PIONEERING WHERE
THE WORLD IS OLD

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ALICE TISDALE

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Bought with the income of the
Azariah Eidridge Memorial Fund
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PIONEERING WHERE THE WORLD
IS OLD

There stood forth the Great IV all of China.

[page 1ss]

PIONEERING WHERE
THE WORLD IS OLD
(Leaves From a Manchurtan Note-Book)
BY
ALICE TISDALE

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1917

Copyright, 1916, 191;
BY
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
Copyright, 1917
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published November, 1917

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE
COMPANION OF MY PIONEERING—
MY HUSBAND

I should be loath indeed to let this book go into
print without some little acknowledgment of the untir
ing kindness of my friends. This book — like many
another, I imagine — would never have been written
had it not have been for the faith and encouragement
they have so freely given. I want to thank my friend
H. E. H. for her unfailing belief in me and her timely
and helpful criticism ; my husband for his continual
delight as this record of our pioneering grew and took
shape, and for his assistance in details of the geography
and history of the country; my sister for much and
varied assistance; and my friend Dr. D. S. F. of
Columbia University, for his kindness in reading proof.

NOTE
It is perhaps unnecessary to state that this note
book contains the record of the real experiences of
myself and my husband. But in Chapter VIII, I make
a slight exception. It might better be called a com
posite experience. In it I have sought to portray
that strange loneliness that at times takes hold of the
happiest of us. It is a type of loneliness peculiar to
those who live among an alien race. To do this I have
drawn from my own and my husband's experiences and
I have also drawn from the experiences of other people.

PREFACE
This book was started for the purpose of
giving the breath of open spaces to the stay-at-
home vagabonds. If it fulfils that purpose I
shall be content.
However, as many things of world-wide inter
est have occurred in Manchuria since this record
was begun, I should be glad if my book might
also serve to make of greater human interest a
country whose future, even more perhaps than
its past, bids fair to be of great political interest
to the world.
In 1904 Manchuria leaped into its first political
importance, to the world, through the Russo-
Japanese war when Japan fought, so she herself
stated, to defend the integrity of Korea and the
rights of the Chinese in their provinces of Man
churia against the aggressions of Russia. Be
lieving as we did in Japan, the conclusion was —
as Japan won the war — that the political crisis
for these countries was over. Henceforth Japan
Stood as their recognized protector and their

x Preface
rights were thus assured to the rest of the world.
But more than once since that time matters
of grave political interest to the world have
occurred in these countries. In 1910, despite the
fact that Japan had formally guaranteed to
Korea's emperor the security of his throne and
realm, Korea was made subservient to Japan and
a part of her empire.
In Manchuria, despite Japan's formal agree
ment to the open-door policy (the equal rights of
trade to all nations in China), and despite the
fact that she said she fought the war with Russia
because this open door was being closed, Japan,
since winning this war, has herself sometimes
closed this door in the face of other nations,
even in the face of China. She blocked the
British-American plan for the Chin-Chow Aigun
railway in Manchuria. She also blocked a
Chinese project of like nature: the Chinese
wanted to employ British capital to build the
Hsinmuntun-Fakumun railway, but Japan would
have none of it. But later at the point of the
bayonet Japan forced China to allow her to
build the Mukden-Antung railway. Then having

Preface xi
blocked all projects for railways other than her
own, and through the Russo-Japanese war hav
ing gained control of most of the old railways in
southern Manchuria, Japan proceeded to give
Japanese concerns, in distinction to Chinese or
foreign firms, special rates and privileges on
these railways. Thus the door of equal oppor
tunity for trade in Manchuria was no longer
wide open to the world or to China herself.
These events and others have made Manchuria
leap again into political interest to the world.
Then when the great European war began and
Japan fought Germany over German Tsingtao
she violated the surrounding neutral territory of
China. When the Chinese objected to such in
fringement of their neutral country Japan paid
no attention to these objections. Later she
presented to China the now famous twenty-one
demands; again at the point of the bayonet, she
forced China to accept the major portion of these
demands. Through the enforcing of these de
mands, she gained virtual control over southern
Manchuria by a ninety-nine-year lease of Dalny,
Port Arthur, the South Manchurian railway, and

xii Preface
the Antung-Mukden railway ; by special privileges
to Japanese subjects as regards their engaging in
travel, business and manufacture; by control of
the mining interests of Manchuria; and by the
agreement that whenever a foreign loan is to be
made on the security of the taxes of south Man
churia preference will be given to Japanese capi
talists. These, and other demands affecting
China within the wall, inner Mongolia, and Man
churia, Japan wrung from the Chinese govern
ment under the threat of war.
In justifying herself for such acts, Japan states
that her country is overcrowded and she needs
these extra opportunities for her surplus popula
tion. But China is also overcrowded and needs
her own frontier. Who according to the ethical
laws of the world has more right — China who
owns Manchuria or Japan who wants it ? It is a
wish at least that this book might help to make
this country more than a chessboard of curious
names which the nations move backwards and
forwards; that instead we might realize the
human element behind these strange, unknown
places.

CONTENTS PAGE
Chapter I
Wherein We Explain about the Inheritance
of the ' Everlasting Whisper ' 3
Chapter II
Things Written on the Fly-Leaf of My Note-
Book which Connect up Our Past with Our
Present  15
Chapter III
My First Chance at the Manchurian Trail and
How We Have an Adventure with the Red-
Beards  21
Chapter IV
Loose Leaves in My Note-Book that Tell of
Things I Saw and Thought when I was
Much Alone in the Long Winter ... 56
Chapter V
In which I get My Heart's Desire ... 61
Chapter VI
Just an Odd Leaf in My Note-Book. The
South Wind Blows  105
Chapter VII,
The Manchurian Spring, a Junk, and Uncer
tainty  108

Chapter VIII
A New Knowledge of the Frontier . . . 131
Chapter IX
We Become Pioneer Settlers. How We De
cide to Make a Home of the Things of the
Gods and What Happens . . . .150
Chapter X
Of How We Follow the Old Custom of All
Who Come from ' Within the Wall ' and
Make a Pilgrimage Back to Old Cathay . 181
Chapter XI
Summer Rains Again and Other Knowledge
which They Bring  204
Chapter XII
Of Moments when We Have Caught, Here in
this Civilization that is Old and Simple,
the Spirit of Youth, and a Lament Over the
New Era which Crowds It Out . . .221

ILLUSTRATIONS
There stood forth the Great Wall of China
Frontispiece FACING PAGE
Only for a moment did we look out over the
parapet where the hills dropped sharply
away to the great plains of Manchuria,
spread out like a promised land . . . 18
Only the high-standing, fresh-matting grain-
towers, which spoke of business prosperity 42
The ferry, as we grandly called the mud-scow,
slowly worked across the river by means of
poles  48
For once, the carts rolled aboard without their
wheels slipping off the narrow planks that
led to the boat  48
We were again on our way .... 68
The inn court-yard with its hastily built brush
wood fence  76
The road crossed steeper and more difficult
passes  80
His cart hanging just above a precipice . . 98
And we had numerous accidents . . . 102
xv

xvi Illustrations FACING PAGE
When the wind blew, we sailed . . .122
When it stopped, our boatmen towed us . . 122
The towing men had to hold on like cats . 126
We knew by the bronze incense burner, taller
than a man, that stood in the sunshine just
outside the blue shadow . . . .162
And start on pilgrimages to far-off temples . 182
Worshiper after worshiper recorded his jour
ney to the little temple under whose shadow
we lived  182
I say we follow them to the Temple of the
Heavenly Bamboos  186
Out of which the parapeted walls of the city
rose as a vision in a dream, unsubstantial,
ethereal  202
We reached the arched gate-way and passed
through it  202
Almost before we knew it, our mules were half
buried in the bog  210

PIONEERING WHERE THE WORLD
IS OLD

CHAPTER I
WHEREIN WE EXPLAIN ABOUT THE
INHERITANCE OF THE ' EVERLAST
ING WHISPER '
Till a voice as bad as conscience rang interminable
changes
On one everlasting whisper day and night repeated
... so
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look be
hind the Ranges.
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting
for you. Go! — Kipling.
Once we left our pioneering and went home
to America where people kept saying, " How did
you come to go way out there? " And we looked
at each other perplexed. Was it possible that
with all the marvelous new appliances, labora
tories, and inventions that had come since we
went away, the history of dreams had been
crowded out of our modern life? Of course
that would mean that you would not have heard
about ' the whisper.' So, perhaps, in the very be
ginning, I had better tell you of how Nature
3

4 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
insists on her pioneers by making her ' over
yonder go you there ' an everlastingly enticing
voice to some.
Now this is not the history of those who, be
cause of some grim necessity, are pioneering.
They are like the man Mr. Lucas tells about:
while he was three thousand feet above sea level
in Oregon, where the snow was on the mountain
tops and the air had pines in it, and eagles soared
overhead, he read and reread a batch of old
papers. " Advertisements for servants — he read
them all. The very words ' housemaid,' ' parlor
maid,' ' butler,' gave him a thrill. They recalled
ham and eggs and hot shaving water and every
thing he had not had for years, and apparently
wanted." Theirs are the stories of heroic fights
against the loneliness and hardships which be
numb them, but they belong to another book : for
them there is never the enticing whisper. The
history of the whisper is in the history of the
vagabond pioneers who see visions, find gods and
fairies, and, by some strange alchemy, get out
of danger and hardship old and elemental joy.
There is really nothing mysterious about ' the

The 'Everlasting Whisper' 5
whisper.' For generations and generations as
Nature has parceled out man's inheritances, she
has given out this whisper with the same dis
regard to family, training, or nationality that she
displays in giving out any other characteristic.
There is one strange thing about it all. Although
people are scarcely ever satisfied with their other
inheritances, if they discover that they have been
given this restless spirit they invariably welcome
it as a gift from the gods. If they find that
flaming bit of color of the restless spirit in their
scrap bag of inheritance, they never grumble
even if they find Nature has also tucked in such
a drab bit as poor health. Joy and the whisper,
for some unaccountable reason, go together.
In some countries very few inherit it, and
every one talks of the necessity of comfortable
living and riches and fame. But in other coun
tries this gay irresponsible voice seems to be
whispering and singing in the lives of every one.
And all the people seem a little young. In such
a nation if you scratch the layers of comfortable
civilization, you find, almost every time, a
potential pioneer,

6 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
At one time we were such a nation; the
pioneer blood flowed so fast in our veins that
it was not enough for us to roam through the
vast expanse of the new world, pushing on in
discovery, pushing on in settling. " Look alive ! "
our men cried and scoured the earth for trade.
Those were the days of the clipper-ships and our
men made our new corner of the world hold
hands with all the earth. Then children at
evening, listening to the Atlantic beating against
the shores of their Massachusetts towns, heard
their mothers tell of the uncle who had gone West
to pioneer and also of the uncle who hed inherited
so much of the restless spirit that he had worked
his way as a scullion on a clipper-ship bound by
way of Cape Horn for China and Japan. There
were fascinating tales of how later he became
a captain or took up trade in some far-away
mysterious land. And the restless whisper within
these children was fed as each day they stole
away to the what-not in the corner where stood
those forbidden treasures, — strange ivory carv
ings, grotesque old gods and bits of rich stuffs,
all brought by that uncle from beyond that far-

The 'Everlasting Whisper' 7
away other ocean that lay at the opposite edge
of their country. And the dreams of the explorer
and trader swelled within them. It is no wonder
that in those days we were close seconds to our
big brothers, the British, in landing on the then
somewhat perilous shores of China, asking for
reciprocity of trade and treaties; that later we
should have gone to knock alone on the closed
doors of Japan. But that was the time of the
outermost swing of our pioneer pendulum.
After that we seemed not so impelled by ' the
whisper,' and the pendulum of wandering slowed
down and swung less and less far.
" Look at the far expanse of your own coun
try ! " we began to say to our children. " There
it lies from Alaska to Texas, surely a big enough
place for all of you. We've settled it with hard
ship and denial; now we should like all of our
children to enjoy the fruits and live in comfort.
But if you must pioneer, why pioneer within the
confines of this, your own country, and help to
develop it." Therefore, it came about that there
was less and less of the intermingling of our
work with the work of other civilizations; and

8 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
more and more often it was our big brother, the
Britisher, found trading where once we had been ;
and Japan, to whom we had pointed the way,
came to take our place in shipping. And
still each generation continued to say to
the next, " Develop your own country, my
son." And of late it has sometimes happened that
when a son found within himself the now
little understood inheritance of restlessness which
led him beyond his own country, his town would
sigh, saying, " Another good American spoiled."
That he was of benefit to his country ' way out
there ' they did not see. And once a congress
man said, " Let our consuls live in tents. Tents
are good enough for men who deliberately choose
to live outside of their own country." And
gradually we have come to be more and more
indifferent to Japan's closing of the open door
in Manchuria and Korea — that open door of
trade for which at one time we took so firm a
stand. So unless you happen to have been given
' the whisper ' there has probably been very little
chance for you to learn about it. Nowadays

The 'Everlasting Whisper' 9
it is not much talked about and as a matter of
fact it is not very fashionable.
Nevertheless the gay rover's thread persists
in appearing in the fabric of this and that one's
life, given to them perhaps by a Mayflower great-
grandmother once removed or a clipper-ship
grandfather. Every once in a while you can find
a child who is always laughing at seemingly
nothing but his own lightheartedness. In reality
he laughs over ' the whisper ' that has been
slipped into his inheritance, despite the care taken
by fond and indulgent parents who wish him to
stay at home. This child is very apt to dream
vagabond dreams over his spelling-book and — I
am forced to own, he usually does not spell so
very well.
I was like that. Where the rover's spirit in me
came from I don't know ; but it must have always
lived somewhere under the layers of suburban
rectitude of my childhood, for one day when I
was only five I declared, " When I grow up I
shall either go to live in China or have rag carpets
on my floors." There! The thing had hap
pened! That untamable gay little inheritance

10 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
had cropped out ! Already I was holding out my
small hands for the things of unconvention and
wandering. To be sure my affections were
divided just then between the riot of color in
a certain Irish cottage where I was wont to spend
delicious stolen half-hours, and the brilliancy of
life I had heard depicted by a returned explorer
who lunched with us one day; but there was
wanderlust even in that early confusion of de
sires. Later I forgot that declaration of five
but I never had any use for anything but the
gaiety and freedom that goes with old clothes.
I disliked going to church, not because of the
service but because of the tight gloves I had to
wear in that sanctuary, and I disliked school, not
because of the lessons but because of the straight
rows of desks and also because I wanted the
time for my dreams. I got no thrills out of my
first gloves and not many out of my best
dress. Then when I was ten ' the whisper ' came
again, but this time it was not so debonair for it
came clad in the garments of my Puritan an
cestors — the somber garments of stern command.

The 'Everlasting Whisper' n
It bade me go as a missionary to the cannibals.
But this time, although I was sure it was the
voice of the Lord, I tried to hush it. I fought
long battles with it when I thought I was studying
my lessons, and defied it. But for a long time
I was afraid to go to sleep at night lest vengeance
be taken on me while I slept. Then shortly I
' grew up ' and forgot alike the burning convic
tion of ten and the no less burning desire of five.
Those I considered queer little fancies of my
childhood. But that vague craving was still there
for all that was spacious and free. Then I went
to live in the city and I felt stifled and found that
there was no voice within me, answering its
turbulent, aspiring voice. I looked with envy on
those who heard and understood its call until one
day there came to me a whisper : " Go and look
behind the Ranges. Something lost behind the
Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go ! " I
had at last found that that strange restless
whisper that had always been in my life was not
an alien thing to be forgotten or neglected, but
my golden inheritance. Whither it would lead
me — to joy or sorrow, hardship or ease — I did

fi2 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
not know; but I did know that it pointed out to
me my way of life and follow it I must.
And for the business man there was also ' the
whisper.' But for him there were no battling
misunderstandings: it came to him first in his
manhood as a message of opportunity for the
double spirit which dwelt within him, — the eager
spirit of his manhood that wanted responsibility
and the no less ardent spirit that wanted care
free roving. So he straightway answered it,
knowing somehow that neither of his two selves
would be denied. Thus each listening to his
whisper, we met upon the road of our quest and
went on together to pioneer in a civilization that
is old. I'll leave it for wiser heads to expound the
values of foreign trade. But please don't con
demn without a hearing the man who sells bolts
of red cloth to some black man in a jungle or
thermos-bottles to the Tu Tuck Tu of Mongolia.
Think kindly of the trader who travels by slow
and tedious means across six hundred miles of
desert to reach that priestly monarch who buys
a hundred thermos-bottles for his hundred shep-

The 'Everlasting Whisper' 13
herds. Living in tents, clad in skins, these hun
dred shepherds, uncouth men of the desert, go
forth, each bearing over his shoulder that sign
of civilization, — that as yet un-understandable
thermos-bottle. Perhaps that Russian trader is
a little bit ridiculous, perhaps he is a wee little
bit sublime and also useful, traveling his arduous
six hundred miles to reach the Tu Tuck Tu of the
desert. But that, as I said, I will leave to the
learned ones to prove to the other learned ones.
This is not to be a consistent record of the
traveler with a zeal for informing facts but
rather it is to be of the things that are of necessity
lost beyond the ranges of our industrialism, the
things which are made known unto pioneers
and vagabonds — primitive things, simple things.
These tales of our comings and goings, all
entangled with the thoughts and fancies that have
grown up around our pioneering in China — a
country which is so old that it possesses much
of the far-away youth of the world — are for
those who are not altogether grown up and who
will always possess something of the spirit of
eternal youth and love of adventure, even though

14 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
they labor within the four walls of a shop or
office or just now find their daily toil amidst the
dirt and suffering of war. Maybe some of you
are pleading as Mr. Britling's son Hugh pleaded :
" So send me some books, books of dreams,
books about China and the willow-pattern plate
and the golden age and fairyland. And send
them soon and address them carefully."
For all these, wishing eagerly for a little part
in the things made known unto pioneers and
vagabonds, I am sending my note-book. I wish
that I might send it by courier — as we do letters
on the trail — in Manchuria in order that it might
have about it the breath of these open plains and
be pervaded with the freshness of their night
winds; but America is a long way off. Still,
perhaps, even on such a long journey, it may be
given to it to keep something of the abandonment
of childhood, the joy of far stretches of land,
and ways of simple living which always cling
around our pioneering.

CHAPTER II
THINGS WRITTEN ON THE FLY-LEAF OF
MY NOTE-BOOK WHICH CONNECT UP
OUR PAST WITH OUR PRESENT
For a number of years we had pioneered in a
civilization that is very old, — we have lived in
various and sundry places over the eighteen
provinces of ancient China. The business man
in the East can only rarely count on a settled
abode. That is why to be happy he must have
a dash of the vagabond in his pioneer nature.
We had long ago ceased even to sigh over these
numerous shiftings. How could we? They were
always fraught with such interesting possibilities.
So now we are all athrill with the new thing we
are going to do. We are going to start on a
wholly new line of pioneering. We are going
to go to Manchuria, the pioneer part of China,
the land which is so much her frontier that it lies
outside the Great Wall ! 15

16 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
We left Peking this morning. At sunset we
reached Shanhaikwan — the last old city of the
eighteen ancient provinces of China. The fate
of Lot's wife has no terrors for the Chinese; they
have all stopped to look back over The Flowery
Kingdom. Even the diminutive Eastern train is
seemingly of the same mind; without any ado
it stays here for the night, as if it were right
and natural that a few hours should be spent in
last fond memories of the homes of all the
pioneers it carries.
Leaving behind the wayfarers and the barren
little hotel, we started climbing the hills for a
glimpse of Manchuria, spread out on the other
side. But when at last we stood on the crumbling
grass-grown top of the Great Wall that topped
those hills, something bade us look, not out over
the parapet, but back towards ancient China.
Perhaps it was the silent wish of this old mother
land impelling us as it did her sons to look back
wards. She seemed to say to us, " I shall have
nothing to do with that outside land and I would
keep my sons at home if I could."
Here on the border she had brought together

The Fly-Leaf of My Note-Book 17
her treasures to tempt these sons of hers to stay
with her. At our feet in the moonlight lay the
old walled city of Shanhaikwan, offering the sons
of China protection within its gates, the kind of
protection that their fathers and fathers' fathers
had known for generations. And not far above
us we saw, clinging to the mountain side, a
temple of their fathers' faith. We could dimly
see the worn stone steps leading up to the door
way and the tall trees waving above its curving
roof. And from higher and higher rose the
sound of temple bells. Some priest or novice was
making the rounds of all the mountain shrines,
offering incense. Each striking of the deep-
toned gongs recorded another offering. Plead
ing, enticing, was their sound in the quiet night.
In this way did the old mother land plead with
her restless sons to stay and tread the long
familiar paths of safety and worship made dear
to them by association. She too would protect
them and shut out ' the whisper.' There on the
top of those high hills that hid the outer world
she had built her Great Wall, a prodigious task.
But it had neither shut away others nor kept the

1 8 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
sons at home. Some three hundred years ago
from Manchuria the Manchus had swept down
into China conquering it. Then China and Man
churia became one kingdom, with sparsely settled
Manchuria as the frontier of opportunity.
Only for a moment did we look out over the
parapet where the hills dropped sharply away to
the great plains of Manchuria — spread out like a
promised land. Manchuria was for to-morrow
and many to-morrows. To-night we shared the
feelings of those sons who proudly claimed that
their ancestral homes were ' within the Wall.'
To-morrow we would start with light hearts on
this new adventure, but to-night in accordance
with the time-honored custom of this country we
were looking back. We thought of each far
away corner of this ancient land where we had,
at some time in the past years, made ourselves a
home. We thought of the times we had sat under
the shadow of some old pagoda, listening to the
soft tinkle of its wind bells; we thought of the
days we had spent on the quiet waters of the
country canals; we thought of its thronging cities
with their old gray walls and half-overgrown

Only for a moment did we look out over the parapet -where the hills dropped sharply away to the great plains
of Manchuria, spread out like a promised land.
[page IS]

The Fly-Leaf of My Note-Book 19
moats, like the city that lay below us in the
moonlight. It was an old land crowded as full
of the memories of dead generations as of the
life of the present — a land that bade one loiter
and dream of all that fascinating past. What
would the frontier of such a country be like?
After another day, the ancient China of
pagodas, walled cities, and over-populated prov
inces was gone out of our lives. Manchuria is
no longer a dream but a thing of tremendous
reality. We are in the treaty port where we are
to live — a place of a hundred-odd white-men's
houses, clustered together.
The little plat of Western life with its August
mud-baked streets and its gardens wrested with
much difficulty from the salty tide-washed delta
of the Liao, has a somewhat deserted look even
in the most wide-awake hours of the day. Once
it was a thriving treaty port, but that was before
the Japanese made such inroads in this Chinese
frontier. Now it is dying as Japan slowly closes
Manchuria's broad doors to international trade.
Here it stands not far from the ocean, stands

20 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
facing the three hundred and fifty thousand
square miles of this vast half-tamed frontier, on
the edge of which it has been bold enough to
plant itself in the interests of trade. But I forget
this little frontier town in thinking of the spa
cious trail of Manchuria lying just a few rods
away at the edge of these straggling streets.
This trail seems to start at our very door — so
short are the streets — leading on and on, north
into the trails of silent Siberia, south to those
within the Wall, east to Mongolia's great
stretches, and west into Korea, the interminable
trail !
My memory goes back to the glimpse of it
we have had this day : I can smell again the salt
marshes which we passed through, and see the
red glory of the marsh weed growing on them;
I see the never-endingness of its stretches of
prairie with nothing but the giant grain and far
away, now and then, a tree breaking the level
of the horizon, and the little brown villages swal
lowed up in the vastness — and the marvelous
northern sunlight. This is Manchuria as we saw
it to-day.

CHAPTER III
MY FIRST CHANCE AT THE MANCHURIAN
TRAIL AND HOW WE HAVE AN AD
VENTURE WITH THE RED-BEARDS
I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths
which are revealed to savages and hid from political
economists. — Stevenson.
I am sitting in the quaint little office of our
company in Harbin, the last important city of
China before one steps over into Siberia. I,
myself, should find it hard to think of facts and
figures in an office which has for its outlook a
curved tile roof, with curious gargoyles and
dragons holding on to the ridgepole. I am sure
that in such a place as this I could not put a
pin through my mind, sticking it down to busi
ness and a desk. It all tempts my fancy away
to fairies, goblins, and suchlike folk. For
tunately for me, I am the wife of the business
man and not the business man himself, and my
thoughts are free to wander.

