The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the
color of
new bronze.
I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
is made visible.
Who shall read me your hand?
You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like
the
hand of a woman and the paw
of a chimpanzee.
It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in
pigment
by a fashionable portrait
painter. The tapering
fingers bend backward.
Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise
it
with infinite daintiness,
like a woman under the
eyes of her lover. The
long line of your curved
nail is fastidiousness made
flesh.
Very skilful is your hand.
With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable
suggestion,
glints of hidden beauty.
With a little
tool it can carve strange
dreams in ivory and
milky jade.
And cruel is your hand.
With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
exquisite tortures, eternities
of incredible pain,
that Torquemada never glimpsed.
And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of
touch.
Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly
it can
glide over golden thighs....
Bilitis had not
such long nails.
Who can read me your hand?
In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically
from
the cigarette between your
fingers which are the
color of new bronze.
The room is full of strange shadows.
I am afraid of your hand....
From
the
Interior
Cormorants
The boats of your masters are black;
They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like
the
canals on which they float
they give forth an evil
smell.
On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side
over
the scummy water—you
who should be savage
and untamed, who should ride
on the clean breath
of the sea and beat your pinions
in the strong
storms of the sea.
Yet you are not held.
Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
lurching and half asleep.
Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring,
so
that you may swallow only
small things, such as
your masters desire.
Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
At the word of your masters the parted waters will
close over you and in your
ears will be the gurgling
of yellow streams.
Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
you will pounce on the silver
shadow....
Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
struggling prey,
And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
throats, will take from you
the catch, giving in its
place a puny wriggler which
can pass the gates of
straw.
Such is your servitude.
Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
Lazily you preen your great
wings, eagle wings,
built for the sky;
And you yawn....
Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in
inland
filth!
You grow lousy like your lords,
For you have forgotten the sea.
Wusih
You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
On your head is a domed cap of black satin and your
supple hands with their long
nails are piously
folded.
You rock to and fro rhythmically.
Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal monosyllables,
flows on steadily, monotonously,
like the
flowing of water and the flowering
of thought.
You are chanting, it seems, of the pious conduct of
man
in all ages,
And I know you for a scoundrel.
None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable,
and your voice pleasant.
I listen attentively....
Wusih
In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face
the target
for many eyes.
The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
their faces no lamp burns;
only their eyes glow
faintly with a reflected light.
For their eyes are on his face.
It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under
a sun
of bronze.
The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his
cheek and jaw. His eyes
cut upward from a slender
nose, and his quick mouth
moves sharply out
and in.
Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and
full of guile. When he
draws back the bow of
his lips his face is like
a mask of lacquer, set with
teeth of pearl, fantastic,
terrible....
What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?
Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a
scholar to his doom?
Is an unfilial son tortured
of devils? Or does a
decadent queen sport with
her eunuchs?
I cannot tell.
The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes
burn dully with a reflected
light.
I shall never know.
I am alien ... alien.
Nanking
The Second Well under Heaven lies at the foot of the
Sacred Mountain.
Perhaps the well is sacred because it is clean; or
perhaps
it is clean because it is
sacred.
I cannot tell.
At the bottom of the well are coppers and coins with
square holes in them, thrown
thither by devout
hands. They gleam enticingly
through the shallow
water.
The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous
faces above the coping as
my copper falls
slantwise to rest.
Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
It is a very sacred well.
Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
hungry....
Then the luck will be his!
The Village of the Mud Idols
In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god
who
has grown old.
His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
man who made him has forgotten
him.
Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands.
His
eyebrows and his silken beard
are scarlet as the
hope that built him.
The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears
itself
majestically, but thread by
thread time eats its
scales away,
And man who made him has forgotten him.
For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice
and tea, stored in his anteroom;
For priests the busy spiders hang festoons between
his
fingers, and nest them in
his yellow nails.
And darkness broods upon him.
The veil that hid the awful face of godhead from the
too impetuous gaze of worshippers
serves in decay
to hide from deity the living
face of man,
So god no longer sees his maker.
Let us drop the curtain and be gone!
I am old too, here in eternity.
Pa-tze-kiao
The Bridge of the Eight Scholars spans the canal narrowly.
