“Hallo, Missus,” he said, and I forgot for a moment all the wonders that his people had done, that were here before my eyes.
He had come to fulfil his promise and show me round.
He was a flippant young gentleman impatient of the past, just as I have seen young men of his age, in Western lands. He was only a boy, after all, and he threw stones at the birds just as a younger boy might have done in England. Only I wished he wouldn't. It was nice to think the birds had sanctuary here, but I suppose it was a way of letting off steam, since he could not talk very easily to the foreign woman. A small red squirrel, sitting up deeply engaged with a nut from one of the fir-trees, roused him to wild excitement, and he shouted and yelled to a couple of dignified, petticoated Chinamen on the other side of the lake, in a way that quite upset my ideas of Chinese propriety; in fact, he was the General's secretary, showing off just as I have seen boys in other lands show off.
He took us to the women's temple, since we were interested in temples, a temple away on the other side of the lake, down in a hollow of the hills, hidden away as woman has been hidden away in China for immemorial ages.
“Ladies' temple,” said our cicerone with a wave of his hand.
And it, too, is falling into decay, the dusty gods, ranged round the sacred place, remind one of the contents of a lumber-room, and “Forgotten, forgotten,” is written large all over it. The forlorn old man in shabby blue, with a tiny little queue and a dirty face who keeps it, looks as if he too had been forgotten, and was grateful for a twenty-cent cumshaw. Only the courtyard with the soft breeze rustling in the pine-trees and ringing the musical bells that hung from the eaves was peaceful in the afternoon sunshine, with a charm of its own.
What women have come and prayed here? The proud Manchu Empress whom her lord had neglected, the Chinese concubine who longed to find favour in his eyes?
All over this pleasure-ground are buildings, but so deftly placed they never for one moment interfere with the charm of the countryside. There is a little temple on the Golden Mountain where the Jehol River takes its rise in a spring; on another hill is a little look-out place or tea pagoda with the roof covered with tiles of imperial yellow, and a view from it that even an Emperor is lucky to command. At the end of a long grassy glade where the deer were feeding in the shade of oaks and willows was a tall pagoda, and the Emperor's library was in another little valley, hidden away behind high walls. We entered through a guard-house and came upon a small door in the high stone wall, and this door on the inner side appeared to be blocked not only by the trunk of a tree but by a huge rock. There was, however, just room for one person to pass round, and then we entered a shaded rock garden, which is all round the building that holds the library. The deep veranda was charming, on the hottest day one might sit, cool and secluded, reading here, and on each corner are exquisite bronze models of Chinese ponies. The library itself, like most of these houses, was sealed up, and our young friend had not the key, but the lattice-work windows, and most of the walls are of lattice-work, for this is a summer palace, were down to the ground, and through the torn paper I could get a glimpse of what looked like another lumber-room, but that once must have been gorgeous with red lacquer and gold.
