On my way back to T'ai Yuan Fu I stayed at no mission station except at Fen Chou Fu; I went by a different route and spent the nights at miserable inns that kindly charged me a whole penny for lodging and allowed me to sleep in my litter in their yards, and about eighty li from Fen Chou Fu I came across evidences of another mission that would be anathema maranatha to the Nonconformists with whom I had been staying. It is curious this schism between two bodies holding what purports to be the same faith. I remember a missionary, the wife of a doctor at Ping Ting Chou, who belonged to a sect called The Brethren, who spoke of the Roman Catholics as if they were in as much need of conversion as the ignorant Chinese around her. It made me smile; yet I strongly suspect that Mr Farrer will put me in the same category as I put my friend from Ping Ting Chou! However, here under the care of the Alsatian Fathers the country was most beautifully cultivated. The wheat was growing tall and lush in the land, emerald-green in the May sunshine; there were avenues of trees along the wayside clothed in the tender fresh green of spring, and I came upon a whole village, men and boys, busy making a bridge across a stream. Never in China have I seen such evidences of well-conducted agricultural industry; and the Fathers were militant too, for they were, and probably are, armed, and in the Boxer trouble held their station like a fort, and any missionaries fleeing who reached them had their lives saved. I found much to commend in that Roman Catholic mission, and felt they were as useful to the country people in their way as were the Americans to the people of the towns.

Outside another little town the population seemed to be given over to the making of strawboard, and great banks were plastered with squares of it set out to dry, and every here and there a man was engaged in putting more pieces up. It wras rather a comical effect to see the side of a bank plastered with yellow squares of strawboard and the wheat springing on top.

All along the route still went caravans of camels, mules and donkeys, and, strangest of all modes of conveyance, wheel-barrows, heavily laden too. A wheel-barrow in China carries goods on each side of a great wheel, a man holds up the shafts and wheels it, usually with a strap round his shoulders, and in front either another man or a donkey is harnessed to help with the traction. Hundreds of miles they go, over the roughest way, and the labour must be very heavy; but wherever I went in China this was impressed upon me, that man was the least important factor in any work of production. He might be used till he failed and then thrown lightly away without a qualm. There were plenty glad enough to take his place.

I have been taken to task for comparing China to Babylon, but I must make some comparison to bring home things to my readers. This journey through the country in the warm spring sunshine was as unlike a journey anywhere that I have been in Europe, Africa or Australia as anything could possibly be. It was through an old land, old when Europe was young. I stopped at inns that were the disgusting product of the slums; I passed men working in the fields who were survivals of an old civilisation, and when I passed any house that was not a hovel it was secluded carefully, so that the owner and his womenkind might keep themselves apart from the proletariat, the serfs who laboured around them and for them.

Within a day's journey of T'ai Yuan Fu I came to a little town, Tsui Su, where there was an extra vile inn with no courtyard that I could sleep in, only a room where the rats were numerous and so fierce that they drove Buchanan for refuge to my bed and the objectionable insects that I hustled off the k'ang by means of powdered borax and Keating's, strewed over and under the ground sheet, crawled up the walls and dropped down upon me from the ceiling. Poor Buchanan and I spent a horrid night. I don't like rats anyway, and fierce and hungry rats on the spot are far worse for keeping off sleep than possible robbers in the future. All that night I dozed and waked and restrained Buchanan's energies and vowed I was a fool for coming to China, and then in the morning as usual I walked it all back, and was glad, for Mr Wang came to me and, after the best personally conducted Cook's tourist style, explained that here was a temple which “mus' see.”

I didn't believe much in temples in these parts, but I went a little way back into the town and came to a really wonderful temple, built, I think, over nine warm springs—the sort of thing that weighed down the scales heavily on Mr Farrer's side. What has a nation that could produce such a temple to learn from the West? I shall never forget the carved dragons in red and gold that climbed the pillars at the principal entrance, the twisted trees, the shrines over the springs and the bronze figures that stood guard on the platform at the entrance gate. The steps up to that gate were worn and broken with the passing of many feet through countless years; the yellow tiles of the roof were falling and broken; from the figures had been torn or had fallen the arms that they once had borne; the whole place was typical of the decay which China allows to fall upon her holy places; but seen in the glamour of the early morning, with the grass springing underfoot, the trees in full leaf, the sunshine lighting the yellow roofs and the tender green of the trees, it was gorgeous. Then the clouds gathered and it began to rain, gentle, soft, warm, growing rain, and I left it shrouded in a seductive grey mist that veiled its imperfections and left me a 'memory only of one of the beautiful places of the earth that I am glad I have seen.

