’s sak down the middle of the forehead and a thick savy fringe of little silver fishes, gods, chains, and aborate beads hanging all round the cap and al- lost obscuring the eyes. Ko-chiu is not in our valley but we traveled to it ne day. The road, twenty-three miles of it, no- srious for brigands, climbed over a high mountain ass lined with azaleas. Four Chinese soldiers es- orted us. One wore one puttee on his leg to 1ow that he was a corporal. One sang songs in a nall wandering falsetto voice all the way. All ere very condescending and kind. Down the steep ill came caravans of laden ponies and shouting rivers. The leading ponies of each caravan were ecorated with colored pennants and with poles 210 THE LITTLE WORLD striped like barbers’ poles crowned with gaudy woollen tassels, to act as beacons to the following ponies. The Chinese inn at Ko-chiu where we stayed— since there are no Europeans there—had_ been lately dismantled by brigands. It was empty of everything except a great deal of wild insect life of a kind better imagined than described. | The industries of Ko-chiu are brigandage, opium growing and tin-mining. The last has the disad. vantage of being legitimate. The big tin-mines of Ko-chiu are worked on more or less modern methods, but the little ones are attractive and primitive. A great many humble coolies—whom British mining trade unionists would hardly recog. nize as men and brothers—sat on their haunches shaking little bowls of water and earth; as they shook, the red grains of tin detached themselves from the brown sediment. Everything seemed to be happening at once among the dingy wet terraces that were the mines. Men were digging channels and dykes between the terraces, men —some of them chained prisoners—were jog-trot- ting from one centre to another carrying swinging kerosene cans at either end of shoulder poles; some were wading thigh-deep in brilliant vermilion water, some sat in front of shallow tilted slides, whisking rainbows of water, with perfect regularity, on to, the mud at the top of the slides, so that the grains of metal might ooze slowly down the slopes into | YUNNAN 211 ‘he grooves prepared for them. But the most jramatic process was the furnace. A tall fire flowered broadly from the top of a ‘ower of mud. Half-naked men, like demented organ-blowers, worked the bellows beside the tower, ind the fire gasped harshly in a roaring gaseous yoice. At the foot of the tower there was a dwarf oor, about twelve inches high, and in front of this, but at a distance of about fifteen feet, sat a man pushing a long sharp metal rod through the joor into the heart of the fire. As he stabbed, the molten tin ran down in a thin hesitating stream, like a model of a waterfall in hell, through the ‘ittle door into a pit below. _ Allround the furnaces were stacked thick bars of sold finished tin, shining and somehow delicious to the eye, like silver butterscotch, disclaiming frigidly all relationship with the infernal stream that re- luctantly ran from the heart of the fire. _ The western sun lay among clouds like a gout of molten tin as we finished our sightseeing. We walked out- through the city gate to see how the mountains, plated with gray-green fields of white opium flowers, faced the dying of the day. But nardly had we set foot among the smokey caves in the cliff, lived in by the outcasts and the very poor, when soldiers ran after us and hurried us back ‘nto the city. Even at a few paces from the city wall, it seemed, brigands were the rulers. The fur- naces of heavenly and human industry might die t 212 THE LITTLE WORLD away now for the night, but the brigands’ workin shift had begun. II HE mountains are capricious patron saints fo picnickers. Sometimes they smile and sur plement with a feast of azaleas and lilies th coarser fare of hard-boiled eggs and banana: Then again, sometimes they knock down and stam with mud and humiliation anyone who dares t tickle their ribs with a picnic. There was a picnic which up to five o’clock in th afternoon had been a fairly successful one. Tru it had rained so hard that the road by which w had arrived on horseback must be presumed to b impassable and we must return by train—still, b five o’clock we had dried out and, having reache the railway station, imagined the picnic to be prai_ tically over. What—no passenger train? Ver well then, a goods train. ‘The goods train woul be two hours late? Very well then, we can pla ring-a-roses till it comes. But rings are tarnishe and roses wilted before the goods train come And when it comes it can only spare one oily close freight truck for nine picnickers, the ponies ¢ the riders, one sedan chair containing invalid, fiv coolies, several luncheon hampers and a a) The very wells grow fainter. Still, home must be reached somehow. Flog th YUNNAN 213 yonies into the truck. They are stallions and will ight if they can. One pony wriggles off its bridle ind is challenging the local ponies to a fight. For in agonizing half-hour everyone must pursue the srrant pony with one hand and pacify the impatient Annamite engine-driver with the other. The pony s caught. The shafts of the sedan chair will not yo into the truck. Very well then, balance it on the soal-tender. We can only just squeeze into the Jark truck. A pony is wiping his nose on my hat. My new riding breeches are seated in a pool of ‘rain oil. It is very dark. We sing John Brown’s 3ody in brave quavering voices as the train jolts on n the dark. _ Now we must get out; this is the point nearest 1ome—a little deserted halt halfway up a mountain side, only four steep miles from home in the moon- ess dark without lanterns. [hud succeeds thud. Two of the party have already sprained their inkles. Very well then, they must sit and wait till lawn. One of the ponies will not proceed—it will only kick. We hope it will make a painful dint in ‘he malevolent mountain. The chair containing the nvalid, having, like the rest of us, missed the path, ias foundered on a far crag and must wait till dawn. Zveryone has lost everyone. Nobody has any matches. I am still whole enough to tumble idroitly about halfway down to the valley. But . come to an edge which leaves my groping feet 214 THE LITTLE WORLD guessing in the air. I settle down and confuse everyone within hearing by shouting contradictory, advice. There is a splashing sound at the foot of my precipice. One of the party is sliding in a sitting position down a mountain torrent, using his re. luctant pony as a brake, ingeniously arguing that a stream must eventually reach a valley. He is right. A wail of triumph announces his arrival at the thieves’ village at the foot of the mountain. | A check. Yunnanese thieves, it seems, do not deal in lanterns or even candles. They simply go to bed when it is too dark to pursue their calling. They are, however, like all thieves worthy of the name, resourceful fellows when awake. Presently we on the mountain side can see half a dozen kind thieves running across the distant dark with lighted twists of straw. They have bundles of straw on their backs and neatly light one twist from another as it dies. So we have all been found. We have escaped the mountain; we are at last on a flat trail faced homeward, albeit ankle-deep in water, for the val- ley 1 is flooded. ‘The mountain is left licking its 4 in the dark. I speak from experience when I say that any mountain, however poetic and even kittenish in ap- pearance, can be devilish if you get it in the wrong! mood. Mountains are like wild animals in captiv-| ity. Once they realize their power, they use ity, once they have tasted the blood of human pic YUNNAN 215 _nickers, there is nothing for it but to buckle a stout railway or funicular round their necks and never let them go again. _ There was a mountain that seemed so tame that a , child could have subdued it with a look. It had a _perfectly good trail all the way to the ravine between its peaks, a comfortable temple where picnickers could spend the night, pretty apricot and pome- granate orchards, friendly farms, and a brigand village which was credibly reported to have been _ evacuated. ie _ We started one evening and spent the night in the temple. The temple was built against the face (of a craggy mossy cliff and at its foot Buddha sat in a long dark cave, scarcely to be seen. To him, _all night, sang a rather ill-timed worshiper. We started early next morning and without ad- venture reached the ravine. In a crack in the earth down which the path dived to the gorge, was a man -on a pony. We drew aside to let him pass but, instead of passing, he rode hastily back into the jravine. We had followed him a little way before it occurred to us that his presence and behavior suggested that the brigands had not after all evacu- ated their village. Perhaps the mountain had a posse of brigands up its sleeve. _ As we decided to turn back the skies opened to ‘emit a positive yell of rain. The whole mountain side became a river. Nobody could be more anxious to go home than we at once became. But the moun- 216 THE LITTLE WORLD tain’s blood was up. We had come without consult-. ing it; we should go at its pleasure. It tore its paths to pieces in a frantic effort to hinder our retreat. Rain wrapped us round; waterfalls roared between our knees. ‘The ponies proceeded in the attitude: of newborn puppies—stomachs on the slippery mud, they slid with all four sprawling legs out, as though they were swimming. We could not ride, we could only with difficulty keep our own feet. | It was hours before we reached the village where we had spent the night. But the mountain had not done with us yet. It had arranged that we should meet a caravan of pack-ponies under insufficient control. Our Cyclops, the dapple-gray, tore himself free and, stripping himself to the waist—(kicking off his saddle and breaking his girth)—-challenged all comers. They fought on the churned mud in which were the holsters that had carried our provisions. Our red wine and hard-boiled eggs became a sorry souffle. The men of the village and the caravan men would not help or intervene in the battle; they were true men of their vindictive mountain; they only smiled on the fortunate. With the caravan men exhorting. us to restrain our aggressive ponies, we dangled like helpless bobbins on the reins of the large and leaping Cyclops. We pacified him at last. He was completely naked except for a thick coat of mud. The vanquished caravan ponies stood in a jingling bruised group at a safe distance, reproaching one an- YUNNAN 217 other for not having put up a better fight. And we - had our revenge—a revenge perhaps too subtle for the crude understanding of an angry mountain. S. . turned to a row of mountain men and, removing sev- — eral of their hats with a restrained gesture, threw ' the hats in the stream. The little red buttons acted _as keels and the hats made a very seaworthy exit. — We left the village without a word, leaving the vil- lagers, perhaps, imagining that they had assisted at some British sacrificial rite. The hat removal was our only reproach to the mountain—a retort, I _ maintain, not without a quiet dignity of its own. IV HE four women missionaries and I sat looking at the splendid cake, shaped like a cathedral, _ that was our bond of union. Our hostess, in a broad _ Western American voice, talked without ceasing _ about her seven children, their clothes, their ail- ments, their naughtiness, the dilatoriness of the . Chinese tailor who wasn’t through with Warren’s _ second pair of: cacky pants yet ... “See this li'l nv aad piece of creetonne,”’ she said, “I figured I could make meself a cute little jumper outa that...’ She held the gay little remnant against her wide breast; her figure was the tired figure of a woman who has built a proud barrier of seven children between her- self and the sphere of cute little jumpers. 218 THE LITTLE WORLD Floating and spinning altogether down this stream — of talk, the four missionaries and I must make efforts _ to send up signals one to another, if we did not — wish to pass in complete oblivion. One of the mis- sionaries was by no means tongue-tied, indeed she would probably be described by those who loved | her as ‘‘a perfect scream” or at least ‘‘a truly joyous Christian.’ She seemed to watch archly for errors in her own speech, as a proofreader watches for | misprints, but much more hilariously. ‘There now, listen to me... chugar instead of sugar... chugar in me chea . . . well now, I'll be saying me own name wrong next . . . Ow gurls, don’t look | at me in that tone of voice, I’ve got the giggles bad | 9 enough already . . Our hostess, under cover of her joyous guest’s solo merriment, said in — hoarse parenthesis, ‘“‘Such a bright gurl, she keeps us lafiing all day, but she ha’n’t got the depth nor yet the classy eddication of the other gurls.”” Aloud she added, ‘“There now, mebbe you think you gotta notion what a chore I have to keep these bad gurls in order . . . Reg’lar madcaps, my husband calls them...” The other three missionaries, though doubtless gratified by the high spirits of their merry yet perfectly refined fellow worker in the vineyard, did not laugh and scarcely spoke at all. They sat with bent heads and tight self-conscious smiles. One seemed to be the skeleton of a ghost that surely had never been a woman. Her leaden eyes were set in a quite fleshless face; no hair was to be | if fioncays was left together in the one place,’ | YUNNAN 219 seen under the crushed rag of a hat that drooped ‘upon her head. She did not speak at all from first to last. One was an engaged young lady, as we were sev- eral times archly told by our hostess. “Her fioncay _ (this was another aside) is a gentleman missionary ) -beneath her in rank—but when a gurl fixes her 99 . heart . Members of this mission are not allowed to be in the same station after they are engaged. Every young man missionary knows that the acceptance of his proposal of marriage is the signal for his own instant removal to a distant part of China. ‘“It’d be a bad example for the Chinese b) said - our hostess, and one trembled to think what she could mean. Our engaged young lady had a sad mean little face. She told us little anecdotes about babies, how a missionary child in Canton could re- - cite sacred poems in three dialects, how another, at — oo === nine months old, repeated Halleluia after its de- lighted father. I looked at her suffocated and pathetic face and imagined her suddenly as she was, perhaps, when she left her English home, Roselea— or was it Elmhurst ?—-safe in its uniform row, and _ banished herself triumphantly to a continent where no two roofs cut the sky at the same curve, where gods and men and dragons jostle each other in pagan temples, and where the only god who holds him- self aloof is the god of Roselea or Elmhurst. Had she sipped a filtered dilution of the strong wine of 220 THE LITTLE WORLD adventure? Had she seen a light and heard a voice? Was the voice really that of lost souls—did the light really shine from the gate of heaven? At any rate she had forsaken everything and followed—and now she was to be rewarded, she was to marry a gentleman missionary and her babies would cry Halleluia. . . “Ai don’t know Ai’m sure .. . Ai don’t know Ai’m sure . . .” the fourth young woman replied to all questions on the subject of the disturbed and fascinating province in which she had lived for years, She was a young woman of a heavy rustic prettiness; her shiny sulky face was pink and she had made as little as possible of her sand-colored hair. She! shared a bungalow with one other woman missionary in a town in which no other foreigners were found. ‘‘Ai have to be cerried four days on the becks of men to get there,” she said, and this curious way of referring to the common sedan chair might have interested a psychoanalyst. ‘Nao, its not a pretty taown, its all full of heathen temples . . . Nao, Ai’m not partial to the Chainese, Ai laiked being in India, Ai could make friends there—Ao nao—not with the Indians, we taught the Indians the Word. . . . Ai mean with the English lady and gentleman workers . . . Ai think Chaina’s very dull . . . In- terests in Chaina? . . . Well, Ai don’t know Ai’m | sure . . . Ai’m partial to me garden in K - } Ai don’t know if it’s a good soil for flaowers . .. Ai only grow vegetables. . . .” a YUNNAN 221 She mumbled in a flat voice that could scarcely be heard in the clatter of our hostess’ information. “Them cacky pants of Warren’s,’”’ shouted our hostess for the fifth time, ‘‘the tailor’s hadum for six months . . . It gets me so rattled I lie awake nights thinking mebbe he’s stolen the stuff... mebbe he’s been robbed . . . It was good cacky drill and I paid i A miracle happened. The Chinese tailor, with a pair of khaki trousers over his arm, stood in the window. “Now see here, tailor, I gotta a good mind not to pay you a cent for them pants . . . You had me so rattled I lay awake o’ nights thinking perhaps . . .” The pagan tailor walked into the den of Chris- tians. It is not to be supposed that he knew that four out of six of us had come many thousand miles to bring light to him and his four hundred million compatriots. Yet he turned his serene broad humor- ous face slowly and surveyed us with courteous attention. His eye paused for a few seconds, with a faint look of polite surprise, on the skull-like face of the skeleton missionary, and perhaps he thought, with ruthless Chinese common sense, ‘‘She is mad because she has no man.”’ Behind his upright figure in its seagreen robe, as he stood in the window, bristled and curled the incorrigible roofs of his pagan city, and, behind the roofs again, the red mountains boiled up into a quivering steaming sky. If we had risen there and then and one by one 222 THE LITTLE WORLD preached him the best sermons we knew, he could never have answered us. For we should have been deaf to answers, we who are deaf to the hoarse temple bells and the fading flutes of the wandering beggar-musicians and the sound of the leaping wind coming over the mountains. V N the edge of the lake, looking across to the old glittering three-storeyed pagoda, there isa new pagoda today. It was built as the sun rose over the mountains this morning, and it will never see the sunset. It stands—bravely enough, seeing that it is made of mud and has no future—in the shape of a tower about seven feet high; it has a door by which the smaller stray pigs can enter inquisitively while the architect is putting the finishing touches to the coping. But no pig, unless he wishes to be known in future as pork, must stay in the tower after ten o’clock, for the tower is built for an opium burning. Opium, in spite of laws and Leagues of Nations, | remains one of the ruling factors in Yunnanese life and politics. Officially opium is not known, not grown, not bought, not sold, not smoked. Yet some-— how, in the spring, big white poppies flower en- throned on terraces of gray leaves on the mountain sides. And somehow nearly every Chinese peasant in Yunnan has something of the opium look in his Bea. YUNNAN 223 eyes; opium has puffed out the pouches of his eyes and stretched the stained skin tightly over his face- bones; opium has shewn him an escape from poverty and work; opium has taught him that sleepy gentle- ness that comes of not caring. And somehow at the Customs stations on all frontiers, opium, innocently labelled as shoes or ships or sealing-wax, falls into the hands of perspicacious customs men. _ Every few months, seized opium is publicly burned in the presence of European officials of the Chinese Customs, Chinese Government officials trying to look as if they didn’t know what the stuff was, and the surprised, but not much disturbed, populace. There is more opium in the ground than ever came out of it, thinks the populace, and, at any rate, the sight of thousands of dollars worth of treasure going up in smoke is always worth looking at. Hence the little new tower on the edge of the lake. It is a real stronghold now, for soldiers have come to guard it. The soldiers are dressed in shrunken gray cotton, red-banded caps worn at dif- ferent slovenly angles, perforated black cotton stock- ings, and dark blue cloth slippers. They stack their rifles and at once sink into the wicker chairs that fave been brought out for the use of the distin- guished officials. From these chairs they do not ‘ise even when the distinguished officials arrive. The Chinese soldier does not as a rule remember that he is a soldier unless he wants to shoot some- one with his gun. 224 THE LITTLE WORLD So the tower is not very splendidly guarded. However, the tripods of rifles bristling round it make it a centre of interest, not only to the pigs, the calm buffaloes, and the mangey stray ponies, but also to a score of citizens and a few little spangled, kilted P’u-la women. Babies in embroidered knapsacks lean over their mothers’ shoulders to see the great sight. The Chinese magistrate arrives, dressed in a brown wideawake hat, a gray satin robe and, over the robe, a black brocade Eton coat. He has a sad puffy face, and a long moustache fits into the creases of his cheeks. His beard grows like a tassel from one point in the middle of his chin; he combs it with immensely long dirty fingernails. He does not seem surprised to find his guard sprawling over alf the chairs; there is no room for him to sit down, but he is content to stand, thinking, apparently, “Soldiers will be soldiers.” The officer of the guard has tc stand too—a fat round-shouldered man in bright mustard-color with dazzling yellow boots. A representative of the Tao-yin, or Chinese dis trict governor, arrives. The English Commissionei — of Chinese Customs is here. The show begins. The opium is brought out in two trunks. It is ir several forms. There are a great many little bottle of medicine condemned by authority as containinj — an illegal proportion of the drug. There is prepare i opium like black treacle in thick green pots, ray opium like coarse plug tobacco, almost imperceptibl) — opium carefully mixed with disguising mud. Every YUNNAN 225 thing is exhibited to all the officials and one can almost hear the conjuror’s voice—‘Look them well ‘over, gentlemen, no deception whatever .. . ” | There is a glassy dazzle of heat, like a halo, over ‘the doomed mud tower now, and as parcels of ‘opium, soaked in kerosene, are dropped over the ‘turret keep, the fire declares itself in a great crack- ‘ling clamor within. Flames leap over the battle- ‘ments. All the babies wail, all the little boys cheer, all the adults say, ‘‘Ooo-000,” all the little pigs re- treat hurriedly to their mothers in order to draw ‘nourishment that may sustain them through such ‘a startling experience. The blaze grows higher and ‘higher as it devours all that is given to it. The fire is coiled against the sky like a snake poised to strike. ‘The smoke drifts away over the lotuses on the lake and makes a smudge across the mountains. There is a heavy smell on the air. The mud of which the ‘tower is built begins to crack, and through the cracks come small spurts of smoke, puffed out in simultane- ‘ous gasps in all directions, as if the goblin guardians of the tower were shooting impotently through their loopholes. _ The cremated remains of the sacrifice can at last be seen oozing through the little door of the tower. Fire cannot utterly destroy the value of opium— even the burnt remains must be demolished. Not : the corpse of a pill must survive to mock authority. So presently, when the heat of the fire dies away, the tower must be utterly destroyed, the ground ] 226 THE LITTLE WORLD | scraped, the memory of it shorn from sight and mind. —as Babylon was shorn away. The smallest frag. ments of the tower must be thrown into the lake to fertilize the tall green reeds and the lotuses, to en. rich the mud in which the buffaloes wallow. | Nothing will remain of the mud tower; noth- ing will remain to represent thousands of lost dollars. A fortune, a secret treasure has gone in smoke across the mountains, a burnt offering to the League of Nations. There is more treasure in the : air than will ever come out of it. i The show, at any rate, is over. The peasants go. back to their little dark houses, to their precarious idleness and their consoling opium pipes. Nothing is so sad as remembering broken thing Few tragedies in life are so shocking as the inevitable bursting of the green balloon bought at the gate of Kensington Gardens. Breakages are first introduc. tion to hopeless tragedy and can never fail of their terrible effect. A lost possession might always re- turn; a lost thing can be remembered and dreamed of in all its glorious completeness, but a broken thing is an idol dead; even in dreams it can never be glorious again. | This feeling is on the wind that has blown my little doomed treasure-tower away in dust, it hurtt me every time I see the shell of a burnt house, the old wreck of a ship, a tree torn in pieces by a gale, the tiny disordered body of a bird. I insist that things do what they were born or built to do—the YUNNAN 227 treasure in my tower was not hoarded for the amuse- ment of pigs and the despoiling of goblins; it was a real treasure—and now it is dust. A villa may be more beautiful with fire looking out of its win- dows than with Nottingham lace curtains and an laspidistra—yet it is as terrible as a ghost. I saw a broken train lately for the first time. It was not much of a train—the humblest goods porter on Paddington Station would have laughed it to scorn—still, it was meant to run sanely, right side up, on wheels, from mountain to mountain and in ‘and out of valleys the like of which the haughty trains of the Great Western will never see. And when I saw it its wheels were to the sky, it had been ithrown away like a broken toy. Early in the morning a tall cauliflower of smoke ‘on a distant hillside attracted Mengtsz’s attention. ‘A telescope showed the train’s tragedy; swathed in ‘smoke and in flame the poor thing lay upside down ‘in its last humiliation, like a row of cracked ‘nutshells. _ Four of us rode across the valley and up the bouldery mountain side. The poor train, a freighter, carrying coal and kerosene and carbide, looked inex- ‘pressibly humbled. There are few things prouder than an engine coming into a station—even a Tonkin ‘engine, picking its way among the listless pigs into ‘a jungle-buried wayside halt, has pride and a cer- ‘tain glory. Its breast is puffed out like a turkey’s, ‘its funnel is stiffly upreared under a knightly plume 228 THE LITTLE WORLD of smoke. But here was no plume of smoke—only a smothering shroud of smoke for a smashed thing, only a dead Don Quixote who would defy the great! world no more. None but ridiculous similes would fit that engine now—a smashed egg—an over-ripe gooseberry—a penny toy with the paint licked off and the spring broken. | The trucks which had followed the engine to disaster lay behind it in various degrees of extrava-| gant disarray. ‘Trucks, of course, never have any: dignity. Watch them at their best, being shunted in’ and out of a station, starting to a servile attention as the engine draws breath, passing the word down —clank-clank-clank—as the engine gives the com-| mand to slacken speed ...In the mechanical world they can only fill the place of cringing sheep, hanging on the whims of a panting arrogant sheep-| dog. Now they were martyrs to their silly docility but equal at last to their tyrant—thrown about, splintered, gutted, vomiting, squeezed into fantastic accordion pleats, balanced hysterically on their buffers—they were surely the extreme examples of the squalor and indignity of broken things. The flames roared proud and erect, and all the kerosene tins, red-hot, glowed beautifully, breathing with the breeze. The crew of the train, Annamites’ and Chinese, were nearly all hurt, though no one was killed. The wounded lay patiently waiting for help, looking through the cloud of smoke at the sky. They were so still and feeble that they seemed like j YUNNAN 229 bits of the broken train—a few extra splinters flung _ from the disaster. Just now in Yunnan one other kind of broken | thing is constantly before one’s eyes. All the spring and summer the egrets haunt these valleys; they swing clumsily on the thin topmost branches of the eucalyptus trees or plane above the ‘lakes and the flooded ricefields in search of fish. But now is their nesting season and now the poor mother-birds are cursed with fine feathers. So every- one’s hand is against them; they are not birds now, (not winged flesh and blood—just flying money. They are caught and torn and thrown away, broken 'but not dead, on the grass. No money in them after (that, poor things, they are just white débris under- ‘foot, their green legs sprawling and absurd, their ‘round eyes clipped like pince-nez on the bridges of ‘their long beaks. The feather, the only thing that ‘commended them to human attention, is taken away ‘from them, what does it matter that life is taken itoo? The baby egrets, left orphaned in the eucalyp- (tus trees, fall down forlornly out of the cold nests, ‘but nobody notices them—there is no money in ‘them. I founded an egret orphanage. Henry, Lindsay, Travers, Irene, Bildad, Edith, Osbert, and Sach- -everell—all owe their lives to me. Egberd, Egbreda and Egintruda died. ‘They staggered on their long green legs, they could only be roused to open their ‘long beaks for raw fish when artificially stimulated. 230 THE LITTLE WORLD For a week everything smelt of raw fish and brandy. — The world seemed to hang on the survival of Egberd, Egbreda and Egintruda. But one by one — they died. Their transparent eyelids closed over their round astonished eyes but did not hide them. — Their beaks were half open, perhaps in a last vision of raw fish and brandy. The ants ran up their limp legs. They looked more like broken toys than ever, like marionettes whose showman had forgotten | them. But their mothers’ feathers were on the way to Paris. VI HE Annamites, an obsequious people, have — changed their Dragon Day to make it coincide - with the French Fourteenth of July. ‘The dragon, | who destroyed himself by eating fire, and the mob, — which established itself by storming the Bastille, are curious co-patrons for one innocent July day. There was a banquet in Mengtsz on the Four- teenth of July, attended by about forty patriotic — French citizens and three English neighbors trying — to wear as Hats-Offish an expression as possible. The banquet was nearly two hours late in coming | forward, and the dryness engendered in the air by — forty-three uncocktailed throats was so powerful — that it deranged Mengtsz’s electric system and all the lights went out. The Annamite dragon thus — YUNNAN 231 came into his own; he swallowed the twinkling Western world, he conquered the Bastille for an hour. From their dark thirsty balcony the waiting feast- ers could see the dragon coming through the seething streets of the Annamite quarters in a snaky proces- sion of delicate gay shapes of light. Dancing on poles in single file over the heads of the crowd came the lanterns—luminous swans and horses and fishes and pheasants and prawns and goblins and little fairy turrets. Faery and fiery they came and nodded in a row looking at the balcony. A ring having been cleared in the crowd by the crude method of throw- ing lighted firecrackers at the bare feet of the ob- structing Chinese, two masked men entered it and fought. They scarcely touched each other, yet one could well see that their performance was a fight. It was more than a fight, it was a maneuvring of armies. I am sure it looked much more like a fight than ever did any of Mr. Dempsey’s affairs. Those must be mere beetle-crushing, but this was fought by light crouched tense men, dancing ritually like in- spired leopards. Every time they closed, a quick light somersault or a graceful set-piece resulted, a method which I am sure is not followed by Mr. Dempsey. If Anna Pavlova did not look quite so like a fairy she could dance an Annamite fight. All round the fight shuffled two little men continuously; they wore enormous pale smirking masks. Wob- bling, spinning, grinning through eighteen-inch 232 THE LITTLE WORLD mouths, they