On the gray stone of its arch are carvings in low
relief,
and the curve of its span
is pleasing to the eye.
No one knows how old is the Bridge of the Eight
Scholars.
In our house-boat we pass under it. The boatman
with the rat-like face twists
the long broken-backed
oar, churning the yellow water,
and we creep forward
steadily.
On the bridge the village is assembled. Foreign
devils
are a rarity.
The gold-brown faces are not unfriendly, merely curious.
They peer in rows over the
rail with grunts
of nasal interest.
Tentatively, experimentally, as we pass they spit
down
upon us. Not that they
wish us ill, but it can be
done, and the temptation is
too great.
We retire into the house-boat.
The roof scrapes as we pass under the span of the
Bridge of the Eight Scholars.
Pa-tze-kiao
(The articles sold here are to be burned at funerals for the use of the dead in the spirit world.)
The master of the shop is a pious man, in good odor
with the priests.
He is old and honorable and his white moustache
droops below his chin.
Mencius, I think, looked so.
The shop behind him is a mimic world, a world
of pieties and shams—the
valley of remembrance—the
dwelling place of the unquiet
dead.
Here on his shelves are ranged the splendor and the
panoply of life, silk in smooth
gleaming rolls, silver
in ingots, carving and embroidery
and jade, a
scarlet bearer-chair, a pipe
for opium....
Whatever life has need of, it is here,
And it is for the dead.
Whatever life has need of, it is here. Yet it
is here in
sham, in effigy, in tortured
compromise.
The dead have need of silk. Yet silk is dear,
and
there are living backs to
clothe.
The rolls are paper.... Do not look too close.
The dead I think will understand.
The carvings, too, the bearer-chair, the jade—yes,
they are paper; and the shining
ingots, they are
tinsel.
Yet they are made with skill and loving care!
And if the priest knows—surely he must
know!—
when they are burned they’ll
serve the dead as
well as verities.
So living mouths can feed.
The master of the shop is a pious man. He has
attained
much honor and his white moustache
droops
below his chin.
“Such an one” he says “I burned
for my own father.
And such an one my son will burn for me.
For I am old, and half my life already dwells among
the dead.”
And, as he speaks, behind him in the shop I feel the
presence of a hovering host,
the myriads of the
immortal dead, the rulers
of the spirit in this
land....
For in this kingdom of the dead they who are living
cling with fevered hands to
the torn fringes of the
mighty past. And if they
fail a little, compromise....
The dead I think will understand.
Soochow
The feet of my servant thump on the floor. Thump,
they go, and thump—dully,
deformedly.
My servant has shown me her feet.
The instep has been broken upward into a bony cushion.
The big toe is pointed as
an awl. The small
toes are folded under the
cushioned instep. Only
the heel is untouched.
The thing is white and bloodless with the pallor of
dead flesh.
But my servant is quite contented.
She smiles toothlessly and shows me how small are
her
feet, her “golden lilies.”
Thump, they go, and thump!
Wusih
So this is the wedding feast!
The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded,
filled
with small tables, filled
with many human bodies.
About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp
colors; above our heads hang
innumerable gaudy
lanterns of wood and paper.
We sit in furs,
The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride
martyrs among us. She
is clad in scarlet satin,
heavily embroidered with gold.
On her head is
an edifice of scarlet and
pearls.
For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest.
The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial
rites. Her eyes are closed,
hidden behind her
curtain of strung beads; for
three days she will
not open them. She has
never seen the bridegroom.
At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She
neither
eats nor speaks.
Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of
curious faces, lookers-on—children
and half-grown
boys, beggars and what-not—the
gleanings
of the streets.
They are quiet but they watch hungrily.
To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains
of the bed, they will still
be watching
hungrily....
Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward
in my consciousness.
This is the marriage
at Cana.... I am feasting
with the Caliph
at Bagdad.... I am the
wedding guest who
beat his breast....
My heart is troubled.
What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man
and man?
Wusih
Christ! What is that—that—Thing? Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think.
Across the narrow street it lies, the street where
little
children are.
