We Become Pioneer Settlers

I

THE moment had come when, like our forefathers, we were to leave behind us the life of our own people and go forth alone to reconstruct it anew in a frontier land. So far, although we had wandered far and wide over this outlying province of ancient China, at each journey’s end we returned to a wholly westernized port and to a conventional occidental house. But now we were to go to a far corner of Manchuria and settle in a town of which few outside of China ever heard — and which those who have seldom remember. In that great sprawling town, Oriental from gate to gate, where there is no white man’s quarter, no white man’s house, it was our task to create, out of the fabric of an alien civilization, a home. This land had made known to us the carefree joy of the vagabond, the wild sweet spirit of the wanderer; now we went to it for the high adventures of the pioneer settler. Close to my heart lay this great experiment of home-making.

Many a time, as true pilgrims, we had set out in this country with light hearts and few possessions; now we were to venture forth as a pioneering household, stout of heart and laden with many possessions. And when the evening of our going came and we stood in the long frame building that did duty as a railway station, we were not only able to survey with entire equanimity a surprising number of boxes and bundles of our own, but, with equal composure, we beheld, nestled close to them as if for protection, a pile of Chinese bedding-rolls, with our ‘boy’s’ family asleep in the midst of them. It mattered not that we had been prepared only for the little Chinese wife and the baby that slept at her breast. To be sure, when the business of departure had descended upon us and we had called on our trusty forty-year-old boy — the companion of our pilgrim days — to share with us the hazards of this new enterprise, he had responded that if he left the patriarchal roof he must take with him his wife ‘and one piecee son just now born.’ That in true Oriental fashion he had neglected to mention four small girls who now lay sleeping with the ‘one piecee son’ did not dismay us one whit. The settler, as well as the vagabond, finds nothing in the unexpected to daunt him; and so when the little puffing train tooted its warning, we rushed to our places, smiling benignly at these now active new possessions of ours that were hurrying obediently towards the thirdclass carriage, each bearing reverently a bit of our household goods.

Once more we were on that Oriental night express, moving slowly out into the dark to what lay beyond. Above the noise, the pitching, the jarring, my heart sang its new song of adventure, a song that seemed to find its birth in a shadowy memory of old adventures, of old strivings of pioneer ancestors whose spirits must in some strange way have lived anew in me. I knew that night of ancestors of my own long forgotten in the world, who had fared forth across the wide Atlantic, building their log cabins, sowing their fields; of their offspring, who later had answered the call of Westward ho!’: a long procession working their way straight across to the farthest extremity of America. And here was I, a member of the last generation, still going forth to pioneer. Our call carried us westward until we were east. Those ancestors had left an old civilization to brave the perils of a new one; we were leaving a new civilization to try our fortunes in one almost as old as the world. And yet those experiences were deeply akin.

I peered through the car-window into the moon-flooded night outside. On the vast plain stood great brown shocks of kaoliang, or giant millet — the abundant harvests that the Chinese frontiersmen had made the land yield them. By and by there loomed up sturdy squarebuilt houses that looked like fortresses; these were the houses of the Russian frontiersmen, with their high narrow windows to shut out the cold. Now they were deserted, and the autumn moonlight streamed through the glassless windows and across the empty floors. From all nations under the sun there step forth those who follow a vision known only to the pioneer. Some reap plenty and some win lonely graves, but all have their moment of creating vision. And the train with its sleeping load of wayfarers moved on through the vast frontierland.

In the first faint light of morning the joggling Eastern train was ready to set us down at our wayside station. As it came to a long shuddering halt, the sleeping quiet of its coaches was suddenly gone; the doors flew open and there tumbled from them a seething multitude, every man furiously bent on the business of going somewhere. It was a sight to make glad the heart of a Kim — and such hearts had we. Straightway we forgot everything but that hurrying motley crowd; forgot our own business in our absorbing curiosity in theirs. O bean-buyers, with all your shrewdness hid behind your inscrutable Oriental features, what of your last gamble on the bean-market? Dignified long-gowned merchants, what is your fine dream for this outlying province? Swarming peasant families, weighted down under your bundles and your babies, we know your dream: on this borderland of opportunity, away from your over-crowded town in one of the ancient provinces of ancient China, you are looking for enough to eat and wear. But here comes the disciplined tread of the Japanese soldier. God grant that he may not take your dream from you!