At T'ai Yuan Fu I paid Mr Wang's fare back to Pao Ting Fu and bade him a glad farewell. There may be worse interpreters in China, but I really hope there are not many. He would have been a futile person in any country; he was a helpless product of age-old China. I believe he did get back safely, but I must confess to feeling on sending him away much as I should do were I to turn loose a baby of four to find his way across London. Indeed I have met many babies of four in Australia who struck me as being far more capable than the interpreter who had undertaken to see me across China.

I was on the loose myself now. I was bent on going to Siberia; but the matter had to be arranged in my own mind first, and while I did so I lingered and spent a day or two at Hwailu; not that I wanted to see that town—somehow I had done with China—but because the personality of Mr and Mrs Green of the China Inland Mission interested me.

Hwailu is a small walled city, exactly like hundreds of other little walled cities, with walls four-square to each point of the compass, and it is set where the hills begin to rise that divide Chihli from Shansi, and beyond the mission station is a square hill called Nursing Calf Fort. The hill has steep sides up which it is almost impossible to take any animal, but there are about one hundred acres of arable land on top, and this, with true Chinese thrift, could not be allowed to go untilled, so the story goes that while a calf was young a man carried it up on his back; there it grew to maturity, and with its help they ploughed the land and they reaped the crops. It is a truly Chinese story, and very likely it is true. It is exactly what the Chinese would do.

At Hwailu, where they had lived for many years, Mr and Mrs Green were engaged in putting up a new church, and with them I came in contact with missionaries who had actually suffered almost to death at the hands of the Boxers. It was thrilling to listen to the tales of their sufferings, sitting there on the verandah of the mission house looking out on to the peaceful flowers and shrubs of the mission garden.

When the Boxer trouble spread to Hwailu and it was manifest the mission house was no longer safe, they took refuge in a cave among the hills that surround the town. Their converts and friends—for they had many friends who were not converts—hardly dared come near them, and death was very close. It was damp and cold in the cave though it was summer-time, and by and by they had eaten all their food and drunk all their water, and their hearts were heavy, for they feared not only for themselves, but for what the little children must suffer.

“I could not help it,” said Mrs Green, reproaching herself for being human. “I used to look at my children and wonder how the saints could rejoice in martyrdom!”

When they were in despair and thinking of coming out and giving themselves up they heard hushed voices, and a hand at the opening of the cave offered five large wheaten scones. Some friends, again not converts, merely pagan friends, had remembered their sufferings. Still they looked at the scenes doubtfully, and though the little children—they were only four and six—held out their hands for them eagerly, they were obliged to implore them not to eat them, they would make them so desperately thirsty. But their Chinese friends were thoughtful as well as kind, and presently came the same soft voice again and a hand sending up a basketful of luscious cucumbers, cool and refreshing with their store of water.

But they could not stay there for ever, and finally they made their way down to the river bank, the Ching River—the Clear River we called it, and I have also heard it translated the Dark Blue River, though it was neither dark, nor blue, nor clear, simply a muddy canal—and slowly made their way in the direction of Tientsin, hundreds of miles away. That story of the devoted little band's wanderings makes pitiful reading. Sometimes they went by boat, sometimes they crept along in the kaoliang and reeds, and at last they arrived at the outskirts of Hsi An—not the great city in Shensi, but a small walled town on the Ching River in Chihli. Western cities are as common in China as new towns in English-speaking lands—and here they, hearing a band was after them, hid themselves in the kaoliang, the grain that grows close and tall as a man. They were weary and worn and starved; they were well-nigh hopeless—at least I should have been hopeless—but still their faith upheld them. It was the height of summer and the sun poured down his rays, but towards evening the clouds gathered. If it rained they knew with little children they must leave their refuge.

“But surely, I know,” said Mrs Green, “the dear Lord will never let it rain.”

And as I looked at her I seemed to see the passionate yearning with which she looked at the little children that the rain must doom to a Chinese prison or worse. In among those thick kaoliang stalks they could not stay.

