A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

But it was a long, long while before I could feel I was really in the country. There was the khaki-coloured land, there were the khaki-coloured houses built of mud apparently, with graceful, tiled roofs, and blue-clad people everywhere, and everywhere at work. Always the fields were most beautifully tilled, there were no fences, the Chinese is too civilised to need a fence, and when you see stone walls it is only because, since they can't be dropped off the planet into space, the stones must be disposed of somehow, here and there the kaoliang was coming up like young wheat, in vivid green patches that were a relief from the general dust, and occasionally there were trees, willow or poplar or fir, delightful to look upon, that marked a graveyard, and then, just as I was beginning to hope I was out in the country, a walled town would loom up.

And in the dusk of the evening we stopped and met for the first time the discomforts of a Chinese inn.

We had started rather late, and I had spent so much time bidding farewell to my friends, that we did not reach the town we had intended to, but put up at a small inn in a small hamlet. This, my first inn was, like most Chinese inns, a line of one-storied buildings, built round the four sides of a large courtyard. Mixed up with the rooms were the stalls for the beasts, the mules and the little grey donkeys, with an occasional pony or two, and the courtyard was dotted with stone or wooden mangers. In the pleasant May weather there was no need to put all the beasts under cover, and there were so many travellers there was not room in the stalls for all the beasts.

It was all wonderfully Eastern. I remembered, I could not but remember, how once there arrived at such an inn a little company, weary and tired, and “so it was, that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger: because there was no room for them in the inn.”

I thought of that little company as the Peking cart jolted over the step that is on the threshold of all Chinese doors—no one considers comfort in China, what is a jolt more or less, a Peking cart will not break—and I found myself in the courtyard, and a trestle was brought for me to get down from the cart. I might have jumped, I suppose, but one hundred li, about thirty miles, had left me stiff and aching in every limb. My head ached too with the influenza, and when I inspected the room offered for my accommodation, I only wished drearily that there had been no room in this particular inn, and that I might have slept out in the open.

But that first day as I went across the plain, that while there were no hills upon it rose slowly towards the hills, I realised that in China, there is not the charm of the open road, you may not sleep under the sky, you must put up at an inn, you would as soon think of camping out in one of the suburbs of London. Indeed you might easily find more suitable places for camping about Surbiton or Richmond than you would among the sterile hills or cultivated valley bottoms of Northern China. I hoped against hope for three days. I had a comfortable sleeping-bag and the nights were fine, it seemed it would be so simple a thing to camp a little off the roadside, even though I had no tent, and that first night, when I smelled the smell of the rooms, rank and abominable, and reeking of human occupancy, I envied my mules, and said that as I got farther into the country I could certainly sleep outside.

“Room for ten thousand merchant guests,” said the innkeeper in characters of black on red paper over his door, and unless those merchants were very small indeed, I am sure I don't know where he proposed to put them. I remembered with a shudder, that one man of my acquaintance had said: “What I cannot stand is the perpetual tramp, tramp, all night,” and I had my suspicions that the guests were small on this occasion, and I feared lest they were going to be catered for. There were also notices in the effective red and black that the landlord would not be responsible for any valuables not confided to his care, and exhorting the guests to be careful of fire. And it seemed to me, as I looked at the rotting thatch and the dubious grey walls, that a fire in this inn would be the very best thing that could happen to it. You see I was specially particular this first night. I thought the next inn might be better. I had a good deal to learn. “The tiger from the Eastern Hills and the tiger from the Western Hills,” says the Chinese proverb, “are both the same.” So everywhere a Chinese inn is about as bad as it can be. They are mostly used by carters, and well-to-do people always go to temples, when they are available. There wasn't a temple about here, and I didn't know I could have lodged there had there been one, so I resigned myself to the inevitable, and wondered with all the energy that was left in me what adverse fate had set me down here. I might have gone back, of course. In a way I was my own mistress; but after all, we none of us own ourselves in this world. I had a book to write, and material for that book was not to be got by staying comfortably in the Wagons Lits Hotel, and therefore I very reluctantly peeped into a room from which clouds of dust were issuing, and which smelt worse than any place I had ever before thought of using as a bed-chamber and dining-room combined. The dust was because I had impressed upon the valued Tuan that I must have a clean room, so he had importantly turned two coolies on to stir up the dust of ages, a thousand years at least, I should say, there seemed no end to it, and I wondered, in addition to the merchant guests, what awful microbes were being wakened out of their long sleep. Left alone, they might have been buried so deep that they might not have come nigh me; but he was giving them all a chance. After all it was only fair, a foreign woman did not visit a Chinese inn every day of the week. After more dust than I had ever seen before all at once, had come out of that room, I instructed water to be brought and poured on things in general, and, when the turmoil had quieted down a little, I went in and inspected my quarters.

