OF THE MARJORIE GREENBIE Courtesy Canadian Pacific Railway The harbour of Vancouver on an afternoon betwixt winter and spring IN THE EYES OF THE EAST BY MARJORIE BARSTOW GREENBIE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1921 COPYRIGHT 1921 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE U. 8. A. BY Q3ie (Sutnn & JBoben Contpanp BOOK MANUFACTURERS DEDICATION Forgive me, dear, that I unclose These garden-gates of memory. When there's romance that blooms and grows So gay and fair and strange to see, There's not a fence so tall and stout That it can keep the whole world out. The passer-by will snatch by stealth A look and gossip as he goes ; The bandit breeze will filch the wealth Of perfume in our hoarded rose; And birds and bees and butterflies Go up and down to advertise. Our memories are confiscate. There's nothing left for you and me But to play host before the gate To which the whole world holds the key, And hope to save some private dream In all this communist regime. 20G5SG9 PREFACE THIS record has grown from chapter to chapter in response to the question of the audience: "What next?" Beginning as a somewhat casually selected episode from my journey around the world, in a current periodical, it developed from month to month as entertainment for willing readers 'till, lo, there was a book ! At the same time various reporters' stories of my peregrinations had circulated in the press, and had been copied by weekly digests till one great and enterprising newspaper syndicate capped the climax by turning the trip into a most gaudy love-story, and sending it, with appropriate illustrations, into every hamlet in America. The pub- licity thus given to a detail which I had treated rather lightly in my published account must be my excuse for enlarging on it in the book. At least I may hope that, in the popular imagination, my own version will sup- plant the newspaper story. If any further excuse is needed for thus trailing the romance of my own little life across the broad face of the world, I must urge that it is the necessary explanation of the chain of events narrated in the second half of the book, and, if I did not tell the truth, I should be hard put to it to find a plausible substitute. But, after all, what I have told is not what is private and personal to myself (for that remains inviolate). I have given the world only so much as corresponds to the oldest formula of romance in literature and so has a kind of universality. And I hope that the reader will read into my story throughout not the experience of a private individual at all but the symbol of his own dreams and hopes. For the rest, I have tried to give as living a picture as I could of the great pageantry of life upon the highways of the white man's Orient to present typical indi- viduals among those who go back and forth upon the vii viii PEEFACE borderline where the two great civilizations of the world are now coming together to show the white man shaped and subdued to the environment of the East, and the life of the Oriental sometimes confused, sometimes shattered, but sometimes stimulated to wonderful new vitality by the mighty impact of the West. As one or another personality emerged from the changing throngs upon my path around the world, I have sketched him, swiftly and lightly. And I offer this collection of minia- tures for what they are worth in the interpretation of the larger issues of Eastern life. Yet I need hardly say that I have clung as strictly as possible to fact. The people in this book are all real people who still go up and down upon the highways of the world. Only in some cases I have introduced a de- liberate, though transparent, confusion of non-essential detail, in order to provide any one who wishes to dis- claim the portrait with an alibi. In some cases, too, I have used the dramatist's license, and have concentrated into brief episodes what was more widely scattered in time and space. But such liberties are comparatively rare, and, on the whole, my narrative is as close to fact as common courtesy and the art of the raconteur will permit. I have been under no temptation to invent, be cause the truth was always much more interesting than anything I could imagine. Yet, just because I was tell- ing of unknown people and incidents that would offer no inspiration to the newspaper headline, I have adhered to one principle which seems necessary to raise such a record above triviality: / have written only of facts and people who would be interesting if they were ficti- tious. And so I have tried to put into my book not only the pageantry of the East, but a little of the common heart of humanity. It remains only to acknowledge my indebtedness to two people who have made this story possible. To Karl E. Harriman I owe a special debt of gratitude for inspiring the original narrative and for providing me with my first audience, as well as for his kindly co-operation and enthusiasm throughout. To my hus- PREFACE ix band, Sydney Greenbie, I owe a debt less easy of defini- tion not only for valuable criticism in detail, but for constant stimulus to my own flagging impulse to write, and for the contagious earnestness and integrity of his own literary ideals, as well as for a world of help and sympathy to which no public announcement can be adequate. MARJORIE BARSTOW GREENBIE. GREENSBORO, VERMONT, August 17, 192L PKELIMINARIES OF the vast world of waters that lies between Vancouver and Shanghai, and the manners of men who travel de luxe upon those seas. I introduce the Bishop and the Bishop's incorrigible daughter. Five o'clock