We spent a whole day in Ningsia, the only one without travel between Lanchow and Peking, and could not see how we should have gained much by staying longer—unless perhaps for years, so that to our superficial impression would be added the detailed experience of the “old-timer.” Nor was our attention entirely given to mere sight-seeing and calls of respect. There were our three horses to be shod—though the timid Chinese blacksmiths who wander the streets, shop in hand, refuse to risk their precious lives at the rear end of the most harmless of such animals, even though they are tied hand and foot to stout stanchions. Any American worth his salt at the same trade would shoe any quadruped in China single-handed, behind as well as before, and he certainly would not leave the long, all but untrimmed hoofs which help to make the Chinese pony famous for stumbling, though he would of course throw the first hammer within reach at the man who proposed to pay him only twice as much for one shoe as his Chinese colleague gets for four. Then there was the task of getting rid of our opium-smoking driver without either violently breaking our contract with him or showing undue harshness. For, after all, he had kept up with the other cartman, who was as faultless a driver as one could ask for; and there had been times when his silly grin of doped contentment with life made up somewhat for the sogginess of his intellect during most of the journey. But we were tired of seeing his shaft-horse do all the work, while the two starved mules out in front only now and then staggered taut their rope traces; we were tired of furnishing opium pills for eating and smoking with money that should have been spent in food for beast and man; and we were particularly weary of wondering every time we got out of sight of our caravan whether the “old man” and his miserable animals had at last failed us.
When it came to a showdown his elimination proved simple and easy. Perhaps the pace of the past ten days had cured him of any desire to keep it up for twelve or thirteen more, over worse going. He had told Chang one night that he might shoot him if he wished, but that he could not go a step farther, though this had proved to be a mere figure of speech. Perhaps there were other arguments, of a monetary nature, such as a commission for selling his part of the contract to some one else; for even jobs are bought and sold in China. But of this we knew nothing, and cared less. For he agreed without argument to resign in favor of the new cartman whom his companion brought in, and thanked us profusely for the cumshaw which no doubt quickly went up in fumes.
The new driver, like the one that was left, called our destination home, and had been waiting for sixteen days for a paying chance to return there. Except for a slightly less cheery temperament, he was no less excellent a cartman than the other, though only a hired driver; while his companion owned not merely his outfit but an inn at the end of our trail. In the company of such fellows as these, one is struck with the sturdiness of the Chinese character. All about them were moral pitfalls, of which their opium-aged colleague was a striking example. They, too, and millions more like them, could easily get the poppy’s deadly juice and smoke themselves away from their at best dismal reality into the land of beautiful dreams; in fact, most of those whose duty it should be to remove this particular temptation do all they can, short of reducing their own “squeeze” from it, to make the wicked stuff available; yet they had never succumbed to it. Nor is the sturdiness of the Chinese coolie confined to the negative virtues. There was Chang, for instance, born a tiller of the soil in cruelly crowded Shantung, with a bare three years’ elementary schooling, who had taught himself to read, and to write a goodly number of characters, who in a few years as a foreign servant had acquired powers that to his simple parents probably seemed supernatural, who in his two months with us had so improved in poise and the ability to command the respect of his fellow-men that a trained scholar of many generations of similar experiences could scarcely have outdone him, either in deportment or the actual business in hand, when he was called upon to act as interpreter between us and the Mohammedan general, the very thought of meeting whom face to face would probably have set him trembling a few years before. Best of all, he had not let his rise in the world make him ashamed to do the most menial task that came to hand, on the ground that he was no longer a coolie, which is the stumbling-block over which rising young China is so apt to come a cropper. Chang and our cart-drivers were, of course, only individual instances; but I like to think of them—believe, in fact, that I can rightly think of them—as typical of millions of their class, as proofs that, given anything like a decent opportunity, the Chinese coolie can rise to a genuinely higher plane just as well as the American farmer can. If such is the case, it is not too much to hope that China may in time, even though it be centuries distant, advance to real democracy, that the name “republic” by which she now styles herself may some day become a reality and not merely a mockery and a catchword.
