These towns on the great railway are weird little places, merely scattered houses and wide roads leading out into the great plain, and the railway comes out of the distance and goes away into the distance. And the people who inhabit them seem to be a conglomeration of nations, perhaps the residuum of all the nations. Here the marine officer and his sister and I fell into the hands of a strange-looking individual who might have been a cross between a Russian Pole and a Chinaman, with a dash of Korean thrown in, and he undertook to take us to a better hotel than that usually-frequented by visitors to Chang Ch'un. I confess I wonder what sort of people do visit Chang Ch'un, not the British tourist as a rule, and if the principal hotel is worse than the ramshackle place where we had breakfast, it must be bad. Still it was pleasant in the brilliant warm sunshine, even though it was lucky we had bathed the night before at Mukden, for the best they could do here was to show us into the most primitive of bedrooms, the very first effort in the way of a bedroom, I should think, after people had given up k'angs, and there I met a very small portion of water in a very small basin alongside an exceedingly frowsy bed and made an effort to wash away the stains of a night's travel. Now such a beginning to the day would effectually disgust me; then, fresh from the discomforts of Chinese travel, I found it all in the day's work.
I found too that I had made a mistake and not brought enough money with me. Before I had paid for Buchanan's ticket I had parted with every penny I possessed and could not possibly get any more till I arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at Kharbin. I am rather given to a mistake of that sort; I always feel my money is so much safer in the bank's charge than in mine.
We went on through fertile Manchuria and I saw the rich fields that coming out I had passed over at night. This train was Russian, and presently there came along a soldier, a forerunner of an officer inspecting passengers and carriages. Promptly his eye fell on Buchanan, who was taking an intelligent interest in the scenery—he always insisted on looking out of the window—and I, seeing he, the soldier, was troubled, tried to tell him my intentions were good and I would pay at Kharbin; but I don't think I made myself understood, for he looked wildly round the compartment, seized the little dog, pushed him in a corner and threw a cushion over him. Both Buchanan and I were so surprised we kept quite still, and the Russian officer looked in, saw a solitary woman holding out her ticket and passed on, and not till he was well out of the way did James Buchanan, who was a jewel, poke up his pretty little head and make a few remarks upon the enormity of smuggling little dogs without paying their fares, which was evidently what I was doing.
We arrived at Kharbin about nine o'clock at night, and as I stepped out on to a platform, where all the nations of the earth, in dirty clothes, seemed yelling in chorus, a man came along and spoke to me in English. The soldier who had aided and abetted in the smuggling of Buchanan was standing beside me, evidently expecting some little remembrance, and I was meditating borrowing from the officer of Marines, though, as they were going on and I was not, I did not much like it. And the voice in English asked did I want a hotel. I did, of course. The man said he was the courier of the Grand Hotel, but he had a little place of his own which was much better and he could make me very comfortable. Then I explained I could not get any money till the bank opened next day and he spread out his hands as a Chinaman might have done. “No matter, no matter,” he would pay, his purse was mine.
Would I go to his house?
Could I do anything else under the circumstances? And I promptly took him at his word and asked for a rouble—Kharbin is China, but the rouble was the current coin—and paid off the soldier for his services. I bade farewell to my friends and in a ramshackle droshky went away through the streets of Kharbin, and we drove so far I wondered if I had done wisely. I had, as it turned out.
But I heard afterwards that even in those days anything might have happened in Kharbin, where the population consists of Japanese and Chinese and Russians and an evil combination of all three, to say nothing of a sprinkling of rascals from all the nations of the earth.
“There is not,” said a man who knew it well, “a decent Chinaman in the whole place.”
In fact to all intents and purposes it is Russian. There were Russian students all in uniform in the streets, and bearded, belted drivers drove the droshkies with their extra horse in a trace beside the shafts, just as they did in Russia. Anyhow it seems to me the sins of Kharbin would be the vigorous primal sins of Russia, not the decadent sins of old-world China.
Kharbin when I was there in 1914 had 60,000 inhabitants and 25,000 Russian soldiers guarding the railway in the district. The Russian police forbade me to take photographs, and you might take your choice: Chinese hung hu tzes or Russian brigands would rob and slay you on your very doorstep in the heart of the town. At least they would in 1914, and things are probably worse now. All the signs are in Russian and, after the Chinese, looked to me at first as if I should be able to understand them, but closer inspection convinced me that the letters, though I knew their shape, had been out all night and were coming home in not quite the condition we would wish them to be. There is a Chinese town without a wall a little way over the plain—like all other Chinese towns, a place of dirt and smells—and there is a great river, the Sungari, a tributary of the Amur, on which I first met the magnificent river steamers of these parts. Badly I wanted to photograph them, but the Russian police said “No, no,” I would have to get a permit from the colonel in command before that could be allowed, and the colonel in command was away and was not expected back till the middle of next week, by which time I expected to be in Vladivostok, if not in Kharbarosvk, for Kharbin was hardly inviting as a place of sojourn for a traveller. Mr Poland, as he called himself, did his best for me. He gave me a fairly large room with a bed in it, a chair, a table and a broken-down wardrobe that would not open. He had the family washing cleared out of the bath, so that I bathed amidst the fluttering damp garments of his numerous progeny, but still there was a bath and a bath heater that with a certain expenditure of wood could be made to produce hot water; and if it was rather a terrifying machine to be locked up with at close quarters, still it did aid me to arrive at a certain degree of cleanliness, and I had been long enough in China not to be carping.