On the Grand Canal

WE were floating southward on the Grand Canal toward the Celestial City, Hangchow. It was raining — a soft, warm, intimate June rain. Soft striped curtains of rain hung over the shores. The whole gray canal was a gentle flutter under the drops. On the cabin roof, fairies were dancing in tiny, soaking clogs. A soothing world, bounded by rain — skyless, almost shoreless, full of minute, liquid sounds. Lop-pa, lop-pa, went the great, calm oar.

Behind the quaking reeds of rain, directly over our path, a shadow arc appeared. It thickened, it solidified into a camel-backed bridge. A chill dread seized us. So low hung the bridge that under its highest point our mast could not pass. And yet nearer, inexorably nearer we were being pushed. And suddenly, as if to abet our own destruction, we were shot swiftly forward. Was it possible that our boatman did not see the danger? Of great, ancient blocks of stone the bridge was made; wads of wet weeds dripped from its cracks. Only a few yards more. All was lost. Already we felt the crash, the shudder of timbers, the tip, the plunge, the choking, swirling flood.

But, at the moment when we were quite done for in our own minds, the boatman skimmed forward over the sleek deck, jerked the heavy loops of rope, and, at the very instant we passed under the bridge, lowered the tall, slippery beam.

Saved! Twenty times a day, at every camel-backed bridge, we perished thus mentally, and were saved actually by our deft little boatman. ‘But why can’t you lower sooner? Why give us such scares?’ Affable, smiling, the little boatman chattered back. He was raising the mast again. He understood not a word we said. We gathered not a syllable of his. Our dialects did not hitch. No matter! We got on famously. We asked questions and made answer without the bore of connections. We smiled and gesticulated. No one felt the least embarrassed.

The bridge was far behind now — a graceful, harmless arc again. Someone was mounting its rim — a man in a long blue gown under a yellow-paper umbrella. He stopped on the vertex to gaze after our boat.

The rain was drawing off. With little farewell sighs, with a parting shake of drops, it trailed down the canal. The shores stood forth — mulberry groves like rank on rank of shriveled coolies under loads of dripping leaves. A shred of white tight tore the clouds in the west. But elsewhere they hung low, swelling, only waiting to gather tears enough to sob forth again.

In the meantime we approached a soggy, gray little town, perched on the twin banks of the canal. The shops and houses pressed tightly to each other as if to keep from sliding down into the water. Here and there dilapidated stone steps dipped to the stream, their worn cups full of rain water now; there on a bottom step some hasty housewife, fleeing from the last shower, had left her clothes-paddle. Along the roof rib of the village temple, against the sky, the little animals sat in a row, glistening after their bath; the lotus bell dripped under the sodden eaves.

Someone had seen us. A shout went up. ‘Foreign devils! Foreign devils below!’ The whole village poured forth. Babies were lugged out, gaffer and grandam tottered to a place of vantage. Here was a sight no one dared miss. Not every day did the gods grant a boatful of aliens with jutting noses, light-colored eyes, and incomprehensible clothes. ‘We may not have a theatre, nor even a fair,’ the townsfolk seemed to reason; ‘we are only a poor, monotonous, muddy little village; but come! Here are foreigners! Make the most of them!’ They did. They gaped and giggled and pointed; they called down remarks and speculated gleefully among themselves; our boatman was plied with questions concerning our nationality, age, and general intentions. The whole village was more alert than it had been for weeks. We sat on the deck and grinned back. It was such a simple way of giving pleasure.

But now the inquisitive village dropped behind and the clamor of its small excitement died away; again we floated through the quiet country. The little farmhouses, warm-toned, the color of the earth, stood in the midst of their fields; over their roofs flowed ceaselessly the restless green waves of the bamboo.

A flock of ducks lay like a brownand-white quilt on the shore. Suddenly the rain returned. With the first tapping of the drops, the ducks rose en masse and, shrieking and squawking, waddling and hurtling, floundering over themselves, falling on each other’s backs, plunged madly down the embankment into the canal. There the hysterical squawks sank to complacent cluckings. How sweet to escape out of the rain into the water!

