A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

They were good servants. The cook I know I shall regret all my days, for I never expect to get a better, and the boy was most attentive. Any little thing that he could do for me he always did, and the way they uncomplainingly washed up plates never ceased to command my admiration. I had only a camp outfit, the making of books may be weariness unto the flesh, as Solomon says it is, but even then it does not make me a rich woman, so I did not wish to spend more than I could help, and yet I wanted to entertain a friend or two occasionally. This entailed washing the plates between the courses, and the servants did it without a murmur. I came to think it was quite the correct thing to wait while the plates and knives for the next course were washed up. My friends, of course, knew all about it, and entered into the spirit of the thing cheerfully, but the servants never gave me away. You would have thought I had a splendid pantry, and my little scraps of white metal spoons were always polished till they looked like the silver they ought to have been. My table linen I made simply out of the ordinary blue cotton one meets all over China, and it looked so nice, so suitable to meals on the look-out place, that I shall always cherish a tenderness for blue cotton. Indeed, but for the lonely nights when one thought, it was delightful. I only hope my friends enjoyed coming to me, as much as I enjoyed having them. Their presence drove away all fears. I never feared the gods in their sanctuaries, I never thought of those who had perished in the Boxer trouble or the possibility of the return of such days when they were with me. I thought I had lost the delights of youth, the joy of the land of long ago, but I found the sensation of entertaining friends in the San Shan An was like the make-believe parties of one's childhood. Sitting on the look-out place, away to the south, we could see a range of low, bald hills. They were enchanted hills. The Chinese would not go near them, for all that the caves they held hidden in their folds were full of magnificent jewels. We planned to go over and get them some day before I left the hills, and make ourselves rich for life. But they were guarded by gnomes, and elves, and demons, who by their nefarious spells kept us away, though we did not fear like the Chinese, and we are not rich yet, though jewels are there for the taking.

Oh, those sunny days in the mountain temple when we read poetry, and told stories, and dreamed of the better things life held for us in the future! They were good days, days in my life to be remembered, if no more good ever comes to me. Was it the exhilarating air, or the company, or the temple precincts? All thanks give I to those dead gods who gave me, for a brief space, something that was left out of my life.

There was only one blot. That imaginative document known as “Cook's book” was brought to me afterwards. It wasn't a book at all, needless to say. It was written on rejected scraps of my typewriting paper, and it generally stated I had eaten more “Chiken” than would have sufficed to run a big hotel, and disposed of enough “col” to keep a small railway engine of my own. Then the flour, and the butter, and the milk, and the lard, I was supposed to have consumed! I did not at first like to say much, because the servants were so good in that matter of washing plates, and knives, and forks, and whenever I did remonstrate the boy murmured something about “Master.” He was a true Chinaman, he felt sure I would not grudge anything to make a man comfortable. The woman evidently did not matter. She was never urged as an excuse for a heavy bill. I put it to him that the presence of “Master” need not add so greatly to the coal bill, and I put it very gently, till one day he mentioned with pride that “Missie other boy was a great friend of his.” And I, remembering Tuan's powers in the matter of squeeze, had gone about getting these servants through quite different channels! But once this knowledge was borne in on me, I became hardhearted. I threatened to do the marketing myself.

“I talkee cook,” said the crestfallen boy, and he did “talkee cook,” said, I suppose, Missie wasn't quite the fool they had counted her, and presently he came back and returned me fifteen cents! After that I had no mercy, and I regularly questioned every item of my bills.

But they were simple souls, and I couldn't help liking them. It seemed hardly possible they could belong to the same people who had slung a helpless woman from a pole like a pig, bearing her to her death, a woman from whom they had had naught but kindness. And yet they were. The selfsame subservience that made them bow themselves to the Boxer yoke, was exactly the quality that made them pleasant to me, who was in authority over them. They were just peasants of Babylon, making the best of life, deceiving and dissimulating, because deception is the safeguard of the slave, the only safeguard he knows. And they certainly made the best of life. It amused me to watch their pleasures, those that were visible to my eyes. They had a little feast one night, with my stores, I doubt not, and they caught and kept crickets in little three-cornered cages which they made themselves. At first, when I went to the temple, these cages were hung from the eaves outside, but as the weather grew colder they were taken inside, and I could hear a cheery chirping, long after the crickets had gone from the hills outside. It rained and was cold the first week in October, and the servants, like the babies they were, shivered, and suggested, “Missie go back Peking,” and one day when it rained hard my tiffin was two hours late, and was brought by a boy who looked as if he were on the point of bursting into tears.

Certainly those temples are not built for cold weather. Everything is ordered in China, even the weather, and the first frost is due, I believe, on the 1st of November, and yet, on that day, I sat in the warm and pleasant sunshine writing on the platform that looked away to the enchanted hills, reflecting a little sorrowfully that presently I would be gone, and it would be abandoned for the winter.

For after that unexpected rain, which for once was not ordered, the days were lovely, and the nights times of delight. The stars hung like diamond drops in the sky, the planets were scintillating crescents, and, when the moon rose, the silver moon, she turned the courtyard and the temple into a dream palace such as never was on sea or land. It was beauty and delight given, oh given with a lavish hand.