looked like infernal village idiots and | very much detracted from the heroic effect of the battle. The dragon entered the ring rampantly in the | middle of the fight. It did not wait for its cue— — history teaches us that dragons seldom do. Behind the business end of the dragon hurried its tail—a role which, I am proud to say, was nobly sustained by my Annamite cook. The dragon’s tail is one of — those subtle yet not spectacular roles that are found | in every cast. It is a humble part and success in it | is rarely appreciated by the public—yet without it the whole drama would literally fall to the ground. It is—like all such parts—a difficult one to play. | The tail, obviously, must follow the lead of the head, but this is no simple matter if the eyes of the — tail are entunnelled in ten yards of scarlet cotton—_ the texture of the dragon’s body. I could see the - coat-tails of my cook, trembling a little with nerv- ousness, supporting the tail, but this effect was of | course not intended. To the head falls most of the spectacular work, and the role requires an athlete. The actor not only has to carry an immense head the size of a small dining-table, frothing with tassels, beads, pom: poms, wands, wool-mats, feather-brooms, and other superstructures, but he has also to leap incessantly — to a great height, while anchored to the earth by his less nimble tail, and tread out all the flames thrown to him by the spectators. The fire-eating habits of YUNNAN 233 the dragon form the plot of the whole ballet. People throw him spitting firecrackers, wire balls with blazing wool inside, impromptu torches of all kinds and even common lighted matches. All these the dragon must dispose of by raking them in under his curly teeth and curly beard. So strong is his craving for fire that he actually climbs a pole— standing on the spine of his faithful tail—and bites off a little flame that wriggles deliciously at the top. It would be fun fishing for dragons, swinging a succulent flame against the stars on a bent pin. It becomes apparent that our dragon has over- eaten himself. He writhes, he rears, he makes rushes at the shrieking spectators, he bumps his chin on the ground and rears and writhes again. Even his tail realizes that a crisis is at hand, and wags and writhes as best it may. Finally after two swoons, followed by terrific recrudescences of dying energy, the dragon dies. His lifeless beard is tan- gled with his teeth and his eyelashes among the extinguished crackers in the mud. The tail, after a moment of unpremeditated pas-seul, realizes the situation and dies too. Behind the dead dragon, over the dark lake, rise the French rockets. How he would have loved to eat rockets! Perhaps he is eating them now in the dragon’s paradise. But on earth he would never have dared. He was an Annamite dragon, and these are indigestible imperial French rockets, sent up to tell the gods about democracy triumphant—a thing 234 THE LITTLE WORLD our poor dragon knew nothing about. Alas for a | timid fire-eater—a gourmand of weak digestion— | his toothy tasselled mouth would have watered, but | he would never have dared... Anyway he is dead now; the lights are on again. - We must drink now, not to dragons but to democracy. Vil SI-SHAN lies across the lake from Yunnanfu, | and the lake, like a large silver suburb of | Greater Yunnanfu, lies an hour’s chair-ride away from the Chinese Mayfair where we stay. Fora whole hour we jigged through the seething streets. | Little unfinished stories caught my eye—the re-: proachful look of a silversmith who, engaged in some intricate small work, was persistently inter- rupted by his hen which would fly on the counter of his booth and poke its beak into the matter in hand . a donkey with the tassel of its tail caught fast in a thornbush so that the tail could only wag at the root, as it were, to the perplexity of the donkey —which so much amused my chairmen that they almost dropped the chair . .. a tribeswoman in purple hood, green tunic and pink trousers, enquir-. ing from a merchant the use of patent sock-sus- penders . . . an old Taoist priest blinking at an. acroplane ha | The canal, beside which our path lay, was choked YUNNAN 238 _ with sampans and shrill with the curses of lady bargees. Each sampan seemed to be sinking beneath a heaped load of salt-blocks, babies, cats, pigs, bas- kets, cabbages, sacks and straw hats. The female captain of each craft, perched on a mountain of such miscellanies, her strong brown toes gripping the in- secure heaving foothold, punted the boat from one collision to another and only stopped swearing in order to spit into a neighbor’s cockpit. But our two boats, at the lake end of the canal, floated among the rabble like boats of the serene gods. One had a little green wooden house on it and this was for our personal transport. The other, which was to carry our servants and our escort of seven soldiers, was an ordinary sampan already heaped with camping kit, cocktail shakers, crockery and other luxuries. Commanding positions on the heap seemed always to be reserved for the more intimate, and usually private, domestic contrivances. We entered our boat between two black and gold extracts from classical literature which were painted on the doorposts. ‘Mountains come into the mir- ror,’ said one, and the other added, ‘‘There is one song in the air.”’ Both were true. The great striped cliffs of Hsi-shan leaned further and further over us to seek their enormous reflections in the lake, and for two hours no sound but that of our own voices interrupted the small tuneful clapping of water against our boat’s oars and sides. 236 THE LITTLE WORLD A pavilion with a broad curved tiled roof ran out like a peninsula from the garden of the house in which we were to stay. It was a Chinese house, | lent us by a Chinese business man, and it was built at the very foot of the great cliffs of Hsi-shan. Its garden stepped down by means of terraces into the lake; the lowest terrace was flooded, and swimmers could swim there under old trees and over drowned flowers. The branches of a big pine tree swept the roof of the house and on that roof three little squirrels played all day long. Almost all day we sat in our pavilion with calm lapping water on three sides of us. Incredibly high, on the face of the great precipice, behind the house, the little temples of Hsi-shan clung like butterflies on a sunny wall. At sunset we were rowed over deep rose-pink — water to the door of a ruined temple. Our boatman — shouted at the door, ‘‘Er-ko-o-0, Er-ko-o-0 .. .” (Second Brother, Second Brother) again and again, a thin shrill cry ending in a sort of wail. For along — time Second Brother made no reply—only brigands, he must have argued, would trouble to row to his desert island. But our boatman would not be dis- couraged. ‘‘Wait, he is there, he is there . 7 Er-ko-o-0, Er-ko-o-o . . .”’ Second Brother opened the door; he was heavy with distrust and sleep; he was an old dirty man with a thin beard and drawn pouched eyes. A terribly thin dog and a cat to match rushed to meet us hoping we meant food. There was nothing in the temple, nothing but ruins, YUNNAN 237 dirt and a broken god, no reason to have disturbed the old man’s sleep. Second Brother at the water’s edge watched us float away; he bowed a little cynical bow and turned back to his opium and his solitude. Early next day we started on the climb to the high cliff temples. I had recently broken a rib so I was carried up in a mountain sling. This simple contrivance was made by draping a blanket across slack cords between two stout bamboos. I lay as if in a short hammock, with my unsupported head and feet wagging to the rhythm of my bearers’ march. When the steps were very steep I almost stood on my head. There is a steep sloped wood at the foot of the precipice, a wood not too thick to let the sunlight in and to let the grass and flowers grow. Through this wood the path climbs calmly, only occasionally breaking out into a fever of steep broken stone steps. Loosely strung along the holy path there are shrines and temples. The temples are all different, but all alike in having stone-balustraded terraces with great bronze or stone lanterns in the middle, and painted pillars, and dogs fascinated yet dis- trustful, and kind square-hatted priests anxious to serve tea to travelers, and a wide sight of the sunny lake and of mountains miles away. But presently we surmounted the roots of the precipice and climbed continually up cornered steps hewn in the cliff’s surface. “Temples availed them- selves of shallow caves here; Buddha looked out 238 THE LITTLE WORLD between ferns and the dripping mosses of little © springs; the buildings of man were clamped hope- | fully on to great ridges and boulders; little archways with shrugged shoulders sprang from rock to rock. | Looking down, one could see treetops; looking out, | one could see cloudy space; looking up, it seemed © that the eaves of the highest shrines—still far above | us—were pressed hard against the metallic blue sky | and might break off at any moment and carry us — down with their fall—straight down through the | soft feathers of the pines to disturb the squirrels on _ the roof of our night’s shelter and at last to make | big rings in the still pale surface of the lake. | The topmost temples of Hsi-shan are corded to- | gether as human mountaineers are. The cord that — binds them together is a stone passage grooved in | the cliff’s face, a shallow gallery, an elongated stone — cage. Here even I, who had arrived so near the — sky without stepping out of my mountain chair, must — walk on my own feet, with cautiously bent head, — along the low stone passage. | The highest shrine of all is really nothing more — than a balcony—a fairy balcony leaning out of a huge stone cloud. ‘There was only room there for us and our seven soldiers all kneeling on a semi- | circular stone seat looking down at the world. The — great lake seemed full of clouds and of color—the various colors of its floor. There was a cloud of © milky green and a cloud of dull gold and a cloud of peacock blue and a white cloud—and through these — YUNNAN 239 clouds of color in the water ran a kind of mild still lightning—scrawls and markings in white on the floor of the lake. We could see an island that had been drowned by the floods; its neat square rice- fields, shimmering through the water, grew cresses and lakeweeds now and had forgotten the print of man and beast and plough. The little boats ran about on their oars as water-beetles run. They vis- ited villages among shoreside trees that were to us like clusters of brown moths among mosses. ‘The high far mountains reached hardly, as it seemed, to our knees. They were gashed red behind blue air. There was nothing to comfort our dizzy eyes in all this immense remoteness, nothing nearer for our eyes to seize on than mountains removed from us by miles and a tree-tufted lake-shore removed from us by fifteen hundred feet. Even Buddha, to whom, after a while, we turned, had fright in his golden face, although he was safe in his grotto, safe be- hind thin blue bars of joss-smoke. Behind him characters were carven, “In this place, even a whis- per can reach God” . . . Yes, but in such a place it seemed as though in earth rather than heaven prayers should be answered. NHeaven was so near as to be negligible . . . We could almost see the texture of the thick round white clouds that bounded over the brim of the precipice directly above us. It was true . . . even a breath, we felt, could have changed their course. And so we waited holding our breath, turning 240 THE LITTLE WORLD | from Buddha to the world and back again. The , silence was only broken by the remark of a Chinese , soldier who was not shy about what he said—in the - Divine Ear. He spoke of my husband to his . neighbor. ‘He has sat in a puddle,” said the soldier — rather sadly, ‘“‘so his bottom is wet .. .” | Whiskies and sodas were'no blasphemy after this. - Into a worn stone basin on Buddha’s right hand trickled a little spring. In this ice-cold water we | put our own refreshing bottles to cool before we , drank. And we presently filed down along the low | tilted galleries towards more human levels. The. soldiers talked to my husband as we all stumbled | down the steps. The puddle seemed to have made | a bond. ‘They said they were paid four and a. half Yunnan dollars a month—the equivalent of — one dollar fifty, gold—and out of this they had to , buy their own rice. But they seemed hearty young men and, though they carried but one cartridge belt between the seven of them, they swung their rifles . robustly within a few inches of our following noses | and could no doubt have said something quite | nasty to any band of brigands that might chal-. lenge us. | We walked down to the level where grass and trees took the place of stone, and thence we climbed again—TI in my sling—to the spine of a rolling ridge - that skirted the lake. The ridge was plumed with pine trees, clothed in grass and jewelled with flowers. I wish I knew the names of more flowers. There YUNNAN 241 - were, I remember, larkspurs of that thick vivid _ gentian blue that seems to be reserved for moun- tain flowers; there were hooded orchids—crimson _and purple—big white marguerites, little mauve or yellow michaelmas daisies and a large starry flower in clear harebell blue which, when in bud, folded roundly like a tiny paper lantern. We passed more temples, big broad luxurious tem- | ples now, that pillowed themselves on grass rather \ than rock and mixed their shadows with those of ‘bamboo groves. There were dark dahlias in their gardens and the red roses on a veteran rose tree ‘were like little memories of youth on the heavy | gnarled face of an old man. There was an old | priest who wore the thick-soled, thick-ankled shoes | with white canvas leggings that one sees in Chinese | pictures but seldom, now, in use. The last temple was being radically rebuilt. | Nothing was finished and peaceful except the great | fishpond in the shape of a tortoise. There was a | new mausoleum, empty but expectant. A big stone | lanternlike erection on the first floor was prepared {to burn the bones of holy men and was connected by (a sort of little service-lift with the vault below. One ‘imagined the surprised holy ashes zooming down the ‘shaft as though they were sausages and mash at an A. B.C. The bronze door of the vault was pad- | locked, but through the crack we could see row upon row of bright brick pigeonholes. I think pompous death must be a little shocked by these efficient 242 THE LITTLE WORLD modern methods. Our soldiers, who had been busy robbing the temple garden of vegetables, helpfully offered to break or pick the lock of the vault. We had to use tact to restrain them; it is never wise to cross a soldier in China. We watched a service to Buddha in this temple. The summons, a tok-tok-tok upon a hollow wooden “fish,” interrupted the junior priests in their chase of an escaping temple hen. MHurriedly hooking strips of gold-brown silk over their gray cotton working robes, they came from all sides, blithely trying out their voices as they came. ‘Iwo must have been under ten years old. Each priest, on arrival, bowed seven times, striking his head upon the ground before Buddha. Then, led by a junior tenor, they sang a racy chant which quickened in beat and excitement every moment. ‘The refrain was the word “Na-mo, Na-mo,”’ a word that has no appli- cable Chinese meaning but was imparted from India, one imagines, to make poor exiled Buddha feel at home. The accompaniment of the chant was shared between the “‘fish,”’ a high flutelike bell and a growl- ing drum. PIGS AND PIRATES HE pig, even in China and Indo-China, where he is a respected citizen, is a poor traveler and a lazy fellow. Nobody except Susie, the Mengtsz pighound, can make a pig run. No pig ever wants to see the world. Yet the first thing the human traveler notices in South China, Indo-China and the Southern China seas, is a seething activity in the pig world. Traveling from Yunnan to Hongkong, one is