Читать книгу A Broken Journey - Mary Gaunt - Страница 8

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But you mayn't go to T'ai Yuan Fu in one day. The southern train puts you down at Shih Chia Chuang—the village of the Stone Family—and there you must stay till 7.40 a.m. next morning, when the French railway built through the mountains that divide Shansi from Shensi takes you on to its terminus at T'ai Yuan Fu. There is a little Chinese inn at Shih Chia Chuang that by this time has become accustomed to catering for the foreigner, but those who are wise beg the hospitality of the British American Tobacco Company.

I craved that hospitality, and two kindly young men came to the station through a dust-storm to meet me and took me off to their house that, whether it was intended to or not, with great cool stone balconies, looked like a fort. But they lived on perfectly friendly terms with people. Why not? To a great number of the missionaries the B.A.T. is anathema maranatha, though many of the members rival in pluck and endurance the missionaries themselves. And why is it a crime for a man or a woman to smoke? Many of the new teachers make it so and thus lay an added burden on shoulders already heavily weighted. Personally I should encourage smoking, because it is the one thing people who are far apart as the Poles might have in common.

And goodness knows they have so few things. Even with the animals the “East is East and West is West” feeling is most marked. Here at the B.A.T. they had a small pekinese as a pet. She made a friend of James Buchanan in a high and haughty manner, but she declined to accompany him outside the premises. Once she had been stolen and had spent over three months in a Chinese house. Then one day her master saw her and, making good his claim, took her home with him. Since that time nothing would induce her to go beyond the front door. She said in effect that she got all the exercise she needed in the courtyard, and if it did spoil her figure, she preferred a little weight to risking the tender mercies of a Chinese household, and I'm sure she told Buchanan, who, having the sacred V-shaped mark on his forehead, was reckoned very beautiful and was much admired by the Chinese, that he had better take care and not fall into alien hands. Buchanan as a puppy of two months old had been bought in the streets of Peking, and when we started on our journey must have been nearly ten months old, but he had entirely forgotten his origin and regarded all Chinese with suspicion. He tolerated the master of transport as a follower of whom we had need.

“Small dog,” Mr. Wang called him, and looked upon him doubtfully, but really not as doubtfully as Buchanan looked at him. He was a peaceful, friendly little dog, but I always thought he did not bite Mr. Wang simply because he despised him so.

Those two young men were more than good to me. They gave me refreshment, plenty of hot water to wash away the ravages of the dust-storm, and good company, and as we sat and talked—of White Wolf, of course—there came to us the tragedy of a life, a woman who had not the instincts of Buchanan.

Foreign women are scarce at Shih Chia Chuang; one a month is something to remark upon, one a week is a crowd, so that when, as we sat in the big sitting-room talking, the door opened and a foreign woman stood there, everyone rose to his feet in astonishment. Mr. Long, who had been up the line, stood beside her, and behind her was a Chinaman with a half-caste baby in his arms. She was young and tall and rather pretty.