In a moment they were all gone; and as another throng came pouring in from the gateway to take their places, we awoke to our own glorious venture, and began looking for our possessions and our black-eyed family, even unto the last little girl that the boy had neglected to mention. But when the train gave its last toot and puffed away into the distance, with its new wayfarers bound to all the corners of the globe, we all stood in a dumb group in the doorway of the station, looking off over the gray straggling town — the creation of the Chinese frontiersmen; the train, our last link with the old order of things, was irretrievably gone. Then we looked up to the blue sky, that wonderful northern sky, spreading out above the low-curved roofs, free and unhampered, clear to the sun just rising over the horizon, and our spirits leaped to meet our adventure for

Bundles and babies, we stowed them all away in the corners of our agent’s shop; then we were ready to start on the search of our hearts. At the door stood the equipage for the journey, the ghost of a Russian droshky, a relic of the Russian frontier life that was now no more, to attend us on our way. It was old in limb now, with its years of service. All the glories of this sad relic of the prosperous days of the Russian advance had been stripped from it. The great imposing arch over the horse’s head had long since gone; from the moth-eaten cushions the padding stuck out in tufts; the springs on one side of the seat were broken, giving the wretched old vehicle a perceptible pitch, like a hard-pressed ship at sea. As for the harness, there was only one fragment of leather left; the rest consisted of a complicated mass of knotted string. It was a melancholy ghost, surely, but it dampened not a whit the ardor of the absurd little pony in the big shafts, or the ragamuffin driver on the high perch in front. As for us, the new would-be settlers who clung to the sloping rear seat, we were in no mood to be disheartened. The driver gave a grand flourish, a crack of his whip, and the frisky pony broke into a lively gallop. Up one street and down another we rattled, in this city where tall gilt signs stretched up almost into the sun itself, and the willows cast lace-work shadows in the dust. We were caught in a jumble of squeaking wheelbarrows; we were extricated only to be brought up short in another tangle of pack-mules and other Russian carriages more dilapidated than ours.

We were light of heart as we clung to that sloping seat, because that gay moment was sufficient for our vagabond natures; we were stout of heart, because we knew, instinctively, that we should need all our endurance before our search was ended. In the few minutes since our arrival we had, with the optimistic adaptability born of much wandering in far places, accepted the fact that there were not even Chinese residences in this new city of China. This was the commercial outlet for vast farming lands, and the advance guard of Chinese men who had come here had left their families safe under the patriarchal roofs in Shantung. No matter whether we had a hasty glimpse as we galloped, or a calmer inspection during our numerous entanglements with the traffic in the streets, we beheld only dismaying rows of shops and warehouses, never the high wall that signifies for all China that there is a house and home within. We had therefore given up the idea of a real Chinese dwelling and begun looking simply for an empty hong which by dint of much imagination might be coaxed into the semblance of a home. Ah, there was the rub! It was the busiest time of year in this thriving town; its streets were thronged with woodsmen who had not yet left for the winter’s work in the forests farther north; it was full of craftsmen making the sharp blades of axes, the heavy, stiff leather moccasins, the padded garments for the woodsmen, and of small shopkeepers selling these wares. We beheld all the storehouses piled high with winter supplies of coarse flour and sugar; and in the sunny courts large groups of men were working over cocoons which were not ready for shipment to the south. Not an extra inch of space was to be found in all that great market of the frontier.

As we entered each new street hope rose anew, only to die at the end; for not one boarded-up shop did we see. On the second day we began going over the streets we had traversed the previous day, insisting this time that the driver should make the exuberant pony walk; thus we could scrutinize possible opportunities more closely. The day came to its end, however, with our quest still unfulfilled. The third day we began investigating buildings in course of construction, but each time we were informed that they had been rented last Chinese New Year, or that they would not be rented until this New Year. New Year was the time, we were told. Why did we not wait? There would be plenty of opportunities then, and everything could be done in decency and order, as custom decreed.

‘But that is four months away, and winter is coming,’ we replied in consternation.

