CHAPTER XV

When they woke up the next morning at the étape, Haslam said to Miles: “I guess we needn’t trouble to go to Peking now.”

“Why?” asked Miles.

“Because we shall get our permits to go to Liao-yang, and then south to the Front, in the next few days.”

“What do you mean?”

“I fixed up the hold-up. I fixed it through my boy, who is the nephew of one of the Big Noises among the Hun-hu-ses: this is the get-away act for Diettrich. I put him wise that I wasn’t giving him something for nothing. You see the ‘General’ didn’t care a cent whether we were arrested or not, but I had subscribed handsomely to his old age pension and to his Young Hun-hu-ses Pleasant-Sunday-Afternoon-and-Fresh-Air Fund, and Skreibners’ will find rather a large item on my bill next to the word ‘bribery.’”

“But they would never have dared do anything to Diettrich?”

“They could have kept him ever so long. You see I should have said that he had just faked him.”

“But you wouldn’t have left him alone with those bandits?”

“Sure. He would have felt fine. He mixes with the Chinese. They wouldn’t ever have hurt him.”

“And now you think he will let us go?”

“Sure.”

“But he will have to let the other correspondents go too?”

“They don’t care a cuss about that. You see, the game was to have us waiting here so long that our papers would get mad and call us home…some of them have been called home…now I have got it in writing from Diettrich not only that we shall go to Liao-yang in two days’ time, and then, after a decent interval, to the Front, but that I am to return home when I am through via Japan, and so far the idea has been to bar that route to newspaper men.”

“Had Diettrich no idea that we were going straight into the hands of the Hun-hu-ses?”

“None at all; he is always chasing round and having tea drinks with mandarins and chief magistrates. He likes airing his Chinese, which I guess he talks no better than you or I, and he was mighty glad of the chance.”

“But I believe that Alyosha suspected.”

“Why, Kouragine? He knew.”

“But he did nothing.”

“Why, he wants us to go.”

“Why?”

“Why, he can go off with you and me and not worry any.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, it makes his job much easier to shirk.”

“But what is his job?”

“Aren’t you wise to that?”

“I thought it was something to do with buying horses.”

Haslam laughed: “Maybe it has been, but it ain’t now.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Why, he’s a stool pigeon.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what you call a copper’s nark.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t even know your own language. A spy.”

“But a spy on what?”

“On us newspapermen – correspondents. He’s told off to keep an eye on us, and to see we don’t exceed the time limit. If he reports favourably on us, it will be all right; what he says goes. They know he’s a judge.”

“Why?”

“Well, he’s done most things and seen most people from peculiar angles. He’s been on the bum.”

“But if all that’s true, and he was going to report favourably on us – and I don’t suppose he’d have dragged me here from Paris if he didn’t want me to come…”

“Ah, that was before his job – this job – started.”

“I was going to say that if he was going to report favourably on us in any case, what was the use of your getting Diettrich arrested by the Hun-hu-ses?”

“Just to hasten things. Alyosha can’t get a move on his bosses. He can only report, and what he says goes; but if he says ‘Get a move on’ to the bosses, that doesn’t go.”

At noon they started for Mukden. It took two more days to get back. The day after their return Haslam came back one evening at dinner-time, saying that he had interviewed the Censor, and that they would be able to start for Liao-yang in two days’ time.

When they got their papers, each correspondent would be appointed to a particular corps; he could stay there as long as he liked.

“Would he be able to send off copy from there?” asked Troumestre.

“No,” said Haslam, with a dry smile; “to send off a story he will have to go back to Liao-yang; but they are sending a Censor – Colonel Ivanov – to Liao-yang, who understands English, so he won’t have to go away back to Kharbin every time.”

The next morning was their last day at Mukden. Haslam, Miles, and Troumestre thought they would like a final ride through the streets, and Alyosha went with them.

The streets were crowded. They rode through the swarming, jostling, many-coloured traffic, so bright in colour, so loud, so pungent in smell. There were carts driven by teams of mules, with a noise of bells, urged on by the hoarse, shrill ejaculations of husbandmen…there were Mandarins trotting by on swift white ponies, followed at a respectful distance by their servants…a General, dressed in crimson satin, holding a fan in one hand and his reins in the other; the orange and dark-blue satin tunics flashed like jewels…and in contrast to these there was the coarse indigo of the humbler folk.

There were carts with prehistoric wheels and round hoods; rickshaws, coolies, cattle, dogs being kicked out of the way, foot-passengers, water-carriers, pedlars, fruit-sellers – every kind of vendor hawking his wares. The temple bells tinkled; the gongs clanged and chimed.