in the harbour of Vancouver on an after- noon betwixt winter and spring. For here, on the shores of the northern Pacific, spring had already risen like an exhalation from the waters, sweet with the promise of cherry blossoms in Japan across the way, and scents from the far South Seas. Already the fresh green ran up to meet the snow upon the mountains, and a mist of young verdure seemed to drift and cling among the pines. But beyond the vast rampart of the Canadian Rockies winter still lay heavy upon the plains. The mind of the traveller is superstitious. He likes some omen of wind and weather to speed him on his way. And so, as we steamed slowly out into the Pacific, bound by the swift northern route for Yokohama and Shanghai, the breath of balm that mingled with the cool- ness of the water was like an emanation of friendship from the face of the deep and turned my eyes with glad- ness to that mysterious horizon where West, at last, is East. Yet I suppose there is no more prosaic method of invading the Orient than that which fortune had marked out for my course. I was going first class on one of the greatest steamers on the Pacific for a tour upon the beaten highways of Japan and China, under the escort of a Bishop, the Bishop's Lady, and the Bishop's incor- rigible daughter. Safely and sedately I was going forth, zi xii PRELIMINARIES and safely and sedately I might have returned. But I did not, and thereby hangs the tale. For romance will burgeon and blossom in the heart of youth astray in the world, and, as the American shore turned cloudlike in our rear, and the pale wastes of the Pacific widened around us, my spirit was already stir- ring with presages of adventures whose fulfilment I could not yet foresee. Straight into the sun we steered. Then suddenly those wastes of sky and sea were as one light, and the waters rolled flaming away, as if there were no horizons any more and they might break at last upon the margins of some far cloud, or the uttermost bounds of ether. Only the gulls which had come to escort us out to sea seemed at home in that great splendour, and wheeled and circled betwixt gold and " gold with the sunlight upon their wings. Standing upon the forward deck, too much a stranger to my shipmates as yet to mark their chatter around me more than the squeaking of the gulls, I felt for a moment like one who has slipped all earthly ties, and is afloat in pure space. I thought of the "wild surmise" of those who first saw this new world of water, "silent upon a peak in Darien," and of the prayer of Drake, who, climbing "a great and goodlie tree" in the Isthmus to verify the fable of the liquid space beyond, had prayed that God would give him life and leave to sail once in a ship on that sea. And God heard him, as He has a way of hearing such prayers on the lips of Englishmen. Was not this journey of mine a heritage from his adventures, and this great British ship on which we were now so securely afloat only the last in a long line of vessels which had never ceased, from generation to generation, to take up Drake's challenge to Heaven and this masterless world of waters? XI II So I thought as I waited for the coming of the stars. For some one had told me that the great clipper, which is the guide of all sailors, would have that night a message for me, and its seven stars would write the seven letters of a word of familiar endearment. This romantic and imaginary tryst I was not allowed to carry out un- disturbed, for the Bishop and the Bishop's Lady and the Bishop's incorrigible daughter descended to renew their acquaintance with the girl who had been committed to them for chaperonage and safe-keeping upon the high seas. Concerning the Bishop and the Bishop's Lady, I shall have more to say anon. He was a wise, gentle, and humorous soul, so much a Christian that one forgot all about it and thought of him as only perfectly a gentle- man. She was a simple and loving woman, very up- to-date in costume but essentially the daughter of an- other age than ours. Her friends liked to call her "Lady," and that, perhaps, tells what there is to tell about her. Yet she was, I think, what most men would like their sweethearts to be after twenty-five years of marriage ; and neither for her nor for her husband had the freshness and zest of love as yet gone by. But the Incorrigible Daughter there was the queen flapper of our day of flappers! Dorothy, at the age of seventeen, had already asserted her right which she called her duty to be her father's aid and comfort on his periodical exiles to the Orient. Not that she had any religion. She always professed that she had not, espe- cially at moments when the profession was inopportune. She was adorned with none of the traditional Christian graces, neither with meekness nor silence nor chaste braided locks. She called bishops and other ecclesi- astical personages by nicknames of her own creation, and established rapid flirtations with all nice young mis- xiv PKELIMINAKIES sionaries married or single. She spied upon what she chose to call my "love-affairs," and paraded them to my discomfiture. She collected my mail, and attached a complete romance to each letter, which she retailed with gusto to the missionaries. She always repeated my most foolish remarks to the Bishop. And when her sins drew down upon her a well-merited rebuke, she would re- mark with an air of serene condescension : "Now, Dad, you don't understand. Why, that's this New Woman stuff I got from Marjorie." Yet, withal, she was a little thorough -bred, with the thorough-bred's infallible instinct for the line which