TWO DAYS LATER I left Mukden for Dairen. Dairen is a sort of Japanese Hongkong, very orderly and hygienic and up to date. You can drink the water from the taps without fear of poisoning. All the cabhorses are stabled at night in a depot outside the town, so as to minimize the insect menace. There are any number of large schools and hospitals, though it is true that these might be fewer were Dairen less potentially important as a strategic base where extra barracks may one day be needed. The general atmosphere of the place is suggestive of a garden suburb.
From Dairen I went by boat to Taku, and thence, in a slow, hot train, to Peking. I stayed in Peking for ten days, writing dispatches and enjoying the hospitality of people too numerous to mention. To describe Peking you must be something of an artist and something of a scholar; I, who am nothing of either, prefer not to attempt it. You will be spared the pen-picture which you had good reason to dread; the charm of the place is incommunicable.
For all its curious beauty, I would not like to live there. An atmosphere of unreality pervades the Legation Quarter. The diplomats drift to and fro with the slow, stately, and mysterious grace of fish in an aquarium. Yes, that is what Peking is like: an aquarium. Round and round they go, serene and glassy-eyed. Their natural surroundings have been artfully reconstructed in a confined space, behind glass. Round and round, round and round … How imperturbably they move! Are they contented? Have they forgotten the sea? I doubt it.
Feng Yu-hsian, the ‘Christian General’, was creating a diversion at Kalgan. Nanking had rushed 60,000 troops up the short line which reaches the marches of Inner Mongolia. I was planning to follow them when the line was cut; to travel that way was impossible, and the situation seemed suddenly on the point of being liquidated. So I went south from Peking.
I took away at least one memory which will always give me pleasure. It is a picture of one of the many courtyards in the beautiful house in which I was staying. I used to have breakfast there. The boy would bring the coffee and the scrambled eggs and the local paper and go away. While I ate and read, an old, brown, wrinkled man would come shuffling down a narrow flagged path between the shrubs to the pool in the centre of the courtyard; very meticulously, muttering to himself, he would feed ants’ eggs to the frilled elaborate goldfish in the pool. His face was terribly serious. From the lane outside came the shriek of a wheelbarrow axle, or the plaintive, mechanical cry of a hawker. Sparrows chirped among the demons and dragons on the eaves. Overhead, against the blue sky, a flashing cloud of pigeons wheeled in formation; there were tiny bamboo tubes fastened to their wings, and these made a kind of piping drone, a queer music which rose and fell and was unlike any other sound. It was very peaceful.
I broke the two-day train journey to Shanghai at Tsinanfu, the capital of Shantung. The governor of this province, Han Fu Chu, is in a quiet way one of the strongest men in China. Nominally subservient to Nanking, he is in fact semi-independent and does not embroil himself in Kuomintang politics. He gave me an interview which lasted two hours. A square, bull-like man, he began his career in the armies of Feng Yu-hsian, the ‘Christian General’; the democratic influence of his former leader is apparent in the Shantung troops, whose officers dress as plainly as their men and renounce most of the privileges of rank.
Han Fu Chu compels all his ministers to rise early and take violent exercise before breakfast. Punctuality, which is regarded in China rather as an eccentricity than as a virtue, is rigidly enforced in all government departments, and public morality is safeguarded by edicts restricting the spread of Western fashions among the women; all shingled heads are shaved by the police. In himself, Han Fu Chu impressed me chiefly by his modesty; he would accept no credit for running his province well and strenuously urged the claims of other governors who ran theirs better. He insisted that he was by birth a coolie, and had had no education. I liked him.
And so at last to Shanghai, a city belonging to no country. You have all read before of the overbearing sky-scrapers which line the Bund: of the Chinese City, which hardly a foreigner visits: of the meditative Sikh policemen, with their short carbines tucked under their arms, like men out shooting rabbits: of the shipping on the wide dirty river which, ranging from the sampan to the C.P.R. liner, reflects the whole history of commercial navigation: of the Shanghai Club, which has the longest bar in the world: of the unnumbered night clubs, where the slim, slick Chinese girls are on the whole more popular than their Russian colleagues: of the rich Chinese, whose big cars are packed with guards against the kidnappers: of the trams, and the electric lights, and the incessant noise, and the crowds for ever promenading, capriciously suicidal (a traffic sense is not one of the lessons which the West has been able to teach the East): of the strange cosmopolitan atmosphere, in which an American flavour predominates … You have all, I say, heard these things fully described before.
If you hear them fully described again, it will not be my fault.