A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

They considered one in every way, too. The poet had evidently not been troubled by the family affection of the millionaires, he walked back from the Wall, and was so full of enthusiasm he forgave my presence, came to me as I sat at dinner and, covered with the dust of the way as he was, stood, and just as I should expect of a poet, waxed eloquent on the glories he had seen. The Chinese waiter, with shaven head and long blue smock, let him go on for a few minutes, then he took him gently and respectfully by the sleeve.

“Vash,” he said solemnly, without the ghost of a smile on his face; “vash,” and the poet came to earth with a laugh. We both laughed.

“Well, yes,” he said looking at his dust-begrimed person. “I suppose I had better wash. I'll be back in a moment. May I sit at your table?”

And next day I went to see the Ming Tombs.

St Paul's and Westminster are set in the heart of a mighty city, ever by the peaceful dead sounds the clamour of the living, yet the living forget, in spite of the daily reminder they forget. In China, where graves dot every field, and are part and parcel of the lives of the people, they bury the honoured dead far apart from the rush and roar of everyday life, and they never forget. The Nankou Pass is two hours from Peking, and the tombs of the Ming Emperors are nine miles from the Nankou Pass, set in the very heart of the hills. The entrance to the pass is barren and lonely enough, but the extra nine miles is like journeying into the wilderness where the scapegoat, burdened with the sins of the community, was driven by the Israelites. It is a long, long nine miles over a stony mule track where only a donkey, a pony, or a chair can go, and yet here centuries ago, when it was ten times farther away, China buried her dead, the men who sat on the Dragon Throne, and bridged for the nation the gap that lies between mortal men and high Heaven. It is lonely now when the roadway of the West brings Nankou close to the capital, it must have been unspeakably lonely in the days before the opening of the railway. A chair seemed to me the only way to get there, a chair borne by four blue-clad coolies with queues wrapped round their shaven heads, and while my companion rode a pony, in a chair I swung over the stony narrow track away towards the hills. The hills were rugged and barren, the same hills that the Wall crossed; on their stony sides no green thing could ever grow, and they were brown, and pink, and grey, and when a white cloud gathered here and there in the faraway blue sky, the shadows lay across them in great purple patches. And the road was stony, barely to be seen, impossible for wheeled traffic, even the primitive wheeled traffic of Northern China. I doubt even if a wheelbarrow could have gone along it. I doubted often whether the heaps of stones on the slope could possibly be a road, but the coolies seemed to know, and went steadily on, changing the pole from one shoulder to the other so often that it gave me a feeling of brutality that I should use such a means of locomotion. The only person who was comfortable was I.

My companion rode beside me sometimes. He felt himself responsible for my well-being, and it was good to be looked after.

“Are you all right?”

All right! If the country round was desolate, the sunshine was glorious, the air, the clear, dry air of Northern China was as invigorating as champagne, and I knew that I could go on for ever and feel myself much blessed. The Ming Tombs were but an excuse; it was well and more than well to be here in the open spaces of the earth, to draw deep breaths, to feel that neither past nor future mattered; here beneath the open sky in the golden sunshine swinging along, somewhere, anywhere, I had all I could ask of life.

And always it was a stony way. Sometimes the coolies climbed up a bank of loose stones that slipped and rolled away as they passed, sure-footed as goats, sometimes the stones were piled on either side and a sort of track meandered in between, sometimes they were scattered all over the plain in such masses that even the industrious Chinese seemed to have given up the task of clearing them away as hopeless, and had simply tilled the land in between. For this was no uninhabited desert, desolate as it seemed. Always we came across little stone-built hamlets, there were men and women working in the fields, and rosy-cheeked children stood by the wayside and waved their little hands to the passing stranger. There would be the sound of bells, and a string of mules or donkeys came picking their way as soberly as the coolies themselves, and left much to themselves by their ragged drivers. They looked of the poorest, these people, men and women clad much alike in dirty blue that, torn here and there, let out the cotton-wool which padded it for winter warmth.

Probably they knew nothing, nothing of the world beyond their little dusty, stony hamlets, they prayed perhaps for the rain that should moisten their dusty, stony fields, and give them the mess of meal, the handful of persimmons that is all they ask of Fate, and they watched the few strangers who came to visit the tombs, and perhaps never even wondered what the outside world might be like, if it gave to those who lived there anything more than fell to the lot of the humble dwellers on the road to the Ming Tombs.