separates impertinence from vulgarity and teasing from unkindness a creature of wind and sunshine and re- vivifying spring squalls, and the jolliest young pagan that ever trod on an episcopal toe. So now, adroitly detaching herself and me from our elders, she whispered, as she exuberantly squeezed my arm, that she had picked out "just the man" for me. It was one of Dorothy's beliefs that this journey of ours to Japan and China was to end in a double bridal for herself and me, with her father officiating. This being the case, she was naturally anxious to get on with the preliminaries. So, though we were not yet an hour out of sight of land, one hero was discovered and she has- tened to make me acquainted with my fate. "There he is," she whispered, rapturously. He was a tall man, sombre, homely, and forbidding. I was not impressed. "Oh," said Dorothy, "he looks like that because he is a high-brow. You are a high-brow, and high-brows should always marry high-brows because no one else feels natural with them. Q. E. D., my dear." And she proceeded with the details of the wedding. PRELIMINARIES xv Just then the high-brow opened his lips, in confidence to a squat, red man, who stood by him puffing smoke like a volcano : " 'God damme, my dear/ sez I to the little dame, 'this is the foist time ' . . . The assemblage at dinner an hour or so later gave us a chance of reviewing our impressions, and of being our- selves reviewed and classified. The life of a great Pacific liner is something unique in itself, and a presage of a certain elaboration of social life in the cosmopolitan foreign communities of the East, which has little place in America beneath the ranks of the plutocracy and the plutocracy's intellectual retainers. It was amusing to see the awkwardness of some of the novices mostly salesmen representing American firms who appeared at dinner without tuxedos. No doubt they had come prepared to hob-nob with friendly cannibals, in the lat- est fashion of the Pacific, or at least to show the heathen natives a thing or two. And here they were, flabber- gasted at the outset by promotion to amenities that "regular he-men" in America are still privileged to scorn. One or two simple souls from Kansas were im- pressed by the fact that a red-haired dame at the table near us, who looked like the Queen of the Visigoths, was addressed as "Lady Brandon," and her husband as "Sir James." Here was a real title, the kind you read about in books, and one could really sit next to it at dinner. Then, of course, there were the seasoned travellers de luxe upon these seas, easy, suave, dressed as if born in the dinner jacket, and anxious to determine what our status would be in the foreign settlements on the other side and to order their own behaviour accordingly. As we took our seats, I was conscious of the conven- tion which on these Pacific liners sharply separates the sheep from the goats alias the missionaries from the xvi PRELIMINARIES poker-players. There are, of course, a number of people who feel that they fall neither into the one category nor the other. They find unlimited whiskey and poker about as bad as unlimited psalms. But on board a Pa- cific liner there is no via media. Every one looks for a declaration of faith at the outset. If the condition of your soul is favourable, the missionaries surround you and close you in, and the rest of the ship avoids you thereafter as one too good for this world. In our own case decision hung in the balance. Our general appearance was sufficiently fashionable to temper the hospitality of the church and encourage the worldly. The Bishop, appearing at dinner in his tuxedo, with no decoration of his calling about Mm, was a man to grace any saloon, and Lady yielded to no one on board in de'colletage and manner. Hence, there ensued in our fellow passengers a little struggle between the worship of position and the dislike of Christianity, which are the two ruling passions of the lay communities of the Orient. At dinner we were joined by a man who supplied all the odour of sanctity which our party lacked. He was very tall and broad, with superfluous rolls and protuber- ances of flesh all over his anatomy, one of those men whose soul is pretty well muffled in its fleshly tabernacle. Perhaps for that reason, he wore the extreme form of the clerical costume which his sect allowed him. He had an unctuous smile and a loud voice, and, as he entered the dining saloon, booming and beaming above that mighty expanse of flesh and black broadcloth, he was not an unimpressive figure. Many, indeed, took him for the Bishop, a mistake he never corrected then or afterwards. As the Bishop sank quietly and humor- ously into the role of mere private gentleman beside PRELIMINARIES xvii him, his personality seemed to expand and grow sonor- ous, till he dominated the whole saloon. Christian benevolence or whatever he called it- flowed from him, in a mighty flood of compliment and pious appreciation addressed principally to the ladies of the party, but including the Bishop, too, in its con- descension. But this was nothing to the emotion that the bill of fare aroused in him. He had been dining a la carte in war-times all across the continent ; and such a table d'hote, such a confusion and glory of food, not to be paid for piece-meal out of the cash in his pocket, but handed out as a free gift, wholesale, this seemed to stir him to a passion mightier than love and religion. He ordered everything, and repeated the order for every- thing he liked. He kept all the boys who waited on the table scampering to and fro, till the