They passed the brilliant, variegated, vociferous shops. In front of each shop, at its door, huge signposts carved and gilded and inlaid with coloured glass and gold stars, and bright with all the colours of the rainbow, were fixed upright in the ground and glinted in the sun. In front of the bootmaker’s an enormous boot was hanging, as in a pantomime; and at the fishmonger’s a curious fish; they swayed in the wind. Large Chinese characters, gold, red, or black, stood out boldly on the boards.

Miles said it was like a Hans Andersen fairy tale.

Troumestre said it reminded him of Marco Polo’s voyage.

Haslam said it beat Peking, and made the Chinese quarter at San Francisco look like thirty cents.

They reached the huge grey walls. These were not ordinary walls. They were enormous, wide, solid ramparts, with huge, grey, monumental towers that stood out immense, deserted, and solemn, like mountains or pyramids among swarming ants.

When they reached the wall, they got off their ponies and left them with their mafoos.

It was a hot day.

“Today is the eighteenth of June,” said Troumestre, “the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Let’s climb to the top of the wall.”

They climbed by a narrow staircase to the top of the wall, and found themselves on a wide causeway – so broad that no parapet was necessary – from whence they looked down on the flat roofs of the square town, and the shifting kaleidoscope of the streets.

They had not been long on the top of the wall before Miles and Haslam complained of the heat. They climbed down again, and strolled along under the shade of the rampart.

“People talk of progress,” said Troumestre, “but war still goes on.”

“War will always go on,” said Alyosha, “till all the street boys in the world stop who are quarrelling over an orange, and are ready for arbitration. The Chinese have really got to that point. Watch two Chinamen quarrel. They will snarl, but just stop short of coming to blows… If two people can get thus far without getting to blows, it means that in a country consisting entirely of such people you will have no war. But I am afraid that we Europeans will step in and make this impossible for them. They will have to learn to fight in self-defence.”

“Surely,” said Troumestre, “a country is the better for the possibility of war…when there is no war, doesn’t it mean decadence, the decline and fall of empire?”

“The Roman Empire didn’t decay because it abolished war,” said Alyosha. “It decayed because it relied on mercenaries.”

“That is just my point,” said Troumestre. “They forgot how to fight…”

“Yes; but there were the Barbarians… In China they have reached the point of Romans and Barbarians living together and agreeing not to fight because both sides think it vulgar.”

“The Japs,” said Haslam, “still think it fine to scrap.”

“That is the bore,” said Alyosha. “The Japs still think it fine to scrap. How unlike us! We are peaceful. So are the English. We both go grabbing land, almost by accident, and muddling through. It is all muddle, by us and by you; only you pull through owing to two things.”

“What are they?” asked Troumestre.

“One is your political instinct for doing the right thing without knowing you are doing it, and the other is your good luck. We are more unlucky. But then that is our point. It is the failure who by us is the greatest success. Ivan the Fool, who gains the kingdom – which is not always of this world. That is what we all of us want to grasp.”

“Ivan the Fool grabs a little in this world too, doesn’t he?” said Haslam.

“A little,” said Alyosha, “but not much. Russia looks large, because it can be stretched like an elastic; but think how little we have made of our resources… Think what you Americans might have done with them. We prefer to plough the fields as Adam and Eve used to do; we don’t want to develop, to grow rich; nearly all our rich men are foreigners or Jews…we do not care for money; we treat it like what it is – dirt. There is a proverb which says, ‘If you have two loaves, sell one and buy lilies.’”

“Is that a Russian proverb?” asked Troumestre.

“No,” said Alyosha. “I have been told it is the saying of a Greek sage.”

“I expect,” said Troumestre, “the proverb was really ‘If you have two loaves, sell one and buy rolls,’ because the Greek word for lily, κρίνον, means a kind of loaf as well as a lily.”

“That may be,” said Alyosha, “but the sense remains the same; and we go further, and sell both loaves, or if we have only one, we sell it – if we want lilies or rolls. That is our theory of life.”

“Do you remember what Swift said?” asked Troumestre: “‘One has only to look at the people God has given money to, to see what He thinks of it.’”

“That is true,” said Alyosha.

“But surely,” said Miles, “one can do a lot of things with money; buy pictures, for instance. If I was very rich I would buy old masters.”

“Nonsense,” said Alyosha; “rich people never buy good pictures. They buy bad pictures. What you want for buying pictures, or any objects of art, is not money but knowledge and taste; a taste, and not just the fashion of the time. The best collections have been made by quite poor people.”