It rained, the heavy rain that comes in the Chinese summer, and the fugitives crept out and gave themselves up.

“It shows how ignorant we are, how unfit to judge for ourselves,” said the teller of the tale fervently, “for we fell into the hands of a comparatively merciful band, whereas presently the kaoliang was beaten by a ruthless set of men whom there would have been no escaping, and who certainly would have killed us.”

But the tenderness of the most merciful band was a thing to be prayed against. They carried the children kindly enough—the worst of Chinamen seem to be good to children—but they constantly threatened their elders with death. They were going to their death, that they made very clear to them; and they slung them on poles by their hands and feet, and the pins came out of the women's long hair—there was another teacher, a girl, with them—and it trailed in the dust of the filthy Chinese paths. And Mr Green was faint and weary from a wound in his neck, but still they had no pity.

Still these devoted people comforted each other. It was the will of the Lord. Always was He with them. They were taken to Pao Ting Fu, Pao Ting Fu that had just burned its own missionaries, and put in the gaol there—and, knowing a Chinese inn, I wonder what can be the awfulness of a Chinese gaol—and they were allowed no privacy. Mrs Green had dysentery; they had not even a change of clothes; but the soldiers were always in the rooms with them, or at any rate in the outer room, and this was done, of course, of malice prepense, for no one values the privacy of their women more than the Chinese. The girl got permission to go down to the river to wash their clothes, but a soldier always accompanied her, and always the crowds jeered and taunted as she went along in the glaring sunshine, feeling that nothing was hidden from these scornful people. Only strangely to the children were they kind; the soldiers used to give them copper coins so that they might buy little scones and cakes to eke out the scanty rations, and once—it brought home to me, perhaps as nothing else could, the deprivations of such a life—instead of buying the much-needed food the women bought a whole pennyworth of hairpins, for their long hair was about their shoulders, and though they brushed it to the best of their ability with their hands it was to them an unseemly thing.

And before the order came—everything is ordered in China—that their lives were to be saved and they were to be sent to Tientsin the little maid who had done so much to cheer and alleviate their hard lot lay dying; the hardships and the coarse food had been too much for her. In the filth and misery of the ghastly Chinese prison she lay, and, bending over her, they picked the lice off her. Think of that, ye folk who guard your little ones tenderly and love them as these missionaries who feel called upon to convert the Chinese loved theirs.

After all that suffering they went back, back to Hwailu and the desolated mission station under the Nursing Calf Fort, where they continue their work to this day, and so will continue it, I suppose, to the end, for most surely their sufferings and their endurance have fitted them for the work they have at heart as no one who has not so suffered and endured could be fitted. And so I think the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges.

I walked through a tremendous dust-storm to the railway station at the other side of the town, and the woman who had suffered these awful things, and who was as sweet and charming and lovable a woman as I have ever met, walked with me and bade me God-speed on my journey, and when I parted from her I knew that among a class I—till I came to China—had always strenuously opposed I had found one whom I could not only respect, but whom I could love and admire.

Going back to Pao Ting Fu was like going back to old friends. They had not received my letter. Mr Wang had not made his appearance, so when James Buchanan and I, attended by the master of transport, appeared upon the scene on a hot summer day we found the missionary party having their midday dinner on the verandah, and they received me—bless their kind hearts!—with open arms, and proceeded to explain to me how very wise a thing I had done in coming back. The moment I had left, they said, they had been uncomfortable in the part they had taken in forwarding me on my journey.

It was very good of them. There are days we always remember all our lives—our wedding day and such-like—and that coming back on the warm summer's day out of the hot, dusty streets of the western suburb into the cool, clean, tree-shaded compound of the American missionaries at Pao Ting Fu is one of them. And that compound is one of the places in the world I much want to visit again.