orders of the rest of us were overwhelmed in the procession of dishes that came to him ; and all the while his spirits rose and his tongue was unloosed and his benevolence reached out to inundate us all. His speech alternated between moral and religious sentiments, delivered with a kind of warm, sensuous enthusiasm, and sentimental stories for the benefit of the ladies, which would have been risque', had not a wedding or at least a betrothal been always thoughtfully introduced somewhere in the course of them to save our blushes. He abounded, indeed, in stories of young love and its manifestations, after which he would insinuate, with his eye resting warmly on Dorothy or me, that our "time was coming." Most of these he boomed out in so large a voice that the sum and sub- stance of them reverberated from end to end of the saloon. Cosmopolitan as I had begun to fancy myself, I blushed like any flapper, and, when the Queen of the Visigoths, who had already showed some disposition xviii PRELIMINARIES to be friendly, glanced at me, between amusement and pity, and whispered something to her husband, I thought a shipwreck would be a welcome interruption, or at least an immediate descent into the most private caverns of the sea. This person, it seems, was to travel with us at least till we could impose him on some one else in China. He was going out to see the missions at first hand, and garner enthusiasm at its source. For he was famous as a collector of money for missionary causes, and this trip had been presented to him by the Board of Missions, in gratitude for the past, and lively expectation of favours to come. Travelling with a Bishop involves social vicis- situdes. Wistfully I thought of those days at the Canadian hotel, but just foregone, when, as part of the train of "His Grace," we had been made to feel ourselves kin to the lords of the earth. But now petty clerks and salesmen all around us, whose only passport to social recognition was an expense account, were beginning to look with suspicion upon us because we belonged to the church. And here was this person to justify their ex- pectations. Only the Bishop was suave and humorous as ever. He was, by this time, used to being a Bishop, I suppose. After dinner, as we were standing in the dancing saloon, our new companion joined us. "Brother Barnes," said the Bishop, "are you dancing to-night?" "Bishop," said the good brother, giving an exhibition of what the old novelists mean by drawing himself to his full height, "Bishop, I don't dance." "Don't you?" said the Bishop, in a tone of pleasant surprise, ignoring the shocked expression on his face. "Well, it is never too late to learn, you know. Here," PRELIMINARIES xix he added, indicating me, whose dislike of this brother in Christ was now, I am afraid, sufficiently obvious, "here is a nice lady to teach you." I suppose Freud would say that the state in which I awoke next morning was due to a latent wish. For I was hopelessly sea-sick, and could make my appearance no more in company with our new friend. For four days and four nights I lay below and cursed the day I was born, except, of course, when I rejoiced to think what social complications I was missing. Dorothy visited me with hourly attentions and bulletins about life on ship- board, and full and dramatic accounts of the gastric achievements of our bete noire. Realizing what a good tonic this type of narrative is in cases of mal de mcr, Dorothy would enumerate the number and quantity of dishes that he had consumed at dinner. Then she would tell how he had arisen and, with the marks of his de- bauch still upon him, had gone around and preached to the inhabitants of the smoking room on the evils of tobacco. They didn't feel the effects of it immediately, of course, he said, but they would in the long run; for the temple of our body is sacred, and we owe it to the Creator who gave it to us not to introduce anything that poisons and pollutes it. After the fourth day, I was again on deck. Very bright and stirring it seemed, that vast and tossing body of water beneath the sun. There was something splen- did in the way our ship smashed through the great waves, flinging the spray to the light, and crushing the water into foam. We were skirting the Arctic regions now, passing the long chain of islands into which the peninsula of Alaska disintegrates and drawing so near at last that we could see the smoke from a volcano on one of them. At the one hundredth and eightieth me- xx PRELIMINARIES ridian we left one of the days of our week, without hav- ing any chance to sample its possibilities of joy or sor- row. We went to sleep on Tuesday night and awoke on Thursday morning. Thursday was a dead loss, too, for it took the whole of it to explain this phenomenon to Dorothy, as well as to show why the quickest route to Japan was a detour by way of the North Pole. "But," I said, "it's all because the earth is round." "Oh, that's a yarn I never did believe," said Dorothy, closing the demonstration with a yawn. But for me this obvious illustration of something I had always taken on faith was re-assuring to the im- agination. I felt like some Christian arriving in the New Jerusalem and finding that the streets are of gold after all. For there is, doubtless, a certain amount of hypocrisy in the way we are taught, in early youth, to glory in our knowledge of the spheroidicity of the earth, and feel vastly superior to the poor ignoramuses who lived before Columbus. For all practical purposes, the world is, for the most of us, flat, and we live in still green spaces of it beneath a moving