From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel

When I went into the streets of Hong-Kong I stepped into thick slushy London mud of the kind that strikes chilly through the boot, and the rattle of innumerable wheels was as the rattle of hansoms. A soaking rain fell, and all the sahibs hailed 'rickshaws, – they call them 'ricks here, – and the wind was chillier than the rain. It was the first touch of honest weather since Calcutta. No wonder with such a climate that Hong-Kong was ten times livelier than Singapur, that there were signs of building everywhere, and gas-jets in all the houses, that colonnades and domes were scattered broadcast, and the Englishmen walked as Englishmen should – hurriedly and looking forward. All the length of the main street was verandahed, and the Europe shops squandered plate glass by the square yard. (Nota bene.– As in Simla so elsewhere: mistrust the plate glass shops. You pay for their fittings in each purchase.)

The same Providence that runs big rivers so near to large cities puts main thoroughfares close to big hotels. I went down Queen Street, which is not very hilly. All the other streets that I looked up were built in steps after the fashion of Clovelly, and under blue skies would have given the Professor scores of good photographs. The rain and the fog blotted the views. Each upward-climbing street ran out in white mist that covered the sides of a hill, and the downward-sloping ones were lost in the steam from the waters of the harbour, and both were very strange to see. "Hi-yi-yow," said my 'rickshaw coolie and balanced me on one wheel. I got out and met first a German with a beard, then three jolly sailor boys from a man-of-war, then a sergeant of Sappers, then a Parsee, then two Arabs, then an American, then a Jew, then a few thousand Chinese all carrying something, and then the Professor.

"They make plates – instantaneous plates – in Tokio, I'm told. What d'you think of that?" he said. "Why, in India, the Survey Department are the only people who make their own plates. Instantaneous plates in Tokio; think of it!"

I had owed the Professor one for a long time. "After all," I replied, "it strikes me that we have made the mistake of thinking too much of India. We thought we were civilised, for instance. Let us take a lower place. This beats Calcutta into a hamlet."

And in good truth it did, because it was clean beyond the ordinary, because the houses were uniform, three storied, and verandahed, and the pavements were of stone. I met one horse, very ashamed of himself, who was looking after a cart on the sea road, but upstairs there are no vehicles save 'rickshaws. Hong-Kong has killed the romance of the 'rickshaw in my mind. They ought to be sacred to pretty ladies, instead of which men go to office in them, officers in full canonicals use them; tars try to squeeze in two abreast, and from what I have heard down at the barracks they do occasionally bring to the guard-room the drunken defaulter. "He falls asleep inside of it, Sir, and saves trouble." The Chinese naturally have the town for their own, and profit by all our building improvements and regulations. Their golden and red signs flame down the Queen's Road, but they are careful to supplement their own tongue by well-executed Europe lettering. I found only one exception, thus: —

Fussing, Garpenter
And Gabinet Naktr
Has good Gabi
Nets tor Sale.

The shops are made to catch the sailor and the curio hunter, and they succeed admirably. When you come to these parts put all your money in a bank and tell the manager man not to give it you, however much you ask. So shall you be saved from bankruptcy.

The Professor and I made a pilgrimage from Kee Sing even unto Yi King, who sells the decomposed fowl, and each shop was good. Though it sold shoes or sucking pigs, there was some delicacy of carving or gilded tracery in front to hold the eye, and each thing was quaint and striking of its kind. A fragment of twisted roots helped by a few strokes into the likeness of huddled devils, a running knop and flower cornice, a dull red and gold half-door, a split bamboo screen – they were all good, and their joinings and splicings and mortisings were accurate. The baskets of the coolies were good in shape, and the rattan fastenings that clenched them to the polished bamboo yoke were whipped down, so that there were no loose ends. You could slide in and out the drawers in the slung chests of the man who sold dinners to the 'rickshaw coolies; and the pistons of the little wooden hand-pumps in the shops worked accurately in their sockets.

I was studying these things while the Professor was roaming through carved ivories, broidered silks, panels of inlay, tortoise-shell filigree, jade-tipped pipes, and the God of Art only knows what else.