scarcely for half an hour together out of earshot of the protests of affronted pig-travelers. At almost every station along the line in Yunnan and Tonkin a pig, or a group of pigs, got into the train, and a pig, or a group of pigs, got out. I imagined unseen tigers in the luscious knitted green jungle, licking their lips as our train—squealing with tourist pigs— went by, and then coming out on to the line to snuff up the exquisite scent that we left behind us on the air. The traveling pig squeals in protest all the time it is on the road, and so, no doubt, would other tourists squeal, if compelled to travel upside down with bound trotters slung to a bamboo pole. But the pig brings all its troubles on itself. All other tourists and domestic animals have learned to adapt 243 244 THE LITTLE WORLD themselves to the conditions of modern travel. Elderly ladies have invented the air-cushion and Mothersill; retired colonels play bridge through typhoons; racehorses cross oceans with a smile; dogs merrily wipe off their fleas on the cushions of first-class compartments all over the world; bullocks file philosophically up whitewashed gangways into trucks; cats and cockroaches frisk without fear on the decks of all ships; even a donkey could be per- suaded to shoot Niagara Rapids by means of a judiciously wielded carrot. Not so the pig. The pig is so indolent and so obtuse that it will not put one trotter before the other, even to save itself dis- comfort. No, it prefers to travel—by land, bound, a fat farcical martyr with stake attached,—by sea, squeezed into a cylindrical openwork basket and stacked absurdly on the top of other basketted pigs between decks with the salt spray blowing over it. There are not only pigs but also pirates on this. little French freighter. The pigs, rolled about like bales of cotton, came unwillingly. The pirates ar- rived of their own choice. Yet at this moment pigs and pirates probably share an intense wish to be somewhere else. | Our pirates, with a group of friends, boarded this ship on her last trip disguised as Chinese pas- sengers. Something in the contour of their figures” suggested to our French captain that their intentions were not honorable. He arrested two of them and found them to be stiff with concealed weapons. The PIGS AND PIRATES 245 rest of the band escaped, or at any rate evaded proof of guilt—though I dare say some of the pigs were not as innocent as they pretended. The two pirate captives are now traveling, as regretfully as any tourist pig could travel, under lock and key, to stand their trial in Hongkong. The ship has touched at three ports since she left | Haiphong—Pakhoi, Hoihow and Fort Bayard (Kwang Tchow Wan). At every port the talk was _of pigs and pirates. At Pakhoi fifteen victims of pirates were in the hospital. The squealing of the pigs of Pakhoi is never drowned except by the squealing of wheelbarrows. The squealing wheel- _ barrows run over the tails of the squealing pigs; the pirates run after the squealing citizens—and that is Life at Pakhoi. At Hoihow a conducted tour of _ pigs disembarked, descending, with loud squeals, by means of a squealing pulley attached to a dipping _junk-mast. Neat squealing Hakka women direct operations. They wear big straw hats curtained _ about with deep frills that reach their shoulders so that their faces can only be seen when the curtain _ is raised and thrown back to admit of air, or to emit a squeal of command toa pig. At Fort Bayard the little strip of French territory is becoming over- _ crowded with refugees from the pirates. There is, I believe, a pirate-pig at Fort Bayard. It comes alongside in a little junk to tout for shore- - going passengers, but when no ships are in harbor _ Iam convinced that it does a little pirating. Other- 246 THE LITTLE WORLD wise it could not look so prosperous. It is a white pig with refined black markings; it is of an excellent plumpness and yet has escaped the unpleasing corset- | less corpulence developed by most oriental pigs. It_ looks as if it were brushed and scented daily. | It walks with a racy sailor’s gait about the bouncing | boat under the tawny sail. Side by side with the | lady captain of the vessel it eats out of a small special tub. The lady, who has a baby strapped upon her back and wears an old embroidered ker- | chief folded round her head in the shape of a Vic- torian bonnet, looks not half so rich, romantic, and | happy as the pig. I guessed that the pig was a pirate-pig directly I saw the scorn in the glance that it threw at the trussed fat squealing tourist-pigs on — the French ship’s deck. The look was withering; | it was the proud fiery look of the outlaw scorching — the respectable bourgeois, the look of the romantic _ seafarer on the seasick landlubber. I have suffered from that look myself. HANOI ATIVE citizens of Hanoi did honor to the Tét, the splendid indolent day of their ardu- ous year. Families in pink and applegreen and _ orange robes veiled with black flowered gauze, stood at every door, paying festive visits. Gold and scar- _ let paper prayers and blessings twinkled in the breeze round every doorframe, and from within the doors burst the boisterous sounds of pipes and gongs and drums. The pavements of all the narrow streets were flowered thickly with the pink petals of spent firecrackers. Little boys in clean orange silk tunics, or crackling with new gauze robes, threw down fire- crackers at the feet of all passers-by, hoping to induce death by apoplexy or heart failure. It seemed unkind to disappoint them, but nothing could really damp their enthusiasm on such a day. If the world’s heroes and gods and astronomers had done nothing more than bequeath days of noise to little boys in perpetuity, their lives would have been fully justified. But a firecracker, it seems, like plum-puddings and hot-cross buns and easter eggs and all the glorious juvenile outcroppings of religion, has an Inner Meaning. I saw an elderly man, with an expression, as it were, sheeted in religious fervor, waving a 247 248 THE LITTLE WORLD string of merrily exploding crackers about his door as though it were holy incense. His dogs barked, his pigs had palpitations, his wives squeaked, his babies held their stomachs and skipped in ecstasy, | but it was evident that, in the old man’s view, every-: one but himself was missing the profound solemnity of his act. He had a long very thin moustache: divided into two limp wisps, one of which tickled each corner of his mouth, but the moustache was: not disturbed by a smile as he continued to waft his hellish uproar reverently to Heaven. WHe did not apparently remember the days of his youth. He was: simply dutifully disinfecting his home of demons. I saw a woman, equally serious and devout, pur- posefully throwing crackers one by one into her, backyard. It seemed obvious that she had actually sighted a demon and was aiming at him, as you or) I might throw a boot at a cat. But little boys and demons are blasphemously, allied. If the little boy throws the cracker, the demon applies the match. But what of it >the} uncomprehending elders are proud to see their de-/ scendants so faithfully applying themselves to their. religious duties. Even in the temples the paving is muffled ie the red sequined snow of spent crackers. ‘The alien intruder, trying to join a temple service unob- trusively, treads on a few crackers that were shat ming dead and brings off an embarrassing feu-de-| joie. But it hardly matters, there is already such a. SS SS — et HANOI 249 noise in the temple. In and out among gaudy paper horses, and tall scarlet and gold cranes that balance stiffly on the backs of tortoises, and racks full of wild innocent gilded wooden weapons, walks a loud crowd shining with excitement and color in the tawny dusk. A fat gold Buddha beams tolerantly through his mosquito net of dragon- painted stitched reeds. In front of Buddha an old priest in a brown-gold robe nags noisily at the crowd, pointing, beckoning, jeering at an audience too rever- ent to retort. A great bowl stands at the foot of the altar beside the priest, and into this the sapéques * fly as though charmed out of the scarlet or green knots that serve the worshipers for pockets. The priest never fails to appraise each offering in flight, it seems, and, if the sacrifice seems to him inade- quate, he snarls, chatters, rants up and down his holy dais. But the worshipers, who are nearly all women, look through him at the kind undemanding face of ‘Buddha; with their delicate hands clasped before them they kow-tow, seeing Buddha’s smile and hearing nothing. Behind them their babies, just able to stagger, clasp their little stomachs and make small but orthodox bows. The Confucian temple is the only inal temple in Hanoi during the Tét. Apparently the begin- nings of years meant nothing to Confucius. But the finest temple in Hanoi is his for all that. The long simple dark roofs of that temple are upheld by a * Tonkin sou. 250 THE LITTLE WORLD forest of unshaped tree-trunks; there are no walls except walls of austere shadow. One broad paved courtyard steps down into another; the gateways are crowned with dolphins. One archway frets the sky with a filigree of wheels and circles, and its reflec- tion hangs like a frilled banner in the square stone lilied pool at its feet. JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA ANOI was under a cloud, suffering from an access of climatic bad temper called Je crachin. The warm small rain gave a special harshness to the always harsh light of half-past five in the morn- ing, and all the sleepy lamps shewed that “silver ring” that so reasonably alarmed the mate of the schooner Hesperus. All Tonkin trains start before the sunrise as deso- lately and furtively as though they had committed crimes. In the very early morning it always seems that only the sun can excuse such a forlorn hope as a pleasure trip. Not until later, when the tolerant light of day rises over the bald mountainous backs of the buffaloes already at work in the ricefields, do we begin to see virtue and a future in our enterprises. The train was full of sportif Frenchmen, looking rather like Gallic Buffalo Bills. Each sportif French- man had a cowering native servant carrying guns, and also possessed a dog called Follette. All the Follettes, held tightly on leashes, glared at one another with bloodshot eyes from between their masters’ legs. A clatter of sportif talk echoed above the silken ears of the Follettes; everyone boasted of 251 252 THE LITTLE WORLD intimacy with la brousse. And all the time, la brousse, scornful of those who took its name in vain, moved past the train windows, darkly green, luscious” with thick palms, stabbed with bamboo lances, bound with flowering creepers, parted by roughly-thatched forgotten villages. The crachin was, it appeared, a Hanoi monopoly; it inclosed Hanoi like a dark forest. After three hours, suddenly the train burst out of the shadow and there was the sun throwing sliding lights down the banana leaves; there were the buffalo-calves throwing thick silly heels towards the sun. For two-thirds of the day, our way to Vinh was lined either with jungle or with ricefields. There always seems to be plenty to do in a ricefield; one never sees a Tonkinese family leaning back in its thatched pavilion, watching its fields prosper in the - sun. ‘The Tonkinese father is, to be sure, scarcely ever seen actually working, but he is almost always in the background, diligently exhorting his wives, mothers-in-law, aunts, daughters, and buffaloes to exert themselves more violently. Everywhere the women, in chestnut-brown and scarlet robes girded high about their slim legs, were wading in the mud, — thinning out rice-shoots, hoeing smooth waters, trying to hoist water in wicker sieves from one field’ to another, staggering under immense shoulder-loads and head-loads—but never driving buffaloes. Even a buffalo finds it undignified to be influenced by a mere woman in Indo-China. JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 253 Water is induced to mount from streams into fields, from fields into higher fields, by various means. The most primitive method is to put six naked babies—too young to work otherwise—in a row at the edge of one field, and persuade them to splash the water all day with their hands over a dyke into the next field. Farmers of larger invention and smaller families regulate the water supply in their fields by means of an ingeniously balanced ladle _ which, as it fills with water, is swung in the desired direction by its own weight. But the most usual method is to build a ricketty tripod of bamboos on a dyke between a full field and a thirsty one, to sling a leaky wicker shovel or shallow bucket on the tri- pod, and then to apply two unconsidered female relations to the work of swinging the shovel on two strings rhythmically up and down, digging up chunks of water out of one field and shooting them across into another. In the late afternoon the country changed abruptly, as though the gods had woken up and realized the monotony of their droning exhibition of neat ricefields and ragged trees. The line of the ‘land was broken up into eccentric crags, pinnacles, and steeples. The horizon twisted like lightning about the train windows. It was as if the Baie d’ Along had strayed ashore. The real Baie d’Along was still fresh in our minds —a wild Stonehenge of thin jointed rocks pricking out of the sea just outside Haiphong, a maze of = 254 THE LITTLE WORLD green glittering channels and caves and tunnels. Lonely Crusoe trees were marooned on the top of each distorted monolith; the sea gleamed through - arches that only the sea-beasts might thread. Well, here was the Baie d’Along again, it seemed, escaped from its green silk net of water; here, at night, tigers and jackals, instead of sea-birds and sea-beasts, | might find their way from pinnacle to pinnacle. Vinh was enjoying a rainy season all its own. Crowded wet pavements glimmered in the light of the dripping thatched booths under the dripping trees. There was a French hotel, but it was full. A local conference had filled it to the brim. A vehement bureaucrat was thumping a table in the rapture of an ardent speech, probably about the sewage system of Vinh, and it was evident that ; dozens of minor bureaucrats had come miles to- enjoy his eloquence, even with the prospect of spend- ing the night three abreast on billiard tables. There was certainly no room for globetrotters. We must sleep at a Chinese hotel, though we might eat among — the bureaucrats. La Patronne, a lady of sagging Grecian silhouette, © with a honeysweet manner, was a person of distinc- tion, and exhibited over the most public mantelpiece _ possible a framed certificate of the bestowal upon © her of the Order of Millions of Elephants and a White Umbrella, by the King of Luang-Prabang. Our Chinese hotel was called the Hall of Har- | monious Repose. Its walls were decorated with JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 255 late nineteenth century tradesmen’s calendars. Cock- roaches flopped from stair to stair. Each bed was simply composed of a foundation of planks, a dirty straw mat, and a jointed wooden mattress like a life-belt, which left a most painful corrugation upon the figure of the sleeper. The mosquito-nets were intermittent in texture and of an aged gray color and smell; they were carefully looped back, and all the mosquitoes had gone inside them for shelter from the draughts, unsuspicious of a trap. The wailing of the mosquitoes almost drowned the voices of crickets and frogs and the rustlings of rats and bugs in the Hall of Harmonious Repose. _ Vinh is the diving board for those who wish to plunge into the strange depths of Laos, the least- known province of Indo-China, and surely one of the most primitive provinces in Eastern Asia. At Vinh we found the Tét again—we had lost it in the jungle. We drove out of Vinh to the thunder of firecrackers. Native officials in fine embroidered and brocaded robes were being driven about in tiny victorias by scarlet-clad coachmen to pay New Year calls. But