“I had to kick a dog away that was gnawing at a dead body as we led the lady into a house for the night,” said the narrator. “I could only implore her not to look.”
But at I Chün things were worse still. They reached it just as it had fallen into the hands of the Elder Brother Society, and they began to think they had taken those missionaries out of the frying-pan into the fire. I Chün is a walled city up in the mountains of Shensi, and the only approach was by a pathway so narrow that it only allowed of one mule litter at a time. On one side was a steep precipice, on the other the city wall, and along that wall came racing men armed with matchlocks, spears, and swords, yelling defiance and prepared, apparently, to attack. The worst of it was there was no turning that litter round. They halted, and the gate ahead of them opened, and right in the centre of the gateway was an ancient cannon with a man standing beside it with a lighted rope in his hand. Turn the litter and get away in a hurry they could not. Leave it they could not. There was seemingly no escape for them. It only wanted one of those excited men to shout “Ta, Ta,” and the match could have been applied, and the ancient gun would have swept the pathway. Then the leader of the band of foreigners stepped forward. He flung away his rifle, he flung away his revolver, he flung away his knife, and he stood there before them defenceless, with his arms raised—modem civilisation bowing for the moment before the force of Babylon. It was a moment of supreme anxiety. Suppose the people misunderstood his actions.
“We scarcely dared breathe,” said the storyteller. Every heart stood still. And then they understood. The man with the lighted rope dropped it, and they beckoned to the strangers to come inside the gates.
It required a good deal of courage to go inside those gates, to put themselves in the power of the Elder Brother Society, and they spent an anxious night. The town had been sacked, the streets ran blood, the men were slain, their bodies were in the streets for the crows and the wonks to feed on, and the women—well women never count for much in China in times of peace, and in war they are the spoil of the victor—the Goddess of Mercy was forgotten those days in I Chün. All night long the anxious little party kept watch and ward, and when day dawned were thankful to be allowed to proceed on their way unmolested, eventually reaching Hsi An Fu and rescuing all the missionaries who wished to be rescued.
“It was exciting,” said my friend, half apologising for getting excited over it. “It was the last of old China. Such things will never happen again.”
Exciting! it thrilled me to hear him talk, to know such things had happened barely a year before, to know they had happened in this country. Would they never happen again? I was not so sure of that as I went through walled town after walled town, as I looked up at the walls of Tsung Hua Chou. This was the correct setting. To talk in friendly, commonplace fashion to people who lived in such towns seemed to annihilate time, to bring the past nearer to me, to make me understand, as I had never understood before, that the people who had lived, and suffered, and triumphed, or lived, and suffered, and fallen, were almost exactly the same flesh and blood as I was myself.
Back at the inn my friend the landlady brought me her little grandson to admire. He was a jolly little unwashed chap with a shaven head, clad in an unwashed shift, and I think I admired him to her heart's content. It was evidently worth having been born and lived all the strenuous weary days of her hard life to have had part in the bringing into the world of that grandson. His little sister in the blue-cornered handkerchief, looking on, did not count for much, and yet she had her own feelings, for when I clambered into my cart and was just rumbling over the step I was startled by a terrified childish outcry. Looking back, I saw that a little serving-maid, a slave probably, was running after my cart with the small son and heir in her arms, making believe to give away the household treasure to the foreign woman, with grandmother and subordinates looking smilingly on. Only the little sister, who was not in the secret, was shrieking lustily in protest.
I had been thinking of the cities in the plain of Mesopotamia! And this carried me back to the days of my own childhood and the hills round Ballarat! Many and many a time in my young days have I seen the household baby offered to the “vegetable John,” and the small brothers and sisters shrieking a terrified protest. “They would be good, and love baby, and never be cross with him any more.” Here was I taking the place of the smiling, bland, John Chinaman of my childhood. After all human nature is much the same all the world over, on the sunny hills of Ballarat, or in a walled city at the foot of the mountains in Northern China. If we could but bridge the gulf that lies between, I expect we should have found it just exactly the same on the banks of the Euphrates and beneath the walls of Babylon.