Hsiung Hsi Ling, Premier of China—Preparations for a call—A cart of State—An elderly mule—Waiting in the gate—The yam en—Mr Wu, the secretary—“Hallo, Missus!”—The power of a Chinese General—“Plenty robber, too much war”—Ceremonial farewell—A cultivated gentleman—Back to past ages for the night.

Up in Jehol they called the General commanding the three thousand odd troops the Tartar General, why I do not know, but it seems it is the title by which he is commonly known among the country people. He was Hsiung Hsi Ling, the man who is now Premier of China, and to him I brought letters of introduction so that I might be admitted to the Imperial Palace and Park and be treated as a person of consequence, otherwise I imagine a foreigner and a woman at that would have but small chance of respect in China. The Chinese letters lifted me to the rank of the literati, which must have been rather surprising to the Chinese, and these in English were such that I felt I must bear myself so as to live up to them.

The yamen was about five minutes' walk from the mission station, and in my ignorance I had thought I would stroll up some morning when I had recovered from the fatigues of the journey, but the missionaries, steeped in the lore of Chinese etiquette, declared such a proceeding was not suitable. A person of consequence, such as my letters proclaimed me, must bear herself more becomingly.

“Write and ask if ten o'clock on Tuesday morning will be a suitable time for you to call on the General, and send your letters by your servant. I dare say there will be somebody who can read them, though I am sure there will be nobody who can write an answer,” said the missionary. “The General's English-speaking secretary is away.”

Accordingly I sent off Tuan, who was more than sure that he was equal to the task, and he returned without a letter, as the missionary had prophesied, but saying: “She say all right.”

“And now you must have a cart,” said that missionary who was more worldly wise than I expected an enthusiast to be, “and don't get down till the yamen gates are opened. It would never do to wait with the servants in the gate.”

How Eastern it sounded! And then his wife came and superintended my toilet. The weather was warm, not to say hot, and I had thought a black and white muslin a most fitting and suitable array. But she was horrified at the effect. It was made in the mode of 1913, and did not suggest, as the long Manchu robes do, that I was built like a pyramid, broadest at the base.

“Haven't you got a coat to put over you,” said she looking round, and she seized my burberry which was the only thing in the shape of a wrap I had with me. Chinese ideas of propriety evidently influenced her very strongly.

I declined to wear a burberry on a hot day late in May, though all the Chinese Empire were shocked and horrified at my impropriety, but I sought round and found a lace veil which, draped over me, was a little suggestive of a bridal festivity, but apparently satisfied all conditions, and then I went out to mount into that abomination—a Peking cart. The Peking cart that is used for visiting has a little trestle carried over the back end of the shafts, which is taken down when the occupant wishes to mount and dismount, so I got into the seat of honour, the most uncomfortable seat well under the tilt, and Tuan, glorious in a long black silk brocade robe, his queue newly oiled and plaited, and a big straw hat upon his head, climbed on to the tail of the shaft, and the carter, dressed in the ordinary blue of his class, with the ordinary rag over his head to keep off the dust, walked beside the most venerable white mule I have ever come across. I don't know whether aged animals are held in respect in China, I'm afraid not. The poor old thing had great deep hollows over his eyes. I suspect Tuan had got him cheap, because the cart was respectable, and he had been good once—of course he would never have let me lose face—and then he made me pay full price, a whole fivepence I think it came to.

“That's a very old mule, Tuan,” I said.

“Yes,” he assented, “very old, she forty,” which was certainly more than I had reckoned him. I afterwards came to the conclusion he meant fourteen.

What Tuan was there for, I certainly don't know, except to carry my card-case, which I was perfectly capable of carrying myself.

We went out into the dusty, mud-coloured street, and along between mud-coloured walls of the dullest, most uninteresting description, and presently we arrived at the yamen gates, and here it was evident that Tuan, who had been so important all across the mountains, was now quite out of his depth.

“Cart no can go,” said he. “Missie get out.”

I was prepared for that. “No,” I said very important for once in my life, “I wait till someone comes.”

