In Fen Chou Fu I could have walked about the town alone unmolested. I never did, because it would have been undignified and often awkward, as I could not speak the language, but the people were invariably friendly. On the whole, there was not very much to see. The sun poured down day after day in a cloudless sky, and the narrow streets, faced with stalls or blank grey brick walls enclosing the compounds, were dusty and uneven, with the ruts still there that had been made when the ground was softened by the summer rains of the year before. Away to the south-east was a great pagoda, the second tallest in China, a landmark that can be seen for many a long mile across the plain. This, like the phoenixes, is feng shui. I have never grasped the inwardness of pagodas, which are dotted in apparently a casual manner about the landscape. An immense amount of labour must have been expended upon them, and they do not appear to serve any useful purpose. This one at Fen Chou Fu is meant to balance after a fashion the phoenixes on the northern wall and afford protection for the southern approach to the city. I don't know that it was used for any other purpose. It stood there, tall and commanding, dwarfing everything else within sight. Neither do I know the purpose of the literary tower which stands on the southeast corner of the wall. It denotes that the town either has or hopes to have a literary man of high standing among its inhabitants. But to look for the use in all things Chinese would be foolish; much labour is expended on work that can be only for artistic purposes. To walk through a Chinese town, in spite of filth, in spite of neglect and disrepair, is to feel that the Chinaman is an artist to his finger-tips.
The gate to the American church in Fen Chou Fu, for instance, was a circle, a thing of strange beauty. Imagine such a gate in an English town, and yet here it seemed quite natural and very beautiful. They had no bell, why I do not know, perhaps because every temple in China has a plenitude of bells hanging from its eaves and making the air musical when the faintest breath of wind stirs and missionaries are anxious to dissociate themselves in every way from practices they call idolatry, even when those practices seem to an outsider like myself rather attractive. At any rate, to summon the faithful to church a man beats a gong.
But there is one institution of Fen Chou Fu which is decidedly utilitarian, and that is the wells in the northwestern corner. A Chinaman, I should say, certainly uses on the average less water than the majority of humanity; a bath when he is three days old, a bath when he is married, and after that he can comfortably last till he is dead, is the generally received idea of his ablutions, but he does want a little water to carry on life, and in this corner of the town are situated the wells which supply that necessary. It is rather brackish, but it is still drinkable, and it is all that the city gets. They were a never-ending source of interest to me. They were established in those far-away days before history began—perhaps the presence of the water here was the reason for the building of the town—and they have been here ever since. The mouths are builded over with masonry, and year in and year out have come those self-same carts with solid wheels, drawn by a harnessed ox or an ox and a mule, bearing the barrels to be filled with water. Down through all the ages those self-same men, dressed in blue cotton that has worn to a dingy drab, with a wisp of like stuff tied round their heads to protect them from the dust or the cold or the sun, have driven those oxen and drawn that water. Really and truly our own water, that comes to us, hot and cold, so easily by the turning of a tap, is much more wonderful and interesting, but that I take as a matter of course, while I never tired of watching those prehistoric carts. It was in rather a desolate corner of the town too. The high walls rose up and frowned upon it, the inside of the walls where there was no brick, only crumbling clay with shrubs and creepers just bursting into leaf and little paths that a goat or an active boy might negotiate meandering up to the top. And to get to that part I had to pass the ruins of the old yamen razed to the ground when the Government repented them of the Boxer atrocities, and razed so effectually that only the two gate-posts, fashioned like lions, Chinese architectural lions, survive. A curse is on the place, the people say; anyhow when I visited it fourteen years later no effort had been made to rebuild. Not for want of labour, surely. There are no trade unions in China, and daily from dawn to dark in Fen Chou Fu I saw the bricklayers' labourers trotting along, bringing supplies to the men who were building, in the streets I met men carrying water to the houses in buckets, and now in the springtime there was a never-ending supply of small boys, clad in trousers only, or without even those, bearing, slung from each end of a bamboo, supplies of firewood, or rather of such scraps as in any other land would have been counted scarce worth the cost of transport. Any day too I might expect to meet a coffin being borne along, not secretly and by night as we take one to a house, but proudly borne in the open daylight, for everyone knows a coffin is the most thoughtful and kindly as well as often the most expensive of gifts.
While here I attended a wedding. Twice have I attended a Chinese wedding. The first was at Pao Ting Fu at Christmas time, and the contracting parties were an evangelist of the church who in his lay capacity was a strapping big laundryman and one of the girls in Miss Newton's school. They had never spoken to one another, that would have been a frightful breach of decorum, but as they went to the same church, where there was no screen between the men and the women, as there is in many Chinese churches, it is possible they knew each other by sight. It is curious how in some things the missionaries conform to Chinese ideas and in others decline to yield an inch. In Pao Ting Fu no church member was allowed to smoke, but the women were kept carefully in retirement, and the schoolmistress, herself an unmarried woman, and the doctor's wife arranged marriages for such of the girls as came under their guardianship. Of course I see the reason for that: in the present state of Chinese society no other method would be possible, for these schoolgirls, all the more because they had a little scholarship and education, unless their future had been arranged for, would have been a temptation and a prey for all the young men around, and even with their careful education—and it was a careful education; Miss Newton was a woman in a thousand, I always grudged her to the Chinese—were entirely unfitted to take care of themselves.
Still it always made me smile to see these two women, middle-class Americans from Virginia, good-looking and kindly, with a keen sense of humour, gravely discussing the eligible young men around the mission and the girls who were most suitable for them. It was the most barefaced and open match-making I have ever seen. But generally, I believe, they were very successful, for this one thing is certain, they had the welfare of the girls at heart.
And this was one of the matches they had arranged. It is on record that on this special occasion the bridegroom, with the consent and connivance of the schoolmistress, had written to the bride exhorting her to diligence, and pointing out how good a thing it was that a woman should be well read and cultured. And seeing that she came of very poor people she might well be counted one of the fortunate ones of the earth, for the bridegroom was educating her. The ignorance of the average Chinese woman in far higher circles than she came of is appalling.
Christmas Day was chosen for the ceremony, and Christmas Day was a glorious winter's day, with golden sunshine for the bride, and the air, the keen, invigorating air of Northern China, was sparkling with frost. Now, in contrast to the next wedding I attended, this wedding was on so-called Western lines; but the Chinese is no slavish imitator, he changes, but he changes after his own fashion. The church was decorated by devout Chinese Christians with results which to 'Western eyes were a little weird and outré. Over the platform that in an Anglican church would be the altar was a bank of greenery, very pretty, with flowers dotted all over it, and on it Chinese characters in cotton wool, “Earth rejoices, heaven sings,” and across that again was a festoon of small flags of all nations, while from side to side of the church were slung garlands of gaily coloured paper in the five colours of the new republic, and when I think of the time and patience that went to the making of those garlands I was quite sorry they reminded me of fly-catchers. But the crowning decoration was the Chinese angel that hovered over all. This being was clad in white, a nurse's apron was used, girt in at the waist, foreign fashion, and I grieve to say they did not give her much breathing-space, though they tucked a pink flower in her belt. Great white paper wings were spread out behind, and from her head, framing the decidedly Mongolian countenance, were flowing golden curls, made by the ingenious decorators of singed cotton wool.