No less ebony black is the stone at the far rear of the same compound on which a few thin white lines sketch what is widely reputed to be the only authentic portrait of Confucius. The austere simplicity of the execution and the not unkindly severity of the portrayed face are at once a contrast and a rebuke to the silly gaudiness of demonology that clutters almost all Chinese temples. Then, before Sian-fu can be left behind, there are the famous stone horses, mere bas-reliefs of galloping steeds done centuries ago, yet so full of life and action as to be the despair of any living sculptor. These race low along the outdoor wall of a corridor in the local museum, and imperfectly now, for a vandal all but destroyed them. He was a Frenchman, and the love of art was so strong within him that he resolved to steal the famous horses of Sian-fu and carry them off to his native land. The big stone slabs were impossible to transport entire; the art-loving Gaul broke each of them into several pieces, of course with the connivance of bribed Chinese, and the carts bearing them were already many miles on their way when they were overtaken. It is such little adventures as this, justly distributed throughout China, which make it strange that “outside-country people” are so generally treated with respect by nearly all the four hundred million, and only very rarely as “foreign devils.”
Perhaps the major would have been detected through his incognito of a man on a purely personal jaunt anyway, but it was that wire from Tungkwan concerning motor transportation that gave the game away entirely. We had barely begun to deplore with our host in Sian-fu the difficulties of filling portable zinc bath-tubs with hot water that must be purchased and carried in from the outside, when two Chinese officials called. One was merely a magistrate, but the other was high up in the “foreign office” of the province, as well as no less fluent in our tongue than in his own. He had come at once to pay his respects, to welcome us to the province, and to bring the startling information that we were expected to lodge in some yamen or palace which the Tuchun’s soldiers had spent all day in preparing in a manner befitting the American military official who was unexpectedly honoring Shensi with his presence. I was not grieved that the delicate task of declining these accommodations fell upon the major’s broad shoulders. We could not, of course, put the Tuchun to any such trouble; we were already installed in the capacious dwelling of the postal commissioner, who not only was British but had innumerable other qualifications to recommend him, who was keeping bachelor hall and was entitled to company, who was a very old friend—the major did have, I believe, a note of introduction to him—and who from time immemorial had been the accepted host of any visitor to Sian-fu whose native tongue was English and whose evolution had passed the eat-with-your-knife stage. There was no necessity of divulging such further facts as the fear that even the Tuchun’s ideas of supreme hospitality would probably include wooden-floored beds, unswept corners, and a perpetual crowding by curious and irrepressible retainers, and that civilized toilet-facilities, effective heating-arrangements, and freedom to come and go without formality were quite as sure to be lacking. The chief emissary, being versed in foreign ways, probably knew that all these thoughts were none the less existent for remaining unspoken, and accepted our declination in what seemed to be good spirit after far less than half the usual number of repetitions required by full-blooded Chinese courtesy.
But that did not prevent us from being overwhelmed with official formalities during our stay in Sian-fu. Formality is fully as sturdy and omnipresent a crone in China as in Latin America. It would have been the height of discourtesy, of course, not to make a formal call upon the Tuchun soon after our arrival; this, in the case of so distinguished a visitor as the major, a fellow in arms, had to be returned; there was old precedent for giving us an official feast, which could only properly be reciprocated by getting our host to invite the Tuchun to an elaborate luncheon; the civil governor and the corpulent head of the “foreign office” must at least be honored with a call, which we must be prepared to have retaliated; it would have been discourteous not to return the kindness of our first two callers, even though the magistrate was so low in rank that we could not remain with him more than five minutes; each group of missionaries in town expected us to dinner, or lunch, or tea, or, if worse came to worst, to breakfast; the Chamber of Commerce and other bodies of important citizens expected speeches—fortunately some engagements hopelessly conflicted—and, not to go particularly into details, there was a complete round of farewell calls that could not under any circumstances be omitted. Looking back upon it, I am amazed to realize that we spent only three full days in Sian-fu, and even at that managed to see most of its worth-while “sights”; and that we left it still in tolerably good health in spite of the fact that we accomplished as many as five incredibly heavy meals, not to call them “banquets,” in a single day.
This feat was made possible by the fact that Chinese feasts come at about eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon. Thus we could stagger away from either of these just in time to sit down with a deceptive smirk of pleasure at the repast prepared by some of the foreign groups with a special view to assuaging our ravenous road appetites. In anything concerned with the Tuchun at least, we were obliged to save “face” both for him and for ourselves by bumping about town in a “Peking cart” such as all Sian-fu residents of standing regard as one of their most indispensable possessions. In fact, the Tuchun sent his own for us. There were two of them, gleamingly new, but nicely graded as to caste in details invisible to us, yet as plainly publishing to the Chinese the distinction between a great foreign official like the major and a mere traveler like myself as if their blue cloth sides had been daubed with red characters. A huge, well groomed mule drew each of them; they were upholstered, padded, and cushioned not only within but on the sort of veranda where those of lower caste may sit, while the two wheels were magnificent examples of that universal to-hell-with-the-public attitude of China which dictates great sharp iron-toothed tires that would destroy any road in record time, yet which have absolutely no justification except swank—and perhaps the fear of skidding on wet corners during the three-mile-an-hour dashes about town.