The yamen entrance was divided into three, as all Chinese entrances seem to be, and over it were curved tiled roofs with a little colouring, faded and shabby, about them; all of it was badly in need of repair, and on the fast-closed gates in the middle were representations of some demon apparently in a fit, but his aspect was a little spoiled by the want of a fresh coat of paint. The two little gates at either side were open, and here clustered Chinese soldiers in khaki, and men in civilian dress of blue cotton, and all stared at the foreign woman who was not a missionary, in the cart; that is the rude ones stared, and the polite ones looked uncomfortably out of the corners of their eyes. A Chinaman's politeness in this respect always ends by making me uncomfortable. A good, downright stare that says openly: “I am taking you in with all my eyes,” I can stand, but the man who looks away and down and out of the corners of his eyes gets on my nerves in no time.

However, this time I had not long to wait. After a minute or two out came a messenger, a Chinese of the better class, for he was dressed in a bright blue silk coat and petticoats, with a black sleeveless jacket over it, and the gates at his command, to my boy's immense astonishment, opened, and my cart rumbled into the first courtyard. We went on into a second—bare, ugly courtyards they were, without a flower or a tree or any green thing to rest the eye upon—and then I got down as there came to meet me a small bare-headed man without a queue, and his thick black hair apparently cut with a saw and done with a fork. He wore an ill-fitting suit of foreign clothes, and about his neck, instead of a collar, one of those knitted wraps an Englishwoman puts inside her coat when the weather is cold. On his feet were the white socks and heelless slippers of the Chinese. Instead of the dignified greeting the first man had given me he remarked genially, and offhandedly: “Hallo, Missus!” and he did it with a certain confidence, as if he really would show the numerous bystanders that he knew how to receive a lady.

Through one shabby courtyard after another, all guarded by soldiers in khaki, he led me to the presence of the Tartar General, Hsiung Hsi Ling, the great man who had been Minister of Finance and who now held military command over the whole of that part of China, independent even of the Viceroy of the Province of Chihli. Those who told me made a great point of that independence; but in China it seems that a General with troops at his command always is independent, not only of the Viceroy of the Province in which he is stationed, but of anyone else in authority. The President himself would treat him with great respect so long as he had troops at his back. He is, in fact, entirely independent. If the central authorities give him money to pay his troops, well and good, he holds himself at their command, if they do not, then he is quite likely to sympathise with his men, and become not only a danger to the community among whom he is stationed, but to the Government as well. It is hardly likely yet in China, that a General popular with his troops can be degraded or dismissed. He can only be got rid of by offering him something better.

Here I found none of the pomp and magnificence I had expected to find about an all-powerful Oriental. We went into a room floored with stone, after the Chinese fashion, and furnished with a couple of chairs, and through that into a plain, smallish room, with the usual window of dainty lattice-work covered with white paper. All down the centre of it ran a table like a great dining-table, covered, as if to emphasise the likeness, with a white cloth. I felt as if I had come in at an inopportune moment, before the table had been cleared away. Seated at this table, with his back to the window, was the General. He rose as I entered and came forward, kindly and considerately, to meet me—a man of middle height, younger than I expected, for he hardly looked forty. There was not a thread of white in his coal-black hair, but he had some hair on his face—a moustache and the scanty beard that is all the Chinese can produce—so he was evidently of ripe years, well past middle age. He wore a uniform of khaki, as simple and devoid of ornament as that of one of his own soldiers; his thick black hair was cut short and he had a clever, kindly face. Though he could understand no English, he looked at the foreign woman pleasantly, and as if he were glad to see her. He went back to his chair, and I was seated at his right hand, while his secretary, and very inadequate interpreter, sat on his left. An attendant, looking like an ordinary coolie, brought in tea in three cups with handles and saucers, foreign fashion, and the interview began.

