By the way, how is it that a Highland regiment—the Argyll and Southerlandshire for instance—get such good recruits? Do the kilt and sporran bring in brawny youngsters of five–foot nine, and thirty–nine inch round the chest? The Navy draws well–built men also. How is it that Our infantry regiments fare so badly?
We came to the Happy Valley by way of a monument to certain dead Englishmen. Such things cease to move emotion after a little while. They are but the seed of the great harvest whereof our children's children shall assuredly reap the fruits. The men were killed in a fight, or by disease. We hold Hong–Kong, and by Our strength and wisdom it is a great city, built upon a rock, and furnished with a dear little seven–furlong racecourse set in the hills, and fringed as to one side with the homes of the dead—Mahometan, Christian, and Parsee. A wall of bamboos shuts off the course and the grand–stand from the cemeteries. It may be good enough for Hong–Kong, but would you care to watch your pony running with a grim reminder of "gone to the drawer" not fifty feet behind you? Very beautiful are the cemeteries, and very carefully tended. The rocky hillside rises so near to them that the more recent dead can almost command a view of the racing as they lie. Even this far from the strife of the Churches they bury the different sects of Christians apart. One creed paints its wall white, and the other blue. The latter, as close to the race–stand as may be, writes in straggling letters, "Hodie mihi cras tibi." No, I should not care to race in Hong–Kong. The scornful assemblage behind the grand–stand would be enough to ruin any luck.
Chinamen do not approve of showing their cemeteries. We hunted ours from ledge to ledge of the hillsides, through crops and woods and crops again, till we came to a village of black and white pigs and riven red rocks beyond which the dead lay. It was a third–rate place, but was pretty. I have studied that oilskin mystery, the Chinaman, for at least five days, and why he should elect to be buried in good scenery, and by what means he knows good scenery when he sees it, I cannot fathom. But he gets it when the sight is taken from him, and his friends fire crackers above him in token of the triumph.
That night I dined with the Taipan in a palace. They say the merchant prince of Calcutta is dead—killed by exchange. Hong–Kong ought to be able to supply one or two samples. The funny thing in the midst of all this wealth—wealth such as one reads about in novels—is to hear the curious deference that is paid to Calcutta. Console yourselves with that, gentlemen of the Ditch, for by my faith, it is the one thing that you can boast of. At this dinner I learned that Hong–Kong was impregnable and that China was rapidly importing twelve and forty ton guns for the defence of her coasts. The one statement I doubted, but the other was truth. Those who have occasion to speak of China in these parts do so deferentially, as who should say: "Germany intends such and such," or "These are the views of Russia." The very men who talk thus are doing their best to force upon the great Empire all the stimulants of the West—railways, tram lines, and so forth. What will happen when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to Lhassa, starts another line of imperial Yellow Flag immigrant steamers, and really works and controls her own gun–factories and arsenals? The energetic Englishmen who ship the forty–tonners are helping to this end, but all they say is: "We're well paid for what we do. There's no sentiment in business, and anyhow, China will never go to war with England." Indeed, there is no sentiment in business. The Taipan's palace, full of all things beautiful, and flowers more lovely than the gem–like cabinets they adorned, would have made happy half a hundred young men craving for luxury, and might have made them writers, singers, and poets. It was inhabited by men with big heads and straight eyes, who sat among the splendours and talked business.
If I were not going to be a Burman when I die I would be a Taipan at Hong–Kong. He knows so much and he deals so largely with Princes and Powers, and he has a flag of his very own which he pins on to all his steamers.
The blessed chance that looks after travellers sent me next day on a picnic, and all because I happened to wander into the wrong house. This is quite true, and very like our Anglo–Indian ways of doing things.
"Perhaps," said the hostess, "this will be our only fine day. Let us spend it in a steam–launch."
Forthwith we embarked upon a new world—that of Hong–Kong harbour—and with a dramatic regard for the fitness of things our little ship was the Pioneer. The picnic included the new General—he that came from England in the Nawab and told me about Lord Wolseley—and his aide–de–camp, who was quite English and altogether different from an Indian officer. He never once talked shop, and if he had a grievance hid it behind his mustache.
The harbour is a great world in itself. Photographs say that it is lovely, and this I can believe from the glimpses caught through the mist as the Pioneer worked her way between the lines of junks, the tethered liners, the wallowing coal hulks, the trim, low–lying American corvette, the Orontes, huge and ugly, the Cockchafer, almost as small as its namesake, the ancient three–decker converted into a military hospital,—Thomas gets change of air thus,—and a few hundred thousand sampans manned by women with babies tied on to their backs. Then we swept down the sea face of the city and saw that it was great, till we came to an unfinished fort high up on the side of a green hill, and I watched the new General as men watch an oracle. Have I told you that he is an Engineer General, specially sent out to attend to the fortifications? He looked at the raw earth and the granite masonry, and there was keen professional interest in his eye. Perhaps he would say something. I edged nearer in that hope. He did:—
"Sherry and sandwiches? Thanks, I will. 'Stonishing how hungry the sea–air makes a man feel," quoth the General; and we went along under the grey–green coast, looking at stately country houses made of granite, where Jesuit fathers and opulent merchants dwell. It was the Mashobra of this Simla. It was also the Highlands, it was also Devonshire, and it was specially grey and chilly.
Never did Pioneer circulate in stranger waters. On the one side was a bewildering multiplicity of islets; on the other, the deeply indented shores of the main island, sometimes running down to the sea in little sandy coves, at others falling sheer in cliff and sea–worn cave full of the boom of the breakers. Behind, rose the hills into the mist, the everlasting mist.
"We are going to Aberdeen," said the hostess; "then to Stanley, and then across the island on foot by way of the Ti–tam reservoir. That will show you a lot of the country."
We shot into a fiord and discovered a brown fishing village which kept sentry over two docks, and a Sikh policeman. All the inhabitants were rosy–cheeked women, each owning one–third of a boat, and a whole baby, wrapped up in red cloth and tied to the back. The mother was dressed in blue for a reason,—if her husband whacked her over the shoulders, he would run a fair chance of crushing the baby's head unless the infant were of a distinct colour.
Then we left China altogether, and steamed into far Lochaber, with a climate to correspond. Good people under the punkah, think for a moment of cloud–veiled headlands running out into a steel–grey sea, crisped with a cheek–rasping breeze that makes you sit down under the bulwarks and gasp for breath. Think of the merry pitch and roll of a small craft as it buzzes from island to island, or venturously cuts across the mouth of a mile–wide bay, while you mature amid fresh scenery, fresh talk, and fresh faces, an appetite that shall uphold the credit of the great empire in a strange land. Once more we found a village which they called Stanley; but it was different from Aberdeen. Tenantless buildings of brownstone stared seaward from the low downs, and there lay behind them a stretch of weather–beaten wall. No need to ask what these things meant. They cried aloud: "It is a deserted cantonment, and the population is in the cemetery."