22 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
At present my husband's work takes him all
over these three provinces that make up Man
churia and often I get my chance at the long
trails. Great Manchuria ! At once the hope and
despair of China ! With its potential possibilities
it is the ' big chance ' for the man crowded out
of the other eighteen provinces. Mongolia and
Manchuria are China's unsettled tracts, and are,
between them, rich in all resources. Therein lies
her peril, for other nations are determined to
get hold of this border country. With each
disturbance in her internal affairs, the foreign
powers have wrested from her some new rights
in these frontiers. Harbin, that I sit looking out
upon, is half -Russian; beyond the curved, tiled
roofs, I can see the gold-domed churches of the
Russians; they, and all that they signify, over
shadow the city. From here, the Russians spread
north and south over the land. All of Man
churia above the Amur River is now a part of
Siberia, and to the south, half-way through the
province, the Russians hold the railway.
In the far southeast, on the Korean border, is
the city of Antung; it, too, is no longer purely

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 23
Chinese. Insinuating themselves among the sub
stantial buildings of the natives, are the frail
Japanese. So does the Japanese insinuate him
self into Chinese affairs, spreading his tentacles
up from the south, farther and farther each year.
Even now, his ' railway zone of influence ' ex
tends so far north that it touches that of the
Russians. The little man from the tiny islands
"over the way wants, and intends to have, this
splendid land. He checked the Russian advance,
but there is no one to stop him, and his greed
knows no end. Ah, well, there is at least a little
more time left to the Chinese before the Japanese
bustle in and take possession, killing the person
ality of frontier China as they have ruthlessly
killed native life and customs in Korea. While
these days remain we shall roam here. For a
little while we shall forget such greed. To
morrow we leave the warring nations behind, for
we are going to start for one of the real outposts
of the world — even of Manchuria, which is an
outpost itself.
From Harbin we go a day's journey up the
Sungari River to Hulanho, where we drop all

24 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
outside communications; then, by native cart, we
travel due north to Peilintzu and on to Hailun
over the great northern plain of Manchuria. A
thousand li (over three hundred miles) by the
slowest possible mode of travel, during the worst
time of year, in a bandit-inhabited country: that
is what such a journey implies. We shall present
our passports in every important town, thus se
curing an escort of Chinese soldiers; but often
the escort is small and the individual soldier none
too brave. One never knows just what is going
to happen next in this part of the globe; therein
lies half the fascination of it — which confirms my
suspicion that we are thorough-going vagabonds
at heart.
In the early fall in Manchuria, there is a sort
of presto change from farmer into bandit. It
seems a trifle of a psychological somersault — one
day a plodding farmer, the next a highwayman.
After the tall kaoliang, or giant millet, is cut,
and escape is not so easy over the bare plains,
another clap of the hands and lo, a peaceful
farmer once more! It is not only the farmers
who play this exciting game; many another staid

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 25
member of the community has his little fling.
Some even combine their roles, not differentiating
according to the seasons, but with the Oriental's
disregard for contradictions a man is sometimes
bandit, merchant, and magistrate all at once.
The bandits are almost as old as the country
itself. Long ago they disguised themselves with
red beards, in consequence of which they have
been called hung-hu-tzu (red-beards) ever since.
Once they were orderly, trustworthy souls, taking-
only their ' just toll,' insuring ships and carts and
men, and robbing only those who were too
penurious, or possibly too independent, to pay the
exemption fee. These bands had their insurance
headquarters in the large towns, in the houses
of many a leading merchant; and, as most of
the Chinese regarded this blackmail as they
regard taxes of any kind, to this day these
merchants (if not their agents who do the actual
holding up) move in the best Chinese society.
But more and more as Manchuria has become the
borderland of various civilizations, the ordered
ways of these brigand bands have grown dis
ordered; countless farmers and unpaid soldiers

26 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
have made themselves self-appointed members,
until, along all the main grain ways, whether
cart roads or rivers, the little red flag of in
surance is now of no avail — every man's head
is turned against his brother. The confusion is
made still greater by the influence of those bor
dering, so-called civilized, countries. It is whis
pered by those who know the inside of things out
here that the Japanese furnish arms and encour
agement to would-be Chinese robbers. The more
disorder there is, the better the pretext for Japan
to extend her already extensive police district.
Furthermore, we cannot be altogether sure that
the escorts given us will not be in league with
bandit groups. Strangely enough, in such a case
they may prove the better protection. If soldiers
who secretly belong to organized bands are ap
pointed as escorts to foreigners, they warn the
other members of their bandit group of the pass
port and its influence with the powers that be. It
makes me feel that the gargoyles and the dragons
outside have spirited me away to Alice's Wonder
land — a higgledy-piggledy world where soldiers
are outlaws and we seek their protection.

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 27
As all true pilgrims, we start with light hearts
and few possessions. A native cart is only an
oak box with a rounded top, latticed sides, open
front, and plank bottom. This structure, which,
like Wendy's house, must have been measured
just to fit (for it is exactly high enough and
long enough for one person — if he be of medium
size — to sit in), is set on heavy oak shafts. The
shafts extend out in front, making a little plat
form for the driver, and in back, forming a place
for the luggage. This substantial affair rests,
exactly in its center, without a vestige of springs,
on a wooden axle, at the ends of which the great
wheels turn. Of necessity, then, we curtail our
living to the utmost simplicity : there is little room
and less security for earthly treasure, for the
springless cart jars everything into a more or
less unrecognizable condition. Clothes jostle and
rub until there are holes in them; bottles break,
and crackers are often reduced to crumbs. After
many experiments, we have finally made our
baggage consist of a stout, seamanlike chest
holding the minimum of clothes, a bedding roll,
and a smaller chest in which we store away a

28 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
few tins of meat, crackers, butter, and milk. For
the rest of our food supplies we must depend
upon the country ; chickens, eggs, and rice we can
always get, and there is no place in China, no
matter how far afield you may wander, where
you cannot get a cup of tea for a penny or two.
We left Harbin this morning on a little stern-
wheel paddle-boat. To-night we are in Hulanho.
The boat harbored all sorts and conditions of
men: Russian peasants, Chinese frontiersmen,
strange nomadic men, all journeying away from
the confines of civilization. All day the boat,
with its strange mixed load, paddled towards
Hulanho. The banks, high as our heads, shut
us in to the speculation of the crouching men,
who filled every crack and crevice without regard
to comfort. Those Russians — were they, any of
them, escaped exiles? Those squatting Chinese,
silent and enigmatic — were they, perhaps, mem
bers of the brigand bands that infested the
region ? Those nomads — like us, did they feel a
restless spirit within, calling them to new coun
try? Never had my fellow-man seemed more

/in Adventure with the Red-Beards 29
interesting, more unfathomable. Why were we
all there, and whither were we going? The in
scrutable faces of the Oriental throng gave back
no answer; neither did the inscrutable, deep-blue
sky full of marvelously white Manchurian clouds.
Each man's secret remained his own, but the
splendid sun shone over us all as we pushed
slowly up the shallow river between the high
banks. We forgot home and kindred, we felt pagan-
free; we sensed within us a new life, strangely
old — the free, wandering life rightly inherited by
every man from the days when all the earth
roamed. Under the layers of modern conven
tion, does not a little of the wanderer's spirit lie
hidden within us all ? Has it not started into life
at unlooked-for moments, even when we walked
a city pavement or sat in a wholly business-like
office, as the smoke of a bonfire reached our
nostrils or as we glimpsed night skies above tall
buildings — awakening within us, for the instant,
strange, restless cravings for a lost freedom?
Here, with the modern world far, far away, such
a wild sweet spirit took possession of us. To-

30 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
morrow, to-morrow will bring us to the long
trail, the out trail, at last. And to-night I am
sitting in a Chinese inn on a brick k'ang — a
northern Chinese bed. I am writing by the light
of a tiny lamp, and that of a luminous young
moon, and one very brilliant star. Outside, the
trail leads on, on into the moonlight; a dream
trail, a moon trail, beckoning, enticing. Surely
to-night we have touched the magic spring of the
earth; earth trail joins moon trail.
To-day is to-morrow ! The earth stirs and we
wake with her, such is our close communion out
here where the artificiality of our civilization is
swept from us. We wake to quiet and a soft,
stirring breeze tapping on the paper panes; but
as the sun rises clear of the horizon, the huge
courtyard pulses with the life of a hundred jour-
neyings. Settler and bandit and nomad start the
day's business. The stir of departure tinges the
very air. Even the carts look as if they were
all of the same mind, anticipating the start. In
a Manchurian inn there are two gates at opposite
ends of the court — one where you come in, one

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 31
where you go out. As the carts are never turned
around in the inn inclosure, they bear now, as
always, an expectant mien as they stand with
their shafts towards the gate of departure. Mules
and ponies and horses munch their grain at the
rude stalls ; servants pass with kettles of steaming
tea; men and women are climbing into the tiny
interiors of the ' Peking ' carts ; carters are har
nessing their trains of mules to the heavily loaded
grain carts, one, two, three, and even four, one
in front of the other. Mules and donkeys are
braying, men are shouting; there is the habitual
Oriental bargaining and quarreling. We, too,
join in the din of departure. Our two carts are
soon ready. In one we store the extra baggage
and the never-to-be-left-behind ' boy.' In the
other my husband deftly piles the sacks of grain,
leaving just room enough for me to squeeze in
and take a half-reclining position, with my feet
almost touching the first mule's tail. A ' Peking '
cart is an altogether fearsome thing to ride in,
unless you are wedged in so as not to shake with
each jar of the springless planks beneath you;
but, as I have discovered, the same primeval

32 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
vehicle, arranged by an old-time follower of the
Chinese road, becomes a very possible means of
travel. I wriggled myself into the remaining space be
tween the sacks, my husband swung himself onto
one shaft, the driver let his long whip sing over
the backs of the mules, and sprang to a sitting
position on the other shaft, and we jerked into
motion. We rode from the thronging mules and
men, through the great gate of leaving — jolting
and bumping over its uneven sill, down into the
ruts of the road. Our escort came riding to
wards us on horseback, and our procession of
carts and soldiers passed from the one street of
Hulanho out on the red-brown track, stretching
away over the plains. Having left the other
travelers behind, we had the road. I leaned back
against the grain sacks, perfect peace possessing
me, as I watched the ribbon trail ahead. There
was such a profound tranquillity all around us
that we did not disturb it with a single word; it
was the fulfilment of spring's restless striving,
and amidst this quiet plenty we rode on and on,
without fret, without anxiety.

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 33
Nor did the little world-old villages that we
traveled through bring any bustling discord;
there was the same peace and abundance. On
the rounded tops of the brown mud dwellings lay
great heaps of yellow corn, and through the open
gates of the mud walls we saw, across the courts,
strings and strings of red peppers hanging by
the house doors. Now and then we met the
oldest form of cart — with the two wheels turning
on a fixed axle; they were the grain carts, now
loaded with kaoliang stalks, and we brushed their
leaves in passing them on the narrow way, as the
oxen pulled them slowly, slowly to their destina
tion. The villages were empty now, for every
one was busy in the harvest fields; there were
only a few old women drawing water at the wells
or washing clothes in the stone troughs that stood
near. During their age-long existence, all the
villages seemed to have acquired a meditative
calm. The wayside shrines with their smoking
incense testified to the fact that there was time,
even now in the harvest season, to worship the
gods. In the open country we forded streams,
and we drove through the high-standing grain

34 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
and the low-growing beans. We watched the
naked men working with implements of Abra
ham's time, and the women in bright-red trous
ers and blue top-garments gathering the grain
into bundles, and the little children following
behind, making a last gleaning of the ground in
order that nothing, not even the smallest kernel,
should be lost. Over them all, and us, the
marvelous northern sunshine poured steadfastly,
hour after hour.
At last, the morning with its simple scenes had
slipped away, and we stopped to eat at the side
of the way. It was the usual inn — one long
room with the two k'angs, or brick platforms,
running parallel down the longer sides, and the
rafters blackened with the smoke from the
braziers. As it was cool and empty just then,
we sat cross-legged on one of the k'angs, eating
our tiffin of coffee and eggs from the low k'ang
table, polished and black with the numberless
f eastings of countless travelers. As our ' boy '
came and went, lifting the bamboo curtain at
the door, we caught glimpses of the heated,
glimmering air of noon. Over the inn court

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 35
there was now no bustle of leave-taking: every
thing drowsed in the noonday. The two-wheeled
carts rested on their backs, their shafts high in
the air; the mules munched and munched in
ruminative content. The carters lay asleep in
curious Oriental attitudes on benches as wide as
my hand. Stretching ourselves on the matting
of the k'ang, in the same untutored simplicity,
our bodies and spirits loosened their hold on the
actual, and we too slept. We woke at last,
feeling the hard brick beneath us. It was mid-
afternoon !
" Boy ! boy ! " we called, tumbling off the
k'ang. (When in trouble in China, always call
the boy.) "You no belong proper boy. You
have sleepee. Plenty piecie hung-hu-tzu kill two
gentlemen, night time no have catchee place
sleep." (When you wish to vent your anger
in China, vent it on the boy; that is partially why
you have him — to be the scape-goat.) In answer
to our wrath, the boy sat up sleepily. We hustled
him, we hustled the carters. We were thoroughly
aware now of the danger, for the inns are far
apart in this region of Manchuria. But with all

36 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
our hustling no one hustled. Finally, remem
bering the fate of him who hurried the East, we
forbore; but not being able to become altogether
passive, we paced up and down, up and down — ¦
after the fashion of the West. In due course
of time — according to the Oriental mind — the
mules were harnessed, the baggage in place, and
we drove leisurely forth, our fellows stoically
calm, we impatient.
But a little way, and the care-free spirit of
the open road once more controlled us. We
walked hand in hand, we sat on little hillocks
awaiting the carts we had outdistanced, we felt
the glee of escaped children; the day seemed a
stolen day from some other existence when life
was made up of roving. At last we were tired,
and climbed into the cart and lay against the
musty smelling grain sacks. We were silent
again; the dusk settled down, a revivifying mo
ment when there seemed a vapor of spiritual
life hovering over the earth. So we journeyed
until twilight deepened into night, and the stars
and the moon came out. Late in the evening,
the carters drove their tired mules through the

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 37
shadowy gateway into the moon-lighted inn-
inclosure. We were late indeed ! Fifty or more
carts and two hundred travelers were ahead of
us. Looking into the one common room, we
saw that the two k'angs were crowded with
sleeping humanity. We thought with horror of
such a man-filled night after the spacious world
we had lived in all day, so we made a bed of
straw in the cart and lay there, close together
in a silent companionship. It was a solitude
made perfect, out there with only one's mate,
the animals, and above — the sky and the
moon. The next day a new life seemed stirring; the
farther we went, the younger it seemed to grow.
The methods of work in the fields and villages
were as much of the past as they had been on
the previous day, but the mud dwellings often
looked new. We were touching the frontier,
where men, mostly from the overcrowded prov
ince of Shantung, with more vision and initiative
than their fellow townsmen, had come for their
' big chance,' and they were getting it! The
crops were bumper ones; the grain-towers of

38 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
spiral matting that could be made high or low
according to the amount of grain to be put in
them, stood up high above everything else in the
landscape. The men in the hongs* with whom
we talked business, cared nothing at all for a
small commission; they were used to realizing
twenty and thirty per cent, on their money. At
noon we found our inn was brand-new — a new
inn in China! Those words are without mean
ing. A black and old-age interior are inextricably
bound up with the name. But there the impos
sible stood, with the hoops of red cloth — the
infallible sign of the Chinese hostelry — swinging
gaily in the breeze before the door. We entered,
to find shavings on the floor, and the whole place
as clean as a Dutch hearth. Furthermore, the
entire town was new. The inn-keeper was a
Shantung man, driven out of his own province
in a year of bad crops. That was two years ago,
and this year he was building a complete village,
bringing men and women from his old home to
people it and work for him. He and his creation
were the epitome of his life, young and vital, yet
*A business house.

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 39
even now, in their beginnings, old with the in
herited traditions of the East.
Now we perceived that each day more of con
vention and its ways were slipping from us. We
had our regular rations of crackers, eggs, and a
cup of coffee — just one cup apiece, for the tiny
pot that fitted into the food-chest would not hold
more than two cups. That ended the eating
question. We wore thin shirts and khaki trousers
— just alike. That ended the clothes question.
We forgot the strivings and cravings of the
world, as we count it, in this country whence our
civilization had so utterly vanished. We grew
to want little and to know no haste. The days
came to us with more and more elemental mean
ings, elemental appeals.
On the fourth day we reached Peilintzu. The
life of the Orient surged in the streets with all
its overpowering force. It was evening. From
the latticed sides of the cart, as we rumbled
along, I watched the dim city. The soft flicker
ing lights threw into relief the primitive existing
everywhere and now daily becoming a part of
us. In the dark huts open to the streets, bean-

40 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
oil lamps flared and flickered on families bending
low over their evening meal. With bowls held
to their mouths, they ate eagerly with original
elemental hunger. In the shops were men naked
to the waist, their brown bodies glistening in the
light; and all the streets were crowded with
venders striking their cymbals, shouting their
wares. Beggars in sackcloth and dirt limped,
and groveled, and whinned, holding out begging
hands and raising their voices for alms, alms.
High above these noises and above the creaking
of the cart-wheels, came the shrilling, barbarous
music of the one-stringed violins playing the
wedding guests into strange, unnamed moods,
and of the pounding tom-toms beating forth the
wailing mysteries of death. Before our eyes, in
naked simplicity, was the drama of existence
which we, in our civilization, veil and disguise
and ignore, — the rude joy over food, the ugli
ness of want, the passion of love, the uncontrolled
sorrow of death. In the summer night, feasting
and want, love and death, all lifted their voices.
And again we passed through the shadowy
gateway of the night's stopping-place, into the

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 41
court with its moon-lighted roof and its quiet
munching beasts. Day by day, night by night,
this primordial existence was piling up its ex
perience within us. Life surcharged with rudi
mentary meanings was calling us more and more
insistently to live as profoundly as we could. But
we had yet to touch the very heart of funda
mental things.
We stayed a day in Peilintzu, for my husband
had work to do and we must present our pass
ports at the yamen (the official house and office).
We were not at all sure we should be allowed to
go on. From Peilintzu to Hailun was the stretch
of country reputed to be full of the bandits. We
spent the day in the hongs and prowling over
the city. The one-storied mud buildings, baked
brown by the northern sun, made the city look
like an encampment of gophers. There were no
pagodas, or temples, or even a city wall, to break
the stretch of rounded roofs — only the high-
standing, fresh-matting grain-towers, which
spoke of business prosperity. But for some
reason the city was as fascinating as the more
characteristic Chinese ones with their beautiful

42 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
walls, half-ruined temples, and pagodas. Per
haps its charm was the freedom of the plains, of
which I caught glimpses beyond the brown city;
perhaps it was the daring, almost lawless, free
dom of the pioneer inhabitants.
The market street was the most surprising
thing of all. Away out here, where we felt as if
we had come to the jumping-off place of the
earth, — here where a white woman had never
been, — we found a market-place as busy as Wall
Street although altogether Eastern. The long
way was full of carts and mules and pack-
donkeys, of buyers and sellers and money
changers. Fortunes were made and lost on that
street, in grain and the great gamble in beans.
Here, where man made no pose, I began to
realize how ruthless business is — how it inately
pertains to the savage instinct of struggle for
food and shelter. When I entered the hongs, I
could scarcely sense the large investments with
twenty and thirty per cent, returns, the very air
was so pervaded with the enervating, idle ease
of the wealthy Eastern gentlemen. We all but
stumbled in the dark rooms heavy with smoke

¦ai;k 41

Only the hii;h-standing, fresh-matting grain- towers, which spoke of business prosperity.

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 43
and the odor of incense. Vassals, whose duty it
was to serve every whim of those Oriental busi
ness men, stood on every side. A crowd of them
always ushered us into the inner offices, where
sat the managers amid the dust gathering on the
ancestral tablets and the paper panes of the sealed
windows. One retainer would bring us tea, one
water-pipes. Then there was always a modern
touch — one would offer us British-American To
bacco Company cigarettes. The smoke of West
ern business had penetrated even into the inner
sanctuaries of these hongs.
In the late afternoon, just after we had re
turned to the inn, the head official of the town
came to see us. He was a little, sawed-off
Oriental, clad in Chinese clothes and a derby.
We were indeed honored, for we were only
merchants — and business is not one of the time-
reverenced occupations here. Farmer and scholar
and official stand above the merchant. After
much Eastern politeness, he told us that he
thought we could go on, and that he would give
us an escort of two soldiers! We could have
blessed the absurd little man in the long gown

44 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
and derby, who put his pride in his pocket — or
more correctly, as he was a Chinese, up his huge
sleeve — and made going on possible for us, for
we wanted with all our hearts to see the
country ahead.
Promptly on time the next morning, our escort
appeared riding bravely up the street, their rifles
over their shoulders. They were literally covered
with bandoliers — one had two hundred rounds,
the other a hundred and fifty. Thus we started
prepared for battle, but the day passed without
event, in the same quiet as the previous days.
We were not safe yet. We should have reached
Hailun that night, but a rain the evening before
had softened the roads, which were no more than
paths through the fields, until our heavy wheels
sank deep into the sticky mud, turning more
slowly than ever. We strained our eyes into the
gathering dusk for some sign of Hailun, but in
vain. Had we known it, Hailun was many li
away. Although Chinese carters have been over
a road innumerable times, they can scarcely ever
tell how near you are to your stopping-place.
They will say you are ten li away, but at the end

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 45
of the ten li they will tell you — without seeing the
incongruity of it — that your destination is still
not ten, but twenty li farther on ! " Why should
you wish to know? " they evidently wonder; " it
will not get you there any sooner. Just plod on
and on, and by and by, if Fate wills it, you will
be there. That is all there is to it. Why
discuss it? "
As we drove farther and farther in the dim
September twilight, the mere physical needs,
food and shelter, became the most desired things
on earth. Hailun was, to us, but a mirage of
bodily comfort, forever in the distance. Cart-
tired, weary beyond all expression, the whole
blessedness of living was bed, and food, and
safety. Our uncouth mule-drivers, who had
known no other wants in all their existence, were
not more single in their desires this night than
we. Around us lay the land in perfect peace.
The tall kaoliang rustled its cornlike leaves about
us. Higher than a man's head, higher than a
man on horseback, it stood, offering shelter. We
cried out to claim its protection, to stretch our
selves in the cart and sleep ! But we knew with

46 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
fear — instinctive fear like that of the natives — •
that the high grain could also make safe the
escape of marauding bands. There was no pro
tection to be hoped for from the peaceful earth.
Man had despoiled it, and to man we must look
for help. At last we came to a little makeshift
inn, but there was no room for us and it had
begun to rain ! But in a smaller building, where
grain was stored within the inn inclosure, we
slept on top of the grain — man and woman of the
West, carters and soldiers of the East.
There is no delaying, in the morning, on the
Chinese road, for the carters are early astir and
they see to it that you have no rest, until in
desperation you, too, get up. So, despite the
night's experiences, we made our tiffin place next
morning by nine o'clock. So said our watches,
and the sun, as far as we could tell, agreed with
them. Having quickly disposed of our coffee
and eggs, we pushed on to one of the many
small rivers we had been continually crossing.
As usual (or at least we had come to think it
was customary) the ferryboat was on the other
side and the boatmen were eating their ' chow '

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 47
and refused to hurry. Our escort, exceedingly
wroth at such an indignity — as they reckoned it
— to their distinctive selves, fired off their guns
a couple of times. It was a fine display of empty
authority, but, at any rate, we did not have to
wait longer: the ferry, as we grandly called the
mud-scow (with boards across the hold for the
cart wheels to rest on), slowly worked across
the river by means of poles. For once, the carts
rolled aboard without their wheels slipping off
the narrow planks that led to the boat. For
once, the mules behaved as if ferrying was the
greatest joy of their lives, stepping demurely into
the prow, scorning the very thought of skipping
gaily into the kaoliang at the moment of em
barkation, as we had known them to do. So
we were quickly aboard, keeping well in the
stern to avoid the mules' heels, — and across we
went. Then we started to climb. After going steadily
upward for about an hour, we came out on the
northern plain. It looked for all the world like
' the land east of the sun and west of the moon '
of the folk tales, a great never-to-be-forgotten

48 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
country, vast and rolling and, as far as one could
see, covered with crops of all kinds — kaoliang,
beans, corn, buckwheat. The oats and wheat
had already been harvested, leaving large patches
of rich brown earth. Here and there on the huge
expanse were scattered groups of four or five
mud houses. The productiveness and the im
mensity of that plain held us enthralled. It was
as if we had stumbled into a mythical land,
where things grew of their own accord, where
there were not men enough to gather in the
abundance, where nature appeared graciously to
dispense with man and the sweat of his brow.
The Manchurian sunshine, that glorious godlike
potion, fell like golden wine over those boundless
stretches. Faint, faint, was our Anglo-Saxon
heritage; we were lost to all but the long vaga
bond days, the simple living in inns^ the carts
bouncing along over the roads. Around us was
the shining air; within us the love of the open
day. We had inherited the earth ! There it lay !
Then suddenly, from the quiet road ahead,
a cloud of dust arose. As we strained our eyes
to see, there came riding out of it three or four

The ferry, as we grandly called the mud-scow, slowly worked
across the river by means of poles.

