The little world

Front matter

By STELLA BENSON

I POSE ¢ LIVING ALONE ° TWENTY THE POOR MAN °* PIPERS AND A DANCER

BY

Contents

SBI OTATEIVELL ipa oe i a eet SS MeeeeOTATER AV 7, te ee THE STATEs V .

Japan I.

JAPAN II Manita—Macao—HoncKonG HoNGKONG

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 to save 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 in a sling and your face that color and your determination to get away by yourself at a fixed time every afternoon—and continue to hide from your friends what you’re suffering 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 herself from the ship . . . For her sake, you must let me help you. . .”

The story of his love was, I happen to know, completely untrue. It was part of the damask of romantic fiction with which he covered his rather purposeless 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 confident 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 Western township. You may see a bald red trail labelled Twenty-Something Street. You almost expect to see the sign so expressive of the glowing Western spirit—DRIVE SLOWLY, CON- GESTED BUSINESS DISTRICT—erected hopefully in a wilderness of scrub and sand. The traveler toils across acres of imported America towards the hotel which rears itself, indecently opulent, 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,

Manila, girdled with her golden wall and crowned with a romantic sun.

Americans and Filipinos, as it seems to me, live together in fifty per cent liberty, forty-nine per cent equality, and one per cent fraternity. Politically, a great deal is said about brotherhood—personally, almost nothing.

I arrived in Manila during the Carnival. But the buildings erected for the occasion had been burnt down the night before my arrival. Merrymakers were pathetically trying to make merry in the smoke among the ashes. I do not know what a raw or uncooked carnival in Manila may be like but this one which had been “‘tried in the fire’ was literally refined by the process. I was astonished at the self-conscious politeness of the occasion; an atmosphere of J-can’t-talk-to-y ou-we-haven’ t-been-introduced prevailed. People went laboriously masked and dominoed in select and well-chaperoned parties; it seemed that men poured confetti with feverish caution over their aunts and sisters. Groups of virtuous business men and their overstitched wives stood watching through shocked pincenez a handful of young new Sammies who were making so bold as to dance with some pretty Filipino girls. The girls wore their national dress—wired gauze at the shoulders, high Elizabethan ruff behind the head, looped complicated skirt. . . . The Americans wore their national dress. . . . :

As for Hongkong, that grave and misty tilted

MANILA—MACAO—HONGKONG 41 city, it makes no claim at all to a spirit of equality. It is a solid lump of England; from waterside to peak-tip the little funicular carries Anglo-Saxon civilization up and down. The average Hongkonger has a tendency to address all Chinese in a throaty tone of authority as “Boy.” He is quite sure that to show respect to “these natives” “lowers British prestige.” So Chinese Hongkong has acquired a soul that only answers to the name of Boy. Only the congested attached city of junks and sampans, moored and swinging with the tides at the island’s edge, is true to its own vivid and unsanitary convictions. ‘The little red and gold prayers flutter at every vessel’s mast and stern to protect the water city from the march of civilization.

The city of Macao is old, but it seems older than its years. Here, I think, you have China victorious. Portugal lies drugged and asleep in the arms of China. The empty shell of Portuguese taste is there, the colored plaster walls, the low corrugated red tile roofs, the quiet gardened convents, the churches full of a vulgar and ardent daylight . . . Yet the city seemed to me almost wholly Chinese at heart. The broad calm masks of Chinese women look down on the streets through carved bars and trellises that seem made to frame much more radiant faces; the blunt eccentric shapes of papayas and bananas fill the squares and gardens instead of roses and olives; the churches are deserted except for a few little

tranquil Chinese matrons, trousered and sleek, with their babies strapped, in big colored handkerchiefs, on to their shoulders. And fire, born of a Chinese 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 complacent Buddhas. And the Chinese fan-tan dens stand—are encouraged by the Portuguese Government—and there you can go and take rather monotonous risks with a spare dollar and watch the Chinaman 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.

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—exactly 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 engaged 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 necessary 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 penchant for pea-shooters and cribs, were in the main extremely kind to me and I think that was because my teaching did not tax their brains, and my discipline was so erratic that it demanded an almost 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 Permanganate of Potash. History and Scripture also lent themselves to illustration. I am sure that these “‘twopence-colored” lessons hooked on to inattentive Chinese minds more firmly than did the ‘“‘pennyplain” of some of the more experienced teachers. Scripture was my worst difficulty, since to my generation, 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.

esaperstition . . ono). .°.) yes.) .- but anyway beautiful and amusing . .. Well, I'll 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 to 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. . . .”

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, undertook 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 the British Navy is occasionally willing to lower the British Prestige to this extent, if I may say so without shattering England’s faith in her floating bulwark.

Ng Poon Wong ordered us a dinner. Scarlet 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 took 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 vulgar 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

HONGKONG 47 be re-soaked and used again. I watched fascinated, trembling for my own hat, but I never saw an accident in this towel air-service. Above us the gallery was fringed with the soles of the bare feet of the more plebeian audience; scantily dressed vendors of sunflower seeds pushed about among our knees; the arm between each two chairs was flattened to form a little table on which constantly replenished cups of leafy 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 reserved 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’ heads. 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 telescopic; 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 industriously without reference to one another or to any 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, represented mountains, sometimes a double bed, sometimes a sacred grove of bamboos, sometimes the Emperor’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 inadequately dressed for classical drama. In spite of their negligent look, however, they kept the drama

HONGKONG 49 together. They bristled with little tickets describing the varying roles of the three chairs; whenever an actor wanted to die or to kneel before a superior, the nearest property man produced a little mat; whenever anyone started on a journey—sometimes as many as seven times round the chairs or, on one occasion, up one end of the row of chairs and down the other—a property man stuck a large pointed hat upon the traveler’s passive head. The property men kept the actors supplied with horses or, in other words, little bamboos decorated with red tassels, which were stage shorthand for horses. Directly a mandarin was given one of these, his legs began to frisk about of their own volition, so to speak, leaving his dignified upper manners unimpaired—and the most incurable occidental could then see that he was mounted.