sun. But out here on this great arc of waters, circled by the horizon and spanned by the swift sky, some glimmering sense of being on a great sphere swinging through space did come daily to my mind, and touch me with awe and a sense of illimit- able grandeur. Often, too, I would speculate on the meaning of this tremendous sea. Were those astron- omers right who say that it is the hole left in the cooling earth when the moon flew off into space, and took to a career of her own? I never saw the moon lift her bright head over the waters and walk up the heavens, serene and innocent, without wondering whether she was really a run-away from earth, who had slipped like a woman beneath the yoke of home, and chosen all space Through the rain we saw straw raincoats like animated hay- stacks, and paper umbrellas like gaudy flowers The half-derisive welcome of the populace seemed the essence of courtesy E. M. Newman It was a delicate sea upon which we were launched a sea without substance or tangible reality PRELIMINARIES xxi as her portion. I would think, too, of lauds the Pacific washes through a length of ten thousand miles from the icebergs of the Arctic to the snowy cliffs of the Ant- arctic continent, and the thousands and thousands of islands that rest in its arms. How vast a world of waters it is, how virgin and reticent still, hiding the lives of its peoples away in its shining recesses, and holding them serene and apart from the strife of those lands that publish themselves as the world. Yet some day perhaps the Pacific may still be what the Mediterranean was in antiquity and the Atlantic in recent centuries the centre and heart of the world, the watery plaza, as it were, on which all public life of the nations opens. The remaining eight days of the voyage passed swiftly, in the bland content of the sea. I don't remember what I did with them wasted them, most likely. I only re- call that I learned ship tennis under the tutelage of some soft-spoken, homelike English folk attached to the party of Lady Brandon, and that Brother Barnes tem- porarily diverted his attention from the matrimonial future of Dorothy and me to the conjugal happiness of the Bishop. This he would celebrate in delicate little public eulogiums. We were beginning to tease the Captain to tell us the exact day of landing, and to get just about as much satisfaction as such inquiries deserve, especially in war- times. One afternoon the soft hills and valleys of water over which the ship would swing so gracefully seemed to become mountain peaks and unfathomable abysses, and the waves swept upward as if to wash the edge of the low red sun. All night the ship shivered and tossed and groaned, but with dawn came peace like a quiet hand upon the waters. All day long we slipped over a dim, blue summer sea, haunted and teased by the unseen XX11 presence of land. And, as night fell in grey mist upon the water, we thought we saw casual lights and some- times a far, ghostly glow. Next morning we awoke in the harbour of Yokohama. II It is well not to believe all one hears about Japan. It is still better not to believe all one sees. For, if you come to Japan as a well-meaning stranger, unsophisti- cated in the ways of this flowery empire, without warn- ing from California or China, you will be for some months under enchantment, and will, no doubt, say things which will furnish the Japan Chronicle with food for editorial mirth for a week. So have we all done in our time. Lafcadio Hearn started the fashion, and every one since, from bankers to debutantes, has been in the mode. No doubt there was a time when such rapture was harmless was even, perhaps, a salutary shock to the self-complacent West. But that time has now gone by. The most innocent taste for cherry- blossoms carries bitterness into the heart of Cathay, and mockery to all the shores of the Pacific. Yet surely it is not all "propaganda" that charm which addles the wits of the guest in Nippon. There is illusion in the very atmosphere of Japan, a conspiracy of earth and sky and water to flatter the eye and turn it from unseemly things. Seen through a flash of rain, a mist in the morning, a sunshine which is like fine dust in the eyes, the solid land melts into the stuff that dreams are made of, becomes a world of shadow, and silhouette, and casual flame. There is illusion, too, in the mere accident of the physical littleness of the people, reducing human actions to elfin proportions, subtly dis- PRELIMINARIES xxiii counting and idealizing them in the eyes of men to whom Nature gave weight and inches, as one discounts and idealizes the doings of children. There is illusion, too, in the daily and common use of things dedicated in our minds to intimate, festive, or esoteric functions. A kimono, a wandering paper lantern by night, a bronze Buddha in a forest place, will transform the familiar emotions of common humanity, and give to the most prosaic events the colours of the footlights. For myself, I confess that I never wholly recovered from this enchantment. The first brief glimpse between Yokohama and Nagasaki, en route to Shanghai, was lovely with the light of blossoms and the tenderest spring sunshine. Even when I returned from China for a longer sojourn, with a thousand accusations ringing in my ears and memories of dusty grandeur which nothing Japanese can rival, I seemed to walk back into fairy- land. And when, in the late summer, I climbed Fujiyama by night and saw the dawn from its summit, I climbed into the heart of a dream and carried away the hope and the vision which come, perhaps, only once in a