For once, the carts rolled aboard without their wheels slipping
off the narrow planks that led to the boat. [page 47]

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 49
men. Each man riding was pulling after him
by leading straps a number of animals — that
much we could see.
" Heavenly mud ! " cried my husband, shading
his eyes with his hand, " they are riding hell for
leather. Something's up ! "
Now we were near enough to understand their
shouts : " Hung-hu-tzu lai ! Hung-hu-tzu lai ! "
(The red-beards are coming! The red-beards are
coming!) "They are fighting ... ten li
off ... at the inn . . . they are chasing us
... to get our horses . . . Hung-hu-tzu lai !
. . . Hung-hu-tzu lai ! "
" For God's sake, hurry ! " cried my husband,
fairly lifting me onto the high shaft of the cart
and jumping after me — we had all been walking.
The carters jumped to their places, simultane
ously letting their long whips sing and crack in
the air. Down they came on the mules' backs.
The carts sprang forward with a terrific bounce.
The escort were urging their horses and loading
their rifles. " Have your revolver ready ! " my
husband commanded me, as he slipped his own
out of his belt. It was a wild ride ! Across the

50 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
fields! Through the kaoliang! Over the beans!
Behind and amongst us the frightened bearers of
the news, their horses and their mules ! On, on,
over the furrows, plunged our clumsy train, the
carts rocking until it seemed they must tip over.
All around us, the terrified men yelled savagely,
and the whips hissed and whizzed. Behind,
steadily getting nearer, a cloud of brown dust!
Nearer came the cloud of dust. We knew the
full meaning of it. With painful vividness there
flashed through my mind something they had told
us in Harbin of a man who had left his fellows,
one day, to go on alone; the next morning they
found him stripped of all possessions and of life.
There lay the beautiful earth spread out like a
feast before us, but from us, too, as from him,
might go the sun, and the wind, and all the
earth. I clutched more firmly my revolver. I
heard the horsemen yell : " A hundred in the
band ! " How slowly we moved ! How they
gained on us !
On over more beans, through another field of
kaoliang we went. Suddenly, there in front of
us, hidden until now by the tall grain, stood a

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 51
walled-in farm-house. We sprang to the ground.
We hammered frenziedly on the door. Would
they, oh, would they, let us in? Already the
brown cloud was taking the shape of riding
men! Still within they delayed. We could hear
the farmer-family talking — they thought we were
the bandits! The precious moments were pass
ing. Bullets were now going ' phut ! ' in the dirt
around us. Hope was all but gone — when
through a loop hole, some one within spied us, —
the foreigners! Then they knew and opened
their gates ! Horses, mules, men — we all whirled
into the court, swept on by the overwhelming
instinct to live. The great doors swung to behind
us, the heavy wooden bars clattered into place.
We were safe !
In the courtyard of that far-away farm-house
we waited, our hearts beating fast with the fear
and the joy and the vision of that ride. Only
a short time had passed since we had been idling
along the road, but in those wild moments our
souls had been saturated with the pure instinct
of self-preservation. Our Anglo-Saxon world of
possible conquests, possible possessions, possible

52 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
fame, had been shown to us as mere trappings.
In one revealing flash we had seen the beauty of
naked existence, had been mad with the desire
for life. It was not the sordid struggle to keep
body and soul together that takes place in our
present-day civilized cities; it was the exaltation
of a race for our lives amidst the glowing abun
dance of the clean earth. That moment, sur
charged with primitive vitality and vividness, had
erased from our souls all the pallidity, the color-
lessness of past conventional experience. At last
it had been given to us to throb with the pulsing
heart of the elemental ! Through it, we felt life's
profound significance. Some things are made
known only unto vagabonds. In the open world,
far away from the bustle and blinding competi
tion for conquests, possessions, and fame, we
had tasted living in its essence.
We had little notion how long we should have
to stay with the farmer and his family. The
remainder of the bandits who had followed the
horse-owners would probably not attack us be
hind high walls, unless they were reinforced.
Perhaps we might go on in the morning, but there

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 53
was no certainty of it: it all depended on the
bandits, for we dared not go on, with an escort
of two, until that band of a hundred was
accounted for.
My husband paced the court, his eyes full of
light. " This business is surely an exciting one,"
he exclaimed half-anxiously, half -exultantly.
The husband in him was anxious, the vagabond
exultant. But both of us being largely vagabond,
we dismissed care and entered with zest into the
joys of our forefathers, into the game dear to
all when the world was young — the game of what
will happen next.
No siege was attempted that night, and gray
dawn found the soldier of the last watch asleep
by the loop hole. We hoped the Red-Beards had
decided that it was better not to molest us. After
much discussion, we concluded that we would
wait until noon and then, if there was no sign of
the bandits, we would risk going on. All the
morning we watched and scouted in the im
mediate vicinity. No robbers appeared, but
neither was there a single traveler venturing
forth on the road.

54 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Nevertheless, at noon we started forth, with
one soldier ahead, and one behind the carts. I
sat inside our vehicle with my revolver loaded,
watching the way ahead, while my husband, in
order to see above the rounded top of the cart,
stood on the narrow space in front, where he
usually sat, and watched for sudden attacks from
the rear. Everything was deserted, which made
us doubly anxious. No one else dared make the
attempt. Evidently the historic Red-Beards were
still about.
But by and by, when the tension was getting
well-nigh unbearable, for me at least, we began
meeting carts coming from Hailun. At any rate,
traffic was being resumed.
" Greetings of the road," we called out in
Chinese. "What of the hung-hu-tzu?"
" Soldiers have gone out, caught some and shot
them," was the laconic answer. (Justice is swift
in this no man's land.)
We rode on until we could see distinctly the
low mud dwellings of Hailun and the Chinese,
in the evening light, standing upon the house
tops.

An Adventure with the Red-Beards 55
Coming through a field of kaoliang, there in
the darkening quiet, we saw hanging from the
branches of a tall tree, the bloody heads of the
bandits.

CHAPTER IV
LOOSE LEAVES IN MY NOTE-BOOK THAT
TELL OF THINGS I SAW AND THOUGHT
WHEN I WAS MUCH ALONE IN THE LONG
WINTER. Two autumns have passed with their drifting
clouds, their unquenchable sunshine, their plenty
on the open stretches. The bitter northern winter
has for a second time descended on the land.
It is wonderful and majestic, but at all times
relentless, shutting in this little treaty port to its
own life. The river is closed for the winter;
the junks, covered with snow, lie upturned on
the shore; and no steamers can enter the harbor
for months to come. To reach the Chinese rail
way we must cross the river on sledges. The
Japanese railway is our only near access to the
outer world.
And very small looks this bit of Western life
in the face of this winter frontier and the East
that everywhere encroaches upon the town's
56

Alone in the Long Winter 57
domains. From my upstairs windows I look out
above my own compound wall across an expanse
of white in the foreground to the gray walls and
gray dwellings of the foreign community. There
is one gray spire breaking the sky line; it is the
spire of the Church of England. Flat, earth-
colored Chinese roofs huddle so close that they
touch elbow everywhere with the few foreign
houses. It is neither the time for the business
man to be abroad or the afternoon tea hour —
the beloved migrating moment of the women — so
not a member of the little foreign community is
abroad. English and French and Americans are
alike closely housed against the intense cold — the
frontier is left to winter and the Oriental.
Across that white space in the foreground there
continually pass long lines of carts with their
Oriental drivers, in fur hoods and straw-stuffed
moccasins, plodding at the side. Lean wolflike
dogs — the scavengers of China — slink past; little
beggar children hurry away, crouching from the
cold. Then, as I watch, over that white space
comes a funeral procession — a startling splash of
color against the monotonous gray background.

58 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Musicians in Lincoln green carry great gold in
struments; faint fragments of the dirge, now high
wailing, now deep groaning, reach me above the
wind and my rattling windows. The procession
follows : a long line of muffled black figures carry
ing the paper paraphernalia of the dead — the
gaudy red paper chairs, a deep blue cart as large
as the real ones that are passing, tall phantom
servants and gay paper doll ladies, riding large
birds of luck and looking as witchlike as Mother
Goose upon her broomstick, sweeping the sky.
Pace — pace — on to the white comes the great
catafalque in a clinging mantle of red, borne aloft
by beggars chosen at random from the street;
their rags flap bizarrely below their hastily
donned garments of state. In sackcloth walk
the mourners. At last the procession is gone
and with it the wailing, shrieking music of
death. Again I am left with the slow moving
figures of the carters, the creaking carts, the
sneaking wonks, the deep-toned occasional cart
bells, the wind, and thoughts of my husband out
somewhere under the dim gray sky. As I watch
and listen, I know that each day, incompre-

Alone in the Long Winter 59
hensibly but surely, there is growing in me the
strange fascination for the East.
Another gray and white day. But now my
Manchurian world is claimed by silence. There
are no rattling windows, no dirge for the dead,
no deep-toned cart bells; falling snow possesses
the earth. The gray dwellings and the gray spire
are but dim outlines through the veil of descend
ing white; only a few dark figures, like hooded
wraiths from the world of death, crawl silently
along close to those gray compound walls.
Evening is settling down. The snow has
stopped. Russia and this little port seem closely
akin to-night; this Manchurian village reminds
me of some Russian pictures I once saw. There
is the same blue-gray snow, the same atmos
phere of cold remoteness. The dome of the
Russian consulate, dim against the northern sky,
looks like the ever-abiding presence of the
Russian church, thus lending the last touch of
reality to the illusion that this is a part of the
vast silent steppes. Perhaps, when this village

60 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
was almost one of the Russians' possessions be
fore the war that pushed them back, they left
some unfathomable but unerasable touch upon
it. I stand at my window and look and dream,
fascinated by this strange world now mine. I
hear again the spirit of the frontier trail calling
me — the lure of its winter call is strong to-night,
Filtering to me, as it does, through the comforts
of the port, it tantalizes me for I know I catch
only flashes of its power. I want to know the
frontier through the hardships and dangers and
rough things of a winter journey.

CHAPTER V
IN WHICH I GET MY HEART'S DESIRE
Then she pulled off her silk-finished gown
And put on hose of leather, O !
She's gone with the wraggle-taggle gipsies, O.
— Old English Folk Song.
My chance has come — to try the winter trail.
We have planned for two years, now, a cart
journey over the frozen Yalu, but last winter it
was so bitter cold that no foreigner could risk
it. It is February of the second year and we had
just begun to think that we must give it up
again, for alternate freezes and thaws had made
the rivers in southern Manchuria unsafe for cart
travel and they say that, except for pedestrians,
communication with the upper valleys of the Yalu
is practicable only in winter, when the frozen
river can be the highway.
But here's to the luck of the roamer ! We have
had two weeks of continued cold weather and
61

62 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
at last the Yalu is frozen hard enough for
travel. They say that, if we start immediately,
we can finish the river part of our journey before
the ice breaks. The Yalu forms the eastern
boundary of Manchuria, with Korea lying just
across. The great river winds and winds for
about two hundred miles, then divides, one
branch following the Korean shore, one the Man
churian. In between these branches is a tri
angular-shaped piece of Manchuria, almost
entirely cut off from the mainland, separated
from her own by these bridgeless tributaries.
Higher up, the branches dwindle to thin streams,
and Manchuria again becomes one. But as this
takes place in the impenetrable land near the
Long White Mountain, the few inhabitants of
the triangle must depend on the winter ice and
summer junks for outside communication. This
leaves an in-between time of thin or floating ice.
As my husband's business takes us some two
hundred miles up the eastern side of the triangle
to a big lumbering town, and then across a wide
stretch of country full of ranges of forest-
covered mountains, the danger is that we might

/ Get My Heart's Desire 63
be caught in the veritable island at the time of
her isolation.
Well, here's to the dear, kind gods who look
after wanderers! We shall trust them not to
block our path with floating cakes of ice, leaving
us, like Crusoe, on a separate portion of the
earth. Such a journey! It would rejoice the
heart of any vagabond. Days and days upon the
ice, among the tilled and partially tilled hills of
the lower reaches of the river. Then a plunge
into that isolated triangular-shaped treasure-land,
a far-off country full of hidden coal, copper, and
gold, stretches and stretches of glorious timber
and — bandits and wild animals. It is the country
holding the Chinese pot of gold at the end of
China's rainbow. From confiscated Korea the
Japanese follow this rainbow with hungry
eyes. But to the white world, this part of Manchuria
along the Yalu is almost unknown. The only
travelers who have gone over it, simply with the
explorer's interest, are Younghusband and a
couple of comrades. In 1888 they spent a year's
furlough in Manchuria. The fascinating account

64 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
of their wanderings is now out of print and al
most forgotten. Since then this inaccessible wild
erness of wealth has been left almost to itself,
only now and then a business man venturing into
its wild, unsettled regions. Some ten years ago a
picturesque Englishman, famed all over Man
churia for his erratic doings, went through it
hunting a gold mine, the concession papers for
which he made out himself, and they were after
wards proved fraudulent. Occasionally, in the
years since, large firms operating in the Orient
have sent a white man through. There are also
rumors of a sea-pilot and his wife who, long ago,
went by native boat for a holiday part way up
the river. But never before had a woman gone
over the whole of this territory, or attempted
any of it in the winter.
It's pack and go. Once more out came the
rough clothes of the road. Not a feminine gar
ment went into that chest. I could have hugged
for very joy the good stout shoes, the breeches,
and rough jacket. They meant for me freedom
from the proprieties which sometimes crush from
life some of its buoyant gaiety.

7 Get My Heart's Desire 65
We caught the night's express for Antung, the
great port of the Yalu. The train pulled slowly
out into the night, slipping past deserted Russian
barracks, eloquent of the great Russian advance;
here and there the Russian cemeteries spoke all
too eloquently of later retreat. On that Bud
dhist plain, many days from Russia's border, the
Greek crosses on the huddled graves looked lonely
and exiled.
In time Moukden was gone and the monoto
nous prairies. Close against the cold window-
pane I pressed my face, straining my eyes into
the night for one glimpse of the eternal hills.
" Hurry, hurry fire cart ! The trail, the trail
under the open sky, the trail among the hills, is
just ahead." And then I went to sleep and slept
until we pulled into Antung in the early morning.
All that day we were very busy. First there
were the carts to get, — one for ourselves and one
for those indispensable factors, the boy and the
middle-man. We began early, for we knew by
experience it would be an all-day job to complete
the Oriental bargaining. The carters must, per-

66 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
force, start far in excess of the price they expect,
and we far below. Then by night, without either
of us ' losing face,' we would reach an in-between
price; the middle-man, and the carters, and the
boy, and various other hangers-on would have
carefully arranged the little matter of ' squeeze '
attendant upon the transaction. Has it been
said, " There is six feet of ground awaiting
the man who tries to hustle the East ? " Let
it also be said that the six feet await him
even sooner should he seek to eliminate
' squeeze.' It is evening now and our equipment is com
plete : two carts covered with heavy blue cloth to
protect the latticed wood and lined with fur to
keep out the intense cold, the respective owners
of the carts as drivers, the food box, the
clothes chest, the bedding roll, revolvers, and
the clothes we are to wear. Surely the list of
these clothes is appalling: two suits of flan
nel underwear apiece, flannel shirts, fur-lined
trousers, sweaters, short leather fur-lined coats,
fur caps, mufflers, heavy shoes, and then the final
layer — sheepskin coats with the hair so thick we

I Get My Heart's Desire 67
can scarcely move in them, and Chinese felt
moccasins to go over our big shoes.
Our greatest asset is our boy. He lived in
Harbin during the winter of the plague; he was
one of the retinue of the picturesque Englishman
when he went hunting the gold mine. He has
been a carpenter, a farmer, a boatsman, a coolie,
and a boy. He changes his role as easily as a
chameleon its color. In times of stress on the
road such flexibility is salvation.
Thus attired, thus equipped, on the twenty-
first of February, we left Antung — the last place
we were to see for many a day that had even the
first prerequisites of civilized comforts. " It is
good to cast them all away," — so sang our hearts
as at six o'clock in the morning we left the over
heated hotel, stepping out into the quiet cold,
just before dawn. Our two carts stood ready at
the door; the carters moved around giving a last
greasing to their cart wheels. The food boxes,
looking very small for a month's rations, were
roped on the back; then came the clothes chest
and it, also, was roped on. The bedding-roll was
put in the back of the cart. Last of all, on top

68 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
of the grain sacks of other journeys, we stuffed
in a thin mattress which we were to use on the
k'angs at night time. This mattress was our
latest addition to the Manchurian traditions for
making endurable those primeval vehicles.
The cart, with its fur and mattress, seemed
to have shriveled to half its usual size and I
was twice mine, in my layers of clothes; but, by
dint of much pushing by my husband and much
pulling on my own part, I managed to crawl
in. My husband jumped to his usual place on
the shaft across from the driver; the boy and the
middle-man were already in the cart behind; the
' escort,' consisting of one soldier, walked ahead.
Somewhere from within the bundle of animated
clothes which represented the driver, we heard
the ' Tzu-tzu,' the equivalent of the Yankee ' Gid-
dap.' We were off, rumbling over the snow-
covered streets of Antung! Turning once and
then again, we had left Antung behind. In
another half-hour we had reached the frozen
river where lay the trail of the winter.
I surely have sipped some potion meant for
gipsies; for as soon as we were in that bumpy

I Get My Heart's Desire 69
cart, with the surety of days afield, my spirit
took on a serenity peculiar to our wandering
days. By the time we had reached the river,
the knack of riding in a Peking cart had come
back to me, and I snuggled down into my furs.
" Happy ? " asked my husband.
I sighed contentedly.
The front of the cart, with its fur curtain
rolled up, was a window, arched at the top,
framing for me the winter frontier and its
pageant. On either side were the white hills,
above was the gray sky, before us was the white
Yalu. Over its frozen surface, far to the
horizon, there snaked along, now on one side,
now on the other, a dark streak. Thus had the
winter road been blazed out to avoid the thin
ice and rapids where the water flowed too fast
to freeze.
Tinkle, tinkle went the tiny bell on the shaft-
mule; click, click went the cart as the mules
trotted briskly over one of the very few good
roads a Chinese mule ever sees. The sun came
over the mountain tops, touching that deathlike
gray world with an elfin touch, transforming it

yo Pioneering Where the World Is Old
into a shimmering glory. In that radiant morn
ing, over the sparkling ice and snow, moved the
peasants, bent on business, bent on pleasure, re
joicing with the married children, mourning for
the dead. Black spots advanced out of a shining
haze, grew large, took on shape.
" I see trees as men walking," said I laughing.
" They are Koreans," said my husband.
They were all in white, with their billy-cock
hats perched rakishly on top of their fur bonnets.
From the soft shining distance there emerged
great produce carts pulled by long lines of mules,
with dark-hooded figures huddled on the top of
the load. Foot travelers came along, somberly
clad, stooped low under the loads upon their
backs. Slog, slog, they moved past us. There
were sledges drawn by the family oxen. By the
ox's side plodded the man of the family; on the
sledges, wrapped in padded blankets, sat gay little
ladies, jewels in their glossy black hair. From
the blankets peeped bright-eyed babies, their
cheeks red with cold and daubs of paint. Now
that the crops were harvested they were all going
a-visiting.

I Get My Heart's Desire 71
The little padded driver drowsed. The right-
hand mule, resembling the famous Modestine,
tried to take every snowy by-path, shied at every
familiar and unfamiliar object. But we were
very gay and light-hearted and never minded
anything — just watched the peasant world file
past us.
" Hey ! " cried my husband, as that wicked
white mule gave an extra jump, "wake up here,
Schnicklepenutz, and tend these mules."
" He's not a German, he's got a queue," I
protested. " I can't help it, he's square-headed and got
short legs, and Schnicklepenutz he shall be,"
shouted my husband from over the top of his
fur collar.
So Schnicklepenutz he remained to the end of
the chapter, and drowsed as well under that name
as under any other.
" And Benoni shall be the name of the driver
of the other cart," my husband continued; "I
feel he is marked for tragedy."
Hour after hour the country slipped slowly
behind us — each stretch a repetition of the last :

72 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
low, stony hills, narrow valleys with the ever-
present stream meandering down them but now
almost imperceptible, held, as they were, from
their meanderings by the clutch of winter. In
each valley was a thatched-roofed, brown mud
hut — sometimes two — clinging somewhere up
the rocky hills. Over the tiny fields, from which
the rocks had been laboriously cleared, lay a
thicker layer of snow than on the larger stretches
of rocky unfilled land from which the strong
winds blew all but a thin coating. Occasionally
we saw a hillside covered with scrub-oak, — pre
served to supply food for the silk worms of this
region. These scraps of tilled land, these oc
casional hillsides of scrub-oak, seemed of too
small area to account for the quantities of beans
stored in the matting towers and the cocoons
packed in huge wicker baskets, which we found
at the shipping centers along the river. Nothing
but the prodigious toil of the Chinese frontier
could account for such returns.
Far into the evening we rode under the pale
rays of the moon. We were going to do a splen
did day's work — a hundred and twenty li (forty

I Get My Heart's Desire 73
miles). The road was good; the mules were
fresh; and we unconscious of our cart-bruises
because as yet we had not slept on them. Some
where about nine o'clock we drove our mules up
the bank into the street of the first town from
Antung. The town was dark and empty, for
the curfew rings up here at eight o'clock. All
the shutters were closed; the three or four iron
bars of each door were slid in place. Finally, we
found the shop we were looking for; the middle
man descended and hammered on the door until
some one within shouted through the cracks ask
ing who we were.
" K'ai men, k'ai men!" (Open your doors,
open your doors !) " We are from Antung. We
have business with you."
" Wait, wait ! " they cried, " we must ask the
head-man." More questions from within, more waiting.
Then the bars were slid back and we were re
ceived with Eastern politeness, served with tea
as we warmed our hands over a charcoal brazier,
and then given a warm k'ang in an inner room.
Ah me! the change in our spirits in twenty-

74 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
four hours. All we desired the next morning
when we woke, was to be left in peace on the
warm k'ang. We were so stiff and sore that we
did not like to think of carts. But unfortunately
our business was soon done. We had only one
difficulty with the shop-owner. Sometime before
he had been sent a set of brass signs for adver
tising purposes. Considering it the rankest
extravagance to expose such beautiful things to
the elements, he had carefully wrapped them up
and put them away. But when the matter had
been arranged to our satisfaction and his dis
approval, we had broken bread with our host and
were again on our way. Nature is the great
restorer, — we were not long abroad before the
pain and weariness of the early morning were
gone; in their place there was a blessed feeling
of vigor and renewed life.
There was a north wind and, it was snowing —
great, heavy flakes. The river had become a
stranger. We were speechless, enthralled, unable
to take our eyes from so compelling a thing. The
heaps of snow looked vague and unnatural; the
piles of ice took on eerie shapes. They became

I Get My Heart's Desire 75
but the vagaries of fancy. The hills were gone,
the gay pageant was gone. A blurring, blinding
whiteness enveloped us. We felt ourselves alone
in a world of savage desolation. The snow also
blotted out all sound. The mules walked now
instead of trotting, for it was hard traveling in
the fresh-fallen snow; so our gay tinkling bell
and our cheerful clickity-clack were silent. The
motion of the cart drugged our senses a little.
Had we left civilization only the day before?
The world of events seemed unreal. We had
already forgotten daily papers and mail. Our
interests were the day's stint of travel — and the
inn at the end.
At four, in a snowy twilight, we saw the sign
of our inn — the hoops of red cloth, nothing but
a dark scarecrow dangling from a long pole stuck
in the snow on the high bank above us. Trusting
that the swinging rag told the truth, — for the
bank hid any sign of the inn itself, — we ordered
the carters to drive up the track. With the last
strain of the mules up the embankment, we found
ourselves in the inn courtyard, with its hastily
built brush-wood fence, to which the dead leaves

76 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
still clung. The building was a long, one-storied
mud hut with thatched roof.
We entered. Behold what the frontiersman
had created in the face of the savage winter!
The long room was the scene of homely industry.
From the center rafter hung a big oil-lamp,
shedding its rays over a patriarchal family as
busy as a hive of bees. By the clay stove sat
the grandfather feeding the fire with twigs, and
tending a brood of children playing on the dirt
floor packed hard, swept clean. From one
corner came the merry whir of grinding mill
stones, as a blindfolded donkey walked round
and round, while a woman in red with a wonder
ful headdress gathered up the yellow heaps of
cornmeal that oozed from the gray stones.
More women in red threw the bright meal high
in the air, winnowing it of its chaff; others leaned
over clay mortars, pounding condiments with
stone pestles.
Men were carrying firewood, and cooking for
the travelers. One end of the room was reserved
for these wayfarers, but the k'ang at the other
end was divided into sections. From each rafter

The inn court-yard with its hastily built brush-wood fence.

[page 75]

I Get My Heart's Desire JJ
over each section swung quaint little cradles; in
each cradle was a little brown baby, each baby
tended by a larger child. Thus far away from
the loud clamor of the western world, we fell
asleep in a clean inner room, to the soft sound
of swinging cradles and grinding mill-stones.
Six days, and the first stage of our journey is
over. We have reached the town standing where
the river branches. To-morrow we start up the
right arm of the triangle, cutting ourselves off
from the mainland. The shop-keepers, with
whom we are staying, have given us a k'ang in
the cake kitchen. In a niche above the ovens sits
the kitchen god. It is evening now, and a little
apprentice is making the rounds of all the gods.
He has just been in, offered incense and chin-
chined the kitchen's guardian angel. I wonder
if he looks after vagabonds also — if they don't
possess kitchens of their own ?
I woke in what seemed the dead of night, so
black it was, with only the tiny points of light
from the incense glowing in the room. My hus
band was calling, " Wake up, wake up, thou

78 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
sleepy head; it's time to burn our bridges." Then
the boy entered and stuck a lighted candle in
some melted wax on the k'ang table. The stage
was set for our plunge into the country that
might become isolated.
Despite our early rising it was mid-forenoon
before we left. The boy had been warned in a
dream of bandits, and it caused great discussion;
all the owners of the shop stopped work to take
part in it. The upshot of it was that the yamen
doubled our escort.
Almost as we started, the character of the
country began to change: the slopes of the hills
grew sharper, the valleys narrower; scattering
hardwood trees appeared, the villages became
fewer and fewer, the grain-towers we saw less
and less often. The tracts of tilled land were
far apart now.
Each day the snow grew deeper, each day the
cold grew greater. The people became rougher
and rougher, the inns worse and worse. The
road, which very often lay in an inner valley —
for the more numerous and faster flowing rapids
rendered the river unsafe — crossed, more and

I Get My Heart's Desire 79
more frequently, steeper and more difficult passes.
We came to estimate the day's stint of travel, no
longer in li, but in the number of these passes,
for we had to walk up and down them, as they
were too steep and too slippery for riding to
be safe.
It was cold, hard work climbing. A few steps
forward, and a step back we slid. When we
stood, at last, on the windy tops, there was inner
vision from these vantage-points. We looked
at the grandeur of the far-stretching earth.
Under the brilliant Manchurian sky we could see
for miles and miles, range after range of winter-
white hills, bare and brown in spots where the
wind had blown the snow away. A few brown
huts and the brown circling roadway below us
were the only signs of habitation. All things
material receded. Even the hills stood aloof,
clothed in cold snow. We dwelt apart in spiritual
calm. We felt at one with the learned man of
India who had at his finger-tips all the ways of
London, all the affairs of India, and yet re
nounced everything and departed far into the
hills, where, on the brow of a mountain, he

80 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
made himself into a beggar and a holy man, there
to spend the years working out the riddle of
existence. We were one with the Hebrew crying,
" I will lift up my eyes unto the hills." We
were one with the first Chinese frontiersman
who had made it his duty to build a wayside
shrine just where the road went over the brow
of the hill, leaving a tree to spread its protecting
branches in wind and calm, in rain and sunshine,
over the crude altar. We longed to offer incense
there, and to toll the bell that hung from a branch
of the tree, and thus announce to the valley that
one more man had felt the need of something
beyond food and raiment.
Three days more. Finally, there began to be
timber on the slopes. There was scarcely a hut.
The first day we lost our way entirely and found
ourselves fifteen li off our road. That meant
two hours more added to the traveling day and
it brought us at tiffin to no inn at all. The next
day we met a peasant boy pulling out logs.
" How far is it to the inn of the Virtuous
Family ? " our escort cried, stopping him on the
road.