There is another day, too, I shall not lightly forget. We called it the last meeting of the Travellers' Club of Pao Ting Fu. There were only two members in the club, Mr Long and I and an honorary member, James Buchanan, and on this day the club decided to meet, and Mr Long asked me to dinner. He lived in the Chinese college in the northern suburb. His house was only about two miles away and it could be reached generally by going round by the farms and graves, mostly graves, that cover the ground by the rounded north-west corner of the wall of the city. Outside a city in China is ugly. True, the walls are strangely old-world and the moat is a relic of the past—useful in these modern times for disposing of unwanted puppies; Pao Ting Fu never seemed so hard up for food as Shansi—but otherwise the ground looks much as the deserted alluvial goldfields round Ballarat used to look in the days of my youth; the houses are ramshackle to the last degree, and all the fields, even when they are green with the growing grain, look unfinished. But round the north-west corner of Pao Ting Fu the graves predominate. There are thousands and thousands of them. And on that particular day it rained, it rained, and it rained, steady warm summer rain that only stopped and left the air fresh and washed about six o'clock in the evening. I ordered a rickshaw—a rickshaw in Pao Ting Fu is a very primitive conveyance; but it was pleasantly warm, and, with James Buchanan on my knee, in the last evening dress that remained to me and an embroidered Chinese jacket for an opera cloak, I set out. I had started early because on account of the rain the missionaries opined there might be a little difficulty with the roads. However, I did not worry much because I only had two miles to go, and I had walked it often in less than three-quarters of an hour. I was a little surprised when my rickshaw man elected to go through the town, but, as I could not speak the language, I was not in a position to remonstrate, and I knew we could not come back that way as at sundown all the gates shut save the western, and that only waits till the last train at nine o'clock.

It was muddy, red, clayey mud in the western suburb when we started, but when we got into the northern part of the town I was reminded of the tribulations of Fen Chou Fu in the summer rains, for the water was up to our axles, the whole place was like a lake and the people were piling up dripping goods to get them out of the way of the very dirty flood. My man only paused to turn his trousers up round his thighs and then went on again—going through floods was apparently all in the contract—but we went very slowly indeed. Dinner was not until eight and I had given myself plenty of time, but I began to wonder whether we should arrive at that hour. Presently I knew we shouldn't.

We went through the northern gate, and to my dismay the country in the fading light seemed under water. From side to side and far beyond the road was covered, and what those waters hid I trembled to think, for a road at any time in China is a doubtful proposition and by no means spells security. As likely as not there were deep holes in it. But apparently my coolie had no misgivings. In he went at his usual snail's pace and the water swirled up to the axles, up to the floor of the rickshaw, and when I had gathered my feet up on the seat and we were in the middle of the sheet of exceedingly dirty water the rickshaw coolie stopped and gave me to understand that he had done his darnedest and could do no more. He dropped the shafts and stood a little way off, wringing the water out of his garments. It wasn't dangerous, of course, but it was distinctly uncomfortable. I saw myself in evening dress wading through two feet of dirty water to a clayey, slippery bank at the side. I waited a little because the prospect did not please me, and though there were plenty of houses round, there was not a soul in sight. It was getting dark too, and it was after eight o'clock.

Presently a figure materialised on that clayey bank and him I beckoned vehemently.

Now Pao Ting Fu had seen foreigners, not many, but still foreigners, and they spell to it a little extra cash, so the gentleman on the bank tucked up his garments and came wading over. He and my original friend took a maddeningly long time discussing the situation, and then they proceeded to drag the rickshaw sideways to the bank. There was a narrow pathway along the top and they apparently decided that if they could get the conveyance up there we might proceed on our journey. First I had to step out, and it looked slippery enough to make me a little doubtful. As a preliminary I handed James Buchanan to the stranger, because, as he had to sit on my knee, I did not want him to get dirtier than necessary. Buchanan did not like the stranger, but he submitted with a bad grace till I, stepping out, slipped on the clay and fell flat on my back, when he promptly bit the man who was holding him and, getting away, expressed his sympathy by licking my face. Such a commotion as there was! My two men yelled in dismay. Buchanan barked furiously, and I had some ado to get on my feet again, for the path was very slippery. It was long past eight now and could I have gone back I would have done so, but clearly that was impossible, so by signs I engaged No. 2 man, whose wounds had to be salved—copper did it—to push behind, and we resumed our way....

Briefly it was long after ten o'clock when I arrived at the college. My host had given me up as a bad job long before and, not being well, had gone to bed. There was nothing for it but to rouse him up, because I wanted to explain that I thought I had better have another man to take me home over the still worse road that I knew ran outside the city.

He made me most heartily welcome and then explained to my dismay that the men utterly declined to go any farther, declared no rickshaw could get over the road to the western suburb and that I must have a cart. That was all very well, but where was I to get a cart at that time of night, with the city gates shut?

