Profiles from China | Page 5

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
The Dandy
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
New China: The Iron Works
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 Yâmen, 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 coöperation.
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
Spring
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
Meditation
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
Chinese New Year
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