"I don't think even as much of him (meaning our Indian craftsman) as I used to do," said the Professor, taking up a tiny ivory grotesque of a small baby trying to pull a water-buffalo out of its wallow – the whole story of beast and baby written in the hard ivory. The same thought was in both our minds; we had gone near the subject once or twice before.

"They are a hundred times his superior in mere idea – let alone execution," said the Professor, his hand on a sketch in woods and gems of a woman caught in a gale of wind protecting her baby from its violence.

"Yes; and don't you see that they only introduce aniline dyes into things intended for us. Whereas he wears them on his body whenever he can. What made this yellow image of a shopman here take delight in a dwarf orange tree in a turquoise blue pot?" I continued, sorting a bundle of cheap China spoons – all good in form, colour, and use. The big-bellied Chinese lanterns above us swayed in the wind with a soft chafing of oiled paper, but they made no sign, and the shopkeeper in blue was equally useless.

"You wanchee buy? Heap plitty things here," said he; and he filled a tobacco-pipe from a dull green leather pouch held at the mouth with a little bracelet of plasma, or it might have been the very jade. He was playing with a brown-wood abacus, and by his side was his day-book bound in oiled paper, and the tray of Indian ink, with the brushes and the porcelain supports for the brushes. He made an entry in his book and daintily painted in his latest transaction. The Chinese of course have been doing this for a few thousand years, but Life, and its experiences, is as new to me as it was to Adam, and I marvelled.

"Wanchee buy?" reiterated the shopman after he had made his last flourish.

"You," said I, in the new tongue which I am acquiring, "wanchee know one piecee information b'long my pidgin. Savvy these things? Have got soul, you?"

"Have got how?"

"Have got one piecee soul – allee same spilit? No savvy? This way then – your people lookee allee same devil; but makee culio allee same pocket-Joss, and not giving any explanation. Why-for are you such a horrible contradiction?"

"No savvy. Two dollar an' half," he said, balancing a cabinet in his hand. The Professor had not heard. His mind was oppressed with the fate of the Hindu.

"There are three races who can work," said the Professor, looking down the seething street where the 'rickshaws tore up the slush, and the babel of Cantonese, and pidgin went up to the yellow fog in a jumbled snarl.

"But there is only one that can swarm," I answered. "The Hindu cuts his own throat and dies, and there are too few of the Sahib-log to last for ever. These people work and spread. They must have souls or they couldn't understand pretty things."

"I can't make it out," said the Professor. "They are better artists than the Hindu, – that carving you are looking at is Japanese, by the way, – better artists and stronger workmen, man for man. They pack close and eat everything, and they can live on nothing."

"And I've been praising the beauties of Indian Art all my days." It was a little disappointing when you come to think of it, but I tried to console myself by the thought that the two lay so far apart there was no comparison possible. And yet accuracy is surely the touchstone of all Art.

"They will overwhelm the world," said the Professor, calmly, and he went out to buy tea.

Neither at Penang, Singapur, nor this place have I seen a single Chinaman asleep while daylight lasted. Nor have I seen twenty men who were obviously loafing. All were going to some definite end – if it were only like the coolie on the wharf, to steal wood from the scaffolding of a half-built house. In his own land, I believe, the Chinaman is treated with a certain amount of carelessness, not to say ferocity. Where he hides his love of art, the Heaven that made him out of the yellow earth that holds so much iron only knows. His love is for little things, or else why should he get quaint pendants for his pipe, and at the backmost back of his shop build up for himself a bowerbird's collection of odds and ends, every one of which has beauty if you hold it sufficiently close to the eye. It grieves me that I cannot account for the ideas of a few hundred million men in a few hours. This much, however, seems certain. If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have natives of India, and had given them one tithe of the cossetting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard of their interests and aspirations that we have given to India, we should long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the reward of, the richest land on the face of the earth. A pair of my shoes have been, oddly enough, wrapped in a newspaper which carries for its motto the words, "There is no Indian nation, though there exists the germs of an Indian nationality," or something very like that. This thing has been moving me to unholy laughter. The great big lazy land that we nurse and wrap in cotton-wool, and ask every morning whether it is strong enough to get out of bed, seems like a heavy soft cloud on the far-away horizon; and the babble that we were wont to raise about its precious future and its possibilities, no more than the talk of children in the streets who have made a horse out of a pea-pod and match-sticks, and wonder if it will ever walk. I am sadly out of conceit of mine own other – not mother – country now that I have had my boots blacked at once every time I happened to take them off. The blacker did not do it for the sake of a gratuity, but because it was his work. Like the beaver of old, he had to climb that tree; the dogs were after him. There was competition.

