The question of squeeze—Batter fingers for the boatmen—An array of damp scarecrows—Ox carts—Prehistoric wheels—A decadent people—Beggars—The playing of a part—A side show—Cumshaw.
They tell me I must not talk about a river port in Babylon, because Babylon was a city not a country, and it had no river port, but in that valley of Mesopotamia there must have been in those old days, little places where the people living along the banks landed their produce, or gathered it in, and I think they must have resembled this river port of Lanchou in Chihli, to which I came one still pleasant evening in June.
The sun was on the point of setting, and I consulted Tuan about where I should go for the night. The inns, he opined, would be full, for all the country-side had come to the feast, and, in truth, I did not hanker much after a Chinese inn. I infinitely preferred the wupan, even at its very worst, when the rain was coming through the matting. I only wondered if Tuan and the boatmen would think it extremely undignified of me to stay where I was. The worst I knew there were the cockroaches, and Heaven only knew what I might find in a Chinese inn in June. Apparently Tuan did not think it undignified, and the boatmen of course were glad.
“You pay him one dollar,” suggested Tuan. Now a dollar is a thousand cash, and a thousand cash, I suppose would about fill that money-box of his. He got the dollar, because I paid it him myself, but what squeeze Tuan extracted I am sure I don't know. Some he did get, I suppose as of right, for squeeze seems to be the accepted fact in China.
A woman once told me how she was offered squeeze and a good big squeeze too.
She was head of a hospital, and being an attractive young person, she used to go out pretty often for motor drives with the locomotive superintendent of the nearest railway. The Chinese took note of this, as apparently they do of all things likely to concern them, and one day there called upon her a Chinaman, well-dressed, of the better class. He stood at the door of her sitting-room, shaking his own hands, and bowed three times.
“What do you want?” said she, for she had never to her knowledge, seen him before.
He spoke as good English, almost as she did herself, and he said, well it was a little matter in which she might be of service to him, and—yes—he of service to her.
She looked at him in astonishment. “But I don't know you,” she said, puzzled and surprised.