The road crossed steeper and more difficult passes. [page 79]

I Get My Heart's Desire 81
" To hell with you ! " the boy answered. " I'm
not going along the road to tell you the way," he
finished insolently.
" I'll teach you to insult a soldier out on official
business ! " roared our escort, hitting him with
the butt of his rifle.
Then, so quickly that it made us blink, down
from a hut on the hillside came the men of the
boy's patriarchal family. The oldest one, with
a quavering voice but a strong right arm, be
labored our erstwhile brave soldier and marched
him off to the hut on the hill. It had all taken
time and night was coming to the narrow valley.
We were a bit rueful over the loss of half our
escort, but concluded that one was as good as
two of such brave men, and hurried along with
out more ado.
When we entered the inn that night we beheld
a witch's cave. Great clouds of smoke circled
to the dim rafters, great clouds of steam rose
from the huge caldrons standing over the open
braziers. Over them leaned tall men of the
North, their faces sinister in the alternate gloom
and flashes of light from the wood fires. On the

82 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
long k'angs down each side of the room sprawled
the shadowy figures of uncouth wayfarers. By
the dark, grotesquely small k'ang tables they
hunched, drawing in hot draughts of tea with a
loud sucking sound. The earth floor was wet
and slimy with the melting snow from the feet
of many comers. The dried meat, the baskets
of condiments hanging by crooked sticks from
the dimly seen rafters, took on fantastic and
savage shapes.
Our frugal meal of hot tea, sausage, and dry
bread finished, we crawled under the blankets on
one end of the warm k'ang, for we were to get
no privacy that night (there was no inner room
that we could either beg or command). The
warmth was acceptable, and despite the smoke
and flaring fires we fell asleep.
I was dreaming that I was in Dante's Inferno
when I awoke to find it no idle dream. Many
a late traveler had come in while we innocently
slept. The cooking-pots at the end of the k'angs,
whose fires served the double purpose of heating
the k'angs through a system of flues and cooking
extra large quantities of chow, had been filled

I Get My Heart's Desire 83
to their utmost capacity, with a proportionate
amount of fire built under them. So while the
inn-keepers did a thriving business, and we slept,
the stove beds grew hotter and hotter, until the
grateful heat of early evening turned into a red-
hot grill. Wearily we turned and turned. The
sensation was that of freezing on our upper
side and grilling on our lower. Poking holes
in the paper window panes we watched for the
dawn. With the first streak of light we roused our
retinue. That day we were to make Mao Erh
Shan, the Mecca of the lumbering man. Every
one was tired, and a tired Chinaman, be he big,
brave soldier or stalwart carter, is a whining,
crying baby. By noon one soldier had left his
pony to wander riderless while he rode on the
back of our cart; the other refused to trot his
animal. " It was colder trotting," he complained.
The carter, too, refused to hurry; they also were
tired and their mules as well. " Let us stop,"
they coaxed. When we refused they all started
to turn in at a wretched inn twenty li short of
Mao Erh Shan, our destination. We were in

84 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
despair. Then the boy, our staff and our rod in
difficulty, came to the rescue. He climbed upon
the soldier's pony; he beat that pony into a wab
bling trot. His long fur gown flapped to the
four winds; the pony balked and plunged, but
the boy beat on and on with a little no-account
whip, until our mules sniffed the excitement and
actually trotted. The twenty li were made and
Mao Erh Shan. Thus ended the second stage
of our journey.
Even as we opened our eyes the next morning
we were conscious that we were no longer in the
silent, white wilderness. We sensed the now
unaccustomed sounds and smells of teeming life.
Our breakfast quickly eaten, we were out on the
street. Rough characters with strong, insolent
faces slouched along; the restaurants were as
thick as flies in summer. The occasional shops
looked incredibly prosperous for China. There
was none of the almost penurious thriftiness that
usually marks even the wealthiest shops. The
owners boasted that they had refused the agency
of several large foreign firms. " It doesn't pay

I Get My Heart's Desire 85
to bother with them," they said arrogantly. They
saw things large, they ' talked big.'
Thirty years ago this place had been a little
village with one or two stores, a few huts, and a
military post. Then it constituted the farthest
post on the Yalu where the Chinese had estab
lished authority. Now, except for Antung, it is
the largest place on the river and authority of a
rough order has been established clear to the
Russian border. When the Japanese say that
the Chinese, when left to themselves, do not de
velop their undeveloped country, I wonder if they
forget such towns as this.
Everywhere were the evidences of the good
wages, the large profits of a new country. It
reminded one of the mad life of Alaska when
the miners came in with their pokes of gold.
Money came easily and it went even more easily.
Lust and license ran riot as they do in lumbering
camps the world over, only here there was the
momentum gained from a wild Oriental abandon.
On the edge of the clean, new country men were
crazed with the possession of money easily
obtained.

86 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
After two days of struggle with these men
swollen with power, my husband decided to move
on. We could delay no longer. It was March
now, and we still had seven days' journey
through the forest to the other tributary, which
we must cross to get over to Manchuria's main
land. And we had to give up a slight hope that
had lurked in our minds, — the hope that we might
make the journey to the Long White Mountain.
We yearned to see the mountain about which
clung innumerable legends and from which the
country took its old name — the Land of the
Long White Mountain. It had other lures too:
it was very beautiful with its sides all powdered
with disintegrating pumice stone, and — must I
own? — its greatest attraction lay in the fact that
it had never been visited by any foreigners except
a Jesuit priest and Younghusband's party. The
out-of-the-way is always a magic thing to the
vagabond pioneer. But there was no business
with the rude lumbering camps in that direction
and, too, the mountain lay due north some three
hundred li, which meant, if we visited it, we
would be at least a week later in reaching that

I Get My Heart's Desire 87
tributary, which separated us from the mainland.
So we resolutely turned our backs on the fairy-
white mountain with its ' Blue Dragon Prince '
pool at the top, set in jagged juttings of powdery
white pumice. Yes, we turned our backs on it
and started due west towards that tributary that
now began to loom large in our minds.
In a half-hour after leaving the roaring, rioting
town we were in the thin edge of the virgin forest
underneath which lay China's hidden treasures of
coal and copper and gold. Soon we had for
gotten the Long White Mountain in the beauty
of this other, almost as much untrod, country.
Oh, the wonder of those days ! We saw the earth
almost as it was made in the beginning. There
was no restless haste here, no disorder. Man's
hand was scarcely perceptible. There were just
the swift-rising ranges of mountains, the heaped-
up piles of snow, the great giant trees lifting their
branches high, high above us, mingling up in the
sky in a glorious tangle. Deeper and deeper we
penetrated, higher and higher we climbed. There
was ineffable stillness and peace boundless,
eternal. We had passed, for the time, far away

88 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
from man. We saw the activities of our lives in
the perspective of the past days of toiling travel.
At last we stood on the highest pass in all our
journey. Around us was sunshine and sparkling
snow ; close at hand a dead pine, bare and naked,
stood out majestically. Down the slopes marched
the trees ; far-off the mountains were gray, hidden
in fast-rising snow squalls. A great wind came
biting against us. It was a supreme moment.
We stood thus only the moment; then the sun
fast nearing the tops of the mountains, and the
threatening snow squalls, warned us to hurry
and we started the long tramp to the valley below.
(Riding was not safe.) Just as the early dark
ness was settling down and the snow flurries were
becoming formidable enemies, we reached the
inn which stood in a little clearing at the foot.
It was the loneliest-looking habitation I had ever
seen; its very strength enhanced its loneliness,
making it look as if it pitted itself against the
great primeval savagery of the dark forest that
came down close to the back wall of the inn. The
walls were of huge logs, the chimneys were also
of logs, hollowed, and the roof had shingles as

I Get My Heart's Desire 89
thick as a man's fist. There were a few feet of
courtyard in front scarcely big enough for our
carts and the pack-saddles of a mule train stop
ping there for the night; then the forest began
again. And the inn-keepers looked as if they
might well be members of the bandit raiders they
complained about.
" We make no money," they growled. " One
night a band of robbers comes down out of the
mountains and they make us feed them; the next
night the soldiers come after the bandits and the
law makes us feed them for three cents apiece and
they eat a lot." (Perhaps then we should not
have blamed them for soaking the corn for our
mules before they measured it.) What scenes
peopled my thoughts ! On nights like this when
the wind was moaning among the huge trees of
the dark forest, which stood so near, and the
branches beat crazily on the mammoth shingles
of the roof, then the door would be pushed vio
lently open and wild, unkempt bandits of the
mountains would come in, bringing the wild night
with them. But they did not come that night
and through sheer exhaustion we slept through-

90 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
out the mountain storm that all night belabored
our shelter.
The next day we crossed the last high range
of mountains, and descended into the more
sheltered and more populated land on the other
side. With a gasp we realized that there was
something new in the air, something living,
something fresh. " Look! " I cried. We looked
around us at the ground, at the sun; we looked
at each other. We reached our hands out
beyond the cart. The wind touched them
softly. " Great suffering Mike," groaned my husband,
" it looks like spring, it feels like spring, it smells
like spring, and by gorry, it is spring! A few
days like this and the river will be too rotten to
risk the carts on it."
" It cannot be," I said. " Why, it was only
yesterday that we ran and thrashed around to
keep from freezing."
" And we have nearly a thousand li more to
Ho," continued my husband.
" Wake up, wake up, old Schnicklepenutz," we
both cried, poking the driver's drowsy, padded

I Get My Heart's Desire 91
back. " It's going to be a race with spring.
None of your Eastern procrastination."
Thud, our cart roundly struck a stone in the
soft snow. We hadn't time to consider its mes
sage before we saw ahead the undeniable sheen
of water in the two cart-tracks down each side
of the road. It was on the edge of a lumbering
camp. " Oh, well," we said, " it's just because there
is so much traffic here. The roads cannot melt
so soon."
As you cannot be vagabonds unless you can
forget future dangers in present joys, we, of
course, forgot all about our worries when we
heard the lovely hum of work in the camp.
There was the chip, chip, of the axes mingled with
the loud whir of the huge saws as the man be
neath the propped-up log pulled the saw towards
him, and the quicker whir as the man on top
pulled back again. There was the smell of new-
cut timber, blending with the pungent odor of
the chip fires of fresh pine, and just ahead they
said was the " Not Far Away Inn " — and tiffin.
"This afternoon," we decided, "we must go

92 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
a long way before we stop. Somehow we've got
to manage to hustle the East and we've got to
get started sooner at noon than we usually
do." Oh, for the best-laid plans of mice and men!
" We'll have beans, boy," we said, " and tell
the carters chop, chop, must hurry."
" Master," replied the boy, " carters say must
stop, very late now, to-morrow can go."
"Why?" cried we.
" Mules very tired."
We were paying the carters by the day; hence
the need for rest. If you pay them by the trip,
they get you out of bed at all hours in the morn
ing, and tell you all sorts of tales about there
being no good inns, in order to induce you to
go farther at night. If you travel by the day,
there is a sudden deep concern for their animals
and an astonishing number of sick mules. Just
now, however, we wished we were paying by the
trip. " Tell carters, must go. No go, no money
to-day." The boy departed and we went on with
our beans.

I Get My Heart's Desire 93
" All right," said the boy returning, " can go
little way."
But we had no sooner finished our beans than
a soldier from the town entered, clicked his heels
(if one can be said to click heels booted in cloth
shoes), and stood at attention.
" The head man of the town invites you to be
so good as to remain here for the rest of to-day.
There is a band of two hundred hun-hu-tzus
coming down from the North. He has sent out
the soldiers, but there may be fighting and per
haps on the road, and will you be so kind as to
wait, at least until to-morrow ? "
Of course there was nothing to do but ' be so
kind as to wait.' The carters had a lovely, quiet
afternoon of snoring sleep after their midday
wine ; for us there was nothing to do but go out
and ruefully survey the snow melting in the
afternoon sun, and sit in the inn listening to
tales of bandits. But when evening came and
we lay, wrapped in blankets, Roman fashion, by
our k'ang table, the old carefree spirit descended
upon us.
Whether it was due entirely to fate, or whether

94 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
the gods conspired against us, I really cannot
say. I am inclined to believe the latter. I think
the gods reasoned this way: We cannot allow
any one to hurry the East, however necessary it
may be to him personally. If it is once allowed,
there is no telling where it will stop. We must
save a few quiet corners, else gods, and fairies,
and beloved vagabonds will disappear.
Be that as it may, we had carried out our
rushing program for only two days when, in a
wide valley between hills, our shaft-mule fell
lame. First he began going very slowly, then
he limped, and finally, as we came to the end of
the valley and started on the inevitable pull up
wards, he refused altogether to go on. What
were we to do? Schnicklepenutz got down to
look him over. He grunted angrily; it was evi
dent that he was not going to risk the life of
a perfectly good mule.
Then there was a consultation and an argu
ment; everybody got out. First Benoni climbed
down from his cart, then came the boy, then our
middle-man extricated himself, and last of all,
as he could not be heard in the discussion, down

I Get My Heart's Desire 95
jumped my husband. Sun, the middle-man, who
liked ease and not too many hours in a cart, was
for stopping. Schnicklepenutz, who wished to
lose neither his mule nor his three good dollars
a day, was also all for stopping. The boy, who
cared not a fig for the mule, the money or the
ease, was for going on; not that he felt the
danger of delay, — to that all Chinese are superbly
indifferent, — but he was highly disgusted with
them all. We who had been brought up under
the sheltering arms of the S. P. C. A., but who,
nevertheless, did not intend to risk our lives on
the rotten ice of the far-away river, were for
hunting a new equipment; only we knew all too
well that, if our retinue wanted something else,
however acquiescent they might seem to our
wishes, the new equipment would not be forth
coming. Then Benoni, who was a relative of
Schnicklepenutz and who wanted to keep intact
the mules and money of the family, offered a
solution: put our big white pulling-mule in the
shafts and give the lame one the lighter work.
Since the big white one had never been in the
shafts and was an ill-tempered beast to boot, he,

96 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Benoni, would be the driver, as he was the best
hand with the animals.
The leather buckled, the ropes tied, the strings
of the mysterious harness knotted, the big mule
gave a wicked shake in the shafts, then started
to climb without more ado. The scheme had
worked! By our watches we had lost only half
an hour.
Up we climbed, the big mule pulling bravely
and the alert Benoni flicking the ears of all three
at just the moment to avoid every frozen lump,
every stone. It was the work of art, the ascent
of that. pass! We almost concluded to ride down
in order to save time and see Benoni's fine work.
Still, as Schnicklepenutz, his heavy brain working
more slowly, had not reached the brow of the
hill, we might as well walk, specially as Benoni
was discreetly tying our wheels. We waved him
on; it is never safe to be ahead of the carts
on a down grade, for sometimes they take a
sudden slide. Benoni, whips and lines in one
hand and the other free to steady the cart, ran
along at the side. " Tzu, tzu, oah, oah." The
white mule squared his haunches, planted all his

I Get My Heart's Desire 97
four feet firmly; the cart with its unrevolving
wheels slid slowly behind him.
" Heigh ho, heigh ho," we cried, " we sing to
the luck of our roamings." And we danced after
them down the wintry road. We fell behind,
panting, and then stopped, transfixed to the spot.
" Oh ! oh ! the cart ! the mules ! Benoni ! " The
mules were running; the cart was hopping at
their heels. Benoni was plunging along, but
never for an instant did he stop swinging that
circling whip. Heaven only knows how he
guided those two front mules with the wicked,
white one careering at their heels !
Now the mules were galloping ! The cart was
climbing, like a man demon, on the very backs
of them. The melting snow hid a glaze of
slippery ice, and Benoni's felt shoes were his
undoing. Running full tilt, down he went, his
whip still waving, and slid headlong over the
ice. In one lightning moment the heavy studded
wheel of the cart rode over him. We closed
our eyes.
When we looked, Benoni was dragging him
self by means of his hands back up the road

98 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
towards us. His first instinct pulled him away
from that awful solitary experience back to his
fellows. Not far below him was his cart all
tangled in some underbrush, hanging just above
a precipice, and the mules lying flat in the snarled
harness, with one shaft pinning the white mule
to the ground.
By this time we had all, even the supercilious
Sung, reached Benoni. Why he was alive we
could not understand ; but we found that the ugly
wheel had passed over his leg only and his padded
trousers — two or three pairs — had saved it from
being broken. There was the mark of the iron
studding on his flesh, and his face was white
and drawn with suffering. With set teeth he
got up on his feet and took a few steps towards
the inn in the valley below. Schnicklepenutz had
already departed to view the wreck of his pos
sessions. Hurt relatives were all very well, but
what about hurt mules and broken carts? We
turned around to see his short legs astride one
mule's head. The bad mule had grown restive
and was endangering the cart and the mules,
himself included. We bethought ourselves of our

[page 98]

His

cart hanging just above a precipice.

I Get My Heart's Desire 99
own possessions, corraled a passer-by for Benoni
to lean upon, and departed. The stout cart and
stouter mules were all right, but the ropes that
held our boxes to the back of the cart had broken,
and our clothes, business reports, and cherished
rations were scattered far down the ravine. A
lame mule, a morning lost, a hurt driver, our few
remaining biscuits in the mud at the bottom of
the ravine, business reports torn, and no farther
towards that river.
" We will not try to hustle the East," ruefully
said my husband, " even the mules are against it.
Still, there's the river ! "
In the course of the next two hours we all
reached the inn, where they applied hot wine to
poor Benoni's wounds. Then there was the
discussion all over again as to what to do with
the lame mule, but now there was the added diffi
culty of the hurt driver. Every one took sides
about as they had in the morning. There turned
out to be not a single cart in this tiny village;
and the inn-keeper informed us that, as they
could not be used very often on the mountain

ioo Pioneering Where the World Is Old
roads, no one in the whole countryside owned
one. There were some in the next large town
but that was on a round-about route. It was
the best we could do, and it was evident we
must start that afternoon on the day-and-a-half
journey to that cart. It seemed cruel to Benoni,
but it was the least of several evils. If he were
only badly bruised, he would be stiffer and sorer
long before he was better. If it were something
worse, our best move was to get him to a doctor
as soon as possible. Of course, this wilderness
possessed none.
Theories were good, but who should drive?
It takes a long time to learn to drive the pro
verbially stubborn mule with the flick of a whip
and a few guttural notes. Up came the boy.
Why had we not thought of him before ? Wasn't
he a carpenter, a poler of boats, a farmer? Why
not a driver also? He did not know how to
drive very well, but he knew how to flick the
whip and Benoni promised he would sit out in
front and give the tzu tsus and oah oahs, and
¦Schnicklepenutz was to drive each cart in turn

I Get My Heart's Desire ioi
down the passes. With such highly specialized
labor we started.
The first day was finished. We had moved
slowly but surely toward our destination. A
second day and then a third, and we were
started on the fourth. By changing our course
we had struck on an unfrequented road and we
had numerous accidents. Our highly specialized
labor was very slow. That day we had to grit
our teeth anew. There is no quitting on the
trail, even if a steep pass does suddenly con
front you towards dark, after the evening freeze
has set in and made the melting streams that
had covered the road during the day turn to a
smooth glare. Lame mule, sick driver, every
one had to buckle to the work in hand. Every
one except the sick driver was out to lighten
the pull-back of the carts. The drivers clucked
and clucked and when the mules slipped and gave
up, slash ! went the whips, goading them on to a
frantic leap. One ' escort ' and my husband
pushed from behind; Sung and I followed with
rocks to block the wheels if the cart started
sliding. We were on the last steep grade. The

102 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
lame mule, panting, sweating, went down; the
cart slid; our stones did not hold, back towards
the other cart it began to glide. Frantically we
clawed the freezing earth for fresh boulders. It
was a sickening moment, but we got them there
in time.
Just how that last grade was made I do not
know. I have a half -remembered impression of
all the mules being harnessed first to one cart
and then to the other, and of the men giving
the whole of their strength to pushing until,
man and beast, we all stood at the top. My
whole will was set on the task of not being a
baby. I must not be a quitter now. Long ago
I had honestly earned the name of ' trail woman '
from my husband, and I was not going to lose
it now. I kept saying to myself, " Brace up and
be a man." So saying, and watching the moon
light streaming over the valley, I kept plodding
behind my husband towards a light that seemed
to evade our approach. Then, after an eternity,
we were at the inn and drinking hot tea that
brought tears to my eyes. It was just the tea, I
am sure; and my husband did not see them.

And we had numerous accidents.

[page 101]

I Get My Heart's Desire 103
Benoni secured a driver for his team and we
got a whole outfit to take the place of Schnickle-
penutz's. Such a cart ! It was like the one-horse
shay — so old that if it broke at all it would be
a final break-up; and the driver resembled the
equipage. Old in limb and soul, he had no
interest in anything but a large bean-cake for
fodder which, with the stubbornness of old age,
he was determined to put directly under the
place where I sat. And we named him Jehoso-
phat. We planned it all out: six hundred li to
do; ten li an hour; ten hours a day, a stop of one
day at the station on the river. And then
across — if the gods were good !
We made the river in the seven days! They
said carts were still crossing, but that was not
altogether reassuring. The Chinese often cross
frozen rivers till some one falls in. Still, we
thought the thaws had not been sufficient to melt
the thick underlying masses of ice. If only we
did not encounter too thin a place !
To the river we went in the gray early morn
ing. We all sat perched on the front of the
cart (the inside would be a death-trap should we

104 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
go through). There were several tracks. We
picked the safest looking. Onto the ice we
drove. Slash! went the driver's whip, flicking
each mule's ears. They plunged into a wild
gallop. We were half-way there. We could
feel the ice bend under us. Jehosophat, the old,
the stolid, became motion incarnate. His arms
flapped, his whip flew. He waved his feet, he
brought them bang ! against the shaft mule. He
yapped like a dog. The ice crackled! Faster!
Faster !
We stood again on the good firm ground of
Manchuria, and lo, all motion had left Jehoso
phat. He looked like a lump of flesh unquickened
by flame or fire. We looked behind us: our
other cart was safe also. But over the place
where we had just crossed spread a great and
widening crack. The triangular land was enter
ing into its spring isolation.

CHAPTER VI
JUST AN ODD LEAF IN MY NOTE-BOOK.
THE SOUTH WIND BLOWS
What a long, long time since we saw that
far-off strip of Manchuria, entering into its
spring isolation. We said to each other as we
made the rest of the journey through the moun
tains where the roads were breaking : " Spring is
here." For each day the sun was a little warmer
and each day the deep layers of frost melted a
little more and each day the mud was deeper
and there was that unmistakable smell of fresh
damp earth that comes with the spring. Oh,
what fools we mortals be! What we desire we
trick ourselves into believing in the existence of.
How many times since then have we believed in
the presence of this northern spring, although
from past experience we know that she always
trifles with us, advancing and retreating many
times before she comes to stay? And yet my
105

106 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
husband said to me as we plodded along through
the mountains, " I think the in-between time this
year will be very short. There will of course
be a little time when the roads will be so sticky
that there won't be much travel for you. But
I think the ice will be out of the Yalu early this
year and we'll go in a junk part way up the
river." And because I so much wanted to, I
believed. But that was weeks ago and where now, even
now, is the spring? I am again alone, waiting.
For a month we have had the strong south
winds which all we foreigners in Manchuria
know and dread. The south wind blows un
ceasingly and we live in the midst of a brown
blizzard that smears our whole world into a
monotonous dull brown — the color of the native
huts. Our garden plots are brown, the streets
are brown, the air is brown. The same brown
dust even sifts into our houses, settling every
where. There is no play in this wind, no coming
and going and soft flutterings. It is a steady,
constant blow day after day, day after day, and
our windows rattle unceasingly. Thus I wait for

The South Wind Blows 107
the long deferred Manchurian spring. But it
is a thing worth waiting for — when it comes it
is a thing of almost startling beauty. In the
meantime I have recourse to a gift given to
pioneers who are much alone — the gift of
dreams. And in dreams there are no trails too
hard for a woman.