In calling upon a Chinese official one first sends one’s Chinese card over by a retainer, in order that the great man may be prepared. Within half an hour or so one may follow, presenting another card to some underling who will be found waiting where, in the case of a Tuchun, one might otherwise be casually run through with the naked bayonets which the swarms of soldiers about such a place so generously display. The underling disappears for some time, because the great man is sure to hold forth in the far interior of the flock of buildings filling his long compound, where he could be reached only with difficulty by an unauthorized visitor, even though he knew its devious passages well. In time he returns, and marching before the visitors and holding their cards above his head spread out fan fashion, names to the rear, like a hand at poker, he conducts the way. Gradually more important functionaries take up his task, until the callers are invited to seat themselves in a sort of ante-guest-room by a man who may even be of high enough rank to dare to open conversation with them. This anteroom is usually furnished with a platform built into one wall and upholstered into a divan littered with red cushions, with a somewhat raised space, or a foot-high table, in the center. Tuchuns, however, even of the far interior, have in most cases adopted a foreign style in this as in military uniforms, and one finds oneself instead in a larger and very commonplace room furnished with a long, cloth-laid table surrounded by chairs, with at most a Chinese scroll or two on the walls as the only hints of local color. But a flock of servants and orderlies, setting a little handleless cup of tea before each guest and under no circumstances permitting him to empty it, keep him reminded of his latitude and longitude. If he is of any importance, he is also furnished a cigarette—by having a single one laid on the cloth in front of him—which, if he shows any tendency to consume it, some one lights for him before he realizes it. If he is a man of extraordinarily high rank, such as a military attaché from “Mei-guo” on the other side of the earth, the principal flunky offers him a cigar. This invariably is of some sad Manila brand—the Chinese word for cigar is “Lüüsung-yen,” or “Philippine tobacco”—this time in the box, and usually a full box, whether in the hope that he will not be so bold as to disturb the symmetry of the precious contents or because cigar-smokers are so rare in China that the box seldom loses its pristine fullness. At length the great man himself appears from behind a blue cloth door reverently lifted by several soldiers; there is a general uprising about the table; the host and his guests each fervently shake hands with themselves and bow times innumerable, like automatons hinged only at the waist; and at a graceful gesture of the Tuchun’s hand the gathering finally subsides into the chairs and proceeds to converse on things of no importance as fluently as the guests’ command of Chinese or the ministrations of an interpreter permit. If the call is nothing more than that, it ends in the anteroom where it began. After another long series of bows the guests are accompanied to the door, and as much beyond it as befits their rank. This is one of the most delicate points of Chinese etiquette, the one on which the foreigner, at least if he is newly established in the country, is most apt to stumble. For there is an intricate gradation of ranks in society even in “republican” China, with many factors modifying each under different circumstances; and not to see one’s guest far enough is as serious a social blunder as to accompany him beyond the point to which his caste entitles him. In a Tuchun’s yamen—in theory they call such a place gung-shu, or “people’s house,” since the rise of the republic—there may be nearly a dozen doors or openings of some sort between the inner depths and the front p’ai-lou, and at each of them courtesy requires much “you first” stuff and pretended protests from the guest against his host’s going any farther, so that when the final leave-taking is far out on the threshold of the last gate, as in the case of an official representative of great America, a glance at a watch is likely to be startling when one finally does at last break away.
Our first call on the Tuchun of Shensi was at his military headquarters in the ex-Manchu quarter of town. Here his predecessor, Feng Yü Hsiang, had turned the largest available open space within the city walls into a drill-field with long rows of modern brick barracks. On the big stone-and-mud wall enclosing all this there were painted at frequent intervals huge Chinese characters. But these are not the shoe and tobacco advertisements the resemblance to a baseball-field might lead the uninformed stranger to conclude; they are some of those moral precepts with which the “Christian General” is famous for surrounding his soldiers. Much of the material for wall and barracks, by the way, was said to have come from the palaces in which the Dowager Empress of sinister memory lived with her pet eunuch during the year following her flight from Peking in 1900. The former military governor saw no good reason to keep up this imperial establishment under a republican régime, and now there remains but little more than a field scattered with broken stones where less than a year before our visit there had been something mildly resembling the Forbidden City in Peking. Speaking of the crafty old shrew in question, we no longer wondered so much at her cantankerous disposition when we realized that she rode all the way from Peking to Sian-fu in a “Peking cart,” eating the dust of the loess cañons, and spending her nights at the odoriferous inns along the way, some of which still boast of that fact by their names or decorations.
The Tuchun’s dinner in the major’s honor was an exact replica, except in location, of the call of respect we had made the day before—up to the time when we had begun to take our departure on that occasion. This time the whole party began about five o’clock to drift toward the “banquet-hall” at another end of the compound, with as much contention at every portal along the way as if each had been a dead-line upon which a nest of machine-guns had its muzzles trained. The guests included all the foreigners in town—that is, adults of the male gender—even to a Japanese official who had come to collect an indemnity from the province for the killing of a stray cotton merchant from Nippon; and the flock of Chinese officials mingled with them lacked no one worth while in the political circles of Sian-fu. The three provincial military chieftains with whom we dined during our western journey all go in for foreign-style dinners on official occasions, and attain their intentions in this respect as far as local information and the extraneous learning of their cooks can carry them. The result is an entertaining gustatory hybrid resembling its alien parent perhaps a bit more than its Chinese. Of the irrepressible swarming of persistent flies over all the sumptuousness of that lengthy table I really should have said nothing, for it is surely not the duty of a Tuchun to squander his military genius against such insignificant enemies. That the soldiers flocking almost as thickly about us should have passed slices of bread in their hands instead of using a plate was as genuinely Chinese as were their several other minor faux pas, and merely improved the local color. At least the great Oriental institution of gam-bay-ing held its unaltered own, even in the presence of half a dozen Protestant missionaries and a chief guest of honor who lamentably failed to hold up his end of that pastime.
The east gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house above the flat horizon
