The trunks disappeared, the door shut, the heels clicked down the passage, and I was left scratching my head in wonder. How did that conversation begin—why did it end, and what is the use of meeting eccentricities who never explained themselves? I shall never get an answer, but that conversation is true, every word of it. I see now where the fragmentary school of novelists get their material from.
When I went into the streets of Hong–Kong I stepped into thick slushy London mud of the kind that strikes chilly through the boot, and the rattle of innumerable wheels was as the rattle of hansoms. A soaking rain fell, and all the sahibs hailed 'rickshaws,—they call them 'ricks here,—and the wind was chillier than the rain. It was the first touch of honest weather since Calcutta. No wonder with such a climate that Hong–Kong was ten times livelier than Singapur, that there were signs of building everywhere, and gas–jets in all the houses, that colonnades and domes were scattered broadcast, and the Englishmen walked as Englishmen should—hurriedly and looking forward. All the length of the main street was verandahed, and the Europe shops squandered plate glass by the square yard. (Nota bene.—As in Simla so elsewhere: mistrust the plate glass shops. You pay for their fittings in each purchase.)
The same Providence that runs big rivers so near to large cities puts main thoroughfares close to big hotels. I went down Queen Street, which is not very hilly. All the other streets that I looked up were built in steps after the fashion of Clovelly, and under blue skies would have given the Professor scores of good photographs. The rain and the fog blotted the views. Each upward–climbing street ran out in white mist that covered the sides of a hill, and the downward–sloping ones were lost in the steam from the waters of the harbour, and both were very strange to see. "Hi–yi–yow," said my 'rickshaw coolie and balanced me on one wheel. I got out and met first a German with a beard, then three jolly sailor boys from a man–of–war, then a sergeant of Sappers, then a Parsee, then two Arabs, then an American, then a Jew, then a few thousand Chinese all carrying something, and then the Professor.
"They make plates—instantaneous plates—in Tokio, I'm told. What d'you think of that?" he said. "Why, in India, the Survey Department are the only people who make their own plates. Instantaneous plates in Tokio; think of it!"
I had owed the Professor one for a long time. "After all," I replied, "it strikes me that we have made the mistake of thinking too much of India. We thought we were civilised, for instance. Let us take a lower place. This beats Calcutta into a hamlet."
And in good truth it did, because it was clean beyond the ordinary, because the houses were uniform, three storied, and verandahed, and the pavements were of stone. I met one horse, very ashamed of himself, who was looking after a cart on the sea road, but upstairs there are no vehicles save 'rickshaws. Hong–Kong has killed the romance of the 'rickshaw in my mind. They ought to be sacred to pretty ladies, instead of which men go to office in them, officers in full canonicals use them; tars try to squeeze in two abreast, and from what I have heard down at the barracks they do occasionally bring to the guard–room the drunken defaulter. "He falls asleep inside of it, Sir, and saves trouble." The Chinese naturally have the town for their own, and profit by all our building improvements and regulations. Their golden and red signs flame down the Queen's Road, but they are careful to supplement their own tongue by well–executed Europe lettering. I found only one exception, thus:—
The shops are made to catch the sailor and the curio hunter, and they succeed admirably. When you come to these parts put all your money in a bank and tell the manager man not to give it you, however much you ask. So shall you be saved from bankruptcy.
The Professor and I made a pilgrimage from Kee Sing even unto Yi King, who sells the decomposed fowl, and each shop was good. Though it sold shoes or sucking pigs, there was some delicacy of carving or gilded tracery in front to hold the eye, and each thing was quaint and striking of its kind. A fragment of twisted roots helped by a few strokes into the likeness of huddled devils, a running knop and flower cornice, a dull red and gold half–door, a split bamboo screen—they were all good, and their joinings and splicings and mortisings were accurate. The baskets of the coolies were good in shape, and the rattan fastenings that clenched them to the polished bamboo yoke were whipped down, so that there were no loose ends. You could slide in and out the drawers in the slung chests of the man who sold dinners to the 'rickshaw coolies; and the pistons of the little wooden hand–pumps in the shops worked accurately in their sockets.
I was studying these things while the Professor was roaming through carved ivories, broidered silks, panels of inlay, tortoise–shell filigree, jade–tipped pipes, and the God of Art only knows what else.
"I don't think even as much of him (meaning our Indian craftsman) as I used to do," said the Professor, taking up a tiny ivory grotesque of a small baby trying to pull a water–buffalo out of its wallow—the whole story of beast and baby written in the hard ivory. The same thought was in both our minds; we had gone near the subject once or twice before.
"They are a hundred times his superior in mere idea—let alone execution," said the Professor, his hand on a sketch in woods and gems of a woman caught in a gale of wind protecting her baby from its violence.
"Yes; and don't you see that they only introduce aniline dyes into things intended for us. Whereas he wears them on his body whenever he can. What made this yellow image of a shopman here take delight in a dwarf orange tree in a turquoise blue pot?" I continued, sorting a bundle of cheap China spoons—all good in form, colour, and use. The big–bellied Chinese lanterns above us swayed in the wind with a soft chafing of oiled paper, but they made no sign, and the shopkeeper in blue was equally useless.
"You wanchee buy? Heap plitty things here," said he; and he filled a tobacco–pipe from a dull green leather pouch held at the mouth with a little bracelet of plasma, or it might have been the very jade. He was playing with a brown–wood abacus, and by his side was his day–book bound in oiled paper, and the tray of Indian ink, with the brushes and the porcelain supports for the brushes. He made an entry in his book and daintily painted in his latest transaction. The Chinese of course have been doing this for a few thousand years, but Life, and its experiences, is as new to me as it was to Adam, and I marvelled.
"Wanchee buy?" reiterated the shopman after he had made his last flourish.
"You," said I, in the new tongue which I am acquiring, "wanchee know one piecee information b'long my pidgin. Savvy these things? Have got soul, you?"
"Have got how?"
"Have got one piecee soul—allee same spilit? No savvy? This way then—your people lookee allee same devil; but makee culio allee same pocket–Joss, and not giving any explanation. Why–for are you such a horrible contradiction?"
"No savvy. Two dollar an' half," he said, balancing a cabinet in his hand. The Professor had not heard. His mind was oppressed with the fate of the Hindu.
"There are three races who can work," said the Professor, looking down the seething street where the 'rickshaws tore up the slush, and the babel of Cantonese, and pidgin went up to the yellow fog in a jumbled snarl.