CHAPTER VII
THE MANCHURIAN SPRING, A JUNK, AND
UNCERTAINTY
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.
— Robert W. Service.
All agree that the long-deferred short-lived
Manchurian spring has come at last; although
it would seem to be largely a matter of faith,
for as yet there has been only an occasional
cessation of those south winds that have tor
mented us for weeks on end; to-day to add to
them we are caught in a greater, a browner fury
— a Gobi dust storm. To the local dust is added
the browner, thicker dust swept down from the
desert. But what care we? We are in the delightful
process of preparing for another experience on
the trail. Early this afternoon, donning dust-
goggles and all-enveloping coats, we went boldly
108

The Manchurian Spring 109
forth to the little foreign store — which closely
resembles a country store at a four-corners in
America and is well-nigh as resourceful — and
bought tinned sausage, ham, milk, butter, pickles,
and crackers, with a constantly growing appetite.
Then we hurried home to spend the rest of the
blustering day sitting on the floor of our hall,
packing our chests. We were oblivious of chance
callers and of every convention, and oblivious
also of the brown dust and that never-ending
wind. For is there anything so effacing of all
surroundings as the contentment of the inveterate
wanderer as he packs his well-used equipment
of the trail for use on a new venture — an adven
ture into country so little known that both its
dangers and its joys are left to him to discover?
As I ripped the fur lining from the well-worn
trousers and jacket which had given me service
on our long winter journey, I was engaged in
just such contemplation. Our junk trip up the
Yalu was at hand; this was the favorable mo
ment, for the river was now free from floating
cakes of ice, and the melting of the heavy snows
at the river's source, high in the Long White

no Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Mountain, which put the river in flood, had
scarcely begun. How difficult the ascent of the
river will be, or how far we can go, we do not
know. We do know that our journey will not
include the land trip across the triangular-shaped
piece of Manchuria, for those partial trails are
now not passable. What we do hope to' do is
to reach the lumber camp up the right branch of
the river, but we do not know how possible will
be the ascent of the river even to that point;
the river is full of rapids, but how deep or
swift they will be at this season of the year we
have no means of determining. Everything de
pends on the winds and how much of the winter
snows have melted. " Would the journey be at
all like a trip through the rapids of the Yangtze,
a journey that is one long excitement from be
ginning to end ? " I speculated as I finished my
ripping and stuffed my suit into the last inch
of space in the chest. At any rate the journey
meant spring in a junk and uncertainty. Thus
my great satisfaction.
In the late afternoon, we were again on the
Japanese train, and again I was straining my

<2

The Manchurian Spring in
eyes into the gathering darkness. As many times
as I had made the journey to Moukden, it still
held unnumbered unexplored memories on which
I must needs dwell. Back and forth over that
strip of country had raged almost every conflict
which had come to Manchuria in its long history
— a history that went back to the wild Tartar
tribes who had fought on these plains six hun
dred years before the Christian era. And even
now in this twentieth century my imagination
peopled these quiet evening plains with those
innumerable shadowy conflicts, albeit there were
to be seen but a few blue-clad farmers quietly
sowing their fields. Then I mused on why the
Japanese troops had become so active in this land
since the beginning of the great war in Europe.
Long after dark we saw the light of Moukden
still far away on the plain — Moukden three cen
turies old, built by the first Manchu emperor be
fore he conquered China. Was this bold, free
city to finally become a captive ? I mused again.
It was usually full of the Japanese troops. Just
why? I wondered.
In the very early morning some two hours

112 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
before we reached Antung, we had left ancient
Manchuria behind and were in new Manchuria.
From here the country extending to the Yalu
had, for a century or more after the building of
Moukden, been a no-man's land, and kept so by a
treaty between the Koreans and the Manchus in
which they agreed that this part of Manchuria
should remain as a buffer state between them —
uninhabited by either. Antung itself was as
young as a new Western town in America, a
frontier town, indeed, brought into prominence
by the Russian occupation and the Russo-
Japanese war, for here was fought the first
battle of that war. Now the Russians have dis
appeared, forced out by the Japanese. Thus
do these outside nations quarrel over the bone of
China's frontier.
But what a lady bountiful was Antung that
spring morning! It lies some distance farther
south than our little treaty port, and is shut in
by the hills. Spring had really come here: the
green buds were showing and on the slopes
there was the faintest flush of green. Down
on the Yalu, Antung was dispensing the boun-

The Manchurian Spring 113
ties of all that lovely hill country: at the
landing lay hundreds and hundreds of junks
loading and unloading cargo; sea-going craft
a hundred or two hundred years old — Viking
like ships with huge eyes painted on their
high-pointed bows to guide them on the sea —
were starting for Chefoo and other ports of
China, loaded with bean cakes. There were bean
junks — hundreds of them — just coming down
from the upper reaches of the river. They were
so loaded with the frontiersmen's crops that the
water ran over their curving decks. And out
on the river, forever drifting downstream, were
the rafts of new-cut timber that came from the
far-off timber belt. Each day now saw the river
activity increase : more and more bean-boats came
sailing into port; more and more rafts drifted
into their haven in the lumber yards below; more
and more junks lay anchored at the landings,
until it seemed as if there was not room for
another one; and over them swarmed the Chinese
loading and unloading cargo. High in the air
at the tiptop of the hundreds of exceedingly high
masts fluttered hosts of the tiny red flags of

114 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
luck. And the air was full of the sound of
chanting voices, as the men on outgoing junks
hoisted the big brown sails. And were we not
a part of all this gay spring activity? Were we
not bargaining for a junk to take us up the river?
By noon of the second day our middle-man
was ready for us to make our inspection. With
the freedom of trousers, we climbed from bob
bing sampan to bobbing junk. The boat people's
middle-man, with a spray of pink azaleas over his
shoulder, came towards us over a sea of other
boats and led us to our own, which looked little
larger than a pint cup among the. huge craft that
lay all around it. In reality, it was but an
enlarged rowboat, fitted with mast and sail.
In this we were destined to live during our
journey. The center was a raised box — as in
the bean boats — and was divided into four parts.
'The most central one, which was to be our home
for all this voyaging adventure, was just long
enough to lie down in, just wide enough — lying
side by side — to allow for the bare necessities of
civilization to be stored around the edges. The
second section, a little smaller, is to be inhabited

The Manchurian Spring 115
by that supercilious encumbrance, our middle
man. Behind that, there is a still smaller space
for the crew; and ahead of us is the smallest
section of all, but it is to hold our most cherished
possession — the boy. Around these living quar
ters — but a foot lower — runs a deck some two
feet wide. To enter our quarters we pull off a
board and jump in and thus we named it the
' cave.' We came back in fine feather, for we
were now ready for an early start in the morning
— if the wind were favorable.
But by the next morning Antung had become
something besides the dispenser of bounties and
we saw the dual part she was forced to play
in her country's history. Above the busy hum
of the river life, above the chanting of songs
and the whirr of the hoisting of sails, came the
unmistakably ominous threat of war. Was
China on her frontier always to know more of
despair than hope? How many wars were to
be fought over this land ? For again the fear of
war had descended upon the inhabitants. Japan
had made her famous ' twenty-one demands ' on
China, the granting of which would be the

116 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
camel's body within the tent for China not alone
on her frontiers but also for some of the eighteen
provinces. Naturally China had objected to the
granting of such demands; and Japan, on this
spring morning, had threatened her with war.
Was Belgium's sad history to be repeated? We
wondered. When we started out that morning
we were shadowed by the Japanese, who seemed
to spring up in every nook and cranny of the city.
They skulked everywhere, spying every one's
movements. Panic possessed the town ; exchange
in the money market was knocked to pieces.
It looked as if our spring vagrancy would end
right here; for, if war were declared, no matter
how little of fighting would come to the inac
cessible lands up the river, the powers-that-be
would consider that the foreigner had better be
in the treaty ports. As we could not help, we
did not wish to stay and see China's millions
lose their ' big chance.' So the thing for us to
do was to get under way as soon as possible. We
hurried over our last packing, hastily buying
from the first corner-shop much needed potatoes
and the sugar which we had forgotten to buy on

The Manchurian Spring WJ
the previous day. Jamming the last necessary
articles in the boxes and baskets, we hurried the
small apprentices off with them to the junk. We
ourselves took a short cut to the river in order
to be there in advance, but alas, when those ap
prentices arrived they had on the ends of their
carrying poles little more than a kettle. Thus
did they artfully plan to increase the number of
their journeyings through the spring streets full
of a delightful jumble. And to think that at any
moment war might descend upon us! In every
person who came towards our junk we foresaw
a messenger, calling us back. Still we had to
wait as back and forth went the small appren
tices bringing their paltry loads of our posses
sions. As in all other things we could not hurry
the East. But at last the apprentices had made
their final round trip.
" Push off and make haste about it," we called
to our boatmen, asleep in the stern, as we eyed
the shore for an untimely messenger. Thumping
and jostling innumerable other junks, we made a
start. We got ourselves free at one end only to
get into a jam at the other. Thump, went our

118 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
bamboo poles against the other junks. We were
strung to nervous tension by the confusion, the
thumping boats, and our need for haste, but sud
denly without warning we slid into quiet water
in the middle of the river. A blanket of soft
oblivion settled over all the turmoils of war. We
had entered again into the wanderer's domains
where old sorrows, old difficulties, fall away.
With our heads buzzing with imaginative
thoughts, we fell to the work of settling our
little house afloat. Around the sides of our
quarters we stored our small chest of clothes,
candles, soap, and a few other bare necessities.
On the boards on top of the cave and lashed to
the mast for safety, was our precious food box —
battered and stained with its many travels. On
the deck at the prow, the boy made ready our
charcoal stove, a cooking-pot, and a frying-pan.
There was nothing else to do but wedge the
spray of azaleas, which the middle-man had given
me, between the mast and the food box; our
house was furnished.
By and by we came to the place where the
Japanese had built their pontoon bridge in the

The Manchurian Spring 119
Japanese war. And for a moment the blanket
of oblivion lifted and our minds went back again
to the ever-perplexing problem of this frontier.
How strange it was that two nations had strug
gled for rights on this frontier, a frontier that
did not belong to either of them. And we
wondered if Japan was again making plans to
cross this river and demand still further rights
in Manchuria, or even possession of it. Then
these perplexing problems were blotted out by
the tranquillity of river and hills. We lay on
the boards over the hold and basked in the
sunshine. " I'm a boy with an eternal youth," I called
out. " What about the Martha side of you which
hunts out dust ? " taunted my husband.
" It does not matter that sometimes I have to
lay the boy away in the chest with his clothes.
He always lives to be donned with the coat and
trousers," I cried triumphantly.
Then I caught sight of our big brown sail
which floated to the wind like a great brown
wing. " I'll ride that wing until I reach those

120 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
very white clouds and then I'll ride them," I
cried ecstatically
" That's nothing," cried my husband, rolling
over on his back. " I'll ride it to the sun."
In the stern, with nothing to do but tend the
rude steering gear, squatted the head boatman,
a kindly, simple man with leathery skin and eyes
that were half-shut from continual gazing at
the sun and water. In the prow squatted the
boy, singing in a high falsetto voice. All around
us were other junks with brown sails like ours,
only some were more beautiful with their red
patches or brilliant orange bands. Off on the
shore were the peaceful scenes of farm country.
Now we could see the great things that the
Chinese frontiersman had wrought — the things
that in the winter were hidden. High on the hill
sides the farmers worked, tilling their almost per
pendicular fields into gardens of the Lord.
Oxen and men and primitive plows stood at what
seemed a right angle to the river.
On one hillside were two coffins wrapped
about with fresh matting. Quietly slept the
patriarchs close by their fields and thatch-

The Manchurian Spring 121
roofed cottage, and their children and children's
children worked and played around them. Peace
lay everywhere. The river itself looked just then
as if it flowed from the very fountains of peace.
And that first day ended when the sun sank
below the hills. Then we lay down in the hold
of our junk and looked at the sky an infinite
distance above us and the tall mast stretching up,
up. Had we not reached the very heart of a
wanderer's dream? In a simple land at the re
creating moment of its spring rebirth we lay
cradled on a few rude boards in cool, snow-fed
waters. And we slept like babes with the water
lapping softly around us.
And three days passed; still that peace of farm
land in springtime. We reached the first town.
Flowers grew out of the thatched roofs, and
every shop had its meadow-lark, housed in a
quaint wooden cage, swinging from the over
hanging eaves. The narrow streets were thus
transformed into singing aisles, topped with
flowers. Inside the shops branches of pink,
blooming peach stood in blue jars on the age-
blackened counters, and outside, gay cloth signs

122 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
fluttered, the flowers blossomed, and the hosts
of larks, with swelling throats, sang to the
heavens. The grain-towers were being emptied and
their spiral matting was being unwound a little
more each day; some of the towers had already
disappeared — like the snow they were melting
away with the spring. Everywhere there was
the sound of the falling beans, as the workmen
emptied them from the towers into measuring
boxes and then into big sacks to be carried down
to the river; everywhere the frontiersmen were
singing in rhythmic exultant song the growing
measure of their beans. Who could be stuffy
and matter-of-fact when the world was like
this? We drifted away again into the quiet of river
and hills. When the wind blew, we sailed; when
it stopped, our boatmen towed us. At such times
off on the shore they moved as in a pantomime,
not a sound reaching us. In such fashion we
reached the second town . . . and in such
fashion we left it, scarcely hearing the shopmen
say as we put off, " It is an early spring; the

If hen the icind blew, we sailed.

When it stopped, our boatmen toiced us.

[page 122]

The Manchurian Spring 123
snow in the mountains is melting very fast." We
had forgotten the uncertainty of the river, for
gotten the rapids, forgotten the melting snows,
forgotten everything except the shining river
and the hills which came straight down to the
water's edge, clad in young, green kaoliang and
azaleas. It was the next day or perhaps the next.
" Hi-ee-ee ! " a sound like the warning cry of
wild animals ripped our tranquillity in two.
" Hi-ee-ee ! " Right ahead of us the water
whirled and boiled. In a minute we should be
in the midst of it. " Hi-ee-ee ! Hi-ee-ee ! " came
from fifty throats on our junk and other junks.
"' Hi-ee-ee ! Hi-ee-ee ! " came the savage echoes
reverberating from the hills.
" Get down into the hold," cried my husband.
We were none too quick. The rapids had caught
us. The towing men were down on their hands
and knees pulling with all their might and the
towing rope, fastened to the tip of our mast,
pulled us over farther and farther. We grasped
the side of the boat.
" Look out for your head," called my husband

124 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
again. Coming towards us down the narrow
deck, were our once quiet boatmen — savages
now. Naked, they leaped in the air with great
iron-tipped poles held high above their heads.
"Hi-ee-ee!" rang their savage cries; they flung
their naked breasts against the poles. Crunch!
went those poles against the river's bottom as
the men crouched low over them. Their bare
feet went pat, pat, as they marched down the
narrow deck. The boat moved an inch . . .
another inch up the rapid. " Hi-ee-ee ! " again
rang the cry and again the naked figures leaped
for the prow. Toiling, sweating, they touched us
as they leaped past us on the deck.
It began to rain and night came on. Fiercer
and fiercer grew the cries; it was the frenzy of
the savage, growing as night came on, and ruth
less struggle to survive was upon him. Junk
struggled with junk, each careless of all save his
own safety, and on the shore the towing ropes
tangled as one set of tow-men struggled to get
ahead of another. In the coming darkness, our
brains grew dizzy with the savage nearness of
the sweating, naked bodies. We strained our

The Manchurian Spring '125
eyes to see. One junk had made the quiet water
beyond! But even as we looked there came a
new and ominous cry from behind. We looked
and saw a junk, whirling madly; then it shot
downstream and in the half-light we lost sight
of it. Could we make the waters beyond or
would we, too, slip down? That was what we
thought about.
When it seemed as if hours had passed, and
our hands were numb from holding on, and we
were wet to the skin with the now heavy rain,
our junk — the very last — slid out of the rapid.
But even here the current, whipped by the wind
and fed by the melting snows, was so swift that
it was useless to try to make the shore. So
we tied our junk to a larger one that had cast
anchor in the middle of the stream and we
crawled down into the hold out of the rain. Our
candle flickered and went out; all we could see
in the pitch black of the night were the junk-men,
sleeping the sleep of exhaustion just where
they had thrown themselves around their rude
stove, in the hold at the stern. As the light
from the fire fell for a moment on their bodies

126 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
we thought of cave-men from the stone age.
After that, each day the waters were swifter,
the rapids more frequent, the towing more diffi
cult, for the rocky hills were now often almost
perpendicular to the river's edge and the towing
men had to hold on like cats. We made about
ten miles a day. And when it rained we had to
tie up to the shore or anchor in the stream, for
the perpendicular rocks became too slippery for
the towing men. And still we toiled to reach the
point of land where the river branched; and over
and over we enacted that wild scene of the first
big rapid. We would be watching the shining
hills, when that savage cry would ring out and
all hands were at work to move the boats. In
one rapid our boat almost capsized and we lost
our cooking stove; in another the ropes around
our food boxes broke and we lost most of our
provisions, but still we kept on. We were
alternately wet with the spring rains and warmed
by the spring sun; we slept on hard boards; we
ate what we could get — and the glory of life
grew within us — our spirits intensifying as our
struggles intensified.

The towing men had to hold on like cats. [page 126]

The Manchurian Spring 127
We have reached the point of land ! Now for
the lumbering camp up the right arm of the
river. We have collected what provisions we
could, to make up for the lost ones. Unfor
tunately baking powder, one of the articles in
the box that went overboard, is an unknown
thing, but we have collected a quantity of Chinese
steamed-bread which was raised by means of sour
dough. To the sourness we can testify, for there
is no slight evidence of it in the bread, but by
toasting it we think we can probably make
it do. Nothing seems difficult to endure if we
can only keep on with our fascinating adven
ture. We started once more. We were now past
the settled, familiar lands of the lower river.
There was no longer the placid spring beauty
of the farm country. Everywhere there was a
new, wild beauty; spring here untamed by man
was an uncivilized and vivid creature, a creature
beyond the realms of convention, a creature aban
doned to the one passionate desire of creating.
Life everywhere burst the bonds of the winter
asceticism and rioted in new existence — and

128 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
hourly the river gained new vitality and ran
swifter and swifter.
Our spirits, already whipped into greater vigor
by the previous hours of savage struggle with
the rapids, leaped now with ecstasy. We could
not get enough of the primal activity that was
everywhere — on the hills, in the rapids, in the
struggling men. " More, we want more," we
cried. We pushed aside all memory of the
muffled living of civilization. Greedily, like men
parched with thirst, we drank in this elemental
life. Let the rapids grow stronger — we wanted
them to. The rougher the touch of nature, the
greater our realization!
When we were out of a rapid our sober judg
ments said to each other, " There is no use in
our thinking of going on; even if we can do it
it's foolish. At the rate we are moving the
summer floods will be upon us before we can get
back." " Hi-ee-ee ! " another rapid. And our reason
able decision deserted us. Our breath would
come faster and faster as we abandoned our
selves to the pat of the bare feet, the crunching

The Manchurian Spring 129
of the poles, the creaking sail, the wild cries
echoing in the wild hills. We were out of the
rapid. We were in another. We were out of
that. And in another. Keep on, keep on, more,
more; we could not make up our minds to leave
this glorious hand-to-hand struggle with nature.
The days passed. We had made but a paltry
fifty miles. Still we refused to give up. Then
a greater rapid took us. Straining, pushing, the
men worked; we scarcely held our own. The
men's mouths snarled, the poles pressed deep
into the flesh of their breasts. Snap! it was
a new sound; a pole had broken. The river
picked us up like a toy and hurled us back down
stream. We tried it again. A man slipped on
the wet deck and we were again hurled back.
Over and over we tried; over and over we were
beaten. The river had won.
We should have to give up — the first trail we
had ever given up. We must go back. But it
had been a great struggle. We sighed just a
little thinking of the thrill of the last rapid,
thinking of how we must leave the spring of
twild and free places, the nights when we bathed

130 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
in the star-lit river and slept under the stars with
no roof to shut us in; the days when we were
alternately wet with the spring rain and warmed
with the spring sun. We looked a long farewell
and then turned our backs upon it all.
One day and the unsettled regions were gone,
another and we had shot past nearly all of the
settled farm country, a third and Antung lay
before us. And what of the struggle of the
Japanese for political power and acquisition ? As
we had been having our free and revivifying
struggle with nature, what of this other sordid
struggle for worldly power? We hurried away
to our consul for news. War had been averted
but many of the rights of this bold and free
frontier had had to be signed away. In the
archives of Japan there lay papers surrendering
to them the major portion of those twenty one
demands. Frontier farmers, while you worked
high on your hillsides, boatmen, while you made
your struggle with the river, the opportunities of
this, your frontier, were being signed away to
satisfy the avarice of another nation!

CHAPTER VIII
A NEW KNOWLEDGE OF THE FRONTIER
I remember lighting fires ; I remember sitting by them ;
I remember seeing faces, hearing voices through the
smoke ;
I remember they were fancy — for I threw a stone to
try 'em.
J remember going crazy. I remember that I knew it
When I heard myself hallooing to the funny folk I saw.
— The Explorer — Rudyard Kipling.
Until to-day, I have smiled with all the
superiority of joy on the frontiersmen who have
insisted upon telling me that all journeyings were
not like ours. As they looked into each other's
eyes, I saw strange things that baffled me in those
looks. " You must remember that there are such
things as hoodoo trips," they would say.
" I stamp my foot at your hoodoos," I have
answered. And to myself I have whispered:
" They know not the spirit. The two of us are
vagabonds; we are charmed." 131

132 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Until to-day, I have never deemed it necessary
to heed their words. Until to-day, I have been a
blithe thing, holding out my arms to the billowy
clouds, to the unquenchable sunshine of Man
churia ; I have stood on the top of windy, winter
passes, exulting in the wild, free life of these out
post trails, glorying in the sting of the air, the
hardship, and the danger.
Even in these last months which have been full
of baffled waiting within my house — not at all
like our former life of companionship on the trail
— I have heard but one message from the fron
tier, lying just outside my door, — the unmixed
message of its recreating power. But to-day I
am tortured with apprehension. Can it be that
for us there is another knowledge of the frontier?
But surely if such knowledge were for us, my
husband, who is a seasoned pioneer, would have
discovered it long before this. I am sure the
wilderness holds no lonely terrors for him. And
lately has he not proved it anew ?
It is early September now; and from the first
of April the vagabond gods have deprived him
of all companionship on the trail, for during these

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 133
months the bandits have fairly rioted over the
land; despite our general indifference to bandits
and such bold folk, the powers-that-be declared
that these were moments for caution; nothing
would induce them to let a woman run straight
out to meet such evil bands as were reported to
infest even the towns. So in April my husband
went out without me. When he came back the
first of May it was as I had expected, — that soli
tary month had made him only the more keen-
eyed and virile. I felt that the men who con
doned with him for the loneliness of the trip,
evidently knew nothing of the joys of such travel.
He was home but three days when he was ready
to start again. And surely I am right in what
the wilderness always means to him, for when
he returned after two months more of such travel
and we started in a launch up the Liao River,
he was all the gay boy. How he talked those first
days as we moved up the river ! Again I said to
myself, " The loneliness that other men fear never
harms him. These past three months which he
has spent with the days entirely bare of the
companionship of any white men, are the final

134 Pioneering Where the World Is Oic)
test. Out of the silences he has drawn new life;
out of the solitude his spirit has come forth yet
more free and buoyant."
That was six weeks ago, and when after some
three days the launch broke and he decided that
he could not wait to have it mended but to do
the journey alone on horseback, I was doubly sure
that the frontier had never brought him a sinister
meaning. If it had, he certainly would have
rebelled at going out to it again and alone. But
to-day I am tortured with doubt. Suppose the
eagerness he displayed on the launch were the
eagerness of starvation, not of young life. Sup
pose, unknown to him, in the three months he
had been traveling alone, there had accumulated
within him fragments of loneliness. What then
might this further solitary journey mean to him?
I am no longer a blithe spirit; something
vaguely menacing surrounds me. I roam
through the house, and, within me, something
moans as the rain and wind moan outside. The
frontier no longer beckons with gay, enticing
fingers. This port appears a tiny and helpless
thing, facing the three hundred thousand square

A New- Knowledge of the Frontier 135
miles of untamed Manchuria. I crouch away
from this wild, partially settled country, for it
has suddenly become for me a lean and hungry
wolf slinking into the town — devouring it. And
my husband? The wolf may harm him. The
night is rain-chilled. I will sit by the fire with
the curtains all drawn to shut out the sobbing
rain — and that stealthy approach of the savage
land. Sitting thus, fascinated by that silent, ruthless,
advancing force, I did not hear the door open.
When something impelled me to look up, there
stood my husband, gaunt and worn, as if he
had come from some forty-days' vigil in the
wilderness. There was that in his appearance
that made me cry out, "What is it?" It was
not because he was toil-worn or even emaciated.
(A journey into the unfrequented places of the
earth always strips a man of all the sleek, well-
fed aspect of the town.) But in his eyes was
that strange look that I had seen in the eyes of
those other frontiersmen when they had warned
me against the frontier. Fragment by fragment

136 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
my husband has told me his tale and for me that
look is no longer veiled, — it is the look of one
who has struggled with some terrible demon.
Now while my husband is asleep, spent with his
terrible contest, I go over and over, in the silence
of the night, what he has told me, piecing to
gether that fragmentary tale, determined it shall
yield me its significance.
My vague apprehensions have become realities.
Six weeks ago on that fatal day when our launch
broke down, my husband suddenly realized that
he was starved for human companionship. When
he decided that he must make the trip on horse
back, a strange sensation took possession of him.
Again he must start on a journey; again he must
go alone. Why did something always happen to
rob him of companionship? He began to feel
that there was some relentless hand continually
pulling him back, back into solitude, into the
alien world that had already held him so long.
As he thought of the past, he saw it made up
solely of solitude and yellow men; he thought
ahead — there stretched innumerable days of more
solitude, more yellow men. He began to think

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 137
of this new journey with a lethargy of spirit;
as a child too often struck had grown numb.
He knew that he was very tired from weeks of
hasty, arduous travel — and he thought his feeling
was due to that. But he says it never occurred
to him not to go. He had never turned back
when there was a piece of work to be done; he
did not intend to do so now.
When he reached Tiehling, where he was to
get his ponies, everything was against him. Be
fore this, his belief in his hand, his indomitable
will, had never failed him in difficulties, but at
the very start of this trip, the men who sur
rounded him seemed to know with a sure and
uncanny instinct of primitive men that some
thing was different, — that that indomitable will
that had carried him so far was not so strong.
He was puzzled at his inability to secure the
service he wanted. He paid high prices but he
secured poor ponies, poor service. The boy, his
stand-by, on the plea of the death of his grand
father, left him. With no knowledge that some
thing had snapped within himself, my husband
went doggedly on with his preparations. He did

138 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
not think his lethargy of spirit mattered, for he
still believed himself bigger and stronger than all
the great primal strength of the frontier; he
would bend it to his desires. Although the
summer rains had started, although the Oriental
rebelled, although his spirit was tired, he would
not turn back. He never had. He never would.
Therefore late one afternoon, with the leaden
skies above him, with poor servants and poorer
animals, he rode forth from his starting point to
go to the very border of Manchuria and over into
Mongolia; rode off into the tall kaoliang. I can
see him, erect and determined, on his good-for-
nothing pony, lost in a moment in the forest
of kaoliang, riding straight towards the all-
embracing solitude.
Hour after hour he plodded along with the
wet, sharp leaves of the kaoliang cutting his face,
spraying him with water. The lack-luster day
ended ; a duller twilight came on. As quietly but
as inevitably as the twilight and the night de
scended, there settled over him a strange and
horrid depression. Struggle as I know he must
have, he was unable to throw it off. The night