But to come back to Ningsia, which is still a long way from democracy of even the present imperfect type. Yet more important than matters of horseshoeing and the moral repair of our caravan was the question of a bath, which was eventually settled more or less in our favor by the placing of two large tin cans of warm water in our respective rooms. These were in Ningsia’s best hotel; in fact, the best hotel we graced during all our western journey, though that still does not bring it to the forefront of the world’s hostelries. Probably the main reason for its preëminence was the simple fact that it was quite new, and hence had never had an opportunity to grow filthy and unrepaired. Perhaps the Mohammedan proprietor—or should I call him “manager,” since it was several times confided to us that the real owner was Ningsia’s Moslem general?—had something to do with it, for he was so incessantly on the job that we could not push aside the cloth door across the street portal without finding him bowing us his respects behind it, though always without any violation of his Islamite dignity and certainly with no acknowledgment of inferiority. We might have taken only one of the identical rooms at either end of the unoccupied hall backing the long narrow courtyard, but one of the advantages of roughing it is that whenever the least possible excuse offers one can be extravagant without a twinge of conscience.
The most remarkable feature, perhaps, about the establishment was that it had no earth floors, but that courtyard, hall, and even our rooms were paved in brick. The k’angs were so new that their straw mats were almost inviting; the flue was of some modern improved type which actually gave out more heat than smoke and there was a little baked-mud coal-stove in addition. This detail was important, for the almost summer weather in which we had reached the city had modified the instant we passed through its gate and had disappeared entirely by sunset. I trust it will not unduly shock Western readers to be told that an ox-cart-load of the splendid anthracite coal in huge lumps which is so plentiful in northwestern China sold in this region for about an American dollar, for in that case I should not even dare to mention another kind of coal, evidently of an unusually oily composition, which may be lighted with a match and burns anywhere—on the brick or earth floor, in shallow pans built for that purpose, in an old wash-basin—without smoke enough to be worth mentioning and with a sturdy heat that makes a little of it highly effective. But mankind is never satisfied with his blessings; even missionaries complained that in the good old days a cart-load of coal cost less than half what the wicked profiteers owning ox-carts were now demanding.
CHAPTER XXVI
COMPLETING THE CIRCLE
We might as well have indulged in an extra nap next morning instead of being as exacting as usual on the hour of departure, for the city gate was still closed when we reached it. The rooster that all Chinese inns maintain for the benefit of their watchless clients had already “sung”; but on those moonlight mornings such a timepiece could easily be regarded as out of order, which is no doubt the reason we not only had to waken the soldiers in the little guard-house but that there was a further delay of nearly half an hour while one of them wandered away into the city to get the key, evidently ensconced under the pillow of some other guardian of Ningsia’s safety. All we lacked to make the third act of “La Bohème” complete was a light fall of snow and a more Parisian atmosphere, for not only was there a brazier over which the soldiers warmed their hands, and a collection of countrymen with produce waiting to enter as soon as the gate was opened, but we had, though we did not then suspect it, our Mimi with us.
Our new cartman, it seemed, had come from Paotou accompanied by another cart, and its driver had already found a fare for the return trip when this expedition and ours were thrown together in the back yard of the Moslem inn. In fact, the other might have started a week before had his client not been afraid to travel alone through a region with a bad reputation for bandits and thieves. Wholly unknown to us, therefore, we were to constitute the escort of this timid person, of whose existence we were still completely ignorant. We did notice that a third cart left the inn close behind us, and that it trailed us all the way to the gate, but there was nothing suspicious in some other traveler’s happening to pick the same ill chosen hour of departure as we, nor in his setting out in the same direction. Our first hint that something might be suspected was the sight of the third cart still following on our heels through the gate, as if it belonged to our party and was therefore free from paying the twenty coppers required of every native conveyance.
All that morning it stuck to us across a great plain with much ice, here and there covered with tall reeds. There was no doubt that it had invited itself to join us; the only questions remaining were its destination and who it was that lay ensconced behind its heavy blue cloth front door. These mysteries were solved at the noonday halt. A well dressed boy had already appeared on the front platform beside the driver, and the instant the cart drew up in the yard of the inn we had chosen out stepped a Chinese lady still well short of the age when scandal ceases to wag its tongues about members of the attractive sex. She was the wife of a silk merchant of Paotou, we gathered in a roundabout way; the youth was her nephew or something of the sort; and she had evidently joined us for the whole fortnight that remained of our journey.
We both admit that we are not utterly devoid of sympathy or chivalry, but somehow it did strike us that the lady might have gone to the formality of letting us know, at least indirectly, that she was going to grace our expedition. But they do things differently in China; and perhaps this was a less scandalous way than frankly to make the acquaintance of unrelated male traveling companions.