I have been told that a grave and unsmiling demeanour is the proper thing to bring to a Chinese interview; and if so I failed lamentably to come up to the correct standard. But since the interpreter knew even less English than Tuan, whom I had left outside, there was really little else to do but smile and look pleasant. My host certainly smiled many times. I complimented him on the beauty of his country and then I asked permission, that is to say his protection, to go on to Lamamiao, or as it is called on the maps, Dolnor. Goodness knows why I asked. It would have meant two or three weeks at least in that awful Peking cart, but I appear to be so constituted that, when I am within range of a place, it would seem like missing my opportunities not to try and get there. I don't know what there is to see at Dolnor, but it is up on the Mongolian plateau, and there is a big lamaserie there and a living Buddha, that is an incarnation of the Buddha. The one who is there at present may be very holy as to one part of him, but the earthly part requires plenty of drink, I am told, and the caresses of many women to make this world tolerable. However, I was not to see him. The General and his secretary might not have understood much, but they did understand what I wanted then, and they were emphatic that I could not go. The General looked at his secretary and then at me, and explained at length, and he must have thought that the English language was remarkable for its brevity, for I was curtly informed:

“No can go. Plenty robber. Too much war.”

I had been threatened with robbers before, but not by an important General, and this time I felt I had better take heed, besides there was always the consolatory thought that, if I did not go, I need not ride any more in a Peking cart. Then I asked permission to visit the Palace and Park.

“No can do one time,” said the interpreter. “How many day you want go?”

Somehow, though I had come all this way to see it, I have a rooted objection to sightseeing. To get a ticket to go into a place takes away the charm; still as I was about it, I thought I would go as often as I could, so I said I would like to go on five days. The missionaries, though they had been here for six years, had never yet set foot inside that Park; to go required a permit from the authorities, and it was their idea to ask nothing from those authorities that they could possibly avoid. They would certainly have thought it wicked to ask for anything for their own pleasure. I did not suffer from any such ideas. As the General was bent on being civil to me I thought I might as well say I would like to take my friends in, and as we could not go without proper attendants—I who come from a country where I have blacked my own boots, cooked the family dinner, and ironed my husband's shirts many a time—I asked for and got about thirty tickets. I've got some of them still. Then I drank a cup of very excellent tea, and before five minutes were up rose and made my adieux. Brevity, I had been instructed, was the soul of courtesy in a Chinese interview.

The Tartar General saw me through two doors, which I believe was a high honour, and due to my having been introduced as a learned doctor. The correct thing is to protest all the while and beg your host not to come any farther, but I am really too Western in my ideas and it seems silly. Either he wants to come, or he doesn't, in any case what does it matter, and so I fear me, I was not vehement enough in my protestations of unworthiness. The secretary conducted me to my cart, where a subdued and awed servant awaited my arrival with a new and exalted idea of his Missie's importance. Tuan had magnified my importance, I fancy, for his own sake. He was serving a woman—yes, but she was a rich, generous, and important woman, but he had never, at the bottom of his heart, really dreamt that she could go through the yamen gate in a cart, that she could sit down beside the Tartar General, that she could get many tickets to go inside grounds forbidden to all the Chinese round about. I have not the slightest doubt all the details of the interview reached him before I came out, brief as my visit had been, and he helped me into my cart with, I felt, more deference and less make-believe than was usual. It made me smile a little to myself, but I think it was Tuan who really got most satisfaction out of that visit, though he had not seen the great man.

I had been comparing China to Babylon. I came away from the General's presence with the feeling that a Babylonish gentleman was truly charming—just like a finished product of my own time. Probably he was. But there were other sides to Babylon, as I was reminded that night. It is well to know all sides. When I had said good night and gone to bed, there burst on my ears a loud beating of gongs, and the weird war-song I had found so haunting the night before. The soldiers were stimulating their courage for the fighting in Mongolia. I wonder if the Babylonish soldiery sang so before they marched down upon Jerusalem. Then there came the watchman's gong, and the howl of the wonks that prowled about the town. I was back in past ages, and as I lay there in the darkness I wondered how I had ever had the temerity even to contemplate a visit to Lamamiao, and whether I would ever have the courage necessary to get back to Peking by myself. Luckily the fears of the dark are generally dispersed by the morning sunlight. At least they are with me, or I should never dare go travelling in remote places at all.