Our protest meant nothing in this land of an alien civilization. Custom is sacred law here, and alas, a Chinaman can always wait.

We were driving rather disconsolately down the ‘Great Stone Street,’ when just ahead of us, barring the way, there rose a low gray wall with one great sweeping pine leaning over it! ‘That long stretch of wall may mean — yes, it surely must mean a house,’ we cried excitedly. ‘Yes, the gate is shut tight. It looks unused. It must be an unoccupied house, too. Stop, driver!’ we called, and poked frantically at the ragamuffin’s back.

We climbed out and skipped up the stone steps to the black door in the gate. We refused to ask the driver even one tiny question; since none of the Chinese had told us about this place, it should be our very own discovery. The black door stood ever so slightly ajar, and we could peer in. There was not a soul to be seen, so hand in hand we entered boldly, closing the door behind us. What a paradise of soft stillnesses and shadowy quiet! The swarming streets from which we had just come might have been a thousand miles away. We stood in a court flagged with slabs of stone, between which wild grasses and mosses grew, all hemmed about by the old gray wall, over which peered twisted pines. Standing there in the sunshine, we looked and looked until our sight at last reached the farthermost flaggings, where lay a still blue shadow, the perfect image of a beautiful curved-roof temple beyond. For such it was; we knew by the bronze incenseburner, taller than a man, that stood in the sun just outside the blue shadow.

‘A paradise ready-made!’ we cried. ‘Our quest must end here. This temple is neglected, forgotten amid the busy commercialism of the town. Why not ask the few priests who must be about if we might not live in one of the many courts of the priests? Surely they would not refuse us.’

The Chinese, we knew, live very comfortably with their gods, and many a foreigner in other parts has often been offered their hospitality and for years shared the same building with them.

‘Think of it!’ we cried. ‘Who would have dared hope for a chance to create a home out of the things of the gods? At the end of each day in the marketplace, we could leave it behind and come home by the way of the incenseburner, on past the gods of soft gold, sitting on their golden lotus leaves, to an inner court, our sanctuary. To the pioneer, as to the vagabond, chance happenings are his inspiration. Therefore we sat on the corner of the temple veranda with the still blue shadow at our feet and knew again that we had caught the gay child of adventure. We dreamed and planned and dreamed again, until the sunshine crept right up to the temple-door. Then we ran blithely back to our ghostly chariot, and drove back to the workaday world in search of a middleman, in order that all might be done in accordance with decent custom.

II

Many are the snares, many the pitfalls that beset the road leading to the Splendid Adventure. Three weeks had passed since that day of discovery and inspiration; and our enthusiasm had battered itself to death against the wall of Oriental indifference. Evidently the only creatures in the town that can ever be in a hurry are the Chinese pony and ourselves. We waited for the middle-man to consult the city elders; we waited for the elders to consult the priests. All of them — elders, priests, and gods — move in a mysterious way unknown to the Occidental; we could not understand why they had said us neither yea nor nay. Meanwhile, we lived in two tiny rooms up under the eaves of a shop. That did not matter so long as we had our vision to keep us company. (One can live anywhere with a vision.)

But the day came when it faded. One evening the Manchurian autumn ended with the twilight. In the night the wind crept under the tiles of the roof and rattled them, and next day the threat of the cruel northern winter was in the air. We must forget our vision of the temple and house ourselves against the cold. Our landlord, too, served notice that he needed even the little loft we occupied. Just what was to be done we did not know. If only we had some inkling whether the middle-man, the elders, and the priests did or did not intend to rent us a corner in the temple! But for this knowledge we dared not wait. We had come to our last resource— the boy. Perhaps his Oriental brain, now well steeped in the ways of the Occidental, could solve the problem.

‘Boy,’ we cried, ‘what can do? No can stay here; no have got other place.’

‘I think. By and by I talkee.’

This was at breakfast, as in some miraculous way he managed to serve us by squeezing himself between the wall and the table. Whatever happened to his already over-thin person, the boy was bent on keeping up the ‘face’ of the family, his duty just then consisting in the proper serving of breakfast so that all should seem well before the Chinese, who never passed our door without looking in. He could save our face in only one way at a time. Later he would attack the problem of saving our face in the matter of winter abodes.