It is rocking its body back and forth, back and forth,
ingratiatingly, in the noisome
filth.
Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of
flesh, on one the remnant
of a foot. The wounds
are not new wounds, but they
are open and they
fester. There are flies
on them.
The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.
Professionally maimed, I think. Christ!
Hwai Yuen
It is going to be hot here.
Already the sun is treacherous and a dull mugginess
is
in the air. I note that
winter clothes are shedding
one by one.
In the market-place sits a coolie, expanding in the
warmth.
He has opened his ragged upper garments and his
bronze body is naked to the
belt.
He is examining it minutely, occasionally picking
at
something with the dainty
hand of the Orient.
If he had ever seen a zoological garden I should say
he was imitating the monkeys
there.
As he has not, I dare say the taste is ingrained.
At all events it is going to be hot here.
The Village of the Mud Idols
About the city where I dwell, guarding it close, runs
an embattled wall.
It was not new I think when Arthur was a king, and
plumed knights before a British
wall made brave
clangor of trumpets, that
Launcelot came forth.
It was not new I think, and now not it but chivalry
is
old.
Without, the wall is brick, with slots for firing,
and it
drops straightway into the
evil moat, where offal
floats and nameless things
are thrown.
Within, the wall is earth; it slants more gently down,
covered with grass and stubbly
with cut weeds.
Below it in straw lairs the
beggars herd, patiently
whining, stretching out their
sores.
And on the top a path runs.
As I walk, lifted above the squalor and the dirt,
the
timeless miracle of sunset
mantles in the west,
The blue dusk gathers close
And beauty moves immortal through the land.
And I walk quickly, praying in my heart that beauty
will defend me, will heal
up the too great wounds
of China.
I will not look—to-night I will not look—where
at
my feet the little coffins
are,
The boxes where the beggar children lie, unburied
and unwatched.
I will not look again, for once I saw how one was
broken, torn by the sharp
teeth of dogs. A little
tattered dress was there,
and some crunched
bones....
I need not look. What can it help to look?
Ah, I am past!
And still the sunset glows.
The tall pagoda, like a velvet flower, blossoms against
the sky; the Sacred Mountain
fades, and in the
town a child laughs suddenly.
I will hold fast to beauty! Who am I, that I
should
die for these?
I will go down. I am too sorely hurt, here on
the
city wall.
Wusih
Strangely the sight of you moves me.
I have no standard by which to appraise you; the outer
shell of you is all I know.
Yet irresistibly you draw me.
Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
satin. The fit is scrupulous,
yet no woman’s figure
is revealed. You are
decorously shapeless.
Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.
Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony,
bound
at the neck in an adamantine
knot, in which dull
pearls are encrusted.
Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
blush pink, textured like
ripe fruit.
Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China.
Your eyes—your eyes are witchery!
The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply
on
the iris, and when you smile
the corners twinkle
upward.
It is your eyes, I think, that move me.
They are so bright, so black!
They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of
a
squirrel, and like the eyes
of a squirrel they have
no depth behind them.
They are windows opening on a world as small as your
bound feet, a world of ignorances,
and vacuities,
and kitchen-gods.
And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile
you
are the woman-spirit, adorable.
I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of
you
moves me.
I believe that I shall dream of you.
Pa-tze-kiao
We met him in the runway called a street, between
the
warrens known as houses.
He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds,
his continental hat, and small
round glasses were
alien here.
About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.
He greeted us gladly. “It is good,”
he said in his
soft French, “to see
my foreign friends again.
You find our city dirty I am sure. On every stone
dirt grows in China.
How the people crowd! The street is choked. No
jee ba! Go away,
curious ones! The ladies
cannot breathe....
No, my people are not clean. They do not understand,
I think. In Belgium where
I studied—
... Yes, I was studying
in Bruges, studying
Christianity, when the great
war came.
We, you know, love peace. I could not see....
“So I came home.
“But China is very dirty.... Our priests
are rascals,
and the people ... I
do not know.
“Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere?
The
Greeks died too—and
they were clean.”
Behind his glasses his slant eyes were troubled.
“I do not know,” he said.