we faced towards the mountains that divide Annam from Laos. The road through Laos was only opened to wheeled traffic a few weeks ago and, like all young things worthy of their youth, has a reputation for being temperamental. But our hired car, caked with the mud of ages, driven by a little 256 THE LITTLE WORLD goblin of an Annamite chauffeur and further manned _ by a small patient native mechanic in blue, looked | savage enough and powerful enough to swim rivers — or scale precipices. At first sight it seems that any car traveling in Indo-China must of necessity be amphibious. Be- tween Vinh and the mountains there are—mystically enough—seven rivers, and not one bridge among the seven. On every Indo-China trail the disagreeable little sign looking like the letter IT upside down is as familiar as bananas. ‘That sign means bac, or | ferry. A bac usually consists of a partially sub- merged raft, roughly pinned together, and manned, either by women wearing chestnut robes and black | hoods surmounted by the national tea-tray hat, or else by men wearing nothing more than small tartan dusters round their middles. Some bacs are poled along by men who walk along the vessel’s bulwarks | in the position of ambulant hairpins, some are pulled © with ropes, some are pushed by the crew, which throws itself into the river for the purpose, and some are rowed with slender bamboo rods that offer | the least possible resistance to the water. Each bac avoids, as far as possible, the slightest appearance of speed or efficiency. Mudbanks are there to be cannoned off, not to be avoided; any accident short of total wreck is to be welcomed as relief in the day’s monotony. Each bac is launched from the | foot of a steep slippery mud precipice, and the motorist’s first thought, as he peers gingerly down JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 257 the chute at a broken gangplank all askew, is for his widow. But our goblin chauffeur hesitated at nothing. Danger of death by drowning was no more to him than danger of death by falling over precipices into the jaws of tigers. With one irascible yell of the horn he skidded masterfully on to each bac, the whole river quaking with the impact, the whole ferry’s crew leaping from under his wheels. Stopping his car nonchalantly on the only plank that could possibly bear its weight, the chauffeur would remove, uninvited, the hat of the nearest ferryman or ferry- woman and use it during the transit as a means of "conveying water from the river to his radiator. On landing he would throw the hat into the mud. These are the manners that make things run smoothly in Annam. There are ricefields nearly all the way from Vinh to the foot of the mountains. At first the fields are neatly and exactly squared, but presently wildness begins to thrust through, like the first note of pas- sion in serene music. Rocks and ragged trees inter- _rupt more and more the mild chequered pattern of industry. At last, after the seventh river, the moun- tains stamp out the gentle busy works of men. The mountains are dressed in thickly woven forest. Even upon the faces of the precipices where, one would imagine, no tree could find roothold, trees are matted together. Long, strong creepers droop _ down, and on these ropes, it seems, the forest swings 258 THE LITTLE WORLD itself up the great cliffs. The road was like a tunnel with occasional tall gothic windows, through which an infinite world looked in, a peacock-colored world sewn with far silver rivers. Looking up the slopes i ' | | | through the steep trees, one could see no glimpse | of sky, only a tangled darkness, an infinity of leaves that could never see the sun. The road ran up and down, mounting, but not : continuously. Out of the dark jungle tunnels we slid across rivers, creaking and bouncing on dubious | basketwork bridges that dipped, under our weight, | almost into the milky churned water. As we climbed | nearer to the highest ridge, the trees became larger © and more individual, the twilight of the undergrowth less thick. And in this way we could better see the banyans. ‘The banyan trails thin pale threads to the ground, and these grow into pillars supporting the parent tree and—inheriting in the course of ages | the banyan tradition—stand alone at last as inde- pendent trees. Sometimes these pillars stand astride Over acres; sometimes they group themselves close together. Sometimes they even partially merge themselves with the parent trunk, and then they look like enormous draperies falling to the ground—like the draperies of enormous stone Greek goddesses. Across the border of Laos we were at once among a people new to us. The Annamites we had left behind us were obviously related to the Chinese, and had the pale skin and narrow eyes we were used to—faces not so clever, not so independent, JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 259 not so honest as Chinese faces, costumes peculiar to _ themselves, yet Chinese more or less, a sophisticated _ imitative people living in huts rooted to the ground. _ The frail plaited palmleaf huts of the Laotiens . were built high on thin crazy stilts. “To save them _ from tigers,” said our little mechanic, but it did not -seem likely. A sneeze from a tiger would have _ blown those fairy moth villages away. : The people were obviously of Indian stock, brown, handsome, small, with large sentimental eyes. The / women wore their hair swept back into a loose knot at the nape of the neck; the well-to-do wrapped their bodies round in the brilliant striped silk sampots that jare woven in the villages, these hung like long ‘narrow skirts to the ground; white shifts enclosed their shoulders and breasts under gay shawls. The poorer peasants wore vivid cotton tartans instead of silks, they wrapped their heads, with a charming ‘carelessness, in flapping coifs of bright cotton; the “men were elaborately tottooed in dull blue and red. _ Men who wore things on their*heads politely re- ‘moved them as we passed, some even unwinding ‘elaborate turbans in honor of the conquering race. ‘Everyone looked shocked to see us, and—with the ‘universal human instinct of preoccupation with the ishocking—squatted down on haunches to take a igood look. But everyone reckoned without our igoblin chauffeur. No sooner were we sighted than ‘we were gone. ‘More wild beasts coming into our jungle,” per- 260 THE LITTLE WORLD haps the watchers sighed, as the roar of our inex. | plicable passing died away. At Napé, the first considerable village in Laos — upon that road, there is a sala for travelers, a little | white house facing a wide green field. There the village ponies and the humped cows graze in the shadow of a single banyan tree as broad and many- stemmed as an English grove. In the sala we spent the night, and in the morning drove on down a soft dificult road which after a while became impassable. Our car heeled over and became rooted in soft and bottomless mud. It was at any rate a beautiful place in which to spend the rest of one’s life—there— seemed at first no other prospect. The trees were widely spaced, parklike, in deep grass; shreds of © morning mist trailed along the treetops and moved across the faces of high abrupt crags that leaned over the far forest. The tigers must have smiled, if they looked out | of their lairs, to see us wandering pathetically about | collecting twigs with which to try and fill the yawning — ruts and give the heavy car wheelhold. Bridging — eternity, as it were, with a straw. Our goblin chauf- feur chattered helplessly. The car leaned further and further backwards like a hero of melodrama | who, having successfully delivered himself of his” words, now decides to die. Crackety-bump—three small motor buses ap- peared—motor buses, parting like fairies that mass of vegetable chaos that was the jungle! Out of the JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 261 buses leaped about a dozen Annamites and one Frenchman, who hurried towards our derelict, each obviously saying to himself, ‘‘Well, it won’t take me long to put this right...’ ‘Time is nothing to Annamites. One of the newcomers actually had a phantom wrist-watch tattooed upon his wrist. It stood at twelve o’clock—perpetual dinnertime. No doubt it successfully registered all the time he ever needed. While we were still uncertain whether this eruption of motor buses in Darkest Laos could be real or was only a figment of fever, the French new- comer showed that he was a born riser to emergen- cies. He wore a helmet with a thick khaki curtain all round it from which bristled immense curly - moustaches, and he said to his native servant,“Vas _chercher cent coolies ...’ A hundred coolies in this wilderness! Why not a hundred tigers or a hundred motor buses? Incredibly enough, the hun- dred coolies appeared. Was this then a city under a spell, disguised as bleak and voiceless forest? Our forlorn strip of bog-trail under the untrodden shadows of trees with mist in their hair had become a busy street moving with quick jungle men dressed in dust-colored loincloths, remote little brown men _under a wild thatch of shock hair, brown bodies tat- _tooed, as though with dark lace underclothes, from neck to knee. They swarmed like ants out of the forest, hewed logs, clustered on ropes, heaved to the tune of little muted jungle chanteys, and finally pulled the car out of her grave as surely as one pulls 262 THE LITTLE WORLD a cork out of a bottle. We left the already well- bogged buses to befriend one another and went on, heaving down the changing trail. We crossed the floating bridge and sat on its steep further bank, watching priests in orange robes and oxen in yellow hides and dogs in cinnamon-colored fur and peasants with burdens of golden fruit on their heads, cross- ing behind us while the bridge still quivered under the outrage of our weight. The bridge is a long ribbon of woven bamboos threaded across a broad deep-set river. The ribbon is laid upon a row of buoyant faggots of bamboo, and these float upon the water. The whole contrivance is not stretched taut but yields to every rising and falling humor of © the river. And it is tethered against the strong current by means of long bamboo cords anchored in — the upper air to a taut rope from cliff-brim to cliff- | brim. | Thakhek is a rather sophisticated village—for — Laos. The motor bus here dies in its tracks or — rather—like a grub reborn as a caterpillar—pufts — away towards Upper Siam in the farm of a little — smelly steamboat. Thakhek is a spacious village on | the banks of a very broad reach of the Upper | Mekong river. The inhabitants seem habitually to move about in a solid mass and, while we were there, their movements always coincided with ours. We were never without an audience; their village was seen by us continually over a kind of stockade © of citizens. Without audible criticism or comment _ a | Pe JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 263 they ringed us round, a crowd of slender handsome dark men of most unhumorous mien. Chests were worn naked, turbans and sampots were of various designs. One man wore a little occidental hat with a tiger’s tail tied round it. Monsieur le Résident shewed us great hospitality, but would not speak to us. We stayed in his wide casual generous house, we devoured enormous and excellent meals at his table, we tried to bend our hollow voices to a note enquiring, interesting, witty, domestic, alluring, in turns, but Monsieur le Rési- dent was thinking about something else all the time. Talking like that is like walking the plank of one’s own ideas . . . splash! our hospitable pirate drove us to fall off the end of our abortive endeavor into cold silence. I told him desperately that we were all journalists of international reputation, I thought of claiming to be the Queen of Alaska or the eighth Madame Landru traveling incognito, I would have done almost anything to make him open his eyes wide and say something. But he was so deeply absorbed in his dear Laos that he could not speak— even of Laos, his obsession. France was a very far-off thing to him; he had not seen France for many years and had no present wish to go home. His tongue was unloosed for a moment on the sub- ject of buffaloes. Everyone is impelled to be garru- ‘lous, funny or satirical at the expense of buffaloes; ‘they exist to induce a superiority complex in all observers. But buffaloes have their limits, and very & 264 THE LITTLE WORLD soon we all listened in polite silence once more to the sound of Sao Het continuously laughing. Sao Het, Monsieur le Résident’s pretty Laotienne wife, radi- antly dressed in the native shift and sampot, had sat all day with her women on the verandah, weaving at hand-looms the curious and brilliant silks of the country. But whatever she did she wore a laugh in her voice, just as her pretty peasant girls wore flowers in their hair. She spoke no French that we could understand, but her laugh was better than Esperanto and she was as natural and gentle in her movements as a deer. They took us to a féte after dark. Laotien musicians played, one on a sort of xylophone shaped like a boat, one on tall reed pipes, and one on a cir- cular arrangement of gongs. The scale of their music was the same as ours with the omission of every sixth note. The effect was very soft and gay and much more intelligible than that of the ordinary Chinese village music. The men sat playing and singing in a rough thatched pavilion; the women, brilliant in shawls and starry with flowers, sat apart in a group outside. One man after another sang verses, obviously comic and presumably indecent, addressed to one or another of the women outside. A shout of laughter greeted the end of each im- promptu and, after a coy pause, the woman ad- dressed, holding her shawl over her delighted shy face, replied, and gave rise to another shout of laughter. A Siamese woman from across the river JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 265 sang a Siamese song in a little thin sharp voice scarcely more resonant than a speaking voice. A smiling woman kneeled before each of us in turn, tied the thread of good fortune round our left wrists, gave us flowers—bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani .. . We drove next day to Savannakhet, further down the Mekong river. The road, though it followed the river, did so at a respectful distance and opened no windows in the wall of the forest upon the water. The road was threaded like a crumpled ribbon through the pale colorless jungle. There were no motor stage buses on that road, we were outside the region of swift efficient travel. The tree called Flame of the Forest balanced great fiery flowers on thin leafless branches as pale as frost. Savannakhet was a very hot noisy village down the street of which Siamese and Laotien peasants blew like gaudy great flowers on the hot wind. We never reached Siam. We took a boat and half crossed a very red sunset-soaked river, but only our voices—singing ‘Seven Greek Cities’’—ever reached Siam’s long lilac beaches. We threaded the ways of the little humble frail midstream Venices where peasants—hoverers between two civilizations and two elements, citizens owing national allegiance only to the winds that stir their river,—live in palm- leaf huts on anchored rafts with their wives and babies and chickens and banners, treating the fluent 266 THE LITTLE WORLD and mysterious river as though it were prosaic stable property. But we never set foot on Siam. The night was sudden, the boat fragile and indolent, and the river wide. Savannakhet, though its Anna- mite inn was not hospitable, meant omelette to starving travelers. Still—we have sung to Siam. Savannakhet is cool in the morning; a breeze from the river moves between the pillars of the marketplace. In the shadow of the roofed market- place there is a great singing of talk and a great glow of color to honor the coolness of the morning. The thin boats stride like water-beetles across the river from the far palm-pricked hazy shore of Siam. The Mekong is a definite enough boundary line to satisfy kings and conferences, but to