“Would you like to see a Buddhist Orphanage?” asked Mr Johnston.
I said I would, and he promised to take me to one they were trying to run on Western lines.
It was a pleasantly warm Sunday, with a wind blowing that lifted the filthy dust of Peking from the roadways, and flung it in our faces. We interviewed first two rickshaw coolies with a view to ascertaining whether they; knew where we wanted to go, or rather he interviewed them, for I have no Chinese. They swore they did, by all their gods. Still he looked doubtful.
“Why don't you take them?” said I, feeling mistakenly that nowhere else in the town could the dust and the wind be quite so bad as just outside the Wagons Lits Hotel.
“Because I want to find out if they really know where we want to go. They always swear they do, for fear of losing the job.”
However, at last we set out with rickshaw coolies who seemed to have a working knowledge of the route we wished to follow, and we went through the Chien Men into the Chinese City, and away to the west through a maze of narrow alley-ways, hung with long Chinese signs, past the closely packed, one-storied shops where they sold china and earthenware, cotton goods and food-stuffs, lanterns, and rows of uninteresting Chinese shoes. The streets of course were thronged. There were rickshaws, laden donkeys, broughams with Venetian shutters to shut out the glare, the clanging bell and outrider to tell that some important man was passing, mules, camels, men on foot with or without burdens, with bamboos across their shoulders and loads slung from them, and some few women tottering along on maimed feet. And every man was giving his opinion on things in general to the universe at the top of his voice.
“How I wish I could understand what they were saying,” I said to my companion once, when the exigencies of the way brought our rickshaws side by side.
He laughed. “Sometimes it's as well you shouldn't.” And then he corrected himself lest I should have got a wrong impression. “No, on the whole they are very polite to each other.”
Once we came upon a man with a packet of papers in his hand. He was standing upon something to raise him a little above the passing crowd, and distributing the papers not to everyone, but apparently with great discrimination. Both of us were deemed worthy of a sheet, and I wondered what on earth the hieroglyphics could mean. It was an invitation to a funeral, my cicerone informed me, the next time we were in speaking distance. Some woman, who had been working for a broader education for women, had died, and her friends were going to mark their appreciation of her labours by a suitable funeral. So is the change coming to China.
As we went on the houses grew fewer, there were open spaces where kaoliang and millet were being reaped, for this, my second charity, I visited in September, the grey walls of the city rose up before us, and still there was no sign of the monastery. Our men were panting, the sweat was running down their faces and staining their thin coats, still they dragged us on, never dreaming; of using the tongues Nature had given them to lighten their labours. To ask the way would have been to show the foreigner in the rickshaw that they had not known it in the first instance, and that would be to lose face.