Wusih
It stands before my neighbor’s door, between
him and
the vegetable garden and the
open toilet pots and
the dirty canal.
Not that he wishes to hide these things.
On the contrary, he misses the view.
But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
demons of the earth and air,
foxes and shui-mang
devils, and only the priest
knows what beside.
A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
silk-worms die and his children
go blind and he
gets the devil-sickness.
So living is difficult.
Wusih
Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.
Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
of green; and lower down the
flat brown plain, the
floor of earth, stretches
away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut
their
slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.
Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity—a swift,
white peace,
a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place.
This
is the end that has no end.
Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
before the Nazarene, he stepped,
with me, thus
into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
says: On this spot
once Confucius stood and
felt the smallness of the
world below.
The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.
But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
white peace, this stinging
exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to
the
rhythm of the daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
always I shall feel time ravel
thin about me;
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.
Tai Shan
He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
with fur. Above his velvet
shoes his trim, bound
ankles twinkle pleasantly.
His nails are of the longest.
Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu!
In one slim hand—the ultimate punctilio—dangles
a bamboo cage, wherein a small
brown bird sits
with a face of perpetual surprise.
Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
both fashion and a tender
heart.
Does not a bird need an airing?
Wusih
The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
glow; gigantic machinery clanks,
and in living
iridescent streams the white-hot
slag pours out.
This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
in the east, a graft but not
a growth.
And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar
way
between the dynamos, the cars,
the piles of rails—
you too are of to-morrow,
grafted with an alien
energy.
You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
tongue as one who knows; you
talk casually of
Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....
You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
population of the British
Isles.
Almost you might be one of us.
And then I ask:
“How much do those poor coolies earn a day,
who
take the place of carts?”
You shrug and smile.
“Eighteen coppers. Something less than
eight cents
in your money. They are
not badly paid. They
do not die.”
Again I ask:
“And is it true that you’ve a Yamen, a
police judge,
all your own?”
Another shrug and smile.
“Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder.
For
larger crimes we pass the
offender over to the
city courts.”
* * * * *
“Conditions” you explain as we sit later
with a cup
of tea, “conditions
here are difficult.”
Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
You are fighting, I can see,
upheld by that strange
graft of western energy.
Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
Your voice is weary.
“There are no skilled laborers” you say,
“Among
the owners no cooeperation.
It is like—like working in a nightmare,
here in China.
It drags at me, it drags"....
You bow me out with great civility.
The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
glow, gigantic machinery clanks
and in living
iridescent streams the white-hot
slag pours out.
Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
leprous hands. A woman
sits sorting hog-bristles;
she coughs and sobs.
The stench is sickening.
To-morrow! did they say?
Hanyang
The toilet pots are very loud today.
It is spring and the warmth is highly favorable to
fermentation.
Some odors are unbelievable.
At the corner of my street is an especially fragrant
reservoir. It is three
feet in diameter, set flush
with the earth, and well filled.
Above it squats a venerable Chinaman with a face such
as Confucius must have worn.
His silk skirt is gathered daintily about his waist,
and
his rounded rear is suspended
in mid-air over the
broken pottery rim.
He gazes at me contemplatively as I pass with eyes
in
which the philosophy of the
ages has its dwelling.
I wonder whether he too feels the spring.
Wusih
In all the city where I dwell two spaces only are
wide
and clean.
One is the compound about the great church of the
mission within the wall; the
other is the courtyard
of the great factory beyond
the wall.
In these two, one can breathe.
And two sounds there are, above the multitudinous
crying
of the city, two sounds that
recur as time recurs—the
great bell of the mission
and the
whistle of the factory.
Every hour of the day the mission bell strikes, clear,
deep-toned—telling
perhaps of peace.
And in the morning and in the evening the factory
whistle blows, shrill, provocative—telling
surely
of toil.
Now, when the mulberry trees are bare and the wintry
wind lifts the rags of the
beggars, the day shift
at the factory is ten hours,
and the night shift
is fourteen.
They are divided one from the other by the whistle,
shrill, provocative.
The mission and the factory are the West. What
they are I know.
And between them lies the Orient—struggling
and
suffering, spawning and dying—but
what it is
I shall never know.
