The charm of Peking—A Chinese theatre—Electric light—The custodian of the theatre—Bargaining for a seat—The orchestra—The scenery of Shakespeare—Realistic gesture—A city wall—A mountain spirit—Gorgeous dresses—Bundles of towels—Women's gallery—Armed patrols—Rain in April—The food of the peasant—Famine—The value of a daughter—God be thanked.

The Legation Quarter in Peking, as I was reminded twenty times a day, is not China, it is not even Peking, but it is a pleasant place in which to stay; a place where one may foregather and exchange ideas with one's kind, and yet whence one may go forth and see all Peking; more, may see places where still the foreigner is something to be stared at, and wondered at, and where the old, unchanging civilisation still goes on. Ordinarily if you would see something new, something that gives a fresh sensation, it is necessary to go out from among your kind and brave discomfort, or spend a small fortune to guard against that discomfort, but here, in Peking, you who are interested in such things may see an absolutely new world, and yet have all the comforts, except reading matter, to which you have been accustomed in London. It was no wonder I lingered in Peking. Always there was something new to see, always there was something fresh to learn, and at any moment, within five minutes, I could step out into another world, the world of Marco Polo, the world the Jesuit Fathers saw when first the Western nations were beginning to realise there were any countries besides their own.

It is even possible to go to the theatre every night, but it is a Chinese theatre and that will go a long way. Nevertheless, I felt it was a thing I should like to see; so one evening two of my friends took me to the best theatre that was open. The best was closed for political reasons they said, because the new Government, not as sure of itself as it would like to be, did not wish the people to assemble together. This was a minor theatre, a woman's theatre; that is one where only women were the actors, quite a new departure in the Celestial world, for until about a year before the day of which I write, no woman was ever seen upon the stage, and her parts, as they were in the old days in Europe, were taken by men and boys. Even now, men and women never appear on the stage together, never, never do the sexes mingle in China, and the women who act take the very lowest place in the social scale.

One cold night in March three rickshaws put us down at an open doorway in the Chinese City outside the Tartar wall. The Chinese the greatest connoisseurs of pictures do not as yet think much of posters, though the British and American Tobacco Company is doing its best to educate them up to that level, so outside this theatre the door was not decorated with photographs of the lovely damsels to be seen within, clad in as few clothes as the censor will allow, but the intellects of the patrons were appealed to, and all around the doors were bright red sheets of paper, on which the delights offered for the evening were inscribed in characters of gold.

We went along a narrow passage with a floor of hard, beaten earth, and dirty whitewashed walls on either side, along such a passage I could imagine went those who first listened to the sayings of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The light was dim, the thrifty Chinaman was not going to waste the precious and expensive light of compressed gas where it was not really needed, and from behind the wall came the weird strains of Chinese music. There appeared to be only one door, and here sat a fat and smiling Chinese, who explained to my friends that by the rules of the theatre, the men and women were divided, and that I must go to the women's gallery. They demurred. It would be very dull for me, who could not understand a word of the language, to sit alone. Could no exception be made in my favour? The doorkeeper was courteous as only a Chinese can be, and said that for his part, he had no objection; but the custodian of the theatre, put there by the Government to ensure law and order, would object.

I wanted badly to stay with these men who could explain to me all that was going on, so we sent for the custodian, another smiling gentleman, not quite so fat, in the black and yellow uniform of the military police. He listened to all we had to say, sympathised, but declared that the regulations must be carried out. My friends put it to him that the regulations were archaic, and that it was high time they were altered. He smilingly agreed. They were archaic, very; but then you see, they were the regulations. He was here to see that they were carried out, and he suggested, as an alternative, that we should take one of the boxes at the side. The question of sitting in front was dismissed, and we gave ourselves to the consideration of a box for which six dollars, that is twelve shillings English currency, or three dollars American, were demanded. We demurred, it seems you always question prices in China. We told the doorkeeper that the price was very high, and that as we were sitting where we did not wish to sit, he ought to come down. He did. Shades of Keith and Prowse! Two dollars!

