Profiles from China | Page 5

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 co?peration.?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 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
Echoes
Crepuscule
Like the patter of rain on the crisp leaves of autumn
are the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens.
Festival of the Dragon Boats
On the fifth day of the fifth month the statesman K��h
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 K��h Yuen.
Kang Yi
When Kang Yi had been long dead the Empress decreed
upon him posthumous decapitation, so that?he walks for ever disgraced among the shades.
Poetics
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.
A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
O golden night, lit by the flame of seven stars, the
years have drunk you too.
The Son of Heaven
Like this frail and melancholy rain is the memory of
the Emperor Kuang-Hs��, 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?
The Dream
When he had tasted in a dream of the Ten Courts of
Purgatory, Doctor Ts��ng was humbled in spirit,?and passed his life in piety among the foot-hills.
F��ng-Shui
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