Yet there are two clean spaces in the city where I
dwell,
the compound of the church
within the wall, and
the courtyard of the factory
beyond the wall.
It is something that in these two one can breathe.
Wusih
Mrs. Sung has a new kitchen-god.
The old one—he who has presided over the
household
this twelvemonth—has
returned to the
Celestial Regions to make
his report.
Before she burned him Mrs. Sung smeared his mouth
with sugar; so that doubtless
the report will be
favorable.
Now she has a new god.
As she paid ten coppers for him he is handsomely
painted and should be highly
efficacious.
So there is rejoicing in the house of Mrs. Sung.
Peking
Crepuscule
Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn
are the tiny footfalls of
the fox-maidens.
On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman
Kueh
Yuen drowned himself in the
river Mih-lo.
Since then twenty-three centuries have passed, and
the
mountains wear away.
Yet every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month,
the great Dragon Boats, gay
with flags and gongs,
search diligently in the streams
of the Empire
for the body of Kueh Yuen.
When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed
upon him posthumous decapitation,
so that
he walks for ever disgraced
among the shades.
While two ladies of the Imperial harem held before
him a screen of pink silk,
and a P’in Concubine
knelt with his ink-slab, Li
Po, who was very
drunk, wrote an impassioned
poem to the moon.
O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the
years have drunk you too.
Like this frail and melancholy rain is the memory
of
the Emperor Kuang-Hsue, and
of his sufferings at
the hand of Yehonala.
Yet under heaven was there found no one to avenge
him.
Now he has mounted the Dragon and has visited the
Nine Springs. His betrayer
sits upon the Dragon
Throne.
Yet among the shades may he not take comfort from
the presence of his Pearl
Concubine?
When he had tasted in a dream of the Ten Courts of
Purgatory, Doctor Tseng was
humbled in spirit,
and passed his life in piety
among the foot-hills.
At the Hour of the Horse avoid raising a roof-tree,
for by the trampling of his
hoofs it may
be beaten down;
And at the Hour of the cunning Rat go not near a
soothsayer, for by his cunning
he may mislead
the oracle, and the hopes
of the enquirer come
to naught.
China of the Tourists
This ricksha is more comfortable than some.
The springs are not broken, and the seat is covered
with a white cloth.
Also the runner is young and sturdy, and his legs
flash
pleasantly.
I am not ill at ease.
The runner interests me.
Between the shafts he trots easily and familiarly,
lifting
his knees prettily and holding
his shoulders
steady.
His hips are lean and narrow as a filly’s; his
calves
might have posed for Praxiteles.
He is a modern, I perceive, for he wears no queue.
Above a rounded neck rises a shock of hair the shade
of dusty coal. Each hair
is stiff and erect as a
brush bristle. There
are lice in them no doubt—
but then perhaps we of the
West are too squeamish
in details of this minor sort.
What interests me chiefly is the back of his ears.
Not
that they are extraordinary
as ears; it is their
very normality that touches
me. I find them
smaller than those of a horse,
but undoubtedly
near of kin.
There is no denying the truth of evolution;
Yet as a beast of burden man is distinctly inferior.
It is odd.
At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic,
seems not improbable, a fighting
dream.
Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man
I perceive it to be impossible—the
millennium
another million years away.
I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon.
I am sorry, but what would you?
One is what one is.
Hankow
Whence do you come, and whither make return, you
silent padding beasts?
Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall;
to
Kalgan—and beyond,
whither?...
Here in the city you are alien, even as I am alien.
Your sidling jaw, your pendulous neck—incredible—and
that slow smile about your
eyes and lip,
these are not of this land.
About you some far sense of mystery, some tawny
charm, hangs ever.
Silently, with the dignity of the desert, your caravans
move among the hurrying hordes,
remote and
slowly smiling.
But whence are you, and whither do you make return?
Over the mountain passes; through the Great Wall;
to
Kalgan—and beyond,
whither?...
Peking
He is not an old man, but he is lonely.
He who was born in the clash of a western city dwells
here, in this silent courtyard,
alone.
