Profiles from China | Page 4

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
Our Chinese Acquaintance
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
The Spirit Wall
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.?But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around?a corner their power evaporates.?So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
door. Windows of course he has none.?He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
and the dirty canal.?But he is quite safe!
Wusih
The Most-Sacred Mountain
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
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