Late in the forenoon he reappeared before us, saying, ‘Just now can talkee. Proper Chinaman wait long time; Savee white man no can wait. He talkee wait, wait; master no likee wait, so pay big money so can catchee temple chop, chop. Very bad, master lose face. I think fool Chinaman. This shop got one big godown. Just now have got plenty piece room. We takee one little piece godown. Makee proper house. Chinaman see all things white man do. Then perhaps talkee temple. No talkee, mascee; makee godown one piecee fine house. Master, missie come look, see,’ he pleaded, finally ending this unprecedentedly long speech.

So this was the game. ’After all, the gray wall around the temple does not shut out the commercialism of the town,’ I said, as we followed the boy down the steep stairs, through the many rooms of the shop below, across the street, through another shop into a court.

How different from the great discovery, which, it seemed, we must now turn our backs upon! We stood in the doorway and surveyed, not stone flagging, but dirt packed hard by the many feet that tramped across to the warehouses. There was no tree overhanging a wall here, no incense-burner. The only thing relieving the dreary barrenness of this court was a rough bench made out of bricks topped with a row of wash-basins, where in the early morning the apprentices went through the form of cleansing their hands and faces.

‘Come; look, see!’ cried the boy, leading us toward a building where the paper panes of the windows were torn and frayed and the tattered ends flapped disconsolately in the wintry wind. As he pushed open the door that moved heavily in wooden sockets, we looked into a long room that extended the length of the court. Three solid walls of masonry, a few narrow windows in the fourth wall (the side toward the courtyard), and a dirt floor, gave the place a melancholy resemblance to a shed.

‘So this is where our vision really leads!’ I was thinking somewhat bitterly; when I suddenly remembered that I was a pioneer woman, and pioneer women are equal to anything. I remembered just in time, for at that very moment my husband came anxiously toward me.

‘Do you think you could do it for a little while?’ he said. ‘If not, you might go to Shanghai until we can do better. I won’t ask it of you.’

‘Never!’ I cried, holding my head high. ‘I was thinking of the woman out West who could create a home out of a geranium and a tomato-can! We have n’t a geranium, but we’ve got a beautiful curved roof to our shed. I’m glad the Chinese put curved roofs on their warehouses; they offer inspiration. And then, you know, there is always the alluring, if somewhat vague, hope that the priests and elders may give up the game of trying to outwit us.’

There was no sign from the priests, however, although we dallied a few days longer in a last vain hope. Then one morning, when there was an unmistakable nip in the air, we walked, with those stout hearts which we now so much needed, right up to the warehouse, and boldly started on the task of breathing life into that long, thin godown — a task that would test the prowess of any settler. It was all more discouraging than may be supposed, for the long forbidding building would not lend itself to any comfortable partitioning. One could do nothing with its business-like portions but string the rooms out in a row. There was a certain cold aloofness between the kitchen at one end of the house and the bedrooms at the other.

However, we were undaunted. ‘We will make it come right to-morrow,’ we said, as the workmen departed that night after finishing the last thin partition. ‘To-morrow we will give the house its breath of life. We’ll build a fireplace on that long bare wall at the back of the living-room, and then the warehouse will no longer be a dead, soulless thing.’

We passed out through the shop in front, where the day’s accounts were being balanced, where yellow faces leaned over the open braziers. The light glowed up into their faces and over the shoes of silver, curious roughbeaten masses of shining metal, the solid currency of the town.

‘San-shi-er, san-shi-san,’ rose the voices of the shopmen singing aloud the accounts; and the abacus balls, flying backward and forward like shuttles under their touch, clicked an accompaniment. As we went on across the street, through the other shop with its antiphonal chorus of chanting voices, clinking abacus balls, and piles of roughly wrought silver, our hearts again entered with zeal into our new adventure. ‘We are pioneers building our cabin,’ I thought, ‘and these yellow men with their cadenced voices and clinking abacus balls, are crowding close, as the wilderness crowded round our ancestors.’ Yes; to-morrow we should surely begin the fireplace.

On this frontier there were of course no masons who had ever built a fireplace. Our own ignorance was just as great, except for a magic formula which we kept repeating that night as we went to bed in our garret up under the eaves. ‘The opening of the firebox must be five times that of the flue.’