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 139
deepened around him; the depression deepened
within him like some sticky black evil.
I can see him on every step of the way — once
we made that part of the journey together. It
must have been very late when he rode into the
low hills that surrounded the town, — his night's
stopping place; of necessity he would be feeling
his way in the darkness, his sole guide the gleam
of two parallel lines of water — the ruts of the
road. An hour ago as he told me his broken tale
he seemed not to be here ; it was from that far-off
lonely road, picking his way along, he entreated
me : " My God ! I must end that eternity of mud,
of living burial in the kaoliang, of thoughts stale
as death. Surely I was not to be caught in the
grip of a loneliness I had heard other men tell
about, a thing so malignant that it poisons every
adventure of the .road." With words like these,
he begged me, here to-night, to save him from
something as if even now I could change it all.
When at last there appeared the flicker of low
lights on the horizon he plunged recklessly
through the mud, through the blackness, until he
reached the lantern, swinging as we both so well

140 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
know over the door of the agents. " I worked
like a Turk that night," he said. He scented
' squeeze ' and that gave him his chance to dig
at things. I imagine he worried the agent's
account as a tenacious dog worries a bone and
when he started again the next day, he thought
he had succeeded in ridding himself of the de
pression of the previous day.
But again there was that impotence destroying
his control over men and things. As the day
advanced, the loneliness — that he thought in the
morning he held in abeyance — pushed him down,
down. The disasters grew worse and more fre
quent; his substitute boy grew bad-natured and
unwilling; his muleteers reckless and unruly.
The day ended by a muleteer jumping sidewise
on a pack mule as they were passing a perfect
morass of mud and water. The mule, losing his
balance, fell in, breaking his leg in the fall. A
sullen group, cursing in two languages, they shot
the mule, and dividing his pack among them,
started for the dirty, unfrequented ' Inn of the
Blue Fish.' Think of it! While those aliens
slept around him, he stood far into the night,

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 141
stood shivering over a tiny brazier, trying to dry
out enough clothes, to make it safe to lie down
and sleep; the loneliness, in those moments of
the night, he evidently came to conceive of as
a kind of shadowy shape keeping him ghastly
company. I do not know the details of what followed;
I do not think he knows himself. He knows only
one thing — that for weeks, slowly, painfully,
doggedly, he made his way, traveling harder than
he had ever traveled before, trying to out-travel
that evil phantom of solitude that lay down to
sleep with him, that sat by his side as he ate.
He came to live with one hope — that he could
lose his horrible guest at the border when he
slipped over into Mongolia. He went over in
his mind the tales he had heard of this new
country, a country of magic he was sure. Surely
the buoyancy of life would return to him when
he left behind the monotony of kaoliang, blue-
clad Orientals, and endless red mud. Already he
felt the first faint stirrings of joy which come
to the inveterate wanderer when he thinks of
new, untried countries. Surely, then at the

142 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
border, his spirit would arise and slay this
phantom. But all unknown to him he reached the border
of Manchuria and passed over into Mongolia.
There was no change from the kaoliang, the blue-
clad Oriental, the endless red mud. There were
no Mongols in wine-colored robes, no herders of
vast flocks of sheep, no shaven Lamas watching
over Thibetan temples, no bold horsemen riding
ponies like mad and then dropping below a level
horizon. There, on the border, he came to know
Mongolia simply by the fact that the crops were
poorer, the land less cared for. " There is no
Mongolia ! " he cried out to himself. " It has
turned Chinese in speech, in dress, in manners,
in occupation; the Chinese always absorb all
nations they encounter."
In his despair he did not stop to reason that on
the boundaries of nations there is always an inter
mingling. He saw nothing but the absorbing
power of the Chinese; and into his mind, already
distorted by loneliness, came a horrible fear — he
too was speaking Chinese; he too was dropping
into the ways of the Chinese! Were they ab-

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 143
sorbing him? Could he ever again be like other
white men? Each day he felt his identity
diminishing. From then on, it seemed to shrivel
and shrink before his very eyes. Then two grim
specters instead of one accompanied him. With
insinuating voices they whispered to him : " You
can never escape us"; and one said, "You are
forgotten by your kind " ; and the other, " Each
day you are less a white man."
But the shreds of his will still held against
those hideous guests — as he had come to look
upon them. He still held them in abeyance. He
still fought them, until one evening as he and his
now almost demoralized train straggled into an
inn at dark, a drunken soldier reeled towards
him, hit his boy a resounding crack over the head,
and then before my husband's numbed senses
grasped the scoundrel's meaning, the creature had
him covered with his rifle. He has only a vague
feeling of one of his ' escort ' coming up in time
to knock the gun into the air just before it went
off. Always before, such narrow escapes have
made us rebound with exaltation of spirit, inten
sifying the mere sense of existence until our

144 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
spirits leaped with some vivid elemental joy that
made us gloat over the sting that sharpened the
reality of our existence. But joy seems to be
but for him who hath; there was no exultation
for my husband. He realized but one thing —
that he, the man who had been able to cope with
all difficulties of the trail, had not been enough
master of himself to get ready his revolver in
that interim when the soldier had reeled towards
his boy. Those phantom guests had seen what
manner of man he really was! They knew he
could not conquer them any more than he could
save himself from the soldier.
God-forsaken days followed. On over the
plains he made his way, through drizzle, through
rain, through mud. He no longer rejected those
horrible guests; where he went he invited them
to go. He spent hours ingratiating them, trying
to please them. He let nothing interrupt their
communings together and he toyed with the
cowardly things they whispered in his ear.
How he kept on with his now demoralized
train, I scarcely know. A sort of sixth sense
must have kept him moving back towards the

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 145
border of Manchuria. He lost count of what
day of the month it was, even what day of the
week. None of them knew just where they were
in a land unfamiliar in its shroud of mists. At
last one night when the train of dejected mules
and muleteers was moving more slowly than ever
(the boy had deserted long before and my hus
band knew none of them would last much
longer), they saw a long, level line of low lights
above the flat horizon.
" There's Sze Ling Kai," cried his soldier
guide. He did not hear. " The fire cart comes
there ! " shouted the soldier in his ear. Over the
racking anguish of his thoughts these words came
and for a moment his real self penetrated the
cloudy, cowering new personality whom he had
come to call himself. He jumped from his spent
pony crying, " I'll get there — I can lead him —
I'll kill all those damned insinuating shapes that
deny I am myself." But that resurrection of his
real self was only for a minute; then it faded
away, and he and his two guests became confused
in his mind. Sometimes they were in his way,
sometimes they stumbled behind and he had to

146 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
stop and wait for them. After a time — he does
not know how long — he got as far as the out
skirts of the town. As he huddled on a stone,
those shadowy things leaped up before him living
horrors, cackling, mocking, gibbering at him.
" We've found you out — you're weak. You are
absorbed into the yellow race. You bear the
marks. You can never go back to your kind —
better end it all," they railed.
Then it was, that to himself his personality
snuffed out like a candle. He looked at the long
line of low lights but there was no meaning in
them for him now. There was nothing left for
him but the specters. Again he heard them at it,
" What's a white man doing here? " How they
mocked ! He crouched to spring; his fingers went
tense to grasp their shadowy throats. If he
ended it, they should all end it together. He
jumped for them.
Instead of the specters he stood face to face
with a friend, a man with whom in the past he
had shared many a hard trail. " I've roused you
at last," his friend was saying as he grasped him
by the hand. " Guess you're about all in." Then,

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 147
as he looked into his eyes, he exclaimed, " Had a
hoodoo trip, eh ? How does it come that an old
hand like you let yourself in for a scourging from
the frontier? Come along with me. There are
three of us in a mess over here."
" Guess you'll have to excuse me," began my
husband. " Been off in the country a long time;
I'm not fit for civilized company."
" Billy-be-damned ! You need to come whether
you are fit for it or not," urged his friend.
" Rifle the supply closet, comrades," he called,
as a few moments later the two of them, arm
in arm, stepped over the threshold of the little
house into warmth and light.
My husband sank into a chair and passed his
hand over his eyes. How wonderful were the
voices, how splendid the light! Oh, surely this
was not to be another tantalizing mirage of the
night. He could grasp this light, these men.
It must be true, for had not the gibbering horrors
with their foul suggestions left him? Yes, the
good, common things of life had come back to
him. All was as it always was in the world of
men — they stood with their glasses in their hands.

148 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
" Here's to you," they were saying. Oh, the
warm goodness of their companionship! My
husband jumped to his feet to touch his glass to
theirs, but the light — the humanness — where were
they? He clutched for them. They had gone.
Dim and far away the voice of his friend
reached him, " He has fainted. Wonder what's
the matter ? It's something more than tiredness.
He is not one to fail under the test of the land.
I have made a lot of trips with him. He is
not one of those persons who wreck themselves
with revenging hate for the frontier because she
has shown them that they are tawdry; he is not
one of the weak who mistakes her silence and
liberty for license."
Then light at last broke on what had been to
my husband the blackness of defeat. Men still
believed in him. There was but one thing wrong,
he knew it now, — no man can live long without
his own kind. " I had done it," he said, " and
had thus made the joyous things of solitude and
silence into a forbidding and lonely abode for my
soul." The frontier gives a man no quarter;
she either makes or mars him according to the

A New Knowledge of the Frontier 149
strength or weakness of his soul — and the
strength of every man's soul is not alone in
himself. The night is finished: the fire is a heap of
burnt-out ashes; the wild beating of the rain is
hushed in the dawn. With a deeper knowledge
we throw open our windows to greet the frontier
morning.

CHAPTER IX
WE BECOME PIONEER SETTLERS. HOW
WE DECIDE TO MAKE A HOME OF THE
THINGS OF THE GODS AND WHAT HAP
PENS.
'Twould be a wildish destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange land and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on? — Wordsworth.
The moment has come when, like our fore
fathers, we are to leave behind the life of our
own people and go forth alone to reconstruct it
anew in a frontier land. Until now, although we
have wandered well over this outlying province
of ancient China, at each journey's end we have
returned to a wholly westernized port and to a
conventional Occidental house. But now we are
to go to a far corner of Manchuria and settle
in a town of which few outside of China ever
150

We Become Pioneer Settlers 151
heard — and those that have, seldom remember.
In that city that stretches out, out — a thing of
Orientals — we are to dwell. There, where there
is no white man's quarter, no white man's house,
we are to create, out of the fabric of an alien
civilization, a home. Close to my heart lies
this great advanture of home-making. This land
has made known unto us the care-free joy of
the vagabond, the wild, sweet spirit of the wan
derer ; now do we go to it for the high adventures
of the pioneer settler.
In this country many times, as true pilgrims,
we have set forth with light hearts and few
possessions; now we were to set forth as a
good pioneering household, stout of heart and
laden with many possessions. And when the
evening of our going came and we stood in the
long, frame building that did duty as a railway
station, we were not only able to survey with
entire equanimity a surprising number of boxes
and bundles of our own, but with equal com
posure did we behold, nestled close to them as
if for protection, a pile of Chinese bedding rolls,
and asleep in the midst the boy's family.

152 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
It mattered little that we had only been pre
pared for the Chinese wife and the baby that
slept at her breast. To be sure, when the business
of departure had descended upon us and we had
called on our trusty forty-year-old boy — the com
panion of our pilgrim days — to share with us the
hazards of this new enterprise, he had responded
that if he left the patriarchal roof he must take
with him his wife ' and one piece son just now
born.' That in true Oriental fashion he had neg
lected to mention four small girls that now lay
sleeping with the one piece son, did not dismay
us one whit. The settler as well as the vagabond
finds nothing to daunt him in the unexpected.
So when the little, puffing train tooted its mes
sage, we flew to our places, smiling benignly at
these now active new possessions of ours who
were hurrying obediently towards the third-class
carriage, each bearing reverently a bit of our
household goods.
And again we were on that Oriental night
express, moving slowly out into the dark to what
lay beyond. Above the noise, and pitch, and jar,
my heart sang its new song of adventure, a

We Become Pioneer Settlers 153
song that seemed to find its birth in a shadowy
memory of old adventures, of old striving of
pioneer ancestors whose spirits must in some
strange way have lived anew in me. I knew that
night of ancestors of my own, long forgotten in
the world, who had fared forth across the wide
Atlantic, building their log cabins, sowing their
fields. There was a long procession working
its way straight across to the farthest ex
tremity of America. And here was I, a member
of the last generation; and still did we go forth
to pioneer. This call had carried us westward
until we were east. Those ancestors had left an
old civilization to pioneer in a new one; we left
a new civilization to pioneer in one almost as
old as the world. And yet those experiences were
deeply akin.
I looked into the moon-illumined night outside.
On the plain stood the great, brown shocks of
kaoliang; they were the abundant plenty that the
Chinese frontiersmen had made the land yield
them. By and by, there stood forth sturdy,
square-built houses that looked like fortresses;
they were the houses of the Russian frontiers-

154 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
men, built with high, narrow windows to shut
out the cold. Now they were deserted, and the
autumn moonlight streamed through the glassless
windows and across the empty floors. From all
nations under the sun there step forth those who
follow a vision known only to the pioneer. Some
reap plenty and some reap lonely graves, but all
have their moment of vision. And the train with
its sleeping, nodding load of wayfarers moved on
through the vast frontier.
In the very early morning, the jogging Eastern
train was ready to set us down at our wayside
station. As it came to a long, shuddering halt,
the sleeping quiet of its coaches was suddenly
gone; its doors flew open and there belched from
them a seething multitude, all simultaneously bent
on the business of going somewhere. It was a
sight to make glad the heart of a Kim — and such
hearts had we. Thus we straightway forgot
everything but that hurrying, motley crowd ; for
got our own business in our absorbing curiosity
in theirs. O bean-buyers ! with all your shrewd
ness hid behind your passive Oriental features,
what of your last gamble on the bean market?

We Become Pioneer Settlers 155
Dignified, long-gowned merchants, what is your
fine dream for this outlying province ? Big peas
ant families weighted down under your bundles
and your babies, we know your dream; on this
frontier of opportunity, away from your over
crowded town in one of the ancient provinces
of ancient China, you are looking for enough to
eat and wear. But here comes the disciplined
tread of the Japanese soldier. May he not take
your dream from you?
Then they were all gone, and as another throng
came pouring in from the gateway to take their
places, we awoke to our own glorious venture
and began looking for our possessions and our
black-eyed family, even unto the last little girl
whom the boy had neglected to mention. When
the train gave its last toot and puffed away into
the distance with its new wayfarers bound to
every corner of the globe, we all stood in a dumb
group in the doorway of the station, looking off
over the gray straggling town — the creation of the
Chinese frontiersmen ; the train, our last link with
the old order of things, was irretrievably gone.
Then we looked up to the blue sky, that wonder-

156 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
ful northern sky that spread out above the low-
curved roofs, free and unhampered clear to "the
sun just rising over the horizon, and our spirits
leaped to meet our adventure, for
" Who would stop or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on ? "
Bundles and babies, we stowed them all away
in the corners of our agent's shop and then we
were ready to set out on the search of our hearts.
At the door stood the equipage for the journey.
Did man ever before start in such manner for
his very own great adventure, start with the ghost
of a past-pioneer movement to attend him on his
own fresh undertaking as a settler? But here
we were with the ghost of a Russian droshky, a
relic of a Russian frontier life that now was no
more, to attend us on our way. It was old in
limb now with its years of service. All the
glories of the grand turn-out, of the debonair
days of the Russian advance, had been stripped
from it. The curving and imposing arch over
the horse's head had long since gone; from the
moth-eaten cushions the padding stuck out in

We Become Pioneer Settlers 157
tufts; the springs on one side of the seat were
broken, which gave the thing a very perceptible
pitch like a hard-pressed ship at sea; and as for
the harness — there was only one fragment of
leather left; the rest consisted of a complicated
mass of knotted string. Surely it was a melan
choly ghost, but it dampened not the ardor of
the absurd little pony in the big shafts, or the
ragamuffin driver on the high seat in front, or
of us, the new would-be settlers who clung to the
sloping seat behind.
The ragamuffin driver gave a grand flourish, a
crack of his whip and the gay pony broke into
a lively gallop. Up one street and down another
we rattled in this city where tall gilt signs
stretched up almost into the sun itself, where
the willows cast lace-work shadows in the dust.
We were caught in a jumble of squeaking wheel
barrows; we were extricated only to be caught in
a jumble of pack-mules and other dilapidated
Russian carriages. By alternate hasty gallops
and hastier stops did we pursue our quest !
Our state of mind as we clung to that sloping
seat became a mixture of pioneer and vagabond,

158 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
— we were light of heart because that gay mo
ment was sufficient for the vagabond; we were
stout of heart because we knew, down in our
hearts, that we should need to be long before our
search was ended. In the few minutes since our
arrival we had, with the optimistic adaptability
born of much sojourning, accepted the fact that
there were not even Chinese residences in this
new city of China. This was the commercial
outlet for vast farming lands, and the advance
guard of Chinese men who had come here had
left their families safe under the patriarchal roofs
in Shantung. Whether we had a hasty glimpse
as we galloped or a calmer inspection during our
numerous entanglements with the traffic in the
streets, we beheld only bewildering rows of shops
and warehouses — never the high wall that signi
fies for all China that there is a house within.
We had therefore given up the idea of a real
Chinese house and began looking simply for an
empty ' hong ' that, by dint of much imagination,
might be coaxed into the semblance of a home.
Ah, there was the rub! It was the busiest
time of year in this thriving town; it was throng-'

We Become Pioneer Settlers 159
ing with woodsmen who had not yet left for the
winter's work in the forests farther north; it
was full of hand-craftsmen making the sharp
blades of axes, the heavy and stiff leather moc
casins, the padded garments for the woodsmen; it
was full of small shopkeepers selling them. We
beheld all the warehouses piled high with winter
supplies of coarse flour and sugar, and in the
sunny courts large groups of men worked over
the cocoons that were not yet ready for shipment
to the south. We found not an extra inch of
space in all that great market of the frontier.
As we entered each new street, hope grew anew
only to die at the end, for not one boarded shop
did we see. On the second day, we began going
over the streets we had traversed the previous
day and we insisted that the exuberant driver
should make the pony walk; thus could we
scrutinize possible opportunities more closely.
But the day ended with an unanswered quest as
had the previous day. The third day we began
investigating buildings that were just going up,
but each time we were informed that they had
been rented last Chinese New Year or that they

160 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
would not be rented until this New Year. New
Year was the time. Why did we not wait?
There would be plenty of opportunities then and
we could do all in decency and order as custom
decreed. " But that is four months away and winter is
coming," we replied in consternation.
But that meant nothing in this land of another
civilization than our own. Custom is sacred law
here and alas, alas, a Chinese can always wait.
The gay child of adventure that we hugged to
our bosoms gave promise of becoming a many-
headed hydra of despair. But there was still the
big, blue autumn sky and the mellowing sunshine
when we started the next morning. " Look ! "
we suddenly shouted in unison. We were driving
down the Great Stone Street and now ahead,
ending the way, there faced us a low, gray wall
with one great, sweeping pine leaning over it!
" That long stretch of wall might be — yes, it
surely must be a house," we cried excitedly.
" Yes, the gate is shut tight. It looks unused.
It must be an unoccupied house too. Stop,
driver." We called and poked frantically at the

We Become Pioneer Settlers 161
ragamuffin's back. We climbed out and skipped
up the stone steps to the black door in the gate.
We refused to ask the driver even one tiny
question. Since none of the Chinese had told
us about this place it should be our very own
discovery. The black door stood ever so little
open and we could peer in; there was not a soul
to be seen. So hand in hand we strode boldly
into our paradise.
And what a paradise of soft stillness and
shadowy quiet! The thronging streets from
which we had just come might have been a thou
sand miles away for all they had to do with this
magic place. We stood in a court flagged with
slabs of stone between which wild grasses and
mosses grew, and all hemmed about with an
old gray wall over which leaned twisted pines.
Standing there in the sunshine, we looked and
looked until our sight at last reached the farthest
flaggings where lay a still, blue shadow, the
perfect image of a beautiful curved-roof temple
beyond. For such it was — we knew by the
bronze incense burner, taller than a man, that
stood in the sunlight just outside the blue shadow.

162 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
" We want a piece of this paradise," we cried.
" We want our quest to end here. This temple
is a little neglected, forgotten a bit by the busy
commercialism of the town. Why not ask the
few priests that must be about if we might not
live in one of the many courts of the priests?
Surely they would not say us nay." The Chinese
live very comfortably with their gods and many
a foreigner in other parts has often been offered
their hospitality and for years shared the same
building with them.
" Think of it," we cried, " pioneers with a
chance to create a home out of the things of the
gods. At the end of each day in the market
place we could leave it behind and come home by
the way of the incense burner, on past the gods
of soft gold, sitting on their golden lotus leaves,
to an inner court, our sanctuary." To the pioneer
as to the vagabond chance happenings are his
inspiration. Therefore we sat on the corner of
the temple veranda with the still, blue shadow
at our feet and knew again we had caught
the gay child of adventure. We dreamed and
planned and dreamed again until the sunshine

We knew by the bronze incense burner, taller than a man, that stood in the sunshine just
outside the blue shadow.
[page 161]

We Become Pioneer Settlers 163
crept right up to the temple door. Then we ran
blithely back to our ghostly chariot, and drove
back into the world in search of a middle-man in
order that all might be done in accordance with
decent custom.
Many are the snares, many the ditches that are
set about the road that leads to the ' adventure
splendid.' It is three weeks now since that day
of discovery and inspiration; our flying haste
ended that very day at the door of the shop.
Evidently the only ones that could ever be in a
hurry are the Chinese pony and ourselves. We
have waited for the middle-man to consult the
elders of the town; we have waited for the elders
to consult the priests. All of them — elders,
priests, and gods — move in a mysterious way
unknown to the Occidental; we cannot under
stand why they have said us neither yea nor nay.
Meanwhile we have lived in two tiny rooms
up under the eaves of the shop. But that did
not matter as long as we had our vision to keep
us company. One can live anywhere with a
vision. But to-day it was faded. Last night the
Manchurian autumn ended with the twilight. In

164 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
the night the wind crept under the tiles of the
roof and rattled them and to-day there is in the
air the threat of the cruel northern winter. We
must forget our vision of the temple and house
ourselves against the cold. Also the shopmen
need even this little space. Just what is to be
done we do not know. If only we knew if the
middle-man, the elders, and the priests did or did
not intend to rent us a corner in the temple; but
for this knowledge we dare not wait. We have
come to our last resource, the boy. Perhaps his
Oriental brain, well steeped in the ways of the
Occidental, can solve the problem.
" Boy," we cried, " what can do ? No can
stay here; no have got other place."
" I think. By and by I talkee." This was at
breakfast as in some miraculous way he managed
to serve us by squeezing himself between the wall
and the breakfast table that I vow touched
elbow. Whatever happened to his already over-
thin personality, the boy was bent on keeping up
the face of the family, which just then consisted
in the proper serving of breakfast so that all
should be as it should before the Chinese who

We Become Pioneer Settlers 165
never passed our door without looking in. He
could only save our face in one way at a time.
Later he would attack the problem of saving our
face in the matter of winter abodes.
Late in the forenoon he appeared before us
saying, " Just now can talkee. Proper China
man wait long time. Savee, white no can wait.
He talkee wait, wait; perhaps master no likee
wait, pay big money so can catchee temple chop,
chop. Very bad, master lose face. I think fool
Chinaman. This shop got one big godown. Just
now have got plenty piecee room. We takee
one little piece godown. Makee proper house.
Chinaman see all things white man do. Then
perhaps talkee temple. No talkee, mascee; makee
godown one piecee fine house. Master, missie,
come look, see?" he pleaded, finally ending this
unprecedented long speech.
So this was the game. " After all, the gray
wall does not shut out the commercialism of the
town," we said as we followed the boy down the
steep stairs, through the many rooms of the shop
below, across the street, through another shop
into a court. How different from the great dis-

166 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
covery upon which it seemed we must now turn
our backs. We stood in the doorway and sur
veyed, not stone-flagging, but dirt packed hard
by the many feet that tramped across it to the
warehouses. There was no tree overhanging a
wall here, no incense burner. The only thing
relieving the dreary barrenness of this court was
a rough bench made out of bricks, topped with
a row of wash-basins where, in the early morn
ing, the apprentices did a hasty cleansing of
hands and faces. " Come; look, see! " cried the
boy, leading us towards a building where the
paper panes of the windows were torn and frayed
and the tattered ends flapped disconsolately in the
wintry winds. As we pushed open the door that
moved heavily in wooden sockets, we looked into
a long room that extended the length of the
court. Three solid walls of masonry, a few
narrow windows in the fourth wall (the side
towards the courtyard), and a dirt floor gave the
place a melancholy resemblance to a shed.
So this is where our ' Vision Splendid ' really
leads, I was thinking somewhat bitterly when I
suddenly remembered that I was a pioneer woman

We Become Pioneer Settlers 167
and pioneer women are equal to anything. I
remembered just in time, for at that very
moment my husband came anxiously towards me
saying :
"Do you think you could do it for a little
while? If not you might go to Shanghai until
we can do better. I won't ask it of you."
" Never," I cried, holding my head high. " I
was thinking of the woman out West who could
create a home out of a geranium and a tomato
can," I said. " We haven't a geranium but we've
got a beautiful curved roof to our shed. I'm
glad the Chinese put curved roofs on their ware
houses. They offer inspiration . . . and then
you know there is always the alluring if some
what vague hope that the priests and elders may
give up the game of outwaiting us."
But there was no sign from the priests,
although we dallied a few days longer in a last
vain hope. Then one morning when there was
an unmistakable nip in the air, we walked — with
those stout hearts which we now so much needed
— right up to the warehouse. "We shall," we
cried, " breathe the breath of life into you, O

1 68 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
long, thin godown. We regard it as a task that
would test the prowess of any settler."
Having thus addressed the godown that, except
for its curving roof, bore no gentle aspect of
home about its very forbidding-looking self, we
fell to work. It was all more discouraging than
you may suppose, for that long, unbending ware
house would not lend itself to any comfortable
grouping. One could do nothing with its busi
ness-like proportions but put the rooms along in
a row. There was no great clinging together of
the would-be life of this home but a certain, cold
aloofness between the kitchen at one end of the
house and the bedrooms at the other. However,
we were undaunted.
" We will make it come right to-morrow," we
said, as the workmen departed that night after
finishing the last thin partition. " To-morrow
we will give the house its breath of life. We'll
build it a fireplace on that long, bare wall at the
back of the living-room and then the warehouse
will no longer be a lifeless thing." And we
passed out through the shop in front where the
day's accounts were being balanced, where yel-