life-time. Though the author of Japan: Real and Imaginary now assures me that my Japan is mostly imaginary, his own part in that great deception is now, I suppose, sufficiently obvious to all the world. Be that as it may, certainly on that first morning in the harbour of Yokohama, Japan emerged delicately from the seas. The rain was falling in what seemed more a downpour of mist than water, and through it I saw a terraced green landscape, and people in straw raincoats who moved like animated haystacks, and paper umbrellas of red and blue and yellow which bloomed out of the rain like great gaudy flowers. Yet so remote and quiet was it all behind that veil of falling xx iv PRELIMINARIES water, that the little yellow men in brass-coloured rain- coats who stepped out of the rain, glittering and drip- ping, to inquire about our ancestors and question our right to enter Japan, seemed to come from some dim void and to have no earthly place and habitation. So before I had rightly recovered from the long dream of the sea, I awoke to find myself in a rickshaw drawn by a lively little fellow in a great bowl-shaped hat, who moved as if his feet were made of rubber. The rain had ceased now and all the land was steam- ing. I looked around me with delight. Though Yoko- hama is only a hybrid city, no less Occidental than Ori- ental, and draws its life rather from the great ships that call here than from any native energy, my eye readily discounted its western buildings and small pre- tentious shops to rest with pleasure upon some little grey house with its tiny rocky garden, and small twisted trees, or a rosy blur of cherry blossoms, or a red (maple that burned in the mist. A group of girls with archi- tectural coiffures stopped to point at us, and titter at our complexions and costumes. A band of schoolboys in speckled kimonos, rosy and smiling, paused in our path, and, moved by some inexplicable impulse, saluted all together, awkwardly like mechanical dolls. True, the cherry blossoms, clinging wetly to their coarse brown twigs, looked like pink tulle costumes of ballet girls caught in the rain, and the children, as Dorothy said, had "most awful rummy noses" ; but I had come to be delighted, and delighted I was. The half derisive wel- come of the populace had to my ignorance the very essence of courtesy; and when out of the fogs crept a little green trolley car and ambled down the street, it was as marvellous in that setting as a green dragon with purple eyes. PRELIMINARIES xxv At Yokohama the great steamers commonly deposit their passengers for an overland jaunt, and pick them up on the opposite coast, at Kobe or Nagasaki. So, though our immediate destination was Shanghai, and we were not to see Japan in detail till we had traversed China from Foochow to Peking, the next two days were spent in an overland flight from Yokohama to Kobe. For hours we slipped over the rice fields, which make so quaint a patterning upon the terraced hills, resembling brocade as our rectangular fields resemble patch-work. And the little grey houses embowered in trees and some- times cherishing whole gardens among the thatch on their roofs, and the kiddies in kimonos of scarlet and yellow, and the girls beneath their parasols, and the boys in the streams waist high, angling for eels, and the twinkling gold of the mustard fields, and spring-time blossoming of plum and cherry were all at that time the authentic stuff of romance. After some hours we came out into wilder country, where we whirled in and out of smoky tunnels, and dashed across bridges that spanned plunging streams and flowery gorges, while all around us the mountains formed and melted in the sky like clouds. Then Fujiyama emerged a delicate, ma- jestic, and lonely form. And, seeing how it stands with no clutter of foothills around its base, no confusion and rivalry of lesser peaks, a sheer ascent from sea to sky, I thought I had never seen a mountain so beautiful for it was even more beautiful in my eyes than the mightier cone of Popocatapetl or the starry heights of Orizaba. So I thought then, but I did not know that one day it would mean something more to me than beauty, and all the memories of this casual journey around the world, and perhaps even of my life itself, would focus in the dawn upon its summit. xxv i PRELIMINARIES All afternoon we slipped along the sea, where the crooked pine trees were silhouetted dark against the silvery light, and the little boats played upon the water like birds. Kyoto passed in a galaxy of lights at sun- Bet, without prophecy of the days when it would be, for a time, my home, and in the darkness we were dropped in Kobe. Next day we were out again upon the waters bound for the shores of China by way of the Inland Sea. It was a delicate sea on which we were launched, a sea without substance or tangible reality, where the islands seemed but drifts of cloud, and the waters were liquid light and moving shadow. Over it all shimmered the infinite tender blue which, in this atmosphere of misty Japan, is neither veritable sky nor pure light. It is only a kind of disembodied soul of light, the ghost and lovely memory of what elsewhere is real. So we sailed on and on, lost in dreams and shining appear- ances. And when darkness drifted to us over the quiet waters, and all the waves were alight with little red fires on island shores, or signals of shadowy sampans adrift in the night, some reservoir of tender and mel- ancholy sentiment seemed to open in every heart on board. All over the decks there were whispering couples, and the lights gleamed wanly on interlocked