Seven servants he has, seven men-servants. They
move about quietly and their
slippered feet make
no sound. Behind their
almond eyes move green,
sidelong shadows, and their
limber hands are
never still.
In his house the riches of the Orient are gathered.
Ivory he has, carved in a thousand quaint, enticing
shapes—pleasant
to the hand, smooth with the
caressing of many fingers.
And jade is there, dark green and milky white, with
amber from Korea and strange
gems—beryl,
chrysoprase, jasper, sardonyx....
His lacquered shelves hold priceless pottery—peachblow
and cinnabar and silver grey—pottery
glazed like the new moon,
fired how long ago
for a moon-pale princess of
the East, whose very
name is dust!
In his vaults are incredible textures and colors that
vibrate like struck jade.
Stiff with gold brocade they are, or soft as the coat
of
a fawn—these sacred
robes of a long dead priest,
silks of a gold-skinned courtesan,
embroideries of
a lost throne.
When he unfolds them the shimmering heaps are like
living opals, burning and
moving darkly with the
warm breath of beauty.
And other priceless things the collector has, so that
in many days he could not
look upon them all.
Every morning his seven men-servants dress him, and
every evening they undress
him. Behind their
almond eyes move green sidelong
shadows.
In this silent courtyard the collector lives.
He is not an old man but he is lonely.
Peking
In the aisle of the cathedral it lies, an army rifle
of
the latest type.
It is laid on the black and white mosaic, between
the
carved oaken pews and the
strip of brown carpet
in the aisle.
A crimson light from the stained-glass window yonder
glints on the blue steel of
its barrel, and the
khaki of its shoulder-strap
blends with the brown
of the carpet.
The stiff backs of its owner and a hundred like him
are very still.
The vested choir chants prettily.
Then the bishop speaks:
“O God, who art the author of peace and lover
of
concord,... defend us thy
humble servants
in all assaults of our enemies.”
“Amen!” say the owners of the khaki backs.
The light has shifted a little. On the blue steel
barrel
of the rifle the glint is
turquoise now.
That will be from the robe of the shepherd in the
window
yonder, He of the quiet eyes....
Hong Kong
Up and down, up and down, paces the sentry.
He is dressed in a uniform of khaki and his socks
are
green. Over his shoulder
is slung a rifle, and
from his belt hang a pistol
and cartridge pouch.
He is, I think, Malay and Chinese mixed.
Behind him the rocky islands, hazed in blue, the yellow
sun-drenched water, the tropic
shore, pass as a
background in a dream.
He only is sweltering reality.
Yet he is here to guard against a nightmare, an
anachronism, something that
I cannot grasp.
He is guarding me from pirates.
Piracy! The very name is fantastic in my ears,
colored
like a toucan in the zoo.
And yet the ordinance is clear: “Four armed
guards,
strong metal grills behind
the bridge, the engine-room
enclosed—in case
of piracy.”
The socks of the sentry are green.
Up and down, up and down he paces, between the
bridge and the first of the
life-boats.
In my deck chair I grow restless.
Am I then so far removed from life, so wrapped in
cotton wool, so deep-sunk
in the soft lap of civilization,
that I cannot feel the cold
splash of truth?
It is a disquieting thought—for certainly
piracy seems
as fantastic as ever.
The socks of the sentry annoy me. They are too
green for so hot a day.
And his shoes squeak.
I should feel much cooler if he wouldn’t pace
so.
Piracy!
Somewhere on the River
Beneath the leaning, rain-washed sky this great white
circle—beautiful!
In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one
on
one toward Heaven. And
on each terrace the
white balustrade climbs in
aspiring marble, etched
in cloud.
And Heaven is very near.
For this is worship native as the air, wide as the
wind, and poignant as the
rain,
Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.
Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!
Peking
The coolies lift and strain;
My chair creaks rhythmically.
It is not yet morning and the live darkness pushes
about us, a greedy darkness
that has swallowed
even the stars.
In all the world there is left only my chair, with
the
tiny horn lantern before it.
There are also, it is true, the undersides of trees
in
the lantern-light and the
stony path that flows
past ceaselessly.
But these things flit and change.
Only I and the chair and the darkness are permanent.
