But it was “China town” that I really loved. I have been in Hong-Kong where European women do not go—where, I believe, no other European woman has been. I have gone through dark arcades where hundreds of natives struggled with life and with each other. I have begged a mouthful of rice from a sampan woman. I have wandered alone until I was completely lost, and had to ask my way back to the world of hotels and Europeans. I never met with the slightest incivility. I found the Chinese everything that I had been told they were not.
At night, when I was not working, I used to get into my ’rickshaw and let Chung Lim pull me along the beautiful harbour until the beauty of the night had reconciled me to everything and every one, myself included.
I do not know where Chung Lim slept, nor where he ate. He was always at the hotel door when I went down, day or night; always smiling and ready to run with me to the island’s end. I paid him one yen per day. When we finally left Hong-Kong, I gave him five yen more than I owed him; and a sacrilegious English boy who lives in Hong-Kong, and to whose patronage I recommended Chung Lim, wrote me the other day, “Chung Lim still burns joss sticks to your memory.”
CHAPTER XV
A GLIMPSE OF CANTON
What can I write of Canton? If Hong-Kong was wonderful, if Shanghai was interesting, if Burmah was picturesque, what was Canton? It was superlative!
I know that Europeans go into Canton and come out of it with stolid faces, and sneer languidly as they speak of it. I know a woman who preferred poor little, colourless, on-sufferance Sha-mien, to great, mysterious, unfathomable, lurid Canton. Ah, well! it takes all sorts to make a world—and I dare say I revolted her as much as she disgusted me. “Would you rather live in Canton than in Sha-mien?” some one asks me. Certainly not—at least not permanently. But I, nevertheless, regard Sha-mien as utterly insignificant as compared with Canton. The only significant thing about Sha-mien is its courage in being there at all. No; I should not prefer Canton to Sha-mien as a place of residence for myself. I should be sorry to spend twenty unbroken years in Canton, and I should be displeased to spend twenty unbroken years on the most magnificent iceberg that ever floated on the Polar Seas. But for all that I think the iceberg vastly more interesting, more fascinating, grander, more beautiful, than the snow-flakes that are feebly smudging my window-pane.
Let me introduce you for a moment to my London back-yard, as I see it at this moment. It is a grim conglomeration of rubble, dilapidated ivy, of thin snow blotches, and of burst water-pipes. Nothing could be less picturesque. No earthly eye could think it beautiful, save the eye of a plumber. Yet I would rather live here than in Canton, where a million pictures are yours for the looking. In all Canton I never saw one unpicturesque bit. And once I almost felt like tearing up my sketch-book—not because of my own incompetence, for to that I am accustomed, but because for every sketch I tried to make I must leave ten thousand unattempted. That made selection very difficult.
We sent Mr. Paulding from Hong-Kong to Canton, to see if we could give a performance at Sha-mien. He wrote back, “There are not a hundred Europeans in the place, and there is no theatre. It is expensive getting here. But if the ‘burra memsahib’ is determined to come, I think we might clear our X.’s. Leave the company in Hong-Kong, and you two give a Shakespearian recital in the hotel dining-room. What do you say?” Perhaps I should explain that “X.’s” means expenses. It is not theatrical slang, it is dramatic abbreviation. That letter entailed upon me a mental struggle. I was anxious to see Canton, and my husband insisted that if I went I must “help him out” with the recital. In all my wicked life I had never given a recitation—or at least not since I was a nice little girl with a nice pink sash. Moreover, I had said that I never would give a recitation. I did not approve of them; for that matter, I do not approve of them now; but Canton tempted me, and I was weak.
We made out a programme and mailed it to Mr. Paulding. Mine friend was prepared with any number of recitations, but the only one I knew was “Bingen on the Rhine,” and my associate feared that the audience might have heard that before. Finally, I was put down for two recitations, but it was not specified what they were to be. My husband selected his three recitations, and we added to the list four scenes from Shakespeare.