“Like le Cousin Pons?” said Troumestre.

“Exactly,” said Alyosha. “A cousin of mine, who lived in Paris and who was very poor, made all his life a collection of French pictures that the Louvre was proud to accept. Money is a hindrance to everything of that kind. If you have money, you can’t have anything else; not even good cooking – that is the tragedy of rich people.”

“I think what you say is true,” said Troumestre; “but you live to the east of us, and it is much easier for people who live in the East to take no thought for the morrow, and to go barefoot, and give all they have to the poor, than it is in the West, because here, in the East, they are all agriculturists; in the West, we live in towns, and towns produce a grinding poverty, a slavery, a destitution in which it is difficult for people to live like the birds of the air.”

“Yes,” said Alyosha, “unless they wish to be jailbirds.”

At that moment they passed a cart in which, behind wooden bars, there were three villainous-looking men. They were dirty and unkempt. They were chained, and round their necks there was a portable pillory, a square board called a kang. One of them was smoking a cigarette, and they all of them seemed to be looking at the world with indifferent, callous eyes.

“Who and what are those people?” asked Miles.

“They are criminals,” said Alyosha, “who have been condemned to death. They are on their way to be executed. They will have their heads cut off presently.”

“They don’t seem to mind it,” said Miles.

“Why should they?” asked Alyosha. “To a Chinaman death in itself doesn’t matter. He has always known it is sure to happen. He has been facing it. It doesn’t matter to him when he dies nor how he dies, but only where he dies, or rather where he is buried. It is all-important to him that he should be buried in his own country, for the sake of his family pride.”

“I suppose that is religious faith,” said Miles. “I suppose that people feel like that whatever their religion is, if they’ve got a religion. I suppose at the hour of death any religion would be the same, provided you believed in it.”

“No,” said Troumestre, “that is not religious faith. That is not religion. That is good manners or family pride: to keep it up to the very end; and from the Catholic point of view – and I am a Catholic – I would never admit, firstly, that that was religion, nor, in the second place, that any religion was the same as any other religion. It all depends whether the religion is a true one.”

“But,” said Miles, “if people believe in a future life, and in rewards and punishments after death, the effect must be the same whatever the religion is called?”

“No,” said Troumestre; “the Greeks had religion, and believed in an afterlife, but it didn’t help them to die. On the contrary, Achilles said he would rather have been the meanest serf on earth than king among the dead. Death meant going to an unsubstantial world. At the best, the soul was like a bat in a ghostly tree. The man lay rotting in his grave. The Greeks thought old age horrible – because, as you grew old, you could no longer taste what life could give, and you were going to a place where there were no gifts.”

“That is true about the Homeric Greek,” said Alyosha, “but what about a Greek like Socrates, who believed in God? He died well.”

“If Socrates,” answered Troumestre, “or anyone else you like to mention, has a faith in God that makes them happy to die, it means that the God they believe in is a loving God. It can’t mean anything else. We call that true Faith; true religion, part of it. We say Socrates or a Quaker or a Salvation Army man have not got the whole true Faith, but we don’t mean that nothing in their faith is true. In so far as Socrates or General Booth believed in a God, and in a rewarding God, and in a loving God, we say their religion is true. Theologians call that implicit faith.”

“You mean,” said Alyosha, “if they knew more, their faith would have more truth in it, but it would not make what truth they have got untrue?”

“Exactly,” said Troumestre; “but we believe, too, that a false religion, a religion which is wrong on the vital points – for instance, a religion that presupposes a God like a cat, that will pounce on you the moment you are dead, or that you may be damned to start with – we believe that kind of faith will make life more difficult and death more of a torment the more it is believed to be infallible.”

“But,” said Haslam, “even in our country people have been known to go to the chair with a joke who hadn’t any religion at all…and as for these people, why, look at that bunch which has just passed us in the cart, especially the hobo who was smoking a cigarette. Why, if you’re going to be executed here, you can get a guy to be hanged for you for less than thirty cents.”

“But surely,” said Alyosha, “that shows that in that case religious faith has nothing to do with it. All they mind is where they are going to be buried, and they have been trained ever since the cradle not to show emotion. It is bad manners. It is etiquette not to show any emotion before death.”

“Well, what it comes to is this,” said Miles. “I suppose that people who have no religion at all behave in practice just as people who have got a religion which they believe to be infallibly right.”

“I don’t think so,” said Troumestre.

“No more do I,” said Alyosha.

“The Chinese may have no religion,” said Troumestre, “but they have a rigid code, and a strict training and tradition inthat code.”

“What about the Mahommedans?” said Miles.