We went up some steep and narrow steps of the most primitive order, were admitted to a large hall lighted by compressed gas—in Cambulac! here in the heart of an ancient civilisation—surrounded by galleries with fronts of a dainty lattice-work of polished wood, such as the Chinese employ for windows, and we took our places in a box, humbly furnished with bare benches and a wooden table. Just beneath us was the stage, and the play was in full swing—actors, property men, and orchestra all on at once. It was large and square, raised a little above the people in the body of the hall and surrounded by a little low screen of the same dainty lattice-work. At the back was the orchestra, composed only of men in ordinary coolie dress—dark blue cotton—with long queues. There were castanets, and a drum, cymbals, native fiddle, and various brazen instruments that looked like brass trays, and they all played untiringly, with an energy worthy of a better cause, and with the apparent intention—it couldn't have been so really—of drowning the actors. Yet taken altogether the result was strangely quaint and Eastern.

The entertainment consisted of a number of little plays lasting from half an hour to about an hour. There were never more than half a dozen people on the stage at once, very often only two in the play altogether, and what it was all about we could only guess after all, for even my friends, who could speak ordinary Chinese fluently, could not understand much that was said. Possibly this was because every actor, instead of using the ordinary conversational tone, adapted as we adapt it to the stage, used a high, piercing falsetto that was extremely unnatural, and reminded me of nothing on this earth that I know of except perhaps a pig-killing. Still even I gathered something of the story of the play as it progressed, for the gestures of these women, unlike their voices, were extremely dramatic, and some of the situations were not to be mistaken. Scenery was as it was in Shakespeare's day. It was understood. But for all the bare crudity, the dresses of the actors which belonged to a previous age, whether they were supposed to represent men or women, were most rich and beautiful. The general, with his hideously painted face and his long black beard of thread, wore a golden embroidered robe that must have been worth a small fortune; a soldier, apparently a sort of Dugald Dalgety, who pits himself against a scholar clad in modest dark colours, appeared in a blue satin of the most delicate shade, beautifully embroidered with gorgeous lotus flowers and palms; and the principal ladies, who were really rather pretty in spite of their highly painted faces and weird head-dresses, wore robes of delicate loveliness that one of my companions, whose business it was to know about such matters, told me must have been, like the general's, of great value. The comic servant or country man wore a short jumper and a piece of white paper and powder about his nose. It certainly did make him look funny. The dignified scholar was arrayed all in black, the soldier wore the gayest of embroidered silks and satins, the landlady of the inn or boarding-house, a pleasant, smiling woman with roses in her hair and tiny maimed feet, had a pattern of black lace-work painted on her forehead, and when the male characters had to be very fierce indeed, they wore long and flowing beards, beards to which no Chinaman, I fear me, can ever hope to attain, for the Chinaman is not a hairy man. When a gallant gentleman with tight sleeves which proclaimed him a warrior, and a long beard of bright red thread which made him a very fierce warrior indeed, snapped his fingers and lifted up his legs, lifted them up vehemently, you knew that he was getting over a wall or mounting his horse. You could take your choice. A mountain, the shady side of it, was represented by one panel of a screen which leaned drunkenly against a very ordinary chair, giving shelter to a very evil spirit with a dress that represented a leopard, and a face of the grimmest and most terrifying of those animals.

This was a play that required much property to be displayed, for a general with a face painted all black and white and long black beard, with his army of five, took refuge behind a stout city wall that was made of thin blue cotton stuff supported on four bamboo poles, and this convenient wall marched on to the stage in the hands of a couple of stout coolies. A wicked mountain spirit outside the walls did terrible things. Ever and again flashes of fire burst out after his speech, and I presume you were not supposed to see the coolie who manipulated that fire, though he stood on the stage as large as any actors in the piece.

It is hard, too, talking in that high falsetto against the shrieking, strident notes of the music, so naturally the actors constantly required a little liquid refreshment, and an attendant was prompt in offering tea in tiny round basins; and nobody saw anything incongruous in his standing there with the teapot handy, and in slack moments taking a sip himself.

The fun apparently consisted in repartee, and every now and then, the audience, who were silent and engrossed, instead of applauding spontaneously, ejaculated, as if at a word of command, “Hao!” which means “Good!”

That audience was the best-behaved and most attentive I have ever seen. It consisted mostly of men, as far as I could see, of the middle class. They were packed close together, with here and there a little table or bench among them; and up and down went vendors of apples, oranges, pieces of sugar-cane, cakes and sweetmeats.

