When you think of partly English Hong-Kong in all its regal beauty, when you think of wholly Mongolian Canton in all its super-Asiatic density, think of them with an outer scum—a scum of poverty, a scum of sampans. China, the prolific, has overflowed into the yellow Chinese sea, and it is greatly to the credit of the Chinese overflow that it has found life both palatable and practicable. I saw in China nothing more wonderful than the modus vivendi of the sampan people. They do all that men must do on board their crude, diminutive barks. Nevertheless, they keep the boats scrupulously clean and very much at the service of any European who will exchange a few sen for a long, soft float on the swelling Chinese sea.
Nature herself is thorough in China. When it rains on Hong-Kong, the island is drenched with a wet splendour that dwarfs into a mere mist all the rains that ever fell on Europe. The last time that we were in Hong-Kong it rained incessantly. Between the steamer and the hotel our boxes were thoroughly drenched. I was very cross when my poor trunks were opened, and my maid wept, probably because she foresaw damp, additional labour. We secured an extra room, and every effort was made to remove the stain of Anne Nevill’s black velvet from Pauline Deschappelle’s white bridal satin. But alas, the trailing stain of the Chinese rains was over them all, and I am still the chagrined possessor of sundry costly gowns that are not the colour they were, because they have been soaked by the unexaggeratable torrents of the Chinese storms. The rain came down, the rain came across, the rain seemed to come up from the seething earth.
My thickening manuscript cries to me, “Halt.” I have left unsaid almost all that I ought to have said of China, had my information and my capacity been less meagre. And in the sheerest gratitude I should have chronicled more that one feast on the Peak, and recorded how sweetly the Argyll and Sutherlanders played Annie Laurie, and how potent their uniforms looked against the vivid background of the green Chinese flora.
There are sentences, or rather might be sentences, I long to write—sentences unique with Slavic words and Tartar phraseology—sentences descriptive of the Russian seamen who ’rickshawed through Hong-Kong while the Tsarevitz was peeping at Canton.
The Russian men-of-war were too bulky to slip up the narrow Canton rivers. The Tsarevitz accepted the locomotion of a smaller boat, and the Russian sailors held in Hong-Kong high holiday.
From Hong-Kong we sent back to Australia about half of our artistic corps. We were, as we thought, soon going home to England. My husband wished our departing fellows God-speed and a glad return to their Antipodean homes. I tried to wring Jimmie MacAllister’s huge hand; and I wiped my eyes as the big ship carried him back to the land of the Southern Cross—carried him away from the green hills of Hong-Kong, where the red flowers of China flashed upon the gray walls of the English Barracks.
Of the amateurs who filled up our depleted ranks, I will say nothing, because nothing that I could say would be enough.
I believe that I am a wiser woman for having lived in China. Certainly I am a happier.
There is, I think, if I may say it again, no other civilised country that we misunderstand and misjudge as we do China. There is, I emphatically believe, no other nation so worthy, as are the Chinese, of our sympathy and respect.