We have been moving so since
time was in the
womb.
The seat of my chair is of wicker.
It is not unlike an invalid chair, and I, in it, am
swaddled
like an invalid, wrapped in
layer on layer
of coddling wool.
But there are no wheels to my chair. I ride on
the
steady feet of four queued
coolies.
The tramp of their lifted shoes is the rhythm of being,
throbbing in me as my own
heart throbs.
Save for their feet the bearers are silent. They
move
softly through the live darkness.
But now and
again I am shifted skilfully
from one shoulder to
the other.
The breath of the coolies is short.
They strain, and in spite of the cold I know they
are
sweating.
It is wicked of course!
My five dollars ought not to buy life.
But it is all they understand;
And even I am not precisely comfortable.
The darkness is thinning a little.
On either side loom featureless black hills, their
summits
sharp and ragged.
The Great Wall is somewhere hereabouts.
My chair creaks rhythmically.
In another year it will be day.
Ching-lung-chiao
Of what, I wonder, are you thinking?
It is something beyond my world I know, something
that I cannot guess.
Yet I wonder.
Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate
them with an automatic hatred—the
hatred of
the well-fed for the starved,
of the warlike for
the weak.
When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with
the drawing back of your silken
beard, your
black, black beard, from your
white teeth.
With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short
gutturals.
You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be
of them you are thinking.
Yet neither do you speak the tongue of the master
whom you serve.
No more do you know of us the “Masters”
than you
know of them the “dogs.”
We are above you, they below.
And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect
and splendid, lithe and male.
Your scarlet turban
frames your neat black head,
And you are thinking.
Or are you?
Perhaps we only are stung with thought.
I wonder.
Shanghai
Lotus,
So they called your name.
Yet the green swelling pod, the fruit-like seeds and
heavy flower, are nothing
like to you.
Rather, like a pitcher plant you are, for hope and
all
young wings are drowned in
you.
Your slim body, here in the cafe, moves brightly in
and out. Green satin,
and a dance, white wine
and gleaming laughter, with
two nodding earrings—these
are Lotus.
And in the painted eyes cold steel, and on the lips
a
vulgar jest;
Hands that fly ever to the coat lapels, familiar to
the wrists and to the hair
of men. These too
are Lotus.
And what more—God knows!
You too perhaps were stranded here, like these poor
homesick boys, in this great
catch-all where the
white race ends, this grim
Shanghai that like a
sieve hangs over filth and
loneliness.
You were caught here like these, and who could live,
young and so slender—in
Shanghai?
Green satin, and a gleaming throat, and painted eyes
of steel,
Hunter or hunted,
Peace be with you,
Lotus!
Shanghai
Two men sit in judgment on their fellows.
Side by side they sit, raised on the pedestal of the
law,
at grips with squalor and ignorance.
They are civilization—and they are very
grave.
One of them is of my own people, a small man, definite,
hard-featured, an accurate
weapon of small
calibre.
Of the other I cannot judge.
He is heavily built, and when he is still the dignity
of
the Orient is about him like
his robe. His head
is large and beautifully domed,
his hands tapering
and aristocratic.
When he speaks it is of subtleties.
But when he speaks his dignity drops from him.
His
eyes shift quickly from one
end of their little slit
to the other, his mouth, his
full brown mouth,
moves over-fast, his hands
flicker back and forth.
The courtroom is crowded with ominous yellow poverty.
The cases are of many sorts.
A woman, she of the little tortured feet and sullen
face,
has kidnapped a small boy
to sell. A man was
caught smuggling opium.
A tea-merchant, in
dark green silk, complains
Above them sit the two men, raised on the pedestal
of the law, judging their
fellows.
I turn to the man beside me, waiting his case.
“Tell me” I ask “of these men, which
is the better
judge?”
He answers carefully.
“The Chinaman is cleverer by half. He sees
where
the other is blind. But
Chinese magistrates are
bought, and this one sells
himself too cheap.”
“And the other?” I ask again.
“A good man, and quite honest. You see
he doesn’t
care.”
The judges put their heads together. They are
civilization
and they are very grave.
What, I wonder, is civilization?
Shanghai