Letters From Exile.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVI, Issue 2, 12 July 1911, Page 60

Letters From Exile.

By

RANDOLPH BEDFORD.

No. V THE PLACE OF QUEUES.

HONG KONG. K left Manila with some adX / I ditions and other losses. Tlie lIL additions were two white men and two Filipinos, bound for the University of Tokio, to swell the Philippine ranks of half-pay doctors and abogadillos. The prospective half doctor was one of the half million who desire the continuance of American rule. “Americano,” said he, “more better. In small time the langwitch of Shakeyspeare will be spokken all troo Philipine.” Ah! William, William, thou art to be murdered yet again. The table manners of the abogadillo-to-be proved worse than his <f langwitch. He fed himself with his. elbows outstretched, the left elbow in one man 9 chest, and the right elbow under my. chin. Many times I took thia vagrant limb in my hand and laid it gently in his plate, but he always brought it back to position. This Filipino was apparently the son of a sword swallower, and he had learned all his father’s tricks. He gathered 6 inches of gravy and vegetables on the blade of a knife, which weapon he then pushed down his throat. The action reconstructed for me an experience in the Gulf of Carpentaria country. There was a great goanna, who used to visit the camp to clean it up, paying himself as scavenger with the food scraps. Having cleaned all the meat off a mutton bone, the great lizard carried the bone to a rock, braced himself firmly for the struggle, and, pushing against the rock, forced the bone down his throat. And he was a daintier feeder than this sucking abogadillo.

Tlie abogadillo had also a charming fancy for toothpicks, and ate several of them as a fourteenth course. Which reminds me. Pat Taltry, of Brisbane, kept a hotel very good to take lunch at. but the more continental luxuries of the table were cut out. “Pat,” said a friend, “why don’t you put toothpicks on the table?”

“So oi did,” replied Pat Taltry, with the wail of a lost soul, and the air of a man who has been grievously wronged, “so oi did. an’ the thieves of the wurruld took thim aw-a-ay.”

On the third day we came up to Hong Kong, hooting at the sampans seeking destruction under our bows in the light of early dawn. Constant and meticulous vigilance in navigation was needed to avoid the thousands of junks and sampans crowding the estuary. At sea they carry no lights, apparently not caring whether a steamer runs them down or not. Hach with a family aboard, there is, to their minds, no fairway for anybody but themselves. Women and children struggling at great sweeps to take the sampans out of the danger of some thousands of tons of steel; men lazily giving a safe direction to the rudder of the huge junks sluggishly moving under their huge mat sails. But they will not carry a light though they go great distances out to sea to fish, and in thick weather they blow a mussel shell for a foghorn. The junks are bigger than the cascops of Manila, and are built up aft into the great hind castles which Spanish and all other ships used to fight from as much as from the forecastle. Tlie galleons are gone, but the junk is still here as it was 10 centuries ago, and without alteration. For China never hurries. < r. perhaps, finished hurrying a few thousand years ago. when China was a little boy: certainly medicine and mathematics are for T.hina as they were two thousand years ago. The way to Canton opener! to port : dead ahead the warehouses uf Kowloon; a few warships of Fndimd and freighters and liners from :»11 the world: tn starboard the poik. biding half himself and half his hous in t’ it k mist, ami dropping clouds to float over the town seawards; and mn’e «nn” in-. There are 30.000 sampans In Hom* Kong; ami T think they were all He re th if morning. And on the sampan- there are about 130.000 pi'zt'uls. B h»rn the -h’n was tied up. they knd hnatle nki d fn her mil ami climbed like mnrd. ova nn the I’gbt biinboo shafts of the Leitbnntd. Three m’nnfcs Infer all ftnr ( h*nr-n pn>-M‘n?rrs from Germany tn Pirlfl r were pnnr’n"* Into rampant

as if the ship were sinking. Their peculiar baggage was thrown after them, and they disappeared among the millions of China. Long after they had gone, and the cargo had begun to be worked, and tlie ship was free to the shore as the shore to the ship, came the doctor of the port. Hong Kong is one of those free British ports, and foolishly prides itself on having no Customs restrictions or medical restrictions either. Free Trade may be as right in Hong Kong as it is wrong in Etagland. Hong Kong is a gentleman — there is no trouble with Customs or with a medical officer who came on board hours after and took the ship’s word for it. “ We can’t paralyse trade for a little smallpox,” said this particular port medical officer. “ Paralysing trade ” by detaining a ship for half an hour’s examination. Japan is very careful —a little of the carefulness, I think, is due to vanity and imitativeness; but the United States has a medical man at each port to examine passengers of any ship on going to touch at an American port—Manila, Hawaii, or San Francisco. Hong Kong, at the foot of the Peak, and its houses clustering on the mountain side, quickly rising from tlie water, is like a bit of Naples for location and architecture.