There were also people who supplied hot, damp towels. A man stood here and there in the audience, and from the outer edge of the theatre, came hurtling to him, over the heads of the people, a bundle of these towels. For a cent or so apiece he distributed them, the members of the audience taking a refreshing wipe of face and head and hands and handing the towels back. When the purveyor of the towels had used up all his stock, and got them all back again, he tied them up into a neat bundle, and threw them back the way they had come, receiving a fresh stock in return. Never did a bundle of towels fail in reaching its appointed place, and scores of cents must the providers have pocketed. For the delight of ventilation is not appreciated in China, and to say that theatre was stuffy is a mild way of putting it. The warm wet towel must have given a sort of refreshment. They offered us some up in the dignified seclusion of our box, but we felt we could sustain life without washing our faces with doubtful towels during the progress of the entertainment. Tea was brought, too, excellent Chinese tea, and I drank it with pleasure. I drink Chinese tea without either milk or sugar as a matter of course now; but that night at the Chinese theatre I was only trying it and wondering could I drink it at all.

Opposite us was the women's gallery, full of Chinese and Manchu ladies, with high headdresses and highly painted faces. The Chinese ladies often paint their faces, but their attempts at decoration pale before that of the Manchus, who put on the colour with such right goodwill that every woman when she is dressed in her smartest, looks remarkably like a sign-board. The wonder is that anyone could possibly be found who could admire the unnatural effect. Someone, I suppose, there is, or it would not be done, but no men went near the women's gallery that evening. It would have been the grossest breach of decorum for a man to do any such thing, and the painted ladies drank their tea by themselves.

Somewhere about midnight, earlier than usual, consequent, I imagine, upon the disturbed state of the country, the entertainment ended with a perfect crash of music, and the most orderly audience in the world went out into the streets of the Chinese City, into the clear night. Only in very recent years, they tell me, have the streets of Peking been lighted. Formerly the people went to bed at dusk, but they seem to have taken very kindly to the change, for the streets were thronged. There were people on foot, people in rickshaws, people in the springless Peking carts, and important personages with outriders and footmen in the glass broughams beloved by the Chinese; and there were the military police everywhere, now at night with rifles across their shoulders. Here, disciplining this most orderly crowd, they struck me as being strangely incongruous. I wondered at those police then, and I wonder still. What are they for? Whatever the reason, there they were at every few yards. Never have I had such a strange home-coming from a theatre. Down on us forty feet high frowned the walls built in past ages, we crossed the Beggars' Bridge of glorious marble, we went under the mighty archway of the Chien Men, and we entered the Legation Quarter guarded like a fortress, and I went to bed meditating on the difference between a Chinese play and a modern musical comedy. They have, I fancy, one thing in common. They are interesting enough to see for the first time, but a little of them goes a long way.

I went to bed under a clear and cloudless sky, and the next morning, to my astonishment, it was raining. I have, of course, seen rain many, many times, and many, many times have I seen heavier rain than fell all this April day in Peking, but never before, not even in my own country where rain is the great desideratum, have I seen rain better worth recording.

It was indeed this April day rain at last!

“To everything there is a season,” says the preacher, and the spring is the time for a little rain in Northern China. In England people suppose it rains three hundred and sixty days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, except in Leap Year when we manage to get in another rainy day, but as a matter of fact, I believe the average is about one hundred and fifty wet days in the year, with a certain number more in which clouds in the sky blot out the sunshine. In the north of China, on the other hand, there had been, to all intents and purposes, no cloud in the sky since the summer rains of 1912, till this rain in April which I looked out upon. Is not rain like that worth recording? Still more do I feel it is worth recording when I think of what that day's rain, that seemed so little to me, meant to millions of people. All through the bitter cold winter the country lay in the grip of the frost, but the sun reigned in a heaven of peerless blue, and the light was brilliant with a brilliancy that makes the sunshine of a June day in England a poor, pale thing. The people counted for their crops on the rain that would come in due season, the rain in the spring. March came with the thaw, and the winds from the north lifted the loose soil into the air in clouds of dust. But March passed alternating brilliant sunshine and clouds of dust, and there was never a cloud in the sky, never a drop of moisture for the gasping earth. April came—would it go on like this till June? Rain that comes in due season is necessary to the crops that are the wealth, nay the very life of Northern China.

From the beams of the peasant's cottage hang the cobs of corn, each one counted; in jars or boxes is his little store of grain, millet—just bird-seed in point of fact—he has a few dried persimmons perhaps and—nothing else. Twice a day the housewife measures out the grain for the meal—she knows, the tiniest child in the household knows exactly how long it will last with full measure, how it may be spun out over a few more dreary, hunger-aching days, how then, if the rain has not come, if the crops have failed, famine will stalk in the land, famine, cruel, pitiless, and from his grip there is no escaping.