As for the story, it was an edifying one about a man who was almost too faithful to his grandmother. His life’s work, as he saw it, was seeking bamboo shoots for the old lady’s table. The emperor sent files of emissaries round and round the chairs to 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 became 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.

Finally the grandmother herself, not in the least grateful for this fidelity, tired of bamboo shoots and probably thinking only of the separation allowance, 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 froufrou 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 intervals, 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 hour or two of this we left the performance still closing and no doubt it continued to close for the rest of the night. The gongists and the tenor and alto tea-trays were just settling down to their work, the flautists had been out-crashed. It seemed there never was a night so silent as the night that greeted us outside with a kind winking of stars entangled with the climbing lights of men; never was a sound so blessedly little as the sound of the bare running feet of the ricksha men and the lapping of the moonlit water amid the broad sleeping cities of sampans and 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 concavity 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 so high and the stars so low.

But it was morning when my little ship deftly extricated 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 launches 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 surprised little ship and now—Goodby ... goodby ... goodby . . . I could hardly see them, so furiously

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 crystallized 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 welcome, watched her pass. I have never been so much alone 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 associated ships with little sentimental affairs, with the autobiographies of traveling salesmen, with thwarted Grand Slams in No Trumps, with beef tea and cheap scent. The Chang-Shing carried only indigo and—by courtesy—me. She was only smart in comparison with some of the junks. And, perhaps in order to shew herself to advantage, for the first two days of her voyage north she rolled snorting 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 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 white, 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 sophisticated, 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 Hime? sd) &

“You an’ him can have the sea for me,” said the skipper, who was from Dundee and, like most sailors, believed that he wanted to settle down. He said rather prettily that all he would want to see of the sea for the rest of his life would be a “‘wee far seelver edge .. .”’ He talked little of the immediate 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 one 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 a | sailing ship thirty years ago. Sometimes the talk

THE LITTLE JOURNEY 55 turned on typhoons and pirates but these things are so common they rarely produce a new yarn. Every island talks of one typhoon until the next stops the talk; every river-mouth echoes with the monotonous doings of pirates. One of the most powerful trade unions in China, that land of perfect trade unions, is the pirates’ guild, they say. Most of all the skipper and the mate and, on occasions, the pilot and the firm’s agent, loved to tell very small vague stories about other sailors, stories which everyone but the land-lubber knew. Their minds were a network of names. ‘“Then there was McKay—d’you mind what his bride said when he found her mither in the lairrder? And Guthrie who called for carrots—in Shanghai . . . and what was the tale of Fair-rrguson an’ the centipede?”” One never appreciates the greatness of Scotland until one goes to sea. The Chang-Shing dared not touch at so sophisticated a port as Shanghai, but one evening at sunset, on a sea of glazed crimson, she passed the mouth of the Yang-tse river. The perspective of the clouds followed that of the river and there was a great feather of wine-colored cloud rooted, as it seemed, in the sun itself; the tip of the plume hung low over our mast. The river withdrew into a low confusion of hills 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 to an apparently empty world. But the fog was like the curtain between two acts, for when at noon next day it was drawn up before our sight we were in northern seas and the great square-sailed junks that traveled across our sight were of a new and more austere shape. The coast was clearer, fiercer and more scarred. Wei-hai-wei broke the outline of the cliffs and we could see the bulls of the British herd at rest—the dark formidable outlines of the China Squadron—and a mother-ship of submarines with her frolicsome young. And at Wei-hai-wei, though we did not put into harbor, a large number of passengers alighted. They were courtesy passengers like me, a great company of the most incorrigible landlubbers, most unsuitably dressed for a sea-voyage. Finches, jays, pigeons, little tentative flautists nameless to me, smooth gray-crested dandies with scarlet throats, a couple of sparrowhawks—lion and lamb alike they had been sitting for the last twenty-four hours in agitated rows upon our rigging. They trusted me to a certain extent, though not to the point of eating crumbs which I spread out for them. They combed the deck for worms all round my chair. The seagulls laughed raucous nautical laughter at this innocent invasion. But the passengers knew what they were about. As one bird they disembarked at Wei-hai-wei.

We reached the port of Chefoo late on our sixth night. All next day, while coolies, dyed bright blue with indigo, piled into lighters the oozing sacks of our cargo, the skipper and I explored the sunstricken 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 babies tortured the lizards. The streets seemed full of dark men with faces contorted with anger and bodies full of the power of making anger felt. The churches—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 as a desert. Junks looked as though they had lost their way and run aground.

A pilot, full of wheezy jokes, came on board and inserted the Chang-Shing into the Pei-ho river. Two Chinese mud forts, long proved futile by naval guns in the Boxer rising, still keep up the pretence of guarding that narrow mouth. The Chang-Shing ignored them and began feeling her way up a waterway which is like a puzzle founded on a tireless repetition of the last letter of the alphabet. The earth was no less golden than the sea; the world, cupped in a glittering pale horizon, was like an orgy of golden wine. Villages were built of yellow earth; even shadows were yellow; there was no color but yellow in the eyeless streets of the softly-moulded villages. There were graves everywhere, cones of yellow mud varying in height and perfection of symmetry according to the importance of the occupant. It is a promotion to be dead in China and the choice between one crumbling mud house and another is a very small choice. The cities of the 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 uneasily; 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 musician, 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.