When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

The chattering coolies and a thousand sampans swarmed about our ship. The sampans seemed scrupulously clean and were indescribably quaint. Women stood in them and propelled them, using in a masterly way long bamboo poles. The women wore full blue trousers, and black sack-like long-skirted coats that shone like oilcloth. They all wore ear-rings and bracelets of jade. The men wore their droll rain-coats and conical-shaped hats that had immense brims and were made of bamboo splints. They jabbered like magpies; and the scene was infinitely more Chinese than any I had seen in the harbour at Shanghai. Soon a business-like little tug came alongside, with Mr. Paulding standing smiling in the prow. He had a nice new umbrella and a very nice new hat. I never remember arriving at a new point in our Eastern journeyings and being met by Mr. Paulding minus a new hat. It was his one mania, and a very harmless one; but I believe it more than once provoked his Madrassi boy to tears. Mr. Paulding could never be induced to part with one of his hats, nor to allow them to be roughly stowed away with the heavy luggage. Sam used to look both picturesque and pathetic when he staggered on to a boat, or boarded with difficulty a train, bearing about his patient but unwilling person some dozens of hat boxes and topees.

Much to my disappointment we were transferred to the steam launch. I had artistic yearnings toward a sampan; but we were in a hurry, so the picturesque was sacrificed to the expeditious.

After breakfast—for it was still early—we walked to the theatre. I only know of two European theatres in China; but both are excellent—bar dressing-rooms. The theatre in Hong-Kong is in the Town Hall. It was not only nice, but it was clean.

We had in Hong-Kong a, for us, long holiday. Madame Patey and an admirable company of artists had possession of the theatre. We waited—unless I forget—a week or more, before we opened. The days I spent in prowling about Hong-Kong; and each night that Madame Patey sang, we had a feast of music.

Mr. Paulding had engaged a jinrickshaw and a coolie for me before we arrived. He had learned that wherever we were I would go—go all the time; and that the drain on the managerial exchequer was rather less if some vehicle of locomotion was bargained for, for me, before-hand. It was impossible to hire a carriage, because there were none. The Governor had a landau, if I remember, and some one else had some kind of a carriage, and there were a few dog-carts—a very few. Hong-Kong is so up and down—most of the streets are up so many flights of steps—that a trap would be comparatively useless. Indeed the ’rickshaws have often to go very much round about, where a chair “can go right up.” And there are many nooks of beauty to which the jinrickshaws cannot take you at all. We were great friends—were Chung Lim, my ’rickshaw coolie, and I, although he knew no English and utterly failed to understand my Chinese. He was a little creature, but oh! how he ran. When the amah and the hotel clerk between them had made him understand that I did not care where I went, but that I wished to go everywhere, and that I was vastly more interested in the Chinese than in the European quarter, he went sturdily to work to show me Hong-Kong, and show me Hong-Kong he did. For hours he used to run me up and down the long, narrow streets. From the upper windows of the tall, slim buildings hung the newly-washed garments of the natives. They were all cut after one generous ungraceful pattern, and were all of true Chinese blue, which is not true blue at all, it is so nearly a dull gray. Red paper streamers strung about the open doors told the shop-keepers’ names and the nature of their wares.

When I wished to stop the jinrickshaw I had to give a most undignified grunt, or tap Chung Lim sharply with my parasol. As I rarely carried a parasol I usually had to grunt. Grunting is one of the things a woman does not like to chronicle of herself; but it was the only sound to which my Hong-Kong coolie would pay the slightest attention. I tried screaming once or twice; but he evidently thought that I was singing, and he ran swiftly on. A grunt was something so akin to his own guttural mode of speech that he invariably recognised it as an attempt upon my part to communicate an idea or a desire.

I halted my “human horse” very often. Men passed me with great baskets of joss sticks; and though Chung Lim shook his head, I used at first to stop and buy from each vendor a few of the scented sticks; but I soon found that my coolie was right. They were a very bad quality of joss sticks indeed, those that I bought on the streets of Hong-Kong; but at the proper shops (and I soon found where they were), I bought great armfuls of the slim, fragrant incense sticks. And as I write, the long spark and the thin flame of a burning joss stick carries me back to China; and if I shut my eyes a moment, I can fancy myself back in a grotesque joss house to which Chung Lim and I very often went. It is called, if I remember, “Tin How.” I always took a bunch of joss sticks with me. I used to divide them with Chung Lim, who lit his share before his joss and said “Chin-chin” to me. I think that Chung regarded me as mad, but he never refused anything I offered him; and though I persistently prowled about the native quarters of Hong-Kong, my intrusion was never resented, though it evidently caused a good deal of amazement. Sometimes I stayed in the joss house and burned incense too, and tried to sketch the wonderful types of humanity that were gathered before the big joss. But oftener I roamed about outside, gathering flowers and trying to make friends with some workmen who were digging a few yards from the temple door. Often I sat in the ’rickshaw and studied the exterior of the joss house. I never grew tired of looking at it. Beneath the roof were depicted, in wonderful relief and bas-relief, scenes from Chinese history. They were dramatic in outline, and charming in glorious colouring.

The walls were hung with gorgeous panels, each of which was a prayer or a sermon. Upon the edge of the roof sprawled strange crustations. Beneath them was carved a fringe of conventionalised shells. Under this hung a narrow curtain of wood or stucco, on which, in bas-relief, were marvellous fruits, quaint flowers, odd figures, and impossible fish. This scant curtain was finished with an odd lace-like carving which told, as every bit of conventional decoration in China tells, the omnipotence of bamboo. Dreadful dragons and indescribable elephants supported the roof, and rested upon great graceful beams, from which hung huge lanterns made of silk, of paper, of tinsel, and of bamboo—the soft lamps of Cathay!

Near the doorway sat a personage—priest or merchant, I knew not which. He wore gold spectacles, he smoked opium through a silver pipe, and he committed upon you righteous, ecclesiastical robbery when he sold you joss sticks and prayers. I do not mean that he prayed for you; that he would, I fancy, under no circumstances do. But he sold you prayers printed upon slips of red Chinese paper. The Mongolian characters puzzled you a bit perhaps! That was insignificant—the Chinese gods could read them.

Upon the temple steps sat a stolid, motley crew. I used to buy vicious-looking yellow cakes from one fellow, and from a sour-appearanced old woman I never failed to buy my handkerchief full of the nuts of my childhood. She always rang my bit of money on the temple steps to see that I had not cheated her, and I always was a bit disappointed in her wares. Can you imagine a woman, who in her old age will not grow childish, because in her mature womanhood she has never ceased to be a child,—can you imagine her, half sitting, half reclining, in a Chinese ’rickshaw, and as the ’rickshaw is pulled through the pungent, hilly woods of Hong-Kong, saying in her wicked cosmopolitan heart, as she munches the peanuts of Cathay, “There are no peanuts but in America, and only an American darky or a naturalised Italian can roast them”?