Is there really such a place as Hong-Kong? People say so, but I have not yet seen it. Once indeed the clouds lifted and I saw a granite house perched like a cherub on nothing, a thousand feet above the town. It looked as if it might be the beginning of a civil station, but a man came up the street and said, "See this fog It will be like this till September. You'd better go away." I shall not go. I shall encamp in front of the place until the fog lifts and the rain ceases. At present, and it is the third day of April, I am sitting in front of a large coal fire and thinking of the "frosty Caucasus" – you poor creatures in torment afar. And you think as you go to office and orderly-room that you are helping forward England's mission in the East. 'Tis a pretty delusion, and I am sorry to destroy it, but you have conquered the wrong country.

Let us annex China.

No. VIII

OF JENNY AND HER FRIENDS. SHOWING HOW A MAN MAY GO TO SEE LIFE AND MEET DEATH THERE. OF THE FELICITY OF LIFE AND THE HAPPINESS OF CORINTHIAN KATE. THE WOMAN AND THE CHOLERA.

"Love and let love, and so will I,
But, sweet, for me no more with you,
Not while I live, not though I die.
Good night, good-by!"

I am entirely the man about town, and sickness is no word for my sentiments. It began with an idle word in a bar-room. It ended goodness knows where. That the world should hold French, German, and Italian ladies of the ancient profession is no great marvel; but it is, to one who has lived in India, something shocking to meet again Englishwomen in the same sisterhood. When an opulent papa sends his son and heir round the world to enlarge his mind, does he reflect, I wonder, on the places into which the innocent strolls under the guidance of equally inexperienced friends? I am disposed to think that he does not. In the interest of the opulent papa, and from a genuine desire to see what they call Life, with a capital Hell, I went through Hong-Kong for the space of a night. I am glad that I am not a happy father with a stray son who thinks that he knows all the ropes. Vice must be pretty much the same all the round world over, but if a man wishes to get out of pleasure with it, let him go to Hong-Kong.

"Of course things are out and away better at 'Frisco," said my guide, "but we consider this very fair for the Island." It was not till a fat person in a black dressing-gown began to squeal demands for horrible stuff called "a bottle of wine" that I began to understand the glory of the situation. I was seeing Life. "Life" is a great thing. It consists in swigging sweet champagne that was stolen from a steward of the P. and O., and exchanging bad words with pale-faced baggages who laugh demnibly without effort and without emotion. The argot of the real "chippy" (this means man of the world —Anglice, a half-drunk youth with his hat on the back of his head) is not easy to come at. It requires an apprenticeship in America. I stood appalled at the depth and richness of the American language, of which I was privileged to hear a special dialect. There were girls who had been to Leadville and Denver and the wilds of the wilder West, who had acted in minor companies, and who had generally misconducted themselves in a hundred weary ways. They chattered like daws and shovelled down the sickly liquor that made the rooms reek. As long as they talked sensibly things were amusing, but a sufficiency of liquor made the mask drop, and verily they swore by all their gods, chief of whom is Obidicut. Very many men have heard a white woman swear, but some few, and among these I have been, are denied the experience. It is quite a revelation; and if nobody tilts you backwards out of your chair, you can reflect on heaps of things connected with it. So they cursed and they drank and they told tales, sitting in a circle, till I felt that this was really Life and a thing to be quitted if I wished to like it. The young man who knew a thing or two, and gave the girls leave to sell him if they could, was there of course, and the hussies sold him as he stood for all he considered himself worth; and I saw the by-play. Surely the safest way to be fooled is to know everything. Then there was an interlude and some more shrieks and howls, which the generous public took as indicating immense mirth and enjoyment of Life; and I came to yet another establishment, where the landlady lacked the half of her left lung, as a cough betrayed, but was none the less amusing in a dreary way, until she also dropped the mask and the playful jesting began. All the jokes I had heard before at the other place. It is a poor sort of Life that cannot spring one new jest a day. More than ever did the youth cock his hat and explain that he was a real "chippy," and that there were no flies on him. Any one without a cast-iron head would be "real chippy" next morning after one glass of that sirupy champagne. I understand now why men feel insulted when sweet fizz is offered to them. The second interview closed as the landlady gracefully coughed us into the passage, and so into the healthy, silent streets. She was very ill indeed, and announced that she had but four months more to live.