They all bear a strong family resemblance to one another, the rooms of these Chinese inns. I always tried to get one that opened directly on to the courtyard, as giving more chance of air. The Chinese, as a rule, have not much use for fresh air. Tuan, had he had his way, would have shut the door fast, as being more correct and private, and then I should have been in an hermetically sealed room, lighted all along the courtyard side by a most dainty latticework window covered with white tissue paper, or rather tissue paper that had once been white. It had been well-smoked during the winter, and a considerable quantity of the dust that had been so industriously stirred up, had lodged there. But air I must have, so I had the paper stripped off from the top of the window as far down as my desire for privacy would allow. Below, the more daring spirits, who had assembled to see the foreign woman, wetted their fingers and poked them softly through the bottom part of the window; and then an eye appeared, so that it really seemed at first as if I might as well have been comfortable and had all the paper off. I went outside, and let it plainly be seen that I was very angry indeed, and then Tuan, who had a great idea of my dignity, or rather of his dignity, which was as nothing if I was of no consequence, put one of the “cartee men” on guard, and once more I retired to my uncomfortable lodging. It had a stone floor, being quite a superior sort of inn, the poorer sort have only beaten earth, there were two wooden chairs of dark wood, high, with narrow and uncomfortable seats, a table, also uncomfortably high, and of course, the k'ang. Most people know all about the k'ang now, but this was my first introduction to it as a working piece of furniture. It is a platform of stone about two feet high, so constructed that a small fire lighted underneath, and a very small fire it is, carries the warmth, by a system of flues, all over it. It is covered generally with matting, and on it is always a k'ang table, a little table about eighteen inches square and a foot high, and, though this is not intentional, covered with the grease of many meals.

I looked doubtfully at the k'ang this first day. It seemed to me I could not lodge in such a place, and I wished heartily that I had left the describing of China to some more hardened traveller. There was a grass mat upon it, hiding its stoniness, and I had powdered borax sprinkled over it, about half a tin of Keating's followed, though I am told the insects in China rather like Keating's, and only then did I venture to have my bed set up. Alongside was placed my india-rubber bath, the gift of a friend, and every night of that journey did I thank her with all my heart, it was so much nicer than my old canvas bath, and making sure that the “cartee man” was still on guard I proceeded to wash and undress and creep into my sleeping-bag.

At only one Chinese inn where I stayed could food for the traveller be had, and that was, I think, only because it combined the functions of innkeeping and restaurant. In any case, of course, the foreign traveller would not think of eating Chinese food, and I, like everyone else, provided my own. I brought with me rice, tea, and flour. Tuan cooked for me on an absurd little charcoal stove upon which I might have succeeded in boiling an egg. With the exception of those few stores, I lived off the country, buying chickens and eggs, onions, and hard little pears; Tuan doing the buying, charging me at a rate that made me wonder how on earth the “Wagons Lits” managed to board and lodge its guests at a day. I used to think that, for sheer toughness, the palm might be given to the West African chicken, but I withdraw that statement, he isn't in it alongside the Chinese. We used to buy small birds about the size of a pigeon, But an elderly ostrich couldn't have been tougher. My teeth, thank Heaven, are excellent, but the Chinese chicken was too much for them. I then saw why Tuan had provided a chopper for kitchen use, he called it “cookee knife,” and the fiat went forth—I would have no more chicken unless it was minced.