Thus passed those gentle days on the canal — a floating under halfmoon bridges and high villages, past rice padis and water buffaloes, mulberry groves and ducks. Sometimes we met a sampan or a junk or a fishing vessel with its cormorants. And all day long lop-pa, lop-pa, went the great, calm oar, and from the rear deck purled the chatter of the boatman’s family. It was the dialect of Soochow which they spoke, a dialect often shrilled by the great ladies and the lovely ‘sing-sing’ girls of that city. But in the mouths of the boat folk it had become a liquid speech, soft and rhythmical, full of the sounds of dipping oars and lapping waves.

The boatman and his little wife and their little sweet-smiling boy lived out their life on the tiny after-deck. And their life flowed by as monotonously, but as beautifully, too, as the shores by which they drifted. A life unpremeditated, handed down by their ancestors, fixed in all its forms; a life reduced to the smallest scale, and yet, in its severe economy, in its simple rhythm, affecting one like a work of art.

Their only room in the world was the hole under the planks of the rear deck, a mere pocket of a place with an opening perhaps two feet square. Here were kept their entire goods and chattels — the little roll of bedding, the teapot, the rice-kettle, and the charcoal-burner.

And the goods and chattels stored within their heads were doubtless quite as limited — a little roll of inherited superstitions, a teapot bubbling with small waterside gossip, a ricekettle full of practical knowledge, of the current price of bei-tsai and the cheapest place in which to buy fish. But they had also their inner charcoalburner, the serene and faithful flame of family feeling which warmed and lighted all the simple acts of their existence.

Very early in the morning the daily rowing began — soon after midnight. And if you chanced to wake at dawn when soft streamers of color — green and rose and coral I and gray — were shifting over the canal, against them you saw the patient body of the boatwoman rise and dip, rise and dip at the great oar, and her calm eyes were fixed, not upon the bizarre east, but upon the homely fields beyond the shore.

All day long one or another of the three bent over the oar. Now the husband took his turn while the wife went below to stir the rice or sat on deck chatting with her child. Now the boy rowed while his parents rested, leisurely smoking and watching the shores go by. At mealtimes, while the boat drifted lazily, all three squatted on their haunches on the deck and, deftly balancing on the finger-tips of their left hands their heaping bowls, with the chopsticks in their right, swiftly transported the great, steaming mouthfuls of rice.

At favorable moments when the sail was to be lifted, the whole family was busy at once. Now the mother steered, while the boatman hoisted, and the little boy came skipping forward to help with the ropes, casting a shy smile at the foreigners as he came, and tossing his neat little pigtail over his shoulder. One felt always the equality of life on that little afterdeck. Among peasants the world over, the oppression of woman is largely a fable. Where there is no superfluity, no lion’s share of anything, the necessities are equally divided, pleasure and work, and the small possessions, too.

At night the anchor was dropped in the shadow of some shoreside temple. The boat folk bathed and ate their rice and went to bed, packing themselves neatly into the narrow hole beneath the deck. They slept at once, secure in the nearness of the gods.

Over the canal and over the shores pressed the thick white mist, fold on fold. From the temple came no sound — the gods slept; but on the damp air was borne the ashy smell of old incense. A cryptomeria spread its dark arms over the temple roof and reared a vague shadow into the mist. High in its branches hung a festoon of fireflies; they burned steadily their small green flames, and then put them out, one by one, as though they fell asleep.

Somewhere in the hidden sky a full moon rose and climbed. Through leagues of mist its light struggled; broken, scattered, and dissolved, it brought to the earth only a wan dusk. Through the faintly moonlit mist, from afar off, rose a boatman’s song. Maybe the words were only of some tinsel love, but the melody seemed to spring from the boatman’s soul. It asked, it beseeched, it implored; denied, it sank in despair; in a last yearning effort it leaped up, to break off in mid-air with a cry— For what? Ah, for what? What is this unknown for which the soul eternally cries?

Out of the mist glided a phantom junk, the singing boatman a bowed shadow at the pole. Into the mist vanished the junk, and the song languished and died away.