"Are we going to hold these dismal levees all through the night?" I demanded at the fourth house, where I dreaded the repetition of the thrice-told tales.

"It's better in 'Frisco. Must amuse the girls a little bit, y'know. Walk round and wake 'em up. That's Life. You never saw it in India?" was the reply.

"No, thank God, I didn't. A week of this would make me hang myself," I returned, leaning wearily against a door-post. There were very loud sounds of revelry by night here, and the inmates needed no waking up. One of them was recovering from a debauch of three days, and the other was just entering upon the same course. Providence protected me all through. A certain austere beauty of countenance had made every one take me for a doctor or a parson – a qualified parson, I think; and so I was spared many of the more pronounced jokes, and could sit and contemplate the Life that was so sweet. I thought of the Oxonian in Tom and Jerry playing jigs at the spinet, – you seen the old-fashioned plate, – while Corinthian Tom and Corinthian Kate danced a stately saraband in a little carpeted room. The worst of it was, the women were real women and pretty, and like some people I knew, and when they stopped the insensate racket for a while they were well behaved.

"Pass for real ladies anywhere," said my friend. "Aren't these things well managed?"

Then Corinthian Kate began to bellow for more drinks, – it was three in the morning, – and the current of hideous talk recommenced.

They spoke about themselves as "gay." This does not look much on paper. To appreciate the full grimness of the sarcasm hear it from their lips amid their own surroundings. I winked with vigour to show that I appreciated Life and was a real chippy, and that upon me, too, there were no flies. There is an intoxication in company that carries a man to excess of mirth; but when a party of four deliberately sit down to drink and swear, the bottom tumbles out of the amusement somehow, and loathing and boredom follow. A night's reflection has convinced me that there is no hell for these women in another world. They have their own in this Life, and I have been through it a little way. Still carrying the brevet rank of doctor, it was my duty to watch through the night to the dawn a patient – gay, toujours gay, remember – quivering on the verge of a complaint called the "jumps." Corinthian Kate will get hers later on. Her companion, emerging from a heavy drink, was more than enough for me. She was an unmitigated horror, until I lost detestation in genuine pity. The fear of death was upon her for a reason that you shall hear.

"I say, you say you come from India. Do you know anything about cholera?"

"A little," I answered. The voice of the questioner was cracked and quavering. A long pause.

"I say, Doctor, what are the symptoms of cholera? A woman died just over the street there last week."

"This is pleasant," I thought. "But I must remember that it is Life."

"She died last week – cholera. My God, I tell you she was dead in six hours! I guess I'll get cholera, too. I can't, though. Can I? I thought I had it two days ago. It hurt me terribly. I can't get it, can I? It never attacks people twice, does it? Oh, say it doesn't and be damned to you. Doctor, what are the symptoms of cholera?"

I waited till she had detailed her own attack, assured her that these and no others were the symptoms, and – may this be set to my credit – that cholera never attacked twice. This soothed her for ten minutes. Then she sprang up with an oath and shrieked: —

"I won't be buried in Hong-Kong. That frightens me. When I die – of cholera – take me to 'Frisco and bury me there. In 'Frisco – Lone Mountain 'Frisco – you hear, Doctor?"

I heard and promised. Outside the birds were beginning to twitter and the dawn was pencilling the shutters.

"I say, Doctor, did you ever know Cora Pearl?"

"'Knew of her." I wondered whether she was going to walk round the room to all eternity with her eyes glaring at the ceiling and her hands twisting and untwisting one within the other.