Mr Long explained that his servant was a wise and resourceful man and would probably get one if I would come in and have dinner. So the two members of the Travellers' Club sat down to an excellent dinner—a Chinese cook doesn't spoil a dinner because you are two hours late—and we tried to take a flash-light photograph of the entertainment. Alas! I was not fortunate that day; something went wrong with the magnesium light and we burnt up most things. However, we ourselves were all right, and at two o'clock in the morning Mr Long's servant's uncle, or cousin, or some relative, arrived with a Peking cart and a good substantial mule. I confess I was a bit doubtful about the journey home because I knew the state of repair, or rather disrepair, of a couple of bridges we had to cross, but they were negotiated, and just as the dawn was beginning to break I arrived at the mission compound and rewarded the adventurous men who had had charge of me with what seemed to them much silver and to me very little. I have been to many dinners in my life, but the last meeting of the Travellers' Club at Pao Ting Fu remains engraved on my memory.

Yet a little longer I waited in Pao Ting Fu before starting on my Siberian trip, for the start was to be made from Tientsin and the missionaries were going there in house-boats. They were bound for Pei Ta Ho for their summer holiday and the first stage of the journey was down the Ching River to Tientsin. I thought it would be rather a pleasant way of getting over the country, and it would be pleasant too to have company. I am not enamoured of my own society; I can manage alone, but company certainly has great charms.

So I waited, and while I waited I bought curios.

In Pao Ting Fu in the revolution there was a great deal of looting done, and when order reigned again it was as much as a man's life was worth to try and dispose of any of his loot. A foreigner who would take the things right out of the country was a perfect godsend, and once it was known I was buying, men waited for me the livelong day, and I only had to put my nose outside the house to be pounced upon by a would-be seller. I have had as many as nine men selling at once; they enlisted the servants, and china ranged round the kitchen floor, and embroideries, brass and mirrors were stowed away in the pantry. Indeed I and my followers must have been an awful nuisance to the missionaries. They knew no English, but as I could count a little in Chinese, when we could not get an interpreter we managed; and I expect I bought an immense amount of rubbish, but never in my life have I had greater satisfaction in spending money. More than ever was I pleased when I unpacked in England, and I have been pleased ever since.

Those sellers were persistent. They said in effect that never before had they had such a chance and they were going to make the best of it. We engaged house-boats for our transit; we went down to those boats, we pushed off from the shore, and even then there were sellers bent on making the best of their last chance. I bought there on the boat a royal blue vase for two dollars and a quaint old brass mirror in a carved wooden frame also for two dollars, and then the boatmen cleared off the merchants and we started.

I expect on the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris in the days before the dawn of history men went backwards and forwards in boats like these we embarked in on the little river just outside the south gate of Pao Ting Fu. We had three boats. Dr and Mrs Lewis and their children had the largest, with their servants, and we all made arrangements to mess on board their boat. Miss Newton and a friend had another, with more of the servants, and I, like a millionaire, had one all to myself. I had parted with the master of transport at Pao Ting Fu, but Hsu Sen, one of the Lewis's servants, waited upon me and made up my bed in the open part of the boat under a little roof. The cabins were behind, low little places like rabbit hutches, with little windows and little doors through which I could get by going down on my knees. I used them only for my luggage, so was enabled to offer a passage to a sewing-woman who would be exceedingly useful to the missionaries. She had had her feet bound in her youth and was rather crippled in consequence, and she bought her own food, as I bought my water, at the wayside places as we passed. She was a foolish soul, like most Chinese women, and took great interest in Buchanan, offering him always a share of her own meals, which consisted apparently largely of cucumbers and the tasteless Chinese melon. Now James Buchanan was extremely polite, always accepting what was offered him, but he could not possibly eat cucumber and melon, and when I went to bed at night I often came in contact with something cold and clammy which invariably turned out to be fragments of the sewing-woman's meals bestowed upon my courtly little dog. I forgave him because of his good manners. There really was nowhere else to hide them.