We Become Pioneer Settlers 169
low faces leaned over the counters or the open
braziers. The light glowed up into their faces
and over the shoes of silver, curious, rough-
beaten masses of shining metal, the solid cur
rency of the town. " San-shi-er, san-shi-san,"
rose the voices of the shopmen singing aloud the
accounts, and the abacus balls flying backwards
and forwards like shuttles under their touch
clicked an accompaniment. As we went on across
the street, through the other shop of shouting
voices, clicking abacus balls and piles of roughly
wrought silver, our hearts again entered with
zeal into their new adventure. We sang softly.
" We are pioneers building our cabin, with these
yellow men with their shouting voices and click
ing abacus balls, crowding close as the wilderness
crowded around our ancestors." And we knew
we had wrought well that day, translating the
image of the Anglo-Saxon home — and to-morrow
we should surely begin the fireplace.
On this frontier there were of course no
masons that had ever built a fireplace and neither
had we, but we knew a charmed formula; so
with exceeding great faith we went to bed that

170 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
night in our garret up under the eaves and got
up next morning mumbling it as an incantation,
— " the opening of the firebox must be five times
the flue." With the warm feeling of the creator
we descended upon that lifeless warehouse — the
masons were already there, squatting on the dirt
floor, smoking their pipes with the quarter-inch
bowls. We explained — " the opening of the fire
box must be five times the flue, exactly." In a
moment every man of them became a stolid lump
of unresponsive human clay. By nature, they op
posed exactness; by nature, they opposed inno
vation. Now there is nothing in the wide world
so stubborn as an unyielding Chinaman. Hour
in and hour out, that day and the next, and the
next, we took turns sitting, shivering on an over
turned box, coaxing, prodding, scolding, until our
charmed formula took shape in brick and mortar.
There it stood, a thing complete. Now should we
see our home leap into life. We piled it with
wood; the boy, masons, apprentices of the shop,
heads of shops, stood around in unbelieving si
lence. We touched the match. Puff, puff . . .
the room reeked with smoke. " I told you so,"

We Become Pioneer Settlers 171
was the undeniable meaning in the look of the
head-mason. " He had expected as much from
two barbarians trying to tell him his business and
one of them a woman at that." So spoke his very
contemptuous features.
In the midst of this strange, human wilderness,
we had wrought and failed. We had lost face
before the Chinese! That night we took no
delight in the world-old life in the shops through
which we passed. It was a strange and alien
thing, pressing in and swallowing up our little
attempt at a cabin of our own. We would not
again pin our faith to foreign formulas. We'd
hereafter offer incantations and take our chances
with the gods of luck.
After that, we began chipping off a little here,
putting on a little there and trying that fireplace
again and again. " Someday we'll strike the
lucky combination," we said, working doggedly
and refusing to notice that day by day winter
was creeping down from the north. And was
there ever one calamity that did not breed others ?
When we came to unpack our kitchen stove we
found it was broken past repair. Like every-

172 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
thing from hairpins to pianos, there was not
another obtainable any nearer than Shanghai.
Then as I tinkered with Chinese braziers, trying
to evolve an oven and my husband lay flat on
the floor, chipping away at the mysterious insides
of the fireplace, there came a Chinese merchant
with urgent business; there was nothing for it
but for my husband to start on a two-weeks' trip
' up country ' and that immediately, and the boy
must of necessity go with him.
When the hurry of their departure was over,
I stood in the center of the living room, thinking
of broken stoves, surveying the smoke-blackened
fireplace, the dull mud walls, the dirt floor, my
little non-English-speaking cook who in turn was
surveying me and the homesick wife of the
boy who stood in the doorway, gazing at
me like some dumb animal. It was a barren
moment. Suddenly I bethought myself that in the com
motion of leavetaking we had neglected to try
our fireplace after the last scraping. Once more
I gathered sticks and struck a match. What
magic had my husband wrought in that final bit

We Become Pioneer Settlers 173
of chipping? The fire burned brightly and in
the glowing light the rooms of the house knit
themselves together. In my moment of greatest
need did the warehouse become a living home,
offering me warmth and shelter ! Now was there
forged in me the unyielding metal of pioneer
women. No difficulty, no disaster, no discour
agement should keep me from the creation of
my home.
In the days that followed, how I worked to
properly house that spirit of home that had come
so mysteriously at my bidding! It was a lovely
sprite that I must keep alive and offer fitting
surroundings. Immediately it shook its head at
those mud walls and dirt floors. Truly they must
be changed I said to myself, and after due bar
gaining on the part of my middle-man (the cook)
and much waiting on my own part, the Chinese
paper-hangers descended on my little cabin in the
clearing. And then I discovered there was a new joy
in pioneering in this very old civilization; I was
always finding institutions of my own land and
paper-hanging was one of them — although to be

174 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
sure in a way so different that it was scarcely
recognizable. Two Chinese with their queues
wrapped around their heads for greater efficiency,
came bearing scaffolding large enough to use
in scaling a three-story house and absurdly small
sheets of paper about the size of a man's two
hands. They made of the rooms a mass of
intricate scaffolding. It extended out of the
windows; it extended out of the doors, again
reducing my house to a formidable object that
denied me shelter. On top of this scaffolding the
workmen squatted, and little by little, square by
square, ever so slowly, they papered with those
tiny sheets of paper which, by virtue of many
years on the shelf of a dingy shop, had yellowed
to a fine old ivory.
At last there came an evening when the scaf
folding which made my house bristle like a
porcupine was taken down, and the sprite, housed
in the fireplace, played over rafters of roughly
hewn logs and walls that looked soft and
benign as the walls of a home should. Then I
hurried to work some marvel with the dirt floor
that despite the leaping sprite and the soft, en-

We Become Pioneer Settlers 175
folding walls, still made the place look like a
hovel. " Cook," I cried, " it is late and the curfew
has rung — but I cannot wait. Run quickly to
the back door of a matting shop and tell them
the foreigner wants a great many straw mats."
He sighed softly. Wherefore the impatience of
this barbarian? But he went as he was bidden
and came back with a great roll of mats. Soon
there was not an inch of the brown dirt to be
seen; but the hungry winter was still unabashed
and crept up through the matting, grasping us
in its chilling touch as we stood there. Then
I brought out our thick camel's hair rugs of
beautiful workmanship whose soft, deep surfaces
still held the colors of the desert over which the
camels had traveled. The fire nodded assent ; the
hungry winter was at last shut away; even
the windows refused it admittance, for the new
panes of paper we had put in that day were
strong and tough, offering staunch resistance to
the rough hand of the Manchurian winter, now
beating against them. I wanted to work on,
work until the final touch of home was there.

176 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
But one look at my cook and I knew that I
had outraged custom far enough; the packing-
cases must wait.
The next day as soon as the shutters were
down from the front of the shop which mounted
guard over my clearing and my cabin, I hurried
back to work. The sunlight was shining on my
paper panes so that they glowed warm with
welcome; the curving roof brooded over my
house; and when I passed under the door's rough
lintel I found a small remnant of life left in
my fire.
Day in and day out, I worked over the magic
thing taking shape under my hand. Each room
brought me anew to the problem of transforming
bleak Chinese warehouse to Western home, but
the kitchen almost defied me. Its mud floor, its
smoking braziers that gave off no heat to dispel
the gnawing Manchurian cold, and its Chinese
cook who went about in a coat and a for
eign derby which gave him and the kitchen
an imminent air of departure, seemed to have
no connection with the warm, sweet-smelling
kitchens that I felt sure my ancestors had had

We Become Pioneer Settlers 1J7
in their cabins. But I finally achieved an oven,
made out of twisted wire for the grate and a
bent tin to cover it, which I could use over the
brazier. This gave to the kitchen the sweet
smell of baking bread and roasting fowl. But
this wee progress towards the kitchen of my
dreams nearly brought upon us dire calamity. I
was forced to remember that the way of the
inventor is thorny in a land of ancient civiliza
tion. The cook threatened to leave! He had
through successive years become used to a for
eign stove and now to accept such an innovation
as this — custom was altogether too sacred — he
could not change twice inside of a dozen years.
He must go. " Remain but a few days," I
pleaded, " until the master returns." The strat
egy worked ! Like all his race he was a fatalist
and before these days, which I begged of him,
were finished, he had ceased to struggle against
the inevitable.
And now my cabin is finished : here it stands
in the midst of this city of another civilization.
In the shop in front, in every shop all up and
down the streets of the town, men of another

178 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
race lean over the counters, warming their hands
over the braziers. All day the abacus balls
click and each night sing-song voices chant the
day's accounts as the men pile up the shoes of
silver and count the last copper. But now it is
late; the curfew has rung, hushing all the
manifold sounds of this strange civilization into
a deep stillness that only an Oriental city can
know — a city that has no roaring trains nor
clanging machinery. And here my home stands
complete with this mysterious other life pressing
close around it. As I look into the glowing coals
of my fire, a host of faces appear, — my own
ancestors that have struggled to settle some far
away cabin on ranch or clearing in the forest.
To them I say : " This is the best creation I
could make." And they nod approval to me,
across the years. Then suddenly I knew I had
achieved my dream, — a home built far away on
some frontier. In this moment the warehouse
has become for me the beloved creation, the work
of my own hands. I do not need to explain to
those faces in the fire; they know ' the wonder
and the joy that went to build their own.'

We Become Pioneer Settlers 179
In the deep stillness, I started at the sudden
sound of the great wooden bolts of the shop
door, grating in their sockets and a shutter being
taken down. There was a sound of steps in the
court. My husband threw wide ' the wind doors '
of this new strange home and strode in. He too
fell under the spell. " Why, it is not the ware
house at all," he cried. He paused and then
walked straight to the fireplace, saluting his new
hearth with the old Turkish salutation : " At your
feet I lay my heart and my conscience."
Just as that final seal was put upon this
beloved cabin, the boy came in with an air of
triumph. In his rapid passage through the front
shop, it seems, he had acquired a marvelous
amount of knowledge and the stamp of success
had been put upon his sagacity. In his very best
Chinese he announced : " Most worthy master, the
priests have decided that it is of no value to wait
longer. It gives them great pleasure to grant to
you the hospitality of the gods and protection
under the temple roof. It is well; for although
the hospitality of this shop is great they have
need of the space for the silk cocoons — now

180 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
that there is for you the hospitality of the gods."
And thus in the moment of my greatest joy
in the completion of my cabin, did I learn that
the frontier settler can hug no creation to his
breast. The gay child of adventure beckoned
us on; and it was not to the honor of man and
woman, compounded of the spirit of vagabond
and settler, to say him nay.

CHAPTER X
OF HOW WE FOLLOW THE OLD CUSTOM
OF ALL WHO COME FROM ' WITHIN THE
WALL' AND MAKE A PILGRIMAGE BACK
TO OLD CATHAY.
If a man hath two loaves let him sell one and buy
flowers, for bread is food for the body but flowers are
food for the soul. — The Koran.

Spring had come to the prairies and hill
country of Manchuria, and with it there had
come to us a divine discontent: houses fretted
our spirits, all the settled ways of our own civili
zation, which we had been at such pains to build
up around ourselves as pioneer settlers, served
now only to muffle some reality of life that we
suddenly wanted to grasp. Old and insistent
voices called in our hearts, " Ye are of the free
people, deny not your heritage." In some degree
of intensity these voices had spoken every spring
of our lives, we confided to each other, making
181

1 82 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
us in our school days hate the bondage that
existed in the straight rows of desks in the school
room, making us later — when we had openly
embraced the world of the pioneer and the vaga
bond — flee each spring to the great trail — albeit
we went on business. But this year the voices
would brook no concessions with the material call
of gain. " The sum total of your spirits must
come out to us," came from an uproar of voices
within us.
Had we lived in the Occident we might have
been embarrassed as to how to answer such an
uncompromising invitation. Had we answered
it, there might have been the danger that people
would think us touched with some madness.
Perhaps therefore we would have hid the call
deep in our soul and sternly denied it. Few men
there make a clean-cut flight; rather they let a
little work trail after them to justify to them
selves and others that unreasonable crazy impulse
that has sent them out.
But in the Orient, millions of souls, from the
southernmost point of India to the northernmost
corners of Mongolia, Tibet and Manchuria, are

And start on pilgrimages to far off temples.

ff'orshiper after worshiper recorded his journey to the little
temple under whose shadoiu we Uved. [page IS 3]

Back to Old Cathay 183
wont to leave the counting-room and the shop, to
throw down the hammer and flail and start on
pilgrimages to far-off temples, to sacred moun
tains, to holy streams. No one in their half of
the world thinks it strange that a man should
cast aside all thoughts of material gain to go
on a quest of the spirit. " If a man hath two
loaves let him sell one and buy flowers, for bread
is food for the body but flowers are food for
the soul." So saith the Koran. So doth the
Mohammedan, the Buddhist, the Confucianist
start, without explanation, to hunt for flowers
for their souls . . . and the spring pilgrimages
have begun!
Day after day we watched the vivid green
buds grow on the willow trees; day after day
we listened to the now almost continuous sound
of the temple gong, as worshiper after wor
shiper recorded his journey to the little temple
under whose shadow we lived; day after day we
heard the increasing din of the voices of the
people who, their worship being completed,
feasted and made merry in the temple grounds
near the open-air theater. Pan's voice became

184 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
hauntingly reminiscent through it all. Sly
fellow, he even piped to us in the beggar chil
dren's chanting petition,
" Give me a dongpan, give me a cash,
Want to buy a donkey, want to buy a horse."
Bells, worshipers, and beggars . . . Pan, saucy
fellow, cajoled us through them all. At last
we could resist no longer, and cried, with
one accord, why should we not go on a pil
grimage ourselves? All frontiersmen who come
from ' within the wall ' go on pilgrimages to old
China. We have made all manner of adventur
ous journeyings; why not go back ourselves?
why not undertake this Eastern adventure of the
soul? Leave behind the work of the settler, the
cares of business ! Dare to slip the leash of the
material !
We took counsel together. Where should the
pilgrimage be? There was such a bewildering
array of possible goals. How could one be
single-minded and choose among them ?
" I know a wonderful spot far away to the
north, where the temple roofs are of gold and

Back to Old Cathay 185
the way is arduous and the place remote," I
cried. " But I know a spot far away to the south,"
mocked my husband, " peach trees are in bloom,
this very minute, by the city wall and the whole
country-side is astir. I say we follow them to
the Temple of the Heavenly Bamboos."
" How terrible to have to choose," I wailed.
"If we go to either of these places we cannot
go to the Sacred Mountain; ascend its thou
sands and thousands of steps which Confucius
climbed. The stones must be worn smooth with
the passing of the hundreds of pilgrims in the
hundreds of years since then," I mused. " Think
of such a pilgrimage ! "
" I have it," exclaimed my husband. " We
will go where the Confucianists gather together
at dawn to offer the sacrifice of the boar and
the ram and the bull. You must hear the herald
cry from the outer darkness to the chosen man
who goes in to offer the sacrifice."
But I shook my head; so we sighed in unison
at a land of so many pilgrimages. There seemed
nothing to do but take up the life of the eternal

1 86 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
seeker. Then in glorious irrelevancy we sud
denly joined hands, forgetting all the places we
had mentioned. We knew where we would go!
We would go down inside the Great Wall —
shutting our eyes to a beautiful temple that hung
poised like a bird on a ledge of rock under the
Great Wall's shadow — move on through the flat,
treeless province of Chili till we were close upon
the wonderful, the mysterious city of Peking.
Then being gloriously inconsistent pilgrims, aban
don there that natural means of entrance into the
city, the te-rain (as Kim called it), and trust to
the uncertainties of the road — to cart or donkey
as chance might lead. We would enter the city
of a thousand intrigues with the dust of the road
upon our feet and the simplicity of the foot-worn
pilgrim in our hearts. Straight across that dust-
driven city would we go, stopped not by its
alluring mysteries; pass out by one of the gates
on the west and take the road to the Western
Hills where temple after temple lies nestled in
the folds of these low mountains.
"Out there to the temple of Tan Chou Ssu
we are going," we concluded triumphantly. Then

/ say we follow them to the Temple of the Heavenly Bamboos.
[page 185]

Back to Old Cathay 187
with sweet content we sat and pictured it all:
the gray dust, the multitudinous odors, the hollow
rumble of the carts passing through the tunnel
like passage of the Peking gates. All this and
much more we could picture, but, true to our
heritage, we could not and we would not seek to
divine what was to be the adventure of this
new venture. Make a certainty of the uncer
tainty of what would happen next? That would
take the flavor out of life, and vagabondage, and
pilgrimage. " Out to meet adventure ! " we cried,
and commenced the delightful process of casting
aside the things of civilization.
On Japanese trains, then on Chinese trains we
journeyed across the great outlying province of
Manchuria. Every hour joy grew within us, as
we watched the green marching up the slopes in
the hill country, as we watched the faint shimmer
of green of the half-inch-high kaoliang, stretch
ing away into the remote distance of the far-off,
level horizon. How ample was the world ! There
was no place here for any pinch or cramp of
our bodies or our souls. We forgot the confines
of joggling train; to us as to the Chinese it had

1 88 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
become a fire-cart, a thing of wonder. In a fire-
cart then we traveled on through this ample
world. When the evening of the second day came,
again we saw hills standing out against the hori
zon and on the very ridge of them there stood
forth the Great Wall of China. Up one ridge,
down another, out one spur, along another, down
into the lowlands across the salt-marshes towards
the sea, it advanced like a great army drawn up.
In a moment more with a roar we had passed
through it. After two years on the frontier we
were once more in ancient China — in search of
the roots of the life we had shared on the
frontier. At the end of another day we were near ing
Peking, but we had, as yet, come upon no signs
of the yearly pilgrimages. Not only were there
no signs of this Eastern manifestation of spring,
but there began to appear evidence of the modern
world of convention. Even the fire-cart changed
back into a train, for, after we left Tientsin, it
bore tourists and other conventional folk toward
the well-ordered ways of the Hotel de Wagon

Back to Old Cathay 189
Lits of Peking. Had we not known our Oriental
world, we might have mistrusted the way we
were taking; but we knew we had only to drop
from the train at any wayside station and the
world of convention would be utterly gone. This
we did, knowing that a pilgrim must have nothing
whatever to do with luxury. For him, the haz
ards of the road, the ache and sweat of the
journey. We took our chance that night with native
wayfarers, stopping with them at a wayside
inn. We might have been a thousand, thousand
leagues away from the great Hotel de Wagon
Lits instead of a few miles. Not one little evi
dence of the western world had crept into this
ancient inn. It was the usual inn of northern
China. Out on the frontier we had spent many
a night in faithful replicas of this old structure,
but how different did it all seem to us now — no
material gain brought us here, only that sublimely
foolish call of the wayfarers of the world, a call
with no justification except itself.
In came settlers and ne'er-do-wells upon the
road and yes, at last, here was the sign for which

190 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
we were looking and for which we had begun to
despair : through the inn doorway came a group
of pilgrims, their knapsacks upon their backs.
Now did we rest content; we were in time for
the yearly migration templeward for which there
is no appointed time — only the proddings of fear,
vagrancy, and worship that come in the Orient,
in some unaccountable way, with the spring air.
As there is no caste in China the well-to-do
settler left his cart in the court, the ne'er-do-well
left his staff and his ragged bundle on the dirt
floor of the inn, the pilgrim put his knapsack
with its offering to the gods in a safe corner,
and all sat down to eat the humble food of the
inn and then lay down on the k'angs to sleep,
until dawn should call each one about his own
business. Like true, zealous pilgrims who must know
nothing of soft pamperings, we also were up with
the very first light of the spring morning. The
green shimmer over the earth, on which we had
had to shut our eyes the night before, was still
there. It had seemed such a magic thing that we
were really fearful it might disappear in the

Back to Old Cathay 191
night; and lo, as we started along the road, we
found we had caught the world in its pilgrim
mood. Oftener and oftener we caught — ahead
of us — the flare of the yellow knapsacks. We be
gan meeting silent, ascetic pilgrims, journeying by
themselves; adventurous pilgrims, speaking not
the dialect of that province; social pilgrims, jour
neying with their fellow villager. Once as we
entered a village, all the able-bodied of the town
were just about to start — all dressed in new blue
homespun and fresh, creaking sandals of straw.
So did our secret inner aspirations take material
form in the marching pilgrims; and our pil
grimage came to seem the most natural thing to
do in all the world — in the spring time.
The sun rose higher, grew hotter. Tired pil
grims lagged behind; the worn and less eager
ones stopped under the inviting evergreen bough
awnings in front of the wayside tea shops to
drink of the sweet-smelling tea. The pot-bellied
teakettles, half as big as their masters, looked
most enticing, steaming and hissing there in the
sunshine, but we refused their invitation and kept
on our way in our stout cart; eager we were for

192 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
the first glimpse of the great and mysterious city
of Peking, for the hills beyond and ... for
the temple, our final goal. On, and on, and on,
we journeyed in that slow-moving cart. And
now as we neared the greatest city of the empire
the way became thronged with a motley array:
" Richman, poorman, beggarman, thief,
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief "
all jostled each other on the democratic road.
When the city finally took shape ahead of
us it was but an intangible wraith. A great,
enveloping dust storm of the north was devour
ing the earth; red dust lay over the gray dust
of the road and over the travelers that crowded
the way. It swirled in the air, a whirling red
mist out of which the parapeted walls, watch-
towers and gates of the city arose as a vision
in a dream, unsubstantial, ethereal. Only a
little less unreal looked the travelers who had
shrouded themselves from the fury of the air.
Gone was our gay, tangible world of the morn
ing; in its place was a world made up of the
illusions of dreams.

Back to Old Cathay 193
Unknowingly we were almost upon the outer
gate, when suddenly it loomed above us out of
the enveloping mist, a thing very real and solid.
For a moment we were well-nigh overpowered
by the sights and sounds that came surging in
upon us, sweeping from our minds everything
except half -forgotten memories of the years we
had spent in this city which called us now to
its life. But we would not be tempted away from
our pilgrimage. This time, O gay imperial
city, you are to be only a wayside stopping-place
on the road of a greater adventure. Thus
minded, we passed through the first gate and on
to the broad highway that led to the gate in the
second wall.
The wind began dying away, leaving the red
dust to settle thickly over the gray dust; and
except where the feet of animals and men stirred
it anew, the air became clear and clean. And
the most beautiful thing in all the clean, blue sky
was the blue dome of the Temple of Heaven,
rising in stately fashion above the mean little
houses and huts of the outer city. Thus did we
begin to forget the gay call of the city's life

194 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
in this first majestic evidence of the city's
aspirations. In time, we reached the great, the historic
' Chen Men,' which after the manner of our
speaking is the front gate, and from there we
zigzagged west across another city, for Peking
means city within city. By and by, we came
upon the Forbidden City, which, with its yellow
walls, looks like the golden heart of gray-roofed,
gray-walled Peking. Passing in its shadow, we
saw, not far from us, in the last twilight, a
ruined mosque. This was faith after faith rising
up along our pilgrim path to attend us upon
our way. Small temples seemed now to spring
from the ground — and wayside shrines. Strange,
crude gods looked out at us from the crude altars.
But with the dust of the road upon us and the
ache and sweat of travel made only for the sake
of a pilgrimage, we walked softly before them
all, seeing in each one the vague cravings of
some soul. And still we kept on and still the
notes of unnumbered strivings rose around us,
until every other appeal of the greatest city of
the empire was drowned in this eternal cry of

Back to Old Cathay 195
the seeker. And still we kept on towards the
west, until just before the hour of their closing,
we had passed through the outermost gate of
the outermost wall; only then did we stop. In
a great inn we waited with other pilgrims, waited
for the new day when we would journey up into
the hills to our great goal.
Heigh-ho ! Into the hours of one day we were
going to press so much of joyous vagabondage
that the like should not be known outside the
East. This was our mood when we woke next
morning. Sunlight and spring owned the earth
and new life crowded upwards; fear, vagrancy,
and worship claimed the people and they crowded
templeward; there was no doubt that pure va
grancy possessed us and we were ready to follow
any lead that took us along the open way.
"What ho! " we cried to the day as we looked
to the east and caught the sun full in our faces,
for it stood no higher than a man's head when
we first emerged from the inn doorway in search
of donkeys. " What ho ! " we cried to all the
joyous, vagrant activity that filled the courtyard
like a tempest in a teapot. Would-be renters

196 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
of their animals placed their wares straight in
the way of possible patrons; outgoing pilgrims
stumbled over the leading straps of donkeys, de
signedly blocking the inn gateway. Irate would-
be passengers shouted their protest of high
prices; suave owners shouted, unshamefacedly,
the superior value of many an obviously decrepit
animal. " Into the fray," we shouted at each
other above the tumult, and laughed into each
other's eyes, and joined the bargaining throng.
But the sun stood far above the level of our
eyes and the courtyard noise was thinning a
little, when our bargain was finally finished, and
we at last rode forth and faced to the west. The
wide expanse of the Peking plain lay before us
with a line of pilgrims filing across it, pointing
the way to the great goal. On until the plain
disappeared into the horizon they trailed, with
the sun shining upon the offerings upon their
backs as they journeyed due west. On either
side the plain swept away clean and fresh;
around the wayfarers riding on donkeys, in carts,
in chairs, traveling on foot, there billowed an
ever-increasing cloud of dust.