Next morning, when we descended upon our warehouse, aglow with creative zeal, the masons were already there, squatting on the dirt floor, smoking their tiny pipes with quarter-inch bowls. We explained our plans carefully: the opening of the fire-box must be five times the flue — exactly. In a moment every man of them became a stolid lump of unresponsive human clay. By nature they opposed exactness; by nature they opposed innovation. Now, there is nothing in the wide world so unyielding as a stubborn Chinaman. Hour in and hour out, that day and the next and the next, we took turns sitting shivering on an overturned box, coaxing, prodding, scolding, until our charmed formula took shape in brick and mortar. There it stood, at last, a thing complete! We piled it with wood; the boy, masons, apprentices of the shop, heads of shops standing by in skeptical silence. We touched the match. Puff, puff — the room reeked with smoke. ‘I told you so,’ was the undeniable meaning of the head mason’s expression. He had expected as much from two barbarians trying to tell him his business — and one of them a woman at that. So spoke his very contemptuous features.

In the midst of this strange human wilderness, we had wrought and failed. We had lost face before the Chinese! That night we took no delight in the world-old life of the shops through which we passed. It was a strange and alien thing, pressing in and swallowing our pitiful little attempt to make a home of our own. The spark of hope dies hard, however; we began chipping off a little of the fireplace here, putting on a little there, and trying it again and again.

‘Some day we’ll strike the lucky combination,’ we said, working doggedly, and refusing to notice that, day by day, winter was creeping down from the north. And was there ever one calamity that did not breed others? When we came to unpack our kitchen stove, we found it was broken past repair. Like everything from hairpins to pianos, there was not another obtainable any nearer than Shanghai. Then, as I tinkered with Chinese braziers, trying to evolve an oven, and my husband lay flat on the floor chipping away at the mysterious insides of the fireplace, there came a Chinese merchant with urgent business and my husband had no choice but to start on a two-weeks’ trip ‘up country,’ and that immediately; and the boy must of necessity go with him.

When the hurry of their departure was over, I stood in the centre of the living-room, thinking of broken stoves, surveying the smoke-blackened fireplace, the dull mud walls, the dirt floor, my little cook, who in turn was surveying me, and the homesick wife of the boy, who stood in the doorway gazing at me like some dumb animal. It was a barren moment. Suddenly I bethought myself that in the commotion of leavetaking we had neglected to try our fireplace after the last scraping. Once more I gathered sticks and struck a match. What magic had my husband wrought in that final bout of chipping? The fire burned brightly, and with the glowing light the rooms of the house seemed knit together in a new harmony. In my moment of greatest need the warehouse had become a living home, offering me warmth and shelter!

How I worked in the days that followed to make a fitting habitation for that spirit of home which had come so mysteriously at my bidding! It was a lovely sprite, which I must keep alive and offer congenial surroundings. Obviously it could never be happy with those mud walls and dirt floors. ‘They must be changed,’ I said to myself; and after due bargaining on the part of my middle-man and much waiting on my own part, the paper-hangers descended on my little cabin in the clearing. Two Chinese, their queues wrapped round their heads for greater efficiency, came bearing scaffolding large enough to use in scaling a three-story house, and absurdly small sheets of paper about the size of a man’s two hands. They filled the rooms with a mass of intricate scaffolding, which stuck out of the windows and doors, again reducing my house to a formidable object that denied me shelter. On the top of this scaffolding the workmen squatted, and little by little, square by square, ever so slowly, covered walls and ceiling with the tiny sheets of paper which, thanks to many years on the shelf of a dingy shop, had yellowed to a fine old ivory.

At last there came an evening when the scaffolding that made my house bristle like a porcupine was taken down and the tender light from the fireplace played over rafters of roughly hewn logs, and walls that looked soft and benign, as the walls of a home should. Then I hurried to work some marvel with the dirt floor which, despite the leaping flames and the mellow enfolding walls, still made the place look like a hovel.

‘Cook!’ I cried, ‘it is late and the curfew has rung, but I cannot wait. Run quickly to the back door of a matting shop and tell them the foreigner wants a great many straw mats.’