I went up Victoria Gap on a cable car, swinging on the hill-side, almost vertical it felt, though the angle is but 23 degrees, rose through a cloud, and saw tlie terraces of the Botanical Garden, Bowenroad, and its long and straddling aqueduct. Happy Valley and the winding Barker and Richmond-roads, Lyec Mun Pass at its forts at the harbour entrance, ■where last week a Japanese spy was caught with plans of the forts, being today sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. which is surely playing with a serious matter; Britain’s warships standing out among the merchantmen and the junks and the outer sea for twenty miles. And the mists rising and falling in clouds make it a panorama of sudden and wonderful surprises.

Sihk and English policemen are dotted about the Praya—that long, elean road that hugs the granite quay. All the municipal carts are mandrawn; horses are for carriages, and at this hour there is not a carriage in sight. The dust carts take ten men to pull them; but there are men in plenty—swarming like ants, each apparently as dull and stolid as his fellow, carrying men in chairs—not the sedan, 'but the palaquin of antiquity, drawing men in rickshaws. Tlie street-watering cart shuffles along curiously; the cart is a coolie bearing watering pots on the ends of a bamboo, and dropping irregular squirts of water as he trots along. That day, like all others, began early on the sampans; a child of seven as soon as she woke up was caught and harnessed. Her mother put a baby in a bag of red stuff, and fastened it to the girl’s back. She would carry her old man of the seas for half the day; her hands freed so that she could work, too; the baby’s nose pressed into her back, but its head free so that it might rattle round like the head of a toy doll. Its bag of red and black, with its short legs sticking out at the bearer’s hips, heightens its strong resemblance to a monkey on an organ. Some millions of mothers having bound one child to the other in this way at daybreak, China was now ready to go to work. The sampans and work women began by clearing house—which is the poop deck —in a painfully dirty manner. Then they breakfasted—women and children on one side of the junk, men on the other. I appreciated the clean, beauti-fully-built town; but it must be very cruel to the Chinese to have so few smells in one place. They clean house in the dirtiest manner known, and they eat anything; there were hungry mothers of sampans full of hungry children combing the water for the garbage of the ships. And time is of no value, one chow in a junk was counting wooden chopsticks for half a day; and the value of the lot was about 4d.; but here a clerk at 5/- a week is a tremendous swell, and a family can live on 4 cents a day. They are the people to be afraid of, people who don’t mind wasting time. I missed a chance of making money through a Malay sailor aboard the steamer. A Chinese hawker offered to sell half-a-dozen large pearls for a shilling, and the Malay suddenly rushed to the wharf. "Go an’ clean your boots,* said the Malay. “Don’t you dirty my decks, you boy!” More sampans and