Back to Old Cathay 197
With much pulling on our own part and much
whacking and shouting on the part of our donkey
boys, we managed to get our donkeys into the
tail of the procession. But when we had time
to look behind, we were no longer at the end
of the marching throng. From where had they
all come? Winding and curving behind us was
a momentarily growing line of more donkeys,
more chairs, more carts, more foot pilgrims.
The day's journey had surely begun !
We were soon aware that we had chosen too
well our beasts of burden. Many a worn-out
hack of a donkey, once behind us in the line,
albeit plodding faithfully upon the way, later we
saw far ahead of us. Our alert, sleek-looking
animals were in possession of seven road demons
apiece : sometimes they darted from the way and
when we had them in hand again they were far
down the ranks; sometimes they kicked madly in
the face of other donkeys, and we were forced
out of very necessity to drive them forth, and
again we lost ground. As often before, the fate
ful quality of the westerner was our undoing.
Would we ever learn that in the East the snail

198 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
always wins over the tortoise? After all, it was
only the unreasoned instinct of the westerner
which had caused us at starting to hunt out the
animals who looked the fleetest. In fact, we
found that we were curiously loath to hurry
now that we were on the last stage of this new
trail, the pilgrim trail. For to-day the dust-
clouded road, the noise of the throngs, the thrill
of the pilgrimage.
It was long after noon when we heard the end
of that fifteen-mile plain of sun and dust. Ahead
of us, we saw the shadows among the hills.
Eagerly now we pushed our donkeys forward.
We wanted rest from the glaring sun, from the
careering donkeys, from the teeming life — a little
cessation from all those sensations which seemed
now to have beat upon our brains for an endless
time. Then we were at the gap in the hills and
winding in and out in the narrow valleys. Cool
shadows were about us, the throng could only
partially be seen in the twisting valleys, and the
noise was sometimes hushed in the folds of the
hills. We came to a low stone wall that held back

Back to Old Cathay 199
the hills from disintegrating down on the stone
flagging of the path. Dismissing our donkeys
and donkey boys, we scrambled part way up the
hillside, away from the unceasing travel of the
pilgrim-path; and under some persimmon trees
we ate and drank and then lay down and looked
up through the persimmon branches to the
brooding presence of the pine-covered slopes
above us. An unaccountable mood of waiting —
akin to the mood of the morning when we were
curiously loath to hurry — descended upon us
. . . and we waited. Just why, we neither
knew nor cared to discover. All we desired
was to catch and hold a tantalizingly elu
sive far-away existence that haunted our
memories. How often since we came to pioneer in this
age-old civilization had we lived again the life of
our ancestors! Over and over had we linked
our little, isolated lives with the past : there was
that unforgettable day when we journeyed to
wards Hulanho and a wild, sweet spirit took
possession of us, the spirit of the wanderer's
life rightly inherited by us from the days

200 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
when all the earth roamed; there was that well-
remembered night when our first cabin was
finished and we had seen the vision of the
pioneer settlers of the earth. Now the occasional
smell of incense, the vague odor of the toiling
crowd, the glimpses of the pilgrims' staffs and
knapsacks, the distant sound of the deep-toned
temple-bells, brought to our half-awake brains
strange and but partially comprehended visions
of ourselves in the beginnings of strivings in our
race; half -remembered journeys to Druid woods,
half-real feelings of fear in worship mingled
with our spirit of vagrancy as we lay there under
the persimmon trees.
It grew late enough so that a chill crept into
the spring afternoon, and the crowds began re
turning with empty knapsacks. First they were
an interminable line, filing past; then the line
grew thinner; then there were long breaks in it;
then there were only a straggling few of the
old and lame, passing by. We put on our coats
to shut out the chill, but yet we lingered. Night
came and utter stillness in the valleys; and still
we did not finish our pilgrimage to the temple

Back to Old Cathay 201
of Tan Chou Ssu that stood some two hours'
climb above us in the hills. We were obeying
some inner voice that spoke from that far-away
past which had haunted our memories all through
the pilgrim-thronged afternoon.
But after a time, when the young crescent moon
threw a very little light over the hillsides among
the dark fir trees, that something bade us start.
And we climbed among the firs. We reached the
arched gateway and passed through it; we
reached the temple inclosure, and slipping a little
money into the hands of the gate-keeper, passed
on. The temple, with its roof like a sagging
tent cloth, stood vaguely against the sky; within
we saw the smoky flare of the ever-burning light
before the great Buddha. The cauldrons smoked
with the weight of the paper money cast into
them by the many pilgrims. A strange spirit
that we did not understand seemed brooding over
things there. Hand in hand we stole up the
marble steps to the temple.
The silent night, the mysterious temple, our
tense selves all were prescient with the same dark
stirrings. Wild, heretofore unguessed longings

202 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
within us, surged against the strongholds of our
civilization. We leaned against one of the giant
wood pillars of the temple veranda waiting for
something. Then it came, — the wild, emotional worship of
long ago ages, springing into ominous life right
there before our eyes. Lights flared on the altar,
priests stepped out of the darkness. From the
two sides of the temple veranda, long lines of
them uncoiled, and uncoiled. Faster, faster, they
moved, their feet patting the stone-paved way.
They brushed us as they swept quickly along.
Their rosaries clicked. They chanted a slow,
low chant. Moving, chanting, swaying — they
crowded upon each other. The silent, vaulted
temple changed in one moment into a seething
mass of emotion-gripped, swaying, chanting,
moving frenzies, its air rent asunder with the
Tibetan chant of fear and superstition, rising
faster and louder, faster and louder, faster and
louder! We clung to the pillars, frantic to
protect ourselves against the onsweeping forces
that pelted us like a torrent of wind and rain
and hail; but it was useless. As it beat upon

Out of which the parapeted walls of the city rose as a vision
in a dream, unsubstantial, ethereal. [page 192]

We reached the arched gate-way and passed through it.
[page 2011

Back to Old Cathay 203
us, the left-over fears of our ancestors in un
known gods, gripped us !
Long afterwards we found ourselves in the
quiet night with the quiet stars above us and
the still earth beneath our feet. We were back
from a very long pilgrimage, a long, long pil
grimage to the cloudy beginnings of the spirit.
We had journeyed to the throbbing heart of a
civilization almost as old as time. In so doing,
we had uncovered in ourselves the memory of
our own race's beginnings, its superstitions, its
fear-driven strivings towards the mysteries of
the spirit. We had that night made another link
with the past, united our isolated strivings with
those of the ages. That was the long, long
pilgrimage.

CHAPTER XI
SUMMER RAINS AGAIN AND OTHER KNOWL
EDGE WHICH THEY BRING
But Nature whistled with all her winds,
Did as she pleased and went her way.
— Emerson.
The summer rains are over. With their go
ing, although it is August, this short northern
summer seems to be over. The days in some
mysterious way have grown suddenly cooler;
there is the feeling that there is wine in the
air — and the nights are chilly. But the real,
unmistakable sign we find in those marvelously
white clouds, peculiar to the Manchurian autumn,
that now billow up from the south, those clouds
which hold no rain. I woke this morning to
find — after weeks of rainy mornings — the sun
shine streaming across my bed; it is brilliant
sunshine, healing sunshine that blesses you to
your heart's core. In the autumn the gods pour
204

Summer Rains Again 205
it steadfastly hour after hour over this northern
country. We started to prepare for one of the numerous
short trips which make up the life of many a
trader. It would undoubtedly be one of those
innumerable, uneventful journeys which often
took us in zigzag paths across the near-by coun
try, a journey without event — except the autumn
loveliness. We took the fewest of supplies, for
we expected to be gone but a short time.
Two days passed in this uneventful quiet;
contentment ruled our spirits — we were driving
again over the plains with their brown mud
dwellings, villages, and their big shocks of
kaoliang which, with their reddish-brown tips,
looked like a company of knights arrayed in
gorgeous plumage. Everything was just as it
had been every autumn since we first came to
Manchuria. The autumn weather seemed as
steadfast as the steadiest of country yeomen.
In the usual fashion we had reached the first
of our stops and in the usual fashion passed on.
This third day opened as brilliantly as any of
the fall days that seemed already to have become

206 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
a habit, although the summer rains which this
year had turned into floods were such a short
distance in the past. But gradually the bril
liancy changed into the soft haze which is char
acteristic of the fall at home in America. It
made me think of home and I became reminis
cent. For once my mind and heart were far
from the trail.
Into these dreamy memories of mine spoke
my husband, who for a long time had been
staring at the sky. " I guess we are in for it."
I leaned forward to look beyond the blue cloth
awning which the old carter had erected over the
mules; even as I looked the first sprinkle fell.
Now if there was one thing above another to be
regarded as serious when off on a trip it was
the summer rains. If these sprinkles meant that
the summer rains were not over then heaven help
us. The rains this year being particularly heavy,
whole villages had been washed away. If there
were to be any such violent downfall as we
had reason to expect from the season's record,
the roads in a few hours would be impassable
bogs and the numerous small streams which we

Summer Rains Again 207
had been fording would, with miraculous speed,
turn into deep and dangerous rivers. Now these
streams lay behind us and they lay ahead of us!
In either direction the inns were a number of
hours away, but the one ahead, the carter said,
was a little nearer than the one behind, so we
concluded to keep on. We were becoming inured
to danger; we had long ago concluded that we
lived charmed lives, for a really disastrous ac
cident had never befallen us. So quickly organ
izing our forces so as to make our strength as
great as possible, we moved on. The mules of
the boy's cart were faster than those of ours so
we called to them to go ahead. Then we shouted
to our deaf carter to keep up. Thus we hoped
to spur our animals to greater haste. Whatever
happened we must get to an inn; what might
befall us after that we did not dwell upon. We
knew we had few enough provisions if we
should be marooned, but that difficulty was for
the future.
The sky grew more overcast every moment.
In a quarter of an hour the rain was falling in
the relentless fashion it had in the rainy season.

208 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Travel became more difficult. What a half-hour
before had been thick dust, was now sticky mud,
deepening with surprising rapidity. We began
making large digressions from the worn-down
track that answered for a road — digressions that
took us far into the fields. We must avoid the
catastrophe of getting mired in a mud hole.
Even in the streets of the port-towns of Man
churia mules had been drowned. Should we
lose a mule in such a bog things would be well-
nigh hopeless for us. The rest of the animals
could not meet the extra strain of the carts.
The rain was now coming down in torrents and
the carters tried to drive haphazard through any
and every bog, and we had difficulty in making
them take the longer but safer course through the
fields. My husband, the boy, and the carters were
all walking in order to make the carts as light
as possible. Later I, too, would have to get out,
but I was to save my strength until the end,
for the walking in the mud was a prodigious
task. Just then we came to the inevitable stream;
but a stream it no longer was. The last time

Summer Rains Again 209
we had crossed it, not two hours before, it had
been a harmless little thing; now its waters were
nearly up to the hubs of our cart-wheels and the
current was very strong. But the mules were
sure-footed creatures and that difficulty was soon
over. Catastrophe awaited us on the other side ! My
husband had run ahead to see that the other cart
drove out into the field to avoid a particularly
evil-looking place in the road. He expected us
to follow. Suddenly I felt a sensation of sinking
and almost before we knew it, our mules were
half-buried in the bog. Our old carter had
decided to run the chance of the evil-looking
place; and as my husband's back was turned, he
had succeeded in taking his chance and here we
were to all appearances hopelessly stuck. The
carter whipped frantically at his floundering
animals. All he saw was to make them get out
by brute force. " Stop ! " cried my husband,
"they'll break their legs." Whipping was use
less; it was evident that they could not get out
with the weight of the cart, the boxes on the
back and with me within. But there was no

210 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
way to get either the boxes or me across the
sea of mud. Meanwhile the wind was rising and
the rain increasing.
The carters and the boy and my husband strode
about examining us from every side. Finally
they agreed we had a chance of getting the mules
out whole if they relieved them of the extra
weight of the cart. " We'll have to unharness
the mules and get them out and then attach long
ropes to the cart and put the other mules on
high ground and pull the cart out backwards,"
explained my husband. " Are you all right ? "
he asked anxiously. I confess I was not alto
gether enjoying my predicament but I managed
to answer with a fair degree of cheerfulness; I
knew that there was no time to waste in con
soling me. By dint of many instructions from
the shore I managed to unfasten that mysterious
Oriental harness of string and whatnot. Then
the carter's long whips reached out from the high
ground and stung the mules unmercifully. The
mules were now so tired with their struggles that
one had already attempted to lie down; nothing
but a stinging blow would ever get them out.

Summer Rains Again 211
Time after time they went down on their knees
and stood every chance of breaking their legs,
but the whips continued to goad them on and
at last in a super-struggle — without a broken leg
— they stumbled onto the comparatively firm
ground beyond. Our luck, which we had come
to depend upon to carry us through catastrophe,
was holding.
They were now ready for the cart and me.
After many trials, they managed to get ropes
around the body of the cart and the fresher mules
of the other team fastened to the other end of
the ropes. Again the beating began. I clung to
the sides of the cart as it tipped dangerously one
way and another. I could just see my husband's
face peering at me anxiously from above. Sud
denly the shafts went free of the mud and sent
the back of the cart down and the mud oozed
in from behind. Then the shafts went down
again as the cart struck higher ground and I
was thrown forward. All I prayed for was that
the cart should not go over on its side.
" You're most out ! " cried my husband en
couragingly from somewhere above me — and

212 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
wabbling and rocking the cart stopped. We were
out of the mud hole !
We had been some two hours in the puddle
and the precious daylight which one so much
needed in any predicament on the road, was
nearly gone. There was at least one more stream
to cross before we reached the inn; and when
night actually came we should not be able to see
a hand's breadth in front of us! We had little
but the thought of our luck to cheer us on. No
one spoke as we plodded along; there was,
occasionally, the very sharp cry of one of the
drivers, warning the mules of danger ahead.
For the time being the carters had learned their
lesson and were the personification of discretion.
But we did not come to the stream. Every step
my feet weighed a little more; I felt that I was
attempting to move mountains. But still no
stream appeared. A more grim determination
was necessary every minute, in order to keep
going at all. By this time I could just see my
husband plodding ahead of me. The water ran
in rivulets from his cap and he, too, I saw was
moving with difficulty.

Summer Rains Again 213
As the darkness was getting too thick to
see objects, even as near as my plodding
husband, we heard the rush of waters above
the sound of the rain. It was the stream — but
swollen to formidable proportions. We dared
not think of the odds in getting across — in fact
all the odds seemed against us and none for us.
The depth of the waters was an uncertainty,
the current was swift, the mules were exhausted,
and it was getting darker every minute. Per
haps the growing darkness was a little bit for
tunate, for it gave us no time to meditate on the
chances we were taking. We all got aboard the
carts — our weight had to be added to the weight
of the carts in getting across the stream — and we
drove down into the boiling stream. We were
all crouching on the narrow space in the front
of the cart, steadying ourselves with one hand
and with the other steadying our boxes — which
we had of necessity placed inside the cart to keep
them out of the water. At every step of the
mules, the water rose higher and higher around
us. It was up to the hubs ... a step farther
— it was nearly up to the cart's bottom. The

214 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
water swept past up so rapidly that it gave us
the illusion that we were being carried down
stream with it. The boxes put so hastily inside
the cart, threatened to topple over on us. At
least they took our attention from the moving
torrents so very near us. Anything to forget
that the mules might lose their footing in a
treacherous hole, or the water prove too deep
for them! The water ran in a thin stream over
the cart's bottom. Then it began to go down.
We had passed the deepest point. So we were
straining up the bank and another danger was
over. It was not far to the inn, they told us.
But as we went farther away from the sound
of the waters we seemed to be getting nearer the
sound again. Was it possible that there was
another crossing of that stream which in true
Oriental fashion the carters had neglected to
mention? After a time we could see a few
blurred lights. The village was not far away
but the sound of rushing waters had grown
louder. That swollen stream did indeed lie
between us and our inn. As it was so near to
the village, the carters had not mentioned it!

Summer Rains Again 215
The village did indeed lie just on the other side
but in reality how far away it was with those
waters separating us from it. The night, since
our last crossing, had grown pitch black and the
river was a moving blackness. It was bad enough
to cross the river in the half-darkness of the
last crossing, but in this utter darkness the river
seemed some monster, rushing at us to devour
us. It was so unknowable there in the darkness
— that was the worst of it; it left too much to
one's imagination. Nothing seems quite so
mysteriously awful as black waters and I shud
dered to think of going down into them.
But the carters, after running along the bank
and listening and shouting to some villagers on
the other side, assured us that the crossing could
be done. So down into those black waters we
drove, straining our eyes to see the vague moving
of the vague black mass below us, listening to
the torrent of sound. But above this sound came
a strong and victorious splash as the mules
met and conquered the stream. To that sound
we clung, the sound of the mules plowing on,
meeting and conquering the waters. And for the

216 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
final time that evening, we passed the deepest
place in the river and the mules were plodding
doggedly up the last embankment. At the top
they stood still; their heads nearly touched the
ground and the rain and the sweat ran from
them. They were nearly spent. But good old
animals, they had done their task.
The wind blew from every direction — we
were evidently having a typhoon. Our own
bodies were almost too heavy to carry in our
soaked clothes and the wind buffeted us and the
rain beat on us. Our feet we lifted, seemingly,
by some supernatural force. But spent mules
and spent humans, we all at last reached the inn
inclosure. And we thought of the hard-pressed
ships at sea on a night like this.
The inn turned out to be the rudest of country
huts but we cheerfully accepted its limitations
until we opened our foodbox with its scanty
supplies and discovered that in some way the
cover had come off our baking powder tin and
the baking powder was soaked and past any
possible usefulness. It was all very well to be
philosophical over the loss of supplies when we

Summer Rains Again 217
were in the midst of a thrilling adventure, but the
sight of that water-logged baking powder in the
light of an indefinite number of days to be spent
in this wretched inn was too much. We ate our
supper in silence ; we crawled under our blankets
in silence and never so much as gave one thought
to our luck in extricating ourselves from the bog.
We did not even, like proper happy-go-lucky
vagabonds, thank our little god of luck for our
safe crossing of the swollen streams. We fell
asleep thinking of the baking powder.
" It's leaking in a new place," I was saying
when, with my head thrown back to survey the
roof of the inn, the drip-drop of the water fell
warm and wet in my face.
" Abandon your position," responded my hus
band as he surveyed a third pool growing into
alarming proportions on the matting of the k'ang
where we were sitting. I came and squatted by
his side with my back against the somewhat damp
wall. This was the seventh day that we had been
shut away in the inn and the great sheets of

218 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
Manchurian rain had been gradually conquering
our rude shelter. Already the heavy thatch of
the roof had turned into a sodden mass that let
the water in in numberless places all over the
room; the earth floor was like a muddy mill-
pond; and there was no gainsaying the fact that
there were three pools of water on the k'ang
which must do duty for a place for us to eat and
sleep until the floods subsided. As I watched,
the second of the wee legs of the k'ang table dis
appeared in the meeting pools. My husband slid
gingerly off the wet k'ang, and, departing into
the big common room of the inn, tried to push
open the door and see what the rain was doing.
But the wind almost simultaneously sent in a
great gust of water and blew the door shut.
Thus routed he retreated and went in search of
the boy in order to go over, once more, our
much diminished larder, in the hope of producing
some supper.
At last he returned followed by the boy, who
carried an old and cracked willow teapot. By
this time there was but one dry spot left on the
k'ang. Drawing our feet up under our chins,

Summer Rains Again 219
we spread out our scanty fare on what seemed
the only other dry spot in the universe — the top
of the k'ang table. We munched on unleavened
cakes and drank the tea.
That meal — as most of the others we had eaten
in those last seven days — was soon over and we
sat there — as we had so much of the time during
those days, — listening to the rain. We watched
the room grow dim. The little god standing in
its accustomed place, crude and bizarre in the
daylight, looked down on us — a figure of soft
gold; some one was carrying a light through the
courtyard, making our paper window panes glow
like living pearls. " It's odd," I mused to my
self, " how companionship deepens when we are
shut away like this."
" Listen," said my husband, " it has stopped
raining." And we hurried off to look at the
sky. As we stepped out into the court we saw
the stars were out. The inn-keeper came towards
us. " He says the storm is over," translated my
husband. " That means we can be on the road
in the morning. These floods go down very
rapidly."

220 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
"Oh, by the way," he said and laughed joy
ously, " we've passed the great test all unbe
knownst to ourselves."
" What test ? " I asked, bewildered.
" Oh, don't you know the saying? " he asked.
" Two men going off on a trip always claim that
if they go through a few weeks of all sorts of
difficulties — rains and floods and bad inns and
poor food and no other white men but each
other to talk to and don't have a genuine quarrel,
they are sure enough friends for life."

CHAPTER XII
OF MOMENTS WHEN WE HAVE CAUGHT,
HERE IN THIS CIVILIZATION THAT IS
OLD AND SIMPLE, THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH,
AND A LAMENT OVER THE NEW ERA
WHICH CROWDS IT OUT.

The China of two thousand years has passed away.
The picture is doubtless welcome to some . . . but to
the artist and philosopher it probably brings regrets.
— Rowland R. Gibson.
We reached the inn, our night's stopping-place,
about an hour ago. We are fortunate to-night
for we have a room to ourselves. We are at
rest after the all-day's ride in a primitive Chinese
cart. We have shed our heavy shoes, putties and
riding suits for soft kimonos. It is very quiet
and clean in this inner court of the inn; through
the many-paned paper windows the moon is
shining; through one broken and frayed paper
pane the cool night wind blows; our candle
sputters and flares. From the distance, as if shut
321

222 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
off by the space of quiet in the courtyard comes
the eerie music of a street-theater. We are
possessed of that strange contentment so natural
to the inveterate wanderer. It is a sort of spirit
of youth.
Suddenly my memory gives a leap and I see
in the candle flame a whole host of phantom
children. Once I touched an accidental spring;
a door flew open and I had stepped into the very
heart of childhood. It was a brief never-to-be-
forgotten hour so joyous, so sweet that its per
fume still lingers in my grown-up world. It
happened in Peking.
It was in the hot summer but the cool of the
evening — the time when the mothers go to walk
with their naked babies. The sun had thrown
her last rays of yellow light over the yellow roofs,
watch-towers, and walls of the Imperial City,
which lay as the golden heart of the gray-roofed,
gray-walled, gray dust-streeted Eastern city.
The golden glory was fast fading into the eve
ning and the common gray of all Peking. Men
drowsed in the heavy, gray-stoned doorways and
open shop fronts. There was the dull rumble

A Lament Over the New Era 223
of the heavy wheels of the Peking carts, the
pat of many bare feet, the cries of an Oriental
city, but no new spirit stirred the usual life
of the Eastern evening, though I had heard it
whispered over the city all day that this was
the children's night; every street had been gay
with the shops' display of lotus lanterns like the
real, rose-colored buds that lay at this season of
the year on the waters of the moat around the
Forbidden City.
When I inquired of the old gateman as to the
meaning of the night I was told it was the
Lotus Festival, a thing for children, not for
grownups — and he settled with a sigh to his
water-pipe. So every one answered me. I was
baffled but something within me called out for a
part, so I too sat in the dark doorway or moved
restlessly about in the dust of the street, fearful
lest this festival should be in the courtyards
behind the closed gates where no glimpse would
reach me over the high walls.
Then the moon rose high over the curving
Peking roofs and flooded the street; as if the
moon had brought him, a child came timidly

224 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
forth from one of the dark, massive gateways.
In his hand he held a brilliant lotus bud; then
as if they had only waited for a braver child,
from every silent gateway all up and down that
street the children came forth. A new Piper
was piping a new lay, trailing light in the place
of music and once more the children obeyed him.
The air was filled with the lilt of their happy
voices; there was the sound of their feet in the
dust. Flocking, crowding, running they came,
each clasping a magically flickering lotus bud.
Soon the street was childhood's land, full of
color, sound, and happiness. Still they came:
children in brilliant silk garments, children in
rags, little naked brown children — all with the
sesame of the brilliant lotus bud. The lotus
glowed throwing soft light up into childish faces;
it illumined the very soul of childhood, shining
through the eyes of those countless children.
Then the joyous crowd at the new Piper's back
turned into other streets and ever the crowd of
breathless, joyous children and lovely flowers
increased. I mingled in the crowd, and warm, little

A Lament Over the New Era 225
hands were slipped into mine as I relighted wind
blown candles. I was held in the warm, joyous
heart of childhood. Life for me was renewed at
its very source. Pain and loss were banished.
There was only that marvelous joy of the chil
dren. It was as if those myriads of tiny, soft
hands had forever broken the bondage of
sorrow and striving and pain of the grown-up
world. For a brief, joyous hour like fairy elves they
frolicked with the moon riding high over the
Peking roofs. Then the candles burned low and
one by one sputtered and went out. As quickly
as they came the children vanished. The street
was again still and gray. The new Piper, like
the old, had led his hosts away. But often in
moments like this, in wide stretches on a long
trail in the moonlight or morning mists when
ever simplicity rules my spirit, I hear again the
far-off murmur of childhood.
I heard it this morning. Very early we took
the ferry across the river. There was a shower
and the morning mists still lay over the river
when the sun breaking through the black clouds

226 Pioneering Where the World Is Old
sent a rift of shimmering light across the water
and through the mists.
One by one the junks went sailing through
that track of light with men's dark figures pull
ing in rhythmic motion at wind-blown sails.
Everywhere man was in glorious motion, glori
ous freedom. No one was a tender of machinery
down in a dark hold. Each boat sailed with
fancy-free fervor across the golden light in the
center of the river. A naked boy came along
the shore, singing a shrill morning song.
But the financier has already decreed that
China shall become a great industrial nation. It
has been prophesied, " a network of steel and
sleepers is about to be thrown over the land. No
longer shall we see the still tropic stars except
through the smoke of the furnace chimney."
Already as the moon rises over the curving roofs
it throws into relief the smoking furnace-chim
ney. Soon steamboats with their smokestacks
will take the place of the wind-blown junk. A
hundred miles, which it now takes days of sail
ing, polling, towing to make, will be done in a
few short hours, Ggne will be the slow climb

A Lament Over the New Era 227
up these Chinese rivers but gone also will be the
slowness which gives time for each hill to write
its memory within us. There will be the factory
whistle calling long lines of workers and the
naked boy and his shrill morning song will
disappear. The innate wanderer is doubtless a barbarian.
We sigh at the encroachments of industrialism.
We do not like to think that the wandering
grounds of the earth with their re-creating ex
periences are little by little disappearing. Keep
on, little singer of the way. Let us defy them
as long as we can. The wind on your brown
skin, the freedom to sing — what would fill their
place ?

THE END

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