He sighed softly. Why the impatience of this barbarian? But he went as he was bidden, and came back with a great roll of mats. Soon there was not an inch of the brown dirt to be seen, but the hungry winter, still unabashed, crept up through the matting, gripping us in its chilling clutch as we stood there. Then I brought out our thick camel’s-hair rugs of beautiful Chinese workmanship, their soft deep surfaces still holding the warm colors of the desert where they had been wrought. The fire flickered comfortingly. Hungry winter was at last shut out; even the windows refused it admittance, for the new panes of paper we had put in that day were strong and tough, offering staunch resistance to the rough hand of the Manchurian wind that now beat against them. I wanted to work on, until the final touch of home was there, but one look at my cook, and I knew that I had outraged custom far enough; the packing cases must wait.

The next day, as soon as the shutters were down from the front of the shop which mounted guard over my clearing and my cabin, I hurried back to work. The sunlight was shining on my paper panes so that they glowed warm with welcome; the curving roof brooded over my house; and when I passed under the door’s rough lintel, I found a small remnant of fife left in my fire.

Day in and day out I worked over the magic thing taking shape under my hand. In each room I met and solved anew the problem of transforming a bleak Chinese warehouse into a Western home; but the kitchen almost defied me. Its mud floor, its smoking braziers that gave off no heat to dispel the gnawing Manchurian cold, and its Chinese cook who went about in a coat and a foreign derby hat which gave him a disquieting air of imminent departure, seemed to have no connection with the warm sweet-smelling kitchens that I felt sure my ancestors had in their cabins. However, I finally achieved an oven — made out of twisted wire for the grate, and a bent tin to cover it — which I could use over the brazier, and which was soon filling the kitchen with the sweet smell of baking bread and roasting fowl.

But this wee progress toward the kitchen of my dreams nearly brought upon us dire calamity. I was forced to remember that the way of the inventor is thorny in a land of ancient civilization. The cook threatened to leave! He had through successive years become used to a foreign stove, only to be confronted with such an innovation as this! Custom was altogether too sacred; he could not change twice inside of a dozen years. He must go.

‘Remain just a few days,’I pleaded, ‘until the master returns.’

The strategy worked! Like all his race, he was a fatalist; and before these days which I begged of him were finished, he had ceased to struggle against the inevitable.

And now my cabin is finished: here it stands in the midst of this city of another civilization. In the shop in front, in every shop all up and down the streets of the town, men of another race lean over the counters warming their hands over the braziers. All day the abacus balls click, and each night singsong voices chant the day’s accounts as the men pile up the shoes of silver and stack the last copper. But now it is late; the curfew has rung, hushing all the manifold sounds of this strange civilization into a deep stillness which only an Oriental city can know, a city with no roaring trains or clanging machinery. And here my home stands, complete, with this mysterious other life pressing close round it. As I look into the glowing coals of my fire, a host of faces appear — my own ancestors who have struggled to settle some far-away cabin on ranch or clearing in the forest. To them I say, ‘This is my home; I have done my best.’ And they nod approval to me across the years. In this moment the warehouse has become for me the beloved creation, the work of my own hands. I do not need to explain to those faces in the fire; they know ‘the wonder and the joy’ that went to build their own.

In the deep stillness I am startled by the sudden sound of the great wooden bolts of the shop-door grating in their sockets and a shutter being taken down. There is a sound of steps in the court. My husband throws wide the ‘wind doors’ of this new strange home and strides in. He too falls under its spell. ‘Why, it is n’t the warehouse at all!’ he cries. He pauses, and then walks straight to the fireplace, saluting his new hearth with the old Turkish salutation : ‘At your feet I lay my heart and my conscience.’

Just as that final seal is put upon my beloved cabin, the boy comes in with an air of triumph. In his rapid passage through the front shop, it seems, he has acquired a marvelous amount of knowledge; the stamp of success has been put upon his sagacity. In his very best Chinese he announces, —

‘Most worthy master, the priests have decided that it is of no value to wait longer. It gives them great pleasure to grant to you the hospitality of the gods and protection under the temple roof. It is well, for although the hospitality of this shop is great, there is need of the space for the silk cocoons, now that the hospitality of the gods has been offered you,’