hands. I walked around the deck with Dorothy, who was moved by the starlight and the pensive dark to tell me what she thought of "love." She didn't think much of it, unless it was "free love" the precocious infant ! at which point the discussion was suddenly ended by the voice of the Bishop speaking to us from the shadows. "Dorothy," he said, "you are a nut." But the Bishop himself did not escape the infection. We came upon him later standing by the rail. His PRELIMINARIES xxvii arm was around Lady's waist, and, as she tried to draw away, afraid, apparently, of public notice, he was saying in teasing accents : "But don't you know, dear, you are just like the Devil in the old hymn, tempting, luring, goading into sin." Just then there was the rush of an oncoming pres- ence in the darkness, and a great mass of humanity bore down upon them, booming. "Well, well, well," cried Brother Barnes. "Sweethearts still ! Now I call that beautiful." At Nagasaki an army of sturdy girl coal-heavers stoked our ship, passing the baskets of coal from hand to hand like buckets of water in the old-fashioned fire- drill. Thus provisioned, we steamed out again into the sunset, and awoke on the dull waters of the Yellow Sea. It is strange that seas, too, have their physiognomy of homeliness or grace, and when one exchanges the waters along the Japanese coasts for the sea that is the vesti- bule of China, it is like exchanging the society of a capricious, pretty girl for a drab house-wife. The waters are muddy and yellow, and they move heavily and dis- colour all reflection of light. The skies hang low, and, at the moment of our passing, were of a uniform sullen grey, quite different from the sun-pierced April mists of the shores we had just left behind. Two days across the Yellow Sea brought us within sight of the low green shores of China on Sunday morn- ing. They were blotted with rain, and against the marshy green the waves were breaking in thick, ugly foam. Here we abandoned the ship, and sped up the Yangtse in a launch. As we entered the mouth of the river, I felt, with a home-sick start, that this was not China at all, but some enterprising town washed by the pale floods of the Mississippi; for I saw only the bare xxviii PRELIMINARIES red walls of Shanghai ware-houses, and the spire of a Christian church. Where were the curly roofs and demon haunts of China? Some junks passed us on the river. They had odd, weather-beaten sails of straw, and were painted with eyes whose unwinking watch might scare away the devils. They were reassuring. As we drew nearer to Shanghai, the fact that this was an alien land was borne in upon me with a certain sinister implication. On the Bund I saw soldiers in khaki drilling. "They are British and American volunteers, who are prepared to defend the foreign concessions in case of an uprising among the Chinese," said the Bishop. Drawing near to the dock, I distinguished, among the ragamuffin hordes waiting to apply for jobs as coolies, certain great and stately figures, in dark blue uniforms and huge red turbans. They are the Sikh police im- ported from India by the British to guard the white men. Noble looking creatures they are six feet tall, and proud of mien, with regular black features and they bear themselves like Sultans. Looking out upon them, through the hub-bub and the down-pour of landing, the one thing to delight the eye on all those ugly docks, I remarked to Dorothy, "That reminds me I am going to India before I see New York again!" Dorothy received this announcement calmly. "Good luck to you, my dear. I may go with you." At that time all this was wildest fancy. Our return passage was already engaged for September, from one of the ports of Japan. "Might be your honey-moon," added Dorothy. While she was elaborating this roseate theme, we were suddenly dumped upon the roaring, dirty docks of PRELIMINARIES xxix Shanghai in the cold, blinding rain. That landing was the negation of all dreams of the Orient. There was neither colour, charm, nor interest only great ugly red brick buildings, an uproar of uncouth voices, and a concentrated essence of evil smells. While we w r ere struggling through the Customs with our baggage, I heard a little conversation between the Bishop and Brother Barnes. The Bishop had put upon the good brother a fair share of the details of landing. Brother Barnes demurred; he fidgeted; he looked at his watch. Finally he suggested, "Bishop, have you noticed that it is half -past ten?" "Yes," said the Bishop. Dead silence. Brother Barnes spoke again, with the air of one supported through an unpopular perform- ance by a good conscience. "It is time for divine service, Bishop." "Yes," said the Bishop. "I think I must be excused, Bishop. It is something I never miss." "Business before pleasure, Brother Barnes," said the Bishop coolly, proceeding with the details of landing. As we rode off in battered rickshaws drawn by dirty, ragged, howling coolies, Shanghai seemed a nondescript town, scarcely more Chinese than San Francisco, for it is a British city owned, inhabited, and governed by British, with some American and French co-operation. Under the deluge of rain, its solid grey houses, trimmed in red brick, looked cold and dismal. Sitting disconsolately in a dank and mildewed room, furnished with a hair-cloth sofa, a marble-topped table, and Webster's Dictionary and the Holy Bible in a glass book-case, we told the Bishop what we thought of the Orient. He explained that we had not yet seen China. xxx PKELIMINAKIES In the days wlieii Shanghai was China, it was only a collection of fishing