the Siamese and Laotiens of the border it seems to mean but little. On both sides of the river men talk the same tongue, wear clothes of the same radiance and grace, work at the same crafts, plait themselves the same neat and fragile villages out of rushes and palm leaves. The women, buying and selling at the market, all have flowers in their hair. The heavy hai. is swept back loosely to be knotted loosely—not sleeked to an inhuman glaze like Chinese hair. There isa flow- ery carelessness about dress in Savannakhet; an | orange or crimson shawl can never be prim; vivid | sampots have uneven borders of gold or silver | thread; a man may wear a bold, scarlet and purple sampot and an applegreen shawl, or he may wear JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 267 nothing but his own beautifully tattooed skin and a twist of magenta cotton; he may wear a blue turban or a tiger’s tail round his head, or a hibiscus flower behind his ear—there are, it seems, no sartorial con- ventions on the Upper Mekong, only a craving for color. Only babies are austere—they wear nothing. We have a long way to go. No one in Savannak- het knows the state of the road back into Annam; no one knows whether the bridges will hold our heavy car; no one knows where we shall be able to sleep tonight. We came into Laos by the new front door, the new French trail that has succeeded in humping itself proudly over the mountains be- tween Vinh and Thakhek; we must leave Laos by the old back door, the dubious tremulous old jungle track that does not interest engineers or the enter- prising owners of motor buses. All along the track the priests stride purposefully under their umbrellas, their plentiful tawny yellow robes ballooning behind them. The older the priest, the deeper the yellow. Acolytes, striding with a milder frenzy of holy energy, are palely swathea, in lemon-yellow. But the umbrella and the shaven skull are common to all. I would rather be a plod ding priest than a journalist in a Panhard car on the trail from Savannakhet to Ch’pone, from Ch’pone to Lao-Bao. At every hundred yards or so the track buckles and dips into a green teeming steam- ing crease of land, a trap for black stagnant water “in a net of undergrowth, and this must be crossed 268 THE LITTLE WORLD by means of a plaited wicker bridge which curtseys and creaks under our car’s weight and, after our passing, either twangs bravely taut again or else sags, a wreck, over which following priests and buf- faloes must balance warily. A track made by the naked feet of travelers and the splay hoofs of buf- faloes is a rutless track, rough with coarse tussocks of grass. The heaving of the car throws us vio- lently together and apart. The skull of a husband in one’s eye, the elbow of a friend in one’s jaw, the iron bar of a motor accessory against a short rib— at the dreadful moment of impact there is little to | choose between them. Buffaloes block progress: ‘The theft of a buf- falo. is the commonest transgression among the law-abiding Laotiens and a very heavily punished one. Yet to me it seems that the buffalo in the | jungle sails under false colors. One meets him, © solitary and surly, very far from the huts of men, bulging and crackling in the jungle like a bloated deer. In the inconceivable event of my coveting © such a thing as a buffalo, I should need very little | sophistry to convince myself that the treasure was — mine for the taking. But to consider the buffalo as — a treasure is, to me, most difficult. With me, he can only rank as an obstacle. The buffaloes watch | the coming car through thickly glazed eyes, and not | until it meets them radiator to radiator, as it were, _ do they begin to move, turning slowly and plodding ahead of the car as though they were ponderously JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 269 presenting this new feverish warty iron buffalo with the freedom of the jungle. Always after we have negotiated the adult herd, the calves remain, awk- ward and flustered, shambling in front of us. ‘The mothers, spurred to unnatural haste by domestic sensibility, waddle beside us, grunting contradictory directions to their distracted young. In Laos cocks and hens are wild. It had never occurred to me before that the hen was anything but an egg-laying machine always seen through a rabbit-wire fence. Yet here in the forest was the hen—in appearance the same homely useful rather apoplectic-looking bird that all men know and few men love, with the same badly fitting feathery plus- fours and the same insanely judicial eye—the same outer bird, but in character and standing—how dif- ferent! As agile as a thrush she whizzes from tree to tree. Being a hen, of course she crosses the road at the last minute—but at a dignified height of twenty feet or so. As for the cock, though he seems identical in shape and color with his barndoor brother, here he is a quick jewel in scarlet and green as he shoots down a shaft of sunlight; here he has no duties, nobody to wake to weary work in the -mornings, no tame industrious sun to watch for and announce. It made me wonder whether all the tame poor things of our civilization have somewhere a jungle in which they are radiant and wild, whether somewhere unsuccessful clerks and shy curates and _lady-companions to irascible old ladies come into 270 THE LITTLE WORLD their heritage of lovely savagery; whether some- where the tired old charwomen or the little underfed boardinghouse slavey-girls sweep gloriously like queens from glade to secret glade .. . The little post of Ch’pone is like a village bought _ in a box and set out on the nursery floor. One can almost see the round green wooden stands under the tight young green trees in Ch’pone’s avenue. A | short white stretch of abortive road, a couple of neat _ white wooden houses, a few spotted cows, some | black pigs, two magpies, and a dog with a curly tail—a bigger toy would overcrowd this neat flat ledge of land and encroach on the wild crooked crumpled jungle—which would spoil the game. The Délégué of Ch’pone bicycles forward to : welcome us, a big beaming buck nigger, probably | from Martinique. We sit about a table in his little white house drinking delicious light beer. His wife | has a gentle swarthy face and crinkly hair at the — apex of a flouncy pyramid of trailing white dress. The Délégué is very proud of being in charge of Ch’pone; before we have begun our beer we know all the circumstances of his happy fortune; before — the last shred of foam has slipped to the bottom of — the last glass we know the Délégué’s opinion of the past, present, and future of the ‘‘subject race’’ over — which he is set in authority. Intelligent? All races, he says, are of the same intelligence. Simply it is a matter of contact with civilization. Like all negroes he has a resonant and convincing voice, and JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA a there is great buoyancy and emphasis in the way he speaks French. He shines with the happiness of achieved mastership. To look out of the window at the Laotien villagers, gracious, sleepy, lovely as bright lizards in the sun, and to look again at the Delégué, black, thick, energetic, and completely pro- saic in buttony khaki, gives one a feeling of a mental squint. The Délégué has good news of a sala four hours further on at Lao-Bao. And thither we must go, for a sala—a bungalow provided by the Government for travelers—is the home of the homeless in the jungle. In Laos the alternative to a lodging in a sala is, conceivably, a lodging in a tiger’s belly. Crashing and lurching along the rough road we must go and, before we reach Lao-Bao, that road is only a strip of yellow fading light between two crested dark waves of forest, with vivid parrots shuttling between darkness and darkness. The light stays long on Flame of the Forest. Lao-Bao is a prison post. The Chef de Poste, with a thin quick face made ironical by the down- ward curve of a long moustache, hospitably as- sembles his convicts and his soldiers like fairies, to fill our bare sala with comforts. The convicts wear boards fitted round their necks, and chains attaching the knee of one leg to the ankle of the other. They go in rags and are very hungry; an almost empty corned beef tin, thrown out of the sala, is seized as ardently as crumbs are seized by sparrows. The 272 THE LITTLE WORLD tinkle of chains haunts Lao-Bao. Yet the Chef de Poste is a kind man and confesses a great affection for the men and things of the Laos border. He scratches behind the antlers the enormous deer that lounge about his garden, he fondles the fretful mon- key that swarms up his leg, he pats on the head a little métis boy and, with naive and benign ostenta- tion, gives him a silver piece of money. With the manner of a king in his capital, he shows us his Laotien village. It stands high on thin legs; little ladders are lowered at will from the high doors to the palm-shadowed grass. A Laotien’s home 1s in- deed his castle, albeit a castle in the air. The vil- lage temple is no more durable; there is a gong on its high fragile verandah and the men who squat in its shadow wear canary yellow, but in other re- spects Buddha must democratically share the frail perched existence of his devotees. The gilded face of this peasant Buddha, though flecked by the rude sun that filters through the rush walls, dreams the same dream as do the faces of urban gods among © carven stone pillars and the drums and the dragons © of ceremony. | ‘‘A wise and very virtuous people, my peasants,” says the Chef de Poste, “in the light of their own | laws. The young men and young women, going to- © gether to feasts in neighboring villages, never omit | to take with them these priests . . . the priests — even sleep in the huts of the visiting young girls to guard their chastity. Yes... of a formidable | JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 273 virtue . . . The young girls have a bathing pool, and there I often ride to watch them. But slowly, slowly they immerse themselves, lowering them selves slowly—(he illustrates)—-and all the while they roll up the chemise, slowly, slowly, till they are covered to the neck by water. Then slowly, slowly, they raise themselves, unrolling the chemise in an ex- act manner—thus, I assure you, messieurs, nothing declares itself . . . Not only virtuous but practi- cal, you understand. Laotien law decrees that the man charged with touching a young girl’s breast suf- fers ten years’ imprisonment, the man who violates her—only five years. Car, en effet,—n’est-ce-pas, mesdames?—en ce cas il y a toujours un peu de bonne volonté .. . We came out of Laos into Annam by a road which festooned itself down high hot hills almost all the way to Hué. At midday we stopped by a broad shallow rushing river and bathed in strong rapids. We lay down in the water, setting our feet firmly; the river looped itself like a strong lasso about our shoulders, dragging with an exciting force. Outside the water the air was like fire; the very shade of the thick thirsty palms and tall grasses on the river banks gave no illusion of coolness. And Hué was hot. In Hué the very splendor of the old emperors seemed shrivelled like a rootless flower in the sun. A busy band was playing in the public square, and round and round the band strolled the representa- 274 THE LITTLE WORLD tives of protecting France and their well-corsetted and well-tinted wives. Round and round the outer circle walked the Annamites in gay green and orange and purple robes, their broad low conical straw hats tied with gay ribbons under their chins. The Em- peror stayed at home nursing his bronchitis; there was no Emperor today for the crowd of flowerlike citizens to look at—but never mind, there was the band playing French comic opera, and there were fat buttony French officials and fat cushiony French wives—very nearly as grand as the old days and cer- tainly much funnier. Perhaps the hot wind can even carry the sound of the band to the sick Emperor in his palace across the river. Perhaps he thinks it plays better music than did the gongs and the cym- bals and the flutes that used to fill the ears of emperors. But the old emperors cannot hear. ‘They are, fortunately, asleep. The great pavilions of their tombs stand on most of the hillsides about the town © of Hué. Their tombs are like fortresses—for- tresses impregnably protected against European “protectors.” Tu Duc’s memorial tablet stands enshrined upon the highest of a confusion of low red pavilioned ter- races. The trees bend soberly over the moat where lotuses are, and over the wide bricked walks. The courtyards, bordered by cloisters, seem to sober the sunlight. All the red-paved ways and courtyards are pocked with the pawprints of jackals. They JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 275 must have come impertinently in the moonlight, when the tomb was new and the paving still soft, almost before the Emperor Tu Duc was decently quiet in his grave. I imagine the irreverent goblin jackals coming on dancing paws and filling with their cracked shrill laughter the pompous air of the pavil- ions in which the heavy sound of imperial mourning had scarcely ceased to echo. And the jackals have left as permanent a trace as Tu Duc himself. Looking over the shoulders of the serene dark roofs is the gaudy yellow pavilion in which Tu Duc’s tablet stands. It wears too small a hat. All ornate Annamite architecture has this comedian’s-billycock effect when compared with the Chinese architectural skyline. The generous bell-hung eaves of Chinese tombs and temples, the curved outspringing roofs that veil Chinese walls in shadow—these are, it seems, copied meanly by Annamite designers, as though a disastrously economical village dressmaker tried to copy a French model. The dead emperors are all neighbors one to an- other. Tu Duc’s jewelled and stately ghost, fol- lowed by a cackling pack of rude ghost jackals, has ‘only a little way to walk to meet the ghosts of its “imperial neighbors. The next emperor lies under | delicate terraces of carved white marble. To reach {his tablet one must go under a cornery threefold jarchway, the crosspiece of which is a dragon in isilver and blue enamel; one must pass along an avenue of stone figures—an elephant to right, an 276 THE LITTLE WORLD elephant to left, a saddled horse to right, a saddled horse to left, old bearded stone men with patterned stone robes, all with a hint of life carved into the stone. The shrine in which this emperor’s tablet stands is like an idealized dream of the Marble Arch, and springs delicately up against a background of soft young pine trees. About the terraces stand great circular bronze tanks with wrought handles— an over-eternal home for ephemeral goldfish. There were more tombs—a tomb on every hill- side—a garden suburb of the splendid dead. Am dead empress’ pavilion was studded with porcelain dinnerplates varied by dessert plates and even ice-- cream dishes and coffee-saucers, let into the clay of the building. All the lions that decorated her walls | wore a homely armor of broken china surely unusual | among imperial lions. That empress must have | been a Martha among empresses. A drift of frangi- pani blossoms blew on the piny breeze over her tomb. | Another great tomb was of the same shape as | Annamite hats—a great golden-tiled hat uplifted on pillars on a circular terrace. | Among the trees and the tombs a peasant was catching butterflies with a dead butterfly decoy. He had caught a live one about nine inches from wing- tip to wing-tip, sand color and blue, with curious transparent windows in its wings. It only cost us a few coppers to buy it and release it with a caution. A live Emperor cannot shut up his palace while JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 204 his dead ancestors keep such open house. Under great massive yellow-tiled gates we drove to the palace. A couple of elephants were benevolently carrying haystacks about in the palace park. They put down and lifted up their absurd blunt feet with a firm caution, as though determined not to injure the little beasts