And so behind Shanghai is Chinese City, and behind that there is China, out upon the flat plains. There is another China yet beyond, and still another and as many as there are billows on the sea. Build modern buildings and cities, and the Chinese take them and turn them inside out, and they are what he wants them to be. This plastic people,—what is their destiny? And what, still, is there awaiting the world as they fulfil that destiny?
How strange it feels to call her republic! Yet China has taken to republicanism as though it had been brewing in her these thousands of years. From outward appearances one would never know that she is a republic to-day. Some say she really isn't. Coolies still are coolies, and Chinese, Chinese. And I dare say she is both empire and republic, two in one.
For centuries China has lain dormant as though stung by a paralyzing wasp. Centuries have been lost in sleep. But what are centuries, when waking is so simple and is always possible? China has wakened. She is rising. An hour's work has been accomplished in the first fresh flush of the new dawn. Perhaps that is all that will be done that day, the house put in a little better order. To-morrow is time enough for real work. A Chinese junk comes out of its night-mist retreat with its own dim lights. A shrill whistle of a passing launch echoes across the flat plains about Shanghai. The rain of yesterday remains only as a sorry mist. A vision of clearer day shimmers through, but soon grows dull again. China seems to have shaped her climate in her own image.
A two-days' steam to Moji, Japan, on the bosom of that heaving mistress the China Sea, and my journey was over for a long while. The sea was black, the sky somber; even the sun was sad as it stooped that evening to kiss the cheek of Japan good night. I did not know just then that I was to say farewell to the sea for two and a half years,—a farewell that resulted in Japan: Real and Imaginary.
CHAPTER XII
WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS
The Third Side of the Triangle
... For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh, might our marges meet again!
1
I had gone out to the Katori-maru to inspect my quarters. I always loved to get away from shore, even if only in a launch or sampan; it was so much cleaner and fresher on the bay. That afternoon it was altogether too attractive out there, and the city of Kobe lay so snugly below the hills that I decided to remain on board till late in the evening, and missed the last launch. I hailed a sampan. In this, with the wind splashing the single sail and the spray scattering all about us, we slipped romantically back to the American Hatoba. It was my last entrance to Kobe.