Think of it, as I did that April day in Peking, when I watched the rain pelting down. Think of the dumb, helpless peasant watching the cloudless blue sky and the steadily diminishing store of grain, watching, hoping, for the faintest wisp of white cloud that shall give promise of a little moisture. They tell me, those who know, that the Chinaman is a fatalist, that he never looks so far ahead, but do they not judge him with Western eyes? True he seldom complains, but he tills his fields so carefully that he must see in imagination the crops they are to produce, he must know, how can he help knowing, that if there be no harvest, there is an end to his home, his family, his children; that if perchance his life be spared, it will be grey and empty, broken, desolate, scarce worth living. Every scanty possession will have to be sold to buy food in a ruinously high market, even the loved children, and no one who has seen them together can doubt that the Chinese deeply love their children, must go, though for the little daughter whose destination will be a brothel of one of the great cities, but two dollars, four pitiful shillings, may be hoped for, and when that is eaten up, the son sold into slavery will bring very little more. To sell their children sounds terrible, but what can they do? Some must be sacrificed that the others may have a chance of life, and even if they are not sacrificed, their fate is to die slowly under the bright sky, in the relentless sunshine. This is the spectre that haunts the peasant. This is the thing that has befallen his fathers, that has befallen him, that may befall him again any year, that no care on his part can guard him from, that the clear sky for ever threatens.

“From plague, pestilence and famine, Good Lord deliver us.”

Does ever that Litany to the Most High go up in English cathedral with such prayerful fervour, such thorough realisation of what is meant by the supplication, as is in the heart of the peasant mother in China, carefully measuring out the grain for the meal. Only she would put it the other way. “F rom famine, and the plague and pestilence that stalk in the wake of the famine, oh pitiful, merciful God deliver us!”

And when I took all this in, when I heard men who had seen the suffering describe it, was it any wonder that I rejoiced at the dull grey sky, at the sound of the rain on the roof, at the water rushing down the gutters.

On the gently sloping hill-sides of Manchuria, where they grow the famous bean, the hill-sides that I had seen in their winter array, on the wide plains of Mongolia, where only the far horizon bounds the view, and you march on to a yet farther horizon where the Mongol tends his flocks and herds, and the industrious Chinaman, pushing out beyond the protecting wall, has planted beans and sown oats, in Honan, where the cotton and the maize and the kaoliang grow, all along the gardens and grain-fields of Northern China, had come the revivifying rain. The day before, under the blue sky, lay the bare brown earth, acres and acres, miles and miles of it, carefully tilled, nowhere in the world have I seen such carefully tilled land, full of promise, but of promise only, of a rich harvest. Then, not hoped for so late, a boon hardly to be prayed for, welcome as sunshine never was welcome, came the rain, six hours steady rain, and the spectre of famine, ever so close to the Chinese peasant, for a time drifted into the background with old, unhappy, long-forgotten things. Next morning on all the khaki-coloured country outside Peking was a tinge of green, and we knew that a bountiful harvest was ensured, knew that soon the country would be a beautiful emerald. The house-mother, the patient, uncomplaining, ignorant, Chinese house-mother, might fill her pot joyfully, the house-father might look at his little daughter, with the red thread twisted in her hair, and know, that for a year at least, she was safe in his sheltering arms, for the blessed rain had come, God given.

Peking in the rain is an uncomfortable place. It is built for the sunshine. The streets of the city were knee-deep in mud, the hu t'ungs were impassable for a man on foot unless he would be mud up to the knees, for there had been six hours solid downpour, and every moment it continued was worth pounds to the country. What was a twenty-five million loan with its heavy interest, against such a rain as this? More than one hundred thousand people were affected by the downpour, were glad and rejoicing that day at the good-fortune that had befallen them. This mass of human beings, at the very lowest computation had considerably more than twenty-five million pounds rained down upon it in the course of six hours. There came with that rain, that blurred the windows of my room, prosperity for the land, and, for a time at least, peace, for peace and good harvests in China are sometimes interchangeable terms. What did it matter to Northern China at that moment that the nations were bickering over the loan, that America was promising, Britain hesitating, Russia threatening? What did it matter whether Emperor, President, or Dictator, was in power? What did it matter that the national representatives hesitated to come to the capital? What did it matter what mistakes they made? What does the peasant tilling his field, the woman filling her cooking-pot know about these things? What do they care? A mightier factor than these, a greater power than man's had stepped in. God be thanked, in China that day it rained.