"They will overwhelm the world," said the Professor, calmly, and he went out to buy tea.
Neither at Penang, Singapur, nor this place have I seen a single Chinaman asleep while daylight lasted. Nor have I seen twenty men who were obviously loafing. All were going to some definite end—if it were only like the coolie on the wharf, to steal wood from the scaffolding of a half-built house. In his own land, I believe, the Chinaman is treated with a certain amount of carelessness, not to say ferocity. Where he hides his love of art, the Heaven that made him out of the yellow earth that holds so much iron only knows. His love is for little things, or else why should he get quaint pendants for his pipe, and at the backmost back of his shop build up for himself a bowerbird's collection of odds and ends, every one of which has beauty if you hold it sufficiently close to the eye. It grieves me that I cannot account for the ideas of a few hundred million men in a few hours. This much, however, seems certain. If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have natives of India, and had given them one tithe of the cossetting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard of their interests and aspirations that we have given to India, we should long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the reward of, the richest land on the face of the earth. A pair of my shoes have been, oddly enough, wrapped in a newspaper which carries for its motto the words, "There is no Indian nation, though there exists the germs of an Indian nationality," or something very like that. This thing has been moving me to unholy laughter. The great big lazy land that we nurse and wrap in cotton-wool, and ask every morning whether it is strong enough to get out of bed, seems like a heavy soft cloud on the far-away horizon; and the babble that we were wont to raise about its precious future and its possibilities, no more than the talk of children in the streets who have made a horse out of a pea-pod and match-sticks, and wonder if it will ever walk. I am sadly out of conceit of mine own other—not mother—country now that I have had my boots blacked at once every time I happened to take them off. The blacker did not do it for the sake of a gratuity, but because it was his work. Like the beaver of old, he had to climb that tree; the dogs were after him. There was competition.
Is there really such a place as Hong-Kong? People say so, but I have not yet seen it. Once indeed the clouds lifted and I saw a granite house perched like a cherub on nothing, a thousand feet above the town. It looked as if it might be the beginning of a civil station, but a man came up the street and said, "See this fog It will be like this till September. You'd better go away." I shall not go. I shall encamp in front of the place until the fog lifts and the rain ceases. At present, and it is the third day of April, I am sitting in front of a large coal fire and thinking of the "frosty Caucasus"—you poor creatures in torment afar. And you think as you go to office and orderly-room that you are helping forward England's mission in the East. 'Tis a pretty delusion, and I am sorry to destroy it, but you have conquered the wrong country.
Let us annex China.
No. VIII
OF JENNY AND HER FRIENDS. SHOWING HOW A MAN MAY GO TO SEE LIFE AND MEET DEATH THERE. OF THE FELICITY OF LIFE AND THE HAPPINESS OF CORINTHIAN KATE. THE WOMAN AND THE CHOLERA.
"Love and let love, and so will I,
But, sweet, for me no more with you,
Not while I live, not though I die.
Good night, good-by!"
I am entirely the man about town, and sickness is no word for my sentiments. It began with an idle word in a bar-room. It ended goodness knows where. That the world should hold French, German, and Italian ladies of the ancient profession is no great marvel; but it is, to one who has lived in India, something shocking to meet again Englishwomen in the same sisterhood. When an opulent papa sends his son and heir round the world to enlarge his mind, does he reflect, I wonder, on the places into which the innocent strolls under the guidance of equally inexperienced friends? I am disposed to think that he does not. In the interest of the opulent papa, and from a genuine desire to see what they call Life, with a capital Hell, I went through Hong-Kong for the space of a night. I am glad that I am not a happy father with a stray son who thinks that he knows all the ropes. Vice must be pretty much the same all the round world over, but if a man wishes to get out of pleasure with it, let him go to Hong-Kong.