They were pleasant days we spent meandering down the river. We passed by little farms; we passed by villages, by fishing traps, by walled cities. Hsi An Fu, with the water of the river flowing at the foot of its castellated walls, was like a city of romance, and when we came upon little marketplaces by the water's edge the romance deepened, for we knew then how the people lived. Sometimes we paused and bought provisions; sometimes we got out and strolled along the banks in the pleasant summer weather. Never have I gone a more delightful or more unique voyage. And at last we arrived at Tientsin and I parted from my friends, and they went on to Pei Ta Ho and I to Astor House to prepare for my journey east and north.

And so I left China, China where I had dwelt for sixteen months, China that has been civilised so long and is a world apart, and now I sit in my comfortable sitting-room in England and read what the papers say of China; and the China I know and the China of the newspapers is quite a different place. It is another world. China has come into the war. On our side, of course: the Chinaman is far too astute to meddle with a losing cause. But, after all, what do the peasants of Chihli and the cave-dwellers in the yaos of Shansi know about a world's war? The very, very small section that rules China manages these affairs, and the mass of the population are exactly as they were in the days of the CÆsars, or before the first dynasty in Egypt for that matter.

“China,” said one day to me a man who knew it well commercially, just before I left, “was never in so promising a condition. All the taxes are coming in and money was never so easy to get.”

“There was a row over the new tax,” said a missionary sadly, in the part I know well, “in a little village beyond there. The village attacked the tax-collectors and the soldiers fell upon the villagers and thirteen men were killed. Oh, I know they say it is only nominal, but what is merely nominal to outsiders is their all to these poor villagers. They must pay the tax and starve, or resist and be killed.”

He did not say they were between the devil and the deep sea, because he was a missionary, but I said it for him, and there were two cases like that which came within my ken during my last month in China.

The fact of the matter is, I suppose, that outsiders can only judge generally, and China is true to type, the individual has never counted there and he does not count yet. What are a few thousand unpaid soldiers revolting in Kalgan? What a robber desolating Kansu? A score or two of villagers killed because they could not pay a tax? Absolutely nothing in the general crowd. I, being a woman, and a woman from the new nations of the south, cannot help feeling, and feeling strongly, the individual ought to count, that no nation can be really prosperous until the individual with but few exceptions is well-to-do and happy. I should like to rule out the “few exceptions,” but that would be asking too much of this present world. At least I like to think that most people have a chance of happiness, but I feel in China that not a tenth of the population has that.

China left a curious impression upon my mind. The people are courteous and kindly, far more courteous than would be the same class of people in England, and yet I came back from the interior with a strong feeling that it is unsafe, not because of the general hostility of the people—they are not hostile—but because suffering and life count for so little. They themselves suffer and die by the thousand.

“What! Bring a daughter-in-law to see the doctor in the middle of the harvest! Impossible!” And yet they knew she was suffering agony, that seeing the doctor was her only chance of sight! But she did not get it. They were harvesting and no one could be spared!

What is the life then of a foreign barbarian more or less? These courteous, kindly, dirty folk who look upon one as a menagerie would look on with equal interest at one's death. They might stretch out a hand to help, just as a man in England might stop another from ill-treating a horse, though for one who would put himself out two would pass by with a shrug of the shoulders and a feeling that it wras no business of theirs. Every day of their lives the majority look upon the suffering of their women and think nothing of it. The desire of the average man is to have a wife who has so suffered. I do not know whether the keeping of the women in a state of subserviency has reacted upon the nation at large, but I should think it has hampered it beyond words. Nothing—nothing made me so ardent a believer in the rights of women as my visit to China.

“Women in England,” said a man to me the other day, a foreigner, one of our Allies, “deserve the vote, but the Continental women are babies. They cannot have it.” So are the Chinese women babies, very helpless babies indeed, and I feel, and feel very strongly indeed, that until China educates her women, makes them an efficient half of the nation, not merely man's toy and his slave, China will always lag behind in the world's progress.

Already China is split up into “spheres of influence.” Whether she likes it or not, she must realise that Russian misrule is paramount in the great steppes of the north; Japan rules to a great extent in the north-east, her railway from Mukden to Chang Ch'un is a model of efficiency; Britain counts her influence as the most important along the valley of the Yang Tze Kiang, and France has some say in Yunnan. I cannot help thinking that it would be a great day for China, for the welfare of her toiling millions, millions toiling without hope, if she were partitioned up among the stable nations of the earth—that is to say, between Japan, Britain and France. And having said so much, I refer my readers to Mr Farrer for the other point of view. It is diametrically opposed to mine.