“Islam is a real religion – a fine one and a firm one,” said Troumestre, “but limited. They believe absolutely in a God, in a future life, and in rewards and punishments.”

“But what about people with no religion at all?”

“They may be brave,” said Troumestre, “when faced with death, or they may not; there are plenty of examples of both. The point is – my point is – I say once more, that if you believe in the true religion you will find it a help in life and a solace in death; but if you believe in a wrong religion, the more you believe in it the unhappier it will make you both to live and to die. Many wrong religions have fragments of the truth, but the truth remains the truth.”

“Isn’t the truth relative?” asked Miles.

“We believe not. We believe it is absolute.”

“Yes; but you admit that there are pieces of the truth in almost every religion?” said Alyosha.

“Yes; but we believe that Catholic Truth contains all truths.”

“I suppose that’s why Father Damien was happy,” said Miles, “but I can’t help thinking that anyone would behave like that if he felt his religion was infallibly right.”

“Yes,” said Troumestre; “but you see his religion was infallibly right.”

“But surely,” said Miles, “the Chinese think whatever they believe in – call it code or etiquette or good manners – is infallibly right too…and if they are willing to die for it, and if when they die they are indifferent to death, I don’t see the difference.”

“There is all the difference,” said Troumestre. “They may be indifferent, but they are not happy. Stoics were indifferent, but they were not happy. Etiquette may make the Chinese accept death stoically, but it doesn’t make them accept death joyfully… the man who passed us just now smoking a cigarette was callous, but not happy.”

“I’ve seen gayer boys,” said Haslam. “Rudyard Kipling says somewhere, or at least he has a babu Indian say, that it is fortunate that Europeans minded death, because, as they didn’t mind being hurt, if they knew what every Oriental knows about the future life, and therefore didn’t mind death, there would be no holding them.”

“By future life he meant, I suppose, the transmigration of souls?” said Troumestre.

“I guess so.”

“Well,” said Troumestre, “I can only say in the words ofthe poet:

“‘I thank my God for this in the least,
I was born in the West and not in the East,
That He made me a human instead of a beast
Whose hide is covered with hair.’”

“I can’t see,” said Miles, “why they shouldn’t be just as right as you.”

“We know,” said Troumestre, “they are wrong, because God Almighty came down to earth on purpose to tell us so.”

“Have a cigarette,” said Haslam.

“So you say,” Miles went on.

“Yes, so I say,” said Troumestre, “but if you believe that it was absolutely untrue, you will have to explain a great many things to yourself, and the explanation is not so easy. If Our Lord never existed, or existed and was an impostor or a liar or a madman…then you have to explain a great deal, and your explanation will be as difficult for a thinking, reasonable sceptic to believe as my creed – more difficult.”

By this time they had come back to the place where they had left their ponies. They got on them and settled to ride to the palace, which Miles had never seen. It was close by. It was a dilapidated building, and when they reached it they got off their ponies once more and explored it.

The palace was deserted. The courtyards were green with grass. The walls were wooden and carved, fantastic in shape and colour.

They climbed up the rotting stairways that creaked. They inspected treasures, jewels, china, embroidery, and illuminated manuscripts which were locked up in mouldering cupboards behind wooden grating. The walls were eaten with damp.

“Wants repair,” said Haslam.

“It will not be repaired,” said Alyosha, “and I, for one, am glad. I am content that it should be faded, when its time for fading has come. Repairs are dreadful. They are like trying to make old people young…processes – it can’t be done; they do not make younger what is old; they make something wrong and ugly. It is better to make something altogether new. Keep your repairers to make skyscrapers, forty storeys high. They do it well, and the effect is good. But let them never touch this. They would spoil it.”

“I’m glad some things are repaired,” said Miles. “For instance, if no one had ever repaired Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London, they would have fallen to pieces by now.”

“My father said they had spoilt both of them,” said Alyosha, “even in his day. But with all the repairs in the world, a cathedral lasts only a little time longer than a sand castle…but still, if it amuses you to repair, repair; only the Chinese would no more repair a palace like this than they would repair asand castle.”

“If building is a game like a children’s game, with sand, bucket and spade,” said Troumestre, “so is repairing. Men must have toys to play with.”

“Yes,” said Alyosha, “they must. The difference is that the Chinese know that toys are toys. We take our toys too seriously, and come to believe that our sand castles will last.”

They trotted back to tiffin through the bustling, busy town. There was a smell of beans being fried in oil… The city and the world on this June morning were bright – hot, noisy, dusty, busy, bright, gay, and spicy with all the smells of the East.