It was Tuan's suggestion we should stay there. I would have lingered at the tombs, but he was emphatic.
“Missie want make picture. More better we stop Tsung Hua Chou. Fine picture Tsung Hua Chou.”
There weren't fine pictures at Tsung Hua Chou. He had struck up a great friendship with the “cartee man,” and, perhaps, either he or the “cartee man” had a favourite gaming-house, or a favourite singing girl in the town. At any rate we went, and I, for some hardly explainable reason, am glad we did.
The road from the tombs was simply appalling. The hills frowned down on us, close on either side, high and steep and rugged, but the rough valley bottom, up which we went, was the wildest I was to see for a long time. To say I was tossed and jolted, is to but mildly express the condition of affairs. I sat on a cushion, I packed my bedding round me, and with both my hands I held on to the side of the cart, and if for one moment I relaxed the rigidity of my aching arms, my head or some other portion of my aching anatomy, was brought into contact with the woodwork of the cart, just in the place I had reckoned the woodwork could not possibly have reached me. There were little streams and bridges across them, which I particularly dreaded, for the bridges were always roughly paved, but it was nobody's business to see that the road and the pavement met neatly, and the jolt the cart gave, both getting on and getting off, nearly shook the soul out of my body. I thought of walking, for our progress was very slow, but in addition to the going being bad, the mules went just a little faster than I did, three and a half miles an hour to my three, and I felt there was nothing for it but to resign myself and make the best of a bad job. Not for worlds would I have lingered an hour longer on that road than I was absolutely obliged. And yet, bad as it was, it was the best road I had till I got back to Peking again. There may be worse roads than those of China, and there may be worse ways of getting over them than in a Peking cart, but I do trust I never come across them.
We entered the gates of the city as the evening shadows were growing long, and as usual, I was carried back to the days of the Crusaders—or farther still to Babylon—as we rumbled under the arched gateway, but inside it was like every other town I have seen, dirty, sordid, crowded, with uneven pavements that there was no getting away from. Within the curtain wall, that guarded the gate, there were the usual little stalls for the sale of cakes, big, round, flat cakes and little scone-like cakes, studded with sesame seed, or a bright pink sweetmeat; there were the sellers of pottery ware, basins and pots of all sorts, and the people stared at the foreign woman, the wealthy foreign woman who ran to two carts. It is an unheard-of thing in China for a Chinese woman to travel alone, though sometimes the foreign missionary women do, but they would invariably be accompanied by a Chinese woman, and one woman would not be likely to have two carts. One thing was certain however, my outfit was all that it should have been, bar the lack of a male protector. It bespoke me a woman of wealth and position in the eyes of the country folk, and the people of the little towns through which I passed. It is possible that a mule litter might have enhanced my dignity; but after all, two Peking carts was very much like having a first-class compartment all to myself.
There were no foreigners, that I could hear of, in Tsung Hua Chou. The missionaries had fled during the Boxer trouble, and never come back, so that I was more of a show than usual, though indeed, in all the towns I passed through I was a show, and the people stared, and chattered, and crowded round the carts, and evidently closely questioned the carters.
They tell me Chinese carters are often rascals, but I grew to like mine very much before we parted company.
They were stolid men in blue, with dirty rags wrapped round their heads to keep off the dust, and I have no reason to suppose that they affected water any more than the rest of the population, whereby I perceive, my affections are not so much guided by a desire for cleanliness as I had once supposed. They both had the hands of artists, artists with very dirty nails, so it may be a feeling of brotherhood had something to do with my feelings, for I am hoping you who read will count me an artist in a small way. What romance they wove about me, for the benefit of the questioning people, I don't know, but the result of their communications was that the crowd pressed closer, and stared harder, and they were evil-smelling, and had never, never in all their lives been washed. I ceased to wonder that I ached all over with the jolting and rumbling of the cart, I only wondered if something worse had not befallen me, and how it happened that these people, who crowded round, staring as if never in their lives had they seen a foreign woman before, did not fall victims to some horrible pestilence.
For once inside Tsung Hua Chou I saw no beauty in it, for all the romantic walls outside. The evil-smelling streets we rumbled through to the inn were wickedly narrow, and down the centre hung notices in Chinese characters on long strips of paper white and red, and pigs, and children, and creaking wheelbarrows, and men with loads, blocked the way. But we jolted over the step into the courtyard of the inn at last, quite a big courtyard, and quite a busy inn. This was an inn where they apparently ran a restaurant, for as I climbed stiffly out of my cart a servant, carrying a tray of little basins containing the soups and stews the Chinese eat, was so absorbed in gazing at me he ran into the “cartee man,” and a catastrophe occurred which was the occasion of much bad language.