huts, beside the Whangpo Kiver. But the British saw what a place it might be for the meeting of the great ships they planned to set afloat on these seas, and so they had acquired the land and built upon it, till it was now the great commercial metropolis of the East, a place of docks and ware-houses, and brick walls and shaded avenues of residence which we had not yet seen. To this exposition Dorothy listened in gloomy silence. "Well, Dad," she said. "If there is a real China, lead us to it." "I will," said the Bishop, and the manner and goal of the leading is shown forth in the pages that follow. CHAPTER I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII CONTENTS GOING DOWN THE PIRATE COAST I BECOME A WHITE WONDER HAVOC AMONG THE ANCESTORS . A Pious INTERLUDE .... THE HERITAGE OF NOAH THE GHOST OF THE TEMPLE INFANT CASUALTIES .... A GORY CONCLUSION .... AN ALUMNAE EEUNION CINDERELLA OF THE BAMBOOS OUTLAW BRIDES HEART'S BITTERNESS .... His AMERICAN MARRIAGE . THE KESCUE OF LITTLE MUM THE COURTS OF KUBLA KHAN . THE CHAPERONAGE OF JACOB WANG . "MADAME, I AM A DETECTIVE" . PRINCE AND PAUPER .... A CHAPTER OF LOVE-AFFAIRS THE GOLD-DIGGER THE BISHOP TAKES A HOLIDAY . THE GION MATSURI .... FOOTPATHS IN THE SACRED MOUN- TAINS AN UNINVITED GUEST OF THE MIKADO PILGRIMS AMONG THE STARS A PERSONAL EPILOGUE PAGE 3 i4 28 34 39 48 54 GO 69 80 80 99 108 116 126 141 147 153 158 165 172 179 185 193 206 212 XXX11 CONTENTS CHAPTEB XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV XLVI XLVII XLVIII XLIX L LI LII PERCY, THE PLUTOCRAT THE M. D. DIVISION OF THE BUREAU OF LABOR BACK TO THE PRIMITIVE EX-HEAD-HUNTERS .... THE PYGMIES AT THE THRESHOLD OF INDIA THE KUBBER KING .... ON THE ROAD TO MANDALAY WHERE EVE Is THE GENTLEMAN CARUSO PEACE .... LADIES OF THE ZENANA A GUEST OF TAGORE AT SHANTINIKE- TAN .... CHOTA HAZRI UNDER THE BUDDHA TREE THE LOTUS OF THE WORLD . MEMORIALS OF OLD BLOODSHED THE LAND OF THE GREAT MOGUL OLD LOVE AND MODERN COMEDY . LADDIE SUSPENSE SCANDALS AT THE GATES OF THE FAR EAST "PEACE ON EARTH; GOOD WILL TO MEN" . THE ROAD TO THE ALHAMBRA SHIPWRECKED PAGE 217 230 235 240 244 249 255 260 267 275 287 294 300 312 317 332 338 348 359 369 376 381 392 400 410 416 ILLUSTRATIONS The harbour of Vancouver on an afternoon betwixt winter and spring Frontispiece PAGE Through the rain we saw straw raincoats like animated hay- stacks, and paper umbrellas like gaudy flowers xx The half -derisive welcome of the populace seemed the essence of courtesy xx It was a delicate sea upon which we were launched a sea without substance or tangible reality xxi A frowsy lot they were all except the women .... 18 "Must be a strange land," said a vivacious young thing, "where women wear skirts" 18 "Is she married?" I wondered, looking at a lovely, satiny yellow face 19 These, it seemed, were evidences of her husband's love . . 19 The ancestors were not having it all their own way ... 30 Thither, by all the paths of the rice fields, the people were run- ning The tiny tots basked, like kittens, in the sunshine of the mission So the Bishop went his way, distributing his simple gift of peace even in the red courts of Confucian temples . . 31 Inn-yard, Peking 4(5 Avenue leading to Ming Tombs 47 The mother of the bulbous babe indicated that there was a sub- ject worthy of my camera 82 She seemed to remember that life was not always like this . 82 Patrician girls learned English and foreign manners through the medium of Shakespeare 83 The slum children looked upon the fair mandarin daughters with unconscious cynicism 83 Tea-gardens, Soo-Chow " . . . 104 The last great drama of the Empire is not yet played out . . 105 It seemed scarcely credible that, out of that legendary past, a living princess could step into one's presence . . . 128 A pretty young woman, vivacious and chic, and very much a creature of these times . . 128 In the sunshine that falls so quietly among the old ducal courts of the British legation, there is no memory of smoke and fire 129 zxxiii xxxiv ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Temple of Heaven, Peking 144 Hoang Lu Gate, Temple of Confucius, Peking .... 144 A suburb of Seoul, City Gate in distance 145 Korean Court dancing girl and servant 145 Typical old Korean swell 145 From hill to hill we travelled and from sacred grove to sacred grove 176 The festival begins with the annual debut of the God in human society 176 The temporal and spatial location of the main pageant re- mained a mystery 177 How girls read and study 186 It was a day of mists which soon gave place to warm rain . 187 In honor of the young princes the population had turned out to clean up the road 187 A small boy, under an orange-coloured umbrella, began to sing, "Nearer, my God, to Thee" 194 Small, impassive faces filled up the space beyond the platform 194 I stepped off into the ancient and mossy peace of Nara . . 195 The sweetest inhabitants of Nara are the wild deer . . 195 Beneath the towering branches that make so rich a gloom against the sun, blazes the scarlet temple where a Shinto priestess will dance . . . . 200 Many gods and ghosts there are who call this home . 200 There was not the sombre magnificence of the Buddhist in- teriors Fabulous tales of the ways of the white man in the presence ot a lady had gone abroad .... 208 There was not one who would miss a good chance for observa- tlon 208 Fujiyama reflected in Lake Hakone ... 2 09 In tI JL? ritish le S at [Y n Peking the scars of the Boxer up- smg are now healed with grass and flowers 9 32 ieS ^l t ll brOWn W men had the ^ ace ri naturalness of wild 232 the 201 n sa eo " a