Читать книгу Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them - Archibald Mrs. Little - Страница 10

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Mr. Tee San's garden is one of the most fascinating spots in China, with the bright autumn sunshine glinting through the pretty bits of trellis-work on to its fantastic rocks, and zigzag bridges, and pretty pavilions, and lighting up the truly exquisite specimens of chrysanthemums sometimes on show there. There is the spiky little chrysanthemum, the tiger's moustache, and huge maroon blossoms fading off into delicate cream in the centre, and many other uncommon varieties, each in its appropriate pot, spacious, four-square, and creamy, apparently just made to be painted, and each placed at exactly the right elevation by means of its light wooden stand, sometimes raising the pot an inch or two, sometimes about eight feet, and always so slanted, that the flowers are tilted down towards the spectator, thus showing themselves off in their entirety. But it is not so much worth while to go to this garden in order to see the chrysanthemum, as to admire the infinite variety of Chinese decoration crowded into what is really a very confined space, but which is made to appear a garden large enough to lose oneself in. Rows of bamboo stems of soft blue-green china relieve the monotony of the walls, with their open air-spaces in between, as do also various graceful interlacings of tiles. There are doors of all sorts and sizes, like a horseshoe, like a pentagon, like a leaf cut somewhat irregularly down the middle by the leaf stem, and with outer edge fluted like a leaf. There are, of course, artificial mounds made out of rockwork, and grottoes, and quaint lumps of stone, looking as if they had been masses of molten metal suddenly hardened in their grotesqueness; also, as a matter of course, inside the pavilions there are various specimens of that landscape stone—dear to the heart of the Chinaman, and said to come from Yunnan—framed and hanging on the walls. There used to be also a magnificent peacock; a mandarin duck, with its quaint, bright, decisive colouring; golden pheasants; a scarlet-faced monkey, and a pale-faced; a little company of white geese, and another of white rabbits. But to enumerate the treasures of the garden gives no idea of the artistic skill with which it has been laid out; so that every one who sits down in it even in the most commonplace manner, and even those most unpicturesque of human beings, Chinese men and women, immediately becomes an integral part of a picture.

PAVILION IN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN'S GARDEN.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

There sit two Chinamen, with dark-purple silk outer jackets and long, glowing blue undergowns. They sit on each side of a little square black table, with their long pipes; behind them the sun slants across the latticed paper window, a branch of Virginia creeper, already yellow, pushing in through it. It needs not the addition of the cream-coloured pot with its chrysanthemums planted well to the front of it, as they all are, and on the usual slant. Without that bit of autumn colouring behind them, there is already an autumn picture,—men past their prime soothing the evening of their day in life with the pipe, all nature attuned with its vivid fast-fleeting sunshine and its orange-yellow leaves. In another pavilion sits one of those gorgeous creatures who always recall the braveries of Sir Walter Scott's descriptions, but who are hardly now to be seen out of China: his big loose jacket, of brocaded golden satin, stiff and shimmering: his long gown, only less brilliant, of violet satin. A gnarled and knotted root served there as stand for a flower-pot, artificial streamlets meandering round the pavilion. In the pavement was a stork in white, all formed of little broken bits of tile. The lights and shades were so entrancing, it was difficult to think of ever doing anything in these picturesque retreats, which immediately suggest the Chinaman's ideal—elegant leisure—and furnish most pleasant places to sit and meditate, as one might say, but in reality probably idly to watch the sunlight glorify this tint and soften that.

Without the sunshine it is a different affair. The patterns in the walls, in the fine pebble pavement, are still as complex, the triangles in the latter still as cunningly arranged, the doorways as surprising. There are still the same China drums of soft blue-green and green-blue for garden-seats, and great egg-green vessels for rain-water, as they say "very clear." But it all looks like a theatrical stage by daylight. Even the row of changeable roses by the water, which is really not so clear as it might be, looks uncomfortably pink beneath a grey rain-sky. Only the hoarfrost-resisting flower, as the Chinese call the chrysanthemum, is undimmed, the Chinamen's coats as gay. Whilst Chinese ladies totter as gracefully—or ungracefully—as before, with highly painted cheeks, gay garments, long elaborate earrings, beringed and bebraceleted with soft pure gold unalloyed.

STREET SCENE.

When we were last there, a dainty-looking Chinese dinner was laid out in one of the pavilions; and before the guests sat down, girls arrived to make merry with music. For studying Chinese manners and customs, there could hardly be a more convenient place. Every one seemed very smart and very friendlily disposed towards the foreigner. Those who care for local colour can find it in this garden quite as well as in the China town; and, after all, when one can find local colour without local odours, it is a thing to make note of in China. It is true to get there one must not only drive down the Fukien Road, with its quaint dyers' drying-sheds high up against the sky, their blue draperies streaming from them picturesquely, then across that very fascinating bridge choked underneath with highly polished boats, piled with all manner of merchandise, but also, alas! through a local Covent Garden, full of colour enough, like its prototype in London, but, like that, not smell-less. Once arrived, however, a bewildering sense comes over one of having left prosaic Shanghai very far away, and of having at last arrived at a bit of the romantic East!

WHEELBARROW.