dirty women washed dirty children in dirty water, which is only fair; chickens and ducks by the score are ineubated and and reared on these floating poultry yards; and I left the fiat boats with their decks polished by naked feet, so that ths dirt had become a rich brown stain, and went back to the Praya, whose cleanness delighted the eye, and so between great buildings and past the Hong Kong Hotel. There is much false money in currency in China, and the post office has three score or more samples nailed to the counter. The buildings on the Praya in the Chinese quarter are so tall and piereed with windows at such short intervals as to look like sections of catacombs. But Queen’e-road is more open, the houses less like tombs in a wall, and delightfully cleanly. Rickshaws and chairs roll and sidle through the crowd, and there is a flower market under the camphor trees, and rising steeply with the hill. Flower-street is an ascending transformation scene. Masses of roses, asters, lilies, dahlias, gardenias, cannas, and sunflowers, great spikes of Sweet William, tuberoses that belong to February in Australia, and the gladiolii drawing their velvet swords all blazing. A cafe, remarking on its signboard that it is licensed to sell intoxicating liquors, and where British sailors drank beer out of metal-topped mugs, and Germans drank beer out of overgrown medicine glasses, about a foot high; then men in chairs, carried by four coolies, two bearing the extremities of the shaft and two hearing the slings; fat, fair, sleepy European women, each borne in a chair by two despairing coolies; Ist and 2nd class tramcars, as there are Ist and 2nd class ferries—the lower class nearer the ■water; a wedding procession, with great paper lanterns, going before a dozen shrines in palaquins—each shrine bearing food, and in the last a pig roasted whole, his crackling of a rich red-brown;' and all the compliments to the gods that they may send luck to the marriage. Poor superstitious heathens! Just round the corner is the office of other superstitious heathens. The Christian Scientists’ rooms are in Zetland-street, a madness without excuse.

Very thin English women —young, but stern—like dignified laths, almost trod, on a girl of five. The head of a sleeping child rolled from the bag at the nurse’s back as if it were the head of a dead baby. The dirty faced little nurse looked so friendless that I gave her ten cents—about threepence halfpenny—and

B he looked as if she would die of the shocking wealth. She ran into a building near by—a building yet to complete and still with its bricklayers’ scaffolding. Then I waited and found out things. The mother, a strapping woman in blue shirt and trousers, came out, her trousers mortar splashed, and with a bamboo on her shoulders and basket of mortar at each end of the bamboo. The child gave the money to the mother, and she walked up the inclined planks with her load, smiling—poor cheerful wretch, for here was a day's wages for nothing. The little nurse carried the child about the building so that it might be suckled by the mother in the intervals of carrying the hod—or the baskets. It is all brute strength here that is successful —muscle or money; the weak or the simple or the modest have no chance. But neither have they in London or New York, for that matter. I got a chair and rode on the shoulders of two fellow-creatures, and felt better for it, as they swished along the streets on their matting sandals.

A lußonfc wrth a prisoner on the way to the lockup; crow’ded little streets with abrupt descents; hundreds of sleek Chinese with fans; thousands of weary Chinese with burdens. Artisans making chairs of cane and sea-grass, and nothing ■wasted; a granite lane, steep as that place patronised by the Gadarene swine, and the houses in that sudden fall were packed with eggs—eggs by the thousand, and scores of women testing them by a shake against the light. Lanes made of washing apparently, for the houses that supported the lines were invisible, and more laundry work hung from bamboos projecting from all the houses like so many cemetery banners or flags of truce. And then a street of barbers, and a hundred polls shaven blue by a hundred razors at once; old ladies and girls—the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter staggering under great burdens. They were playing at being horses, as the cheerfully satirical Chinese understand it —that is to say, the burdens were real and so constant that few horses could stand the strain, year in and year Out. Almost naked butchers, chopping through flesh and bone and scattering clotted blood without ceasing, women of the middle class, very neat, and their lightly coiled hair, as black and shining

as their trousers; horrible food, and bad odours, and people like ants, not like the ants of the upper world, but like the white ant, the termite that lives in great dark hills, and shrivels at the sight of the sun.

A woman with 4in feet beat a child about the head with a board, and the child fled to the road and screamed its pain. The monkey woman sat in the gutter, unable to follow the runaway on her pinched feet, and snarled hatred of it; a thing truly simian, she looked to be. Yet they worship their parents; I suppose that beaten child loved the beast with the 4in feet.

I went back to the port and docks, and England’s slate-coloured warships, which were good to see, and bought a paper to read on the ferry. There was new news in it. Wild silk-worms had been found at New Schwang. The tame silk-worm lives on mulberry leaves, but where there are no mulberry .trees they have to eat oak leaves, and that is probably what makes them wild. A policeman gaoled for blackmailing gamblers; British traders opposing all efforts to destroy the opium traffic; tigers eating pigs and dogs at Castle Peak; and a case of witchcraft. Also a military mandarin in Amoy last week was so annoyed over the small amount of dowry given his bride that he beat her to death. I wouldn’t be a bride in Amoy for anything; I’d rather be a policeman or a missionary.