that live in the grass; as they walked they swung their trunks childishly in the grass and smiled to themselves. The imperial guard wore yellow puttees and tabs, and curtains round their conical hats. Just inside the palace gates two golden _ lions were being painfully baked in the sun in large glass cases. Yellow flags and a straw dragon whis- kered with dead flowers acclaimed the recent Impe- rial celebration of Tet. Time is apparently a play- thing of the Emperor’s, for all over the palace there were clocks and cheap tear-off calendars in great numbers. The calendars were, all but one, kept up to date. I imagine it must be one man’s full work _ to keep them torn off. That man’s mind must be dreadfully well stocked with Great Thoughts For the Day. Or perhaps the Emperor himself, now _ that he has no empire, busies himself in tearing off his paper days and committing Thought after Thought to memory. There was one calendar just behind his gilded throne that he had forgotten for two days. Poor Emperor, perhaps he shuns his throne when he can; it is gaudy and solitary and a little ricketty-looking about the legs. The throne-room was an immense room; the 278 THE LITTLE WORLD doors at the two ends were within bare shouting — distance of each other. There was a forest of red © and gold lacquer pillars. At the foot of each pillar | a slender and brilliant Chinese vase stood up; at the © head of each pillar a dingy tarnished cheap Bir- _ mingham lamp bracket leaned down—stalactite and — stalagmite. The daylight was dimmed by very thin | reed mats painted with dragons, and this filtered light made the lacquer and the porcelain and the ex- — quisite embroideries of the panelled screens glow — like half-seen miracles. Definitions of kingly vir- _ tues and precepts were painted in gold and black upon each of the scores of red panels all round the © room ... Prudent Punishment ... The Wise © Making Up of Budgets ... The Tactful Treat-_ ment of Inferiors . . . Dignified Deportment . . . In the middle of the great room the little rich : ricketty throne had a gorgeous brocade cushion only © very slightly dinted by the weight of a ghost of — empire. The coastline of Southern Annam is like the | frayed edge of a rich old brocade. The sea and — the land are entangled together, and the traveler never knows, as he climbs a shoulder of coast, on which side of him he will next see water. There are three day-long stages between Hué and — the railhead, Nhatrang. The way from Hué to Tourane leads partly through the sky. Over the Col des Nuages the road is flung, like a lasso about the thick uprearing neck — JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 279 of a steer. The thick trees fence in the climbing road. The zigzags of the road, diagonally laid across the wall of mountain ahead, are like the crazy rungs of a monstrous ladder. From close up under the sloping ceiling of this great attic of Annam one can still see the immense deep-laid foundation of the world—the sea, ruled neatly with small still waves. But from the very top of the pass one sees nothing; clouds make their permanent headquarters on the top loop of the road. Even a big defant two-foot lizard, coming out of the dripping under- growth to defy intruders, looks like the little ghost of a dragon in the dimmed air and, like a ghost, dis- solves in the mist, finding its defiance useless. The road was difficult and the nerves of our gob- lin chauffeur—which had never seemed very tough —at last gave way with an effect like an explosion. A woman in a gay red robe, having perched herself safely on the side of the road at our approach, obeyed at the last moment that demon that prompts hens and puppydogs—and changed her mind. The next moment, though her life had been saved by a matter of inches, she perhaps wished that death had been her portion. For our goblin chauffeur, with a high scream of rage, stopped the car, flew out of his seat like a champagne cork and, with a terrifying spidering of his legs and arms, threw himself at the offending woman. He ran, she ran; her robe blew like a flag behind her, her great hat fell off, _ her market produce was scattered, she and the chauf- 280 THE LITTLE WORLD feur screamed in unison. For a moment it seemed that he would throw her into the river which flowed conveniently below. But he gave up suddenly. He was as inconsequent as a monkey and, jabbering like a monkey, he returned to his alarmed passengers with a proud look of one who has shown the world what’s what so that’s that. For several miles he chattered shrilly to himself as he yanked the wheel irascibly about. Tourane is a charming unassuming little port sit- uated in a constant brisk sea-breeze upon a blue arm of the sea. The mountains lean over Tourane and, on the mountains, the tall clouds are balanced on pedestals of their own shadows. At Tourane harsh circumstances tore the party asunder. ‘Tourane could only offer us an inadequate small Ford for the next stage and I insisted on being the one to travel alone by native stage bus to meet the others at Quinhon. The bus started before daylight from the Post Office at Tourane. The big Annamite driver, whose face was as fat and flat and whose shoulders were as massive as a negro’s, shouted as he threw the mail- bags on to the roof of the bus with his strong arms. The little mechanic was on the roof doing the subtler work of stacking and securing the mailbags; to him fell all the abuse. Through all the noise of loading, the one native passenger, a woman, slept on the seat of the bus, her great straw hat covering almost her whole crumpled body. I traveled first class. JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 281 I sat between the driver and the little mechanic on the front seat. We roared out of Tourane as daylight began to make the lights look accidental. All the naked brown babies of the town came out to see us go, their silver amulets bouncing against their little pot- bellies. A yelling woman ran out and saved a puppy almost from under our wheels. This was presum- ably because the puppy would make good eating, not—alas—good loving. The driver bent his great shoulders over and round his wheel with an enveloping look of atten- tion, as a very hungry man bends over his plate. But as more and more native passengers entered the bus, and the sleeping woman had to sit up and con- verse, the talk of the passengers gradually broke into the driver’s sanctuary of concentration, and he had to turn to exhort, correct, or applaud the talkers. “Chauffeur, attention, tu vas écraser un chien.” “Madame ta pas avoir peur.” The road was very flat and slightly dyked above the land. The distant line of the sea, sharp and metallic as a knife, cut between the ragged plumes of the eastward trees. And sometimes the forsaken salt lakes of the sea ran up to the left ditch of the road and the ricey marshes to the right, so that water on all sides caught the sun. The marshes had a bloom of very young rice, as soft on the water as down is on a young boy’s chin. Where there was no 282 THE LITTLE WORLD rice, slender starry lilies grew. But to the left, on the salt water, there was no bloom but the shadows of clouds sailing between dune and dune. Outside Postes-Telegraphes in each village a thin flaccid sack of mail waited in charge of a native postmaster dressed in a lily-white robe. The big bus-driver wore the blue overalls of America and spiritual conquest, and he had an imperial manner with postmasters. His great baritone quelled their thin tenors as he thrust gossip from other villages upon them. The little mechanic meanwhile climbed continually up on to the roof and down again, ar- ranging sacks in industrious silence. At one village the bus stopped for a long time, delayed by interest in a domestic crisis. A man, two or three of his friends, and a selection from his mothers-in-law were beating the man’s wife. It looked like a game; flat awkward hands were flapping the air ineffect- ually about the young woman’s shoulders and arms. She was terrified. She uttered thick appalling screams even when no hand actually touched her. She threw her arms about like a madwoman and span and ran and fell against the walls of the yard. Everyone in the bus was much amused. ‘The as- sembled villagers, too, shewed an honest pride in their spectacle, which they felt was making a good impression on us haughty aliens from other villages. Even when the young woman sank to the ground, still shrieking, and lay writhing while one old mother-in-law made ranting cries and gestures over JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 283 her body, as though to point the moral, the bus could not at once bring itself to move away. The driver was shaking with amusement. But duty ts duty, even in Annam—at any rate in the long run— and when one carries the Courrier Colonial one can- ‘not too long linger over roadside delights. All the native passengers talked at once. No man, it seems, is a stranger to his fellows in Annam, be his village never so remote. The Annamite tongue sounds like Nyang-nyang-nyang,; there is a whine and a grievance in the sound of it. A cock, hanging upside down from a passenger’s arm, crowed; men and women cleared throats and spat red betel-juice; our comedian had a very witty way of chewing and spitting. There is a comedian in every bus all the world over, and ours was a crooked simple sardonic old man with a gray chignon droop- ing below his black turban. However loud the gen- eral conversation might be, everyone had attention and a laugh to spare for the comedian whenever he spoke. Annamite women, who enamel their teeth black to prove their virtue, look like frogs when they laugh. Everyone, too, shewed a devoted interest in the affairs of the very old man in a stiff purple cot- ton robe who did not seem to know where he was going. Often he thought that he had arrived and a concerted roar from his helpful neighbors stopped the bus, but each time the old man dribbled, mumbled, and heaved himself like an uneasy sleeper, giving us to understand that the alarm 284 THE LITTLE WORLD was a false one. No one got tired of trying to help him. The little mechanic crawled about the outside of the rattling, leaping bus like a lizard round a wall. A passenger’s fare was reckoned in consultation with the next stone kilometre-mark passed after his en- trance. Passengers sat chattering on tenterhooks, their coppers chinking in their hands, while the little mechanic, one precarious foot on a mudguard and the other on a door-handle, waved in the wind out- side the rushing bus, watching for the stone sign. And when the figure was announced, a wail of pro- test always accompanied the payment of the fare. — Two smart passengers inserted themselves into the first class between the mechanic and me. Both wore black flowered gauze, one over a green robe and the other over a white one; their trousers were dazzling white, their clogs were decorated with col- ored beads, their black turbans were coiled with incredible neatness. They were obviously first-class passengers to the core, and not conceivably to be herded with the hay-trusses, dried fish, pumpkins, upside-down hens and straw- and cotton-clad travel- ers behind. Yet each of the two bowed himself double, clasping his stomach, and said, “Madame excusera?” before presuming to sling his luggage on to my proud imperial feet. Bacs put their best oar foremost as our great bus hailed them. It is something, even to the skinny half-naked skipper of a dozen leaky boards nailed JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 285 together, to carry the Courrier Colonial. The big chauffeur made everyone else descend from the bus and walk on to each bac, to distribute the weight. Only he and I, outriders of conquering civilization, remained in our seats. On the largest bac there was an entertainer, a little blind boy click- ing two attuned pieces of wood together in a most excellent and racy rhythm. To the accompaniment of this curious exact shrill clicking, he sang an ex- cited little song, also in a very accurate, almost syn- copated rhythm. He sang it in a clear confident voice up and down his breath. He seemed tense and drunk with the ranting excitement of his song; his springing voice sounded more and more sharply at every verse; his blind hollowed eyes twitched; his little clogged foot kicked the air. There were end- less verses to the song and the singing occupied the whole slow crossing. Each verse varied the tune a little. At about twenty yards from the southern bank our overloaded raft ran aground. We took a kind of pivoting root in sand, while shrieks from the ferrymen prevailed upon a rival raft to come and lighten us of some of our passengers. In a com- pact mass all my fellow passengers changed boats and were poled away in a kind of slow cyclone of uninterrupted cacklings and squawkings. ‘The re- lieved bac, containing the bus, the driver, and me, in a silence that seemed tomblike by contrast, could now be pushed to shore by the amphibious ferrymen, 286 THE LITTLE WORLD The bus set its wheels on a long strip of wickerwork which, for a quarter of a mile, took the place of a road across a soft blinding plain of sand. A dis- tant shrill even jangle of discordant sounds marked the cheerful progress of my fellow passengers, pa- tiently pursuing us on foot until a better road should be reached. At Quang-Ngai the bus stopped for luncheon at an Annamite inn. “Chauffeur, toi pas partir sans moi—bien str.” “Madame ta pas avoir peur.” The flies in the inn were callous to rebuff; in mil- lions they stood impartially on me, on three good- hearted but diseased dogs, on a couple of pigs at the door, on the half-bald hens that followed the waiters in and out, on the sardines on my plate. The starved dogs, on whose protruding ribs the patches of mange were stretched taut, tried to climb on to my lap. They said that the inn had never enter- tained so complaisant a guest; it seemed to them incredible that they should actually be encouraged to eat the whole of the flyblown déjeuner. The sound of the flies in the strong heat during the two hours’ breathing space was like a horn played by one who never paused to draw breath. The form of the driver, hunched fatly over the wheel, reappeared as graciously as the form of a long-lost friend. ‘Moi pas oublier madame.” The road swung up and down low hills now. Sec- tions of sunny sea were dovetailed into the ends of JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 287 green valleys. And I shall never forget one sheeny -palmy valley that glittered as bravely as the sea. “The whole valley was starred with palms, and every leaf of every palm juggled with a sword of sunlight. The pale pearly-green coconuts clung round the thin necks of the palms, close under their funny shock heads. We passengers drank cool bubbly coconut milk from the shell, while the bus collected the mail from a straw-thatched village that smelt of pigs and glowed with orchids and banana flowers. A pretty woman passenger caught the bus there, running on tuned clogs, ding-dong ding-dong. .. . She wore an orange robe and her big straw hat was tied down to the top of her turban with red ribbons that fluttered under her chin. She was committed to the driver’s care by her husband, a fat apoplectic na- tive in a French khaki suit. She bowed to him and wrung her hands in his direction as the bus started, but round the corner a pretty young man ran be- side us and threw a flower and a note which she caught adroitly in her outstretched hat. She laughed, showing all her shiny black teeth, when she read the note, but she let the flower fall. The hills sprang higher and higher; the driver crouched more exclusively over his wheel as the road looped itself round the cones of the hills. New valleys, new spaces, new seas were flung in front of us and then behind us as we turned and turned. The sun fell low and dyed the hills yellow, but it 288 THE LITTLE WORLD could not stain the whiteness of the sand-dunes | which crouched, striped with sparse gray grass, between the hills and the sea. On the hills were steepled red sandstone shrines, each shrine very solitary on a bleak summit, each shrine fretted with carvings that now only served as roothold for the creepers and the little wind-blown flowers and shrubs. China’s peaceful horizontal | lines were as last forgotten; here were the “pine- — apple” outlines of the south, the cramped peaks and pointings, the encrusted subtleties of India. “Chauffeur, toi savoir quel homme batir ces pagodes-la?” “Moi pas moyen savoir, madame. Tout le monde pas moyen savoir. Tout ¢a beaucoup vieux. Tout Ca LOUE IE ean Quinhon, being reached in the dark and left in a morning mist, was interesting to us only fur the fact that there our party was reunited. The stage from Quinhon to Nhatrang was a hot but beautiful stage. A harbory land is the southeastern corner of Annam; everywhere a vivid fresh sea comes in at numberless rock gateways that only the golden- sailed native fishing boats know. ‘The fragile fish- ing villages are plaited for safety with the steeply climbing trees that grow on the black and silver wild edge of the sea. Inland sweep the hills, chequered with hedged fields and curiously like English ‘‘colored counties.”’ English fields, seen, as JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 289 it were, through arsenic-green glass—for here were none of the mellow golds and lemon-colors and soft spring greens of home. Between Nhatrang and Saigon one must forsake air and happiness and the comfort of free will and green coconuts, and travel by train. Blinds down, electric fans whirring, dust-caked throats, moribund flies, voluble French schoolgirls for fellow passen- gers . . . for a while we forgot the pleasant art of traveling, for a while we merely proceeded pain- fully from one place to another. At one deserted halt in the blind gray jungle, with no work of human hands other than the railway line in sight, a most unlikely visitant boarded our train—an American soldier in khaki, with his hat tasselled with the familiar acorns, his arms full of peacocks’ feathers, the accent of Illinois on his tongue. It was easily explained—a major on leave from Manila .. . after tigers . . . only one skin . nearly killed by an elephant .. . say, ain’t the niggers queer around here... But no ex- planation could dismiss the initial surprise of his arising from the dreadful sheer jungle. Saigon is a city of which French colonials speak with pride, and French novelists write with succu- lence and daring. But we find nothing to remember in it except its lack of beauty and its stifling heat. There was, I have always understood, a breed of hen that was patented in Cochin China. If this 290 THE LITTLE WORLD was so the recipe must have been lost, for I did not meet a single hen, dead or alive, nor anything else real, typical, or exotic. I only know that the band © in the hotel was playing ‘Yes, We Have No | Bananas” as we arrived. Were it not for the hope of seeing Angkor, no | one would ever motor from Saigon to Pnom-penh. It is the dullest day’s work in the world—I say that | with confidence. Saigon, as I see it, is not worth going to and, equally, not worth coming away from. | The only view from the road at first is of rubber — plantations. Rubber trees are of a refreshing clean green; they always look as if they ought to bear splendid and vivid fruit, not mere stuff for motor tires. Yet, after a very few miles one wearies of the exactness of their spacing, the monotony of their shape, and the ubiquity of the prosaic tin cans that collect their life-blood. After leaving the rubber — plantations one traverses a blank in the world. There are two ferries and, between these, a dry yellow grass wilderness stretches from sky to sky, | varied only by a few stumpy blowsy palms and an — occasional mud-hole in which buffaloes wallow. There are only birds to look at and these, being all of one kind, soon become as stale as rubber plantations. They are long-legged, smartly tailored birds, wearing black wings over white waistcoats, and they look all dressed up and no place to go. Pnom-penh is the capital of Cambodia, and has a real live king living in a palace hideous enough JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 291 to take rank with any other royal residence through- out the world. We went and groaned superciliously about the palace precincts. The roofs all bristle with crinkled gilded rays; wherever that palace can radiate it radiates a thousandfold. There is not an honest horizontal or vertical line in it. The whole effect is like a disastrous sunburst. The pictures of the king in state costume show that the radiating mania is an essential part of Cambodian life—he wears a row of crimped brass flames on either shoul- der to match his palace. He is, however, a very docile good king, we understand, and indeed might almost be a Frenchman. He retains one Cambodian ideal—his interest in and support of the dancers for whom his country is famous. But on the day we were there they were enjoying their rest, and we could only see the empty open pillared dais on which they dance. ‘They are strenuously trained from in- fancy and, by means of the art of their pliable bodies, have built a strong and wonderful tradition in which a thousand years ago and a thousand years hence find common ground. The Chinese of Pnom-penh, not the native Cam- bodians, provided the entertainment of that hot evening. Silk Guilds were marking some unspecified occasion by an endless series of processions up and down the palm-bordered bank of the Mekong river. Decorated ponies drew waggons on which colored revolving discs and painted screens made back- grounds for groups of magnificently dressed chil- 292 THE LITTLE WORLD dren. The children at first seemed to be dolls; poised in mid-air on almost invisible loops and props of wire, they steadied themselves only by resting their hands on the tops of poles which were carried | by coolies walking beside the waggons. Some chil- dren sustained incredible attitudes of flight and movement, and one little girl seemed to be hanging — by her hair. Yet their faces were calm and expres- sionless, and only when one noticed the occasional sraceful waving of a fan or the calm and remote patience in a pair of watchful eyes, did one realize | that hearts beat and pride surged up there in that inhuman encrustation of gorgeous silks and embroid- eries and powder and paint. Behind each waggon, on a pony’s back, rode a little baby with its crowned sleepy head rolling above its elaborate dress, and its limp little body supported by a proud father. But what the meaning of the fantastic procession was I _ know no more than if it had been a dream. We were to be the first tourists in the world’s history to reach Angkor entirely by land in a car. When we enquired about the new road from Pnom- penh—the completion of which road had been the subject of congratulation a few days before in all newspapers interested in the Far East—we found that, in Pnom-penh itself, the existence of the road was not credited. “One goes by boat to Angkor. Messieurs mesdames deceive themselves . . . by automobile nothing marches . . . ’’ Even the Chief of Police had never heard of a road to Angkor. A JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 293 new road is not without honor save in its own country. But a genius at the garage had heard of the road and directed us at last. He did not think we should reach the other end of it, but what of that? For a hundred and seventy kilometres the road is fairly good. Bits of it have been washed away by floods, but there is always a graded dip down into the desert which, by daylight, is not difficult. But after Kompong-thom the good road dies; a prelim- inary sketch for a road is all that exists. The track that heaves and hiccoughs over the dry bed of the Great Lake is one to be remembered with tears of blood and gasoline. Soft yielding sand stretches for miles; the car grinds and skids insanely, and never can find a yard of firm ground from which to take off for a plunge through a sandhole. In the last seventy kilometres—which we cover by moon- light—there are over a hundred bridges that are not, so to speak, there yet. To the triumphant en- gineers and the congratulatory leaderwriters, the road to Angkor is an accomplished thing. But a motor car has no eye of faith; its unimaginative tires must flounder in deep sand; a hundred handsome bridges designed on paper in Saigon cannot save us now from rolling and roaring and bucking through the dry bridgeless streambeds in the streaked light of the tepid Cambodian moonlight. After thirteen hours of almost continuous strug- gle, here is Siem Reap, the “port” of Angkor. 294 THE LITTLE WORLD Thence a good road whisks us through the forest to Angkor. Angkor Vat, by full moonlight, is heaped upon a line of dim moon-reflecting moat. Across the moat on a great causeway we go, feeling like shadows. Incredible stillness melodramatically succeeds thir- teen hours’ prosaic clatter. There is a gateway crowned with a peaked dome, another causeway to | an inner gate and, beyond that, the holiest highest place stands on a symmetrical peak of very steep | steps. Bordering every causeway the stone body of Naga, the holy Cerberus snake, acts as a balus- trade, and, at every corner, Naga rears his great . broken fan of heads to defy the proud stone lions | that flank the gateways. Eight hundred years of jungle oblivion have | drained those wide spaces empty even of ghosts, I | think. The stone monsters have guarded the place | too well. It is surprising that Angkor Vat is quite a young wonder of the world. Even we Europeans, who are | generally found to have been blue hairy hordes at the time of the gorgeous decline of Eastern civili- zations,—even we had invented trousers and built Westminster Abbey at the time Angkor Vat was_ built. Angkor Thom is a little older, but still not too old for the imagination to remember. For Angkor, the forest has taken the place of | years. The trees stand like wild cynical companions among the carved pillars of the temples; a net of | | —_——— JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 295 weeds has caught the old stone pools; the grass has flowed in like a tide over the paved steps and the stone feet of gods and monsters; little soft cruel plants are strong enough to tilt and tear in two the great friezes, the stone stories that once were a hot strong excitement in men’s minds. Naga, the snake, is a stone prophecy. The ghosts of the men who linked, by means of Naga’s stone body, one pinnacled gateway with another, must know now what they meant—now that the forest, many-headed, many-mouthed like Naga, has de- voured their treasure. Naga, in the light of the moon, challenges strangers and binds them with a spell. Naga’s monstrous taut body along the broad causeways leads strangers away and away from everything neat and known. Come along... come along ... stranger ... let the lions throw out their silly stone chests for the admiration of the crazy palms .. . let the fish mumble among the lit- tle green sequins of weeds upon the pools .. . let the bats, blurs of silver, swing and shimmer and mew against the frosted sky at the top of the broken tower ... come, stranger, the night is short... Naga’s heads are reared at the end of the wide way, arrogantly and finally. Look now .. . this is my Angkor, my treasure. . . you shal share a treasure with me and the forest ... The holy place ts propped on a precipice of insanely steep steps, so steep that the moonlight shuns the slopes of that fierce hill, and touches only the three proud horns 296 THE LITTLE WORLD that toss the stars. Naga, keep your dreadful treasure, strangers must seek it by the safe trans- forming light of the sun... Day comes up dull and hot, impaled on the horns of Angkor. By daylight the forest indeed retreats; by daylight the smart reasonable efforts of French preservers and renovators make their effect; by day- light the holy place is not too holy to be winked at by the rude eye of a Number One Brownie. For Brahma is dethroned by the light of the day and in his place there is kind placid Buddha, wearing a yellow dress, like a child in its party frock. Even Naga, by daylight, can look a fool. It seems now that there was an undignified episode in the life of | Naga. It is spitefully bared to the sun in bas-relief along one of the galleries. Naga, one day before history began, went to sleep coiled carelessly round a mountain and there was found by a group of idle giants. They divided into two teams and taking hold of Naga’s head and tail began a tug-of-war. One imagines poor Naga wak- | ing up and saying, ‘“‘Hey, fellers, that’s enough—no, I mean seriously, this is beyond a joke . . . ” And his protests were reinforced from all sides. For the | mountain round which Naga was coiled happened to be the one on which heaven and earth were balanced. The pull to, pull fro of the tug-of-war twirled the mountain this way and that. Seldom are the true | gods seen in attitudes of such impotent indignity as this frieze shews—thrones reeling, crowns askew, : | JOURNEY IN INDO-CHINA 297 divine legs and arms sprawling in an effort to re- gain balance. Really it might be the twentieth cen- tury. But the waters under the earth are in still worse case. A crimped chaos vividly expresses the turmoil. Crocodiles, sea-horses, newts, axolotls and plain whiting are seen bursting in two; even when they remain intact they are upside down, and their expression—down to that of the smallest eel— well suggests their intense astonishment and dis- comfort. At each end of the frieze a company of men and horses applaud the heartless game. There is a demon coach, too, with a great shouting mouth and gesturing arm, giving the word—‘‘Pull, boys, pu-u-ll . . . Good Lord, what are yer arms made of—treacle? Now pull like hell, all together, boys io .by God; you've got’ em: )...t))’> Oneiimagines that Naga, now in retirement in a suburb of the Seventh Heaven, can never go into its club without seeing its fellow members smiling behind their hands, remembering that day... . Round every courtyard the friezes run, and there is excitement and a most childishly told story in each frieze. There is a meeting between two gods, one mounted on a peacock and the other on a goose. The goose-rider is not apologetic, as you or I might be if we, padding up Rotten Row on the family goose, met a friend on a peacock. I think it is only in the light of ribald modern legend that the goose has become a butt and a buffoon. The goose-mount of the Angkor god was of the same family as the 298 THE LITTLE WORLD geese who saved Rome, and the geese whose lovely female guardian married the prince in the story. After the marriage of the goose-girl, the breed of © geese degenerated. No god, no king, not even an | O.B.E., would be seen on a goose today. A rhino-— ceros is witness of this meeting, an unmistakable rhinoceros with pocked and plated skin, pig ears and ~ a knobbed nose. No rhinoceros walks that jungle now. But I hope the fame of that stone portrait has reached Rhinoceros in his inner jungles, so that he may say to his friends, ‘‘There’s a portrait of me somewhere—of me, when I was young—hobnobbing with the gods.’ In another gallery is fought the war that Ram fought with the King of Ceylon for the possession of Sita. There are the monkeys, Ram’s allies, and there, too, romp the dear ele- phants. The sculptors of Angkor were connoisseurs and lovers of elephants; all their elephants bounce in and out of the scraps and tangles of Khmer mythology, dimpled, twinkling, and curly-trunked. This must have been the age of innocence for ele- phants; gods were elephants then and elephants gods. The death of gods and the birth of the Brit- ish Empire have bowed their bumpy heads and straightened their retroussé trunks. All around the galleries the stone battles sway and the processions rear their banners in the striped sunlight that comes between the pillars. But in the holiest place there is no pomp—only dancers dancing. On every inch of pillar and wall the stone ee: v ‘ ‘ ae ae fl & fo 7) Ae hy