Chapter XII: The Soldier Said Something in Chinese

Before starting on this around-the-world trip a friend of mine in the United States said to me: "When you get to Shanghai look up my friend, Dr. "John Blank." He has been in China over thirty years. He is the biggest individual intellectual asset in China today--the founder and moving spirit of an International Institute which recognizes the good in all religions and gives them all a hearing.

"He is a graduate of Hamilton College in your town of Clinton. He is a strong, a busy man, and true. Please look him up and arrest his attention long enough to give him my regards"--and I promised this enthusiastic friend of "John Blank's" I would do this thing.

"Missouri" had, by rare good luck, driven his business in Japan ahead of him to such purpose that he was ready to sail on the same ship that brought me from Nagasaki to Shanghai. He had, in his peregrinations through Japan, run his intense Americanism plumb against an English tea. Somehow, when "Missouri" and an English tea collided the tea got spilt--as "Missouri" told me the tale en route from Nagasaki to Shanghai the tea took second honors.

Arriving in Shanghai, "Missouri" went his way on business bent, while I looked up Dr. "John Blank," only to find that this busy man was out of town, and I regretted that I should have to disappoint our mutual friend and not be able to deliver his regards to Dr. "Blank." And I took a railroad trip to Pekin.

While I have come to China several times, until this trip I had never ridden a mile on a railroad in China, nor had I been north of Shanghai, and I was full of curiosity to see what I should see on a thousand-mile ride through China with its teeming millions.

At eleven P. M. of a sweltering night I found myself ensconced in a very comfortable sleeping car, composed of commodious staterooms of four berths each, two upper and two lower, and as the only traveling companion to share my stateroom, a young German of twenty-six years.

He was a keen young chap who had right ideas of life. Dropped in Shanghai four years ago, with an expired term in the German navy and fifty Mexican dollars in his pocket, bare-handed and alone, he had hit the Orient with such sturdy resolution and solid German sense that he had, in four short years, added to the fifty Mex. a young Urasian wife, half German and half Chinese (he assured me she was the dearest, sweetest little thing), a baby, and nine thousand good hard Mexican dollars in the bank.

A feat like that is worth mentioning--when you know the Orient--they don't all do so well, even with pull and influence to help.

It's good to have a chap like that, a right-principled, wholesome chap, who can speak your tongue and Chinese as well, in the berth across from you on a lonesome thousand-mile trip through China. A night's run and Nankin is reached at seven A. M. with a three hours' wait for breakfast, and to ferry across the Yangtze to Pukow to connect, at ten A. M., with the Pukow-Tientsin road--then settling down in a comfortable train, carrying a good restaurant car, for a ride of thirty hours without change of cars until we should reach Tientsin.

For an hour we followed up the delta of the Yangtze, low, level land devoted to rice culture, splendidly tilled. The only remarkable thing about the landscape was dearth of population.

We passed no towns of any size. A lonesome railroad station, now and then some little mud-walled, straw-thatched hamlets. A like ride over such agricultural land in any of our Middle States at home would show much greater evidence of population.

Then for another hour a poor strip of territory, a hilly, semi-barren country, then we rolled out onto level plains which stayed with us until darkness shut out the scene.

From a little after noon till dark on a day in early June we passed through Illinois and Iowa land, prairies bounded by the horizon, with fields of waving wheat and barley just coming into harvest, and fields of corn and beans six inches high. And in all that seven or eight hours of travel, at an average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, we passed no city of any size.

Lonesome, solidly well-built brick railroad stations, at long intervals villages and hamlets, set back from the railroad, of the same one-story, mud-walled, thatched construction.

The wonder to me was: Where did the population live to till the land so thoroughly?--for it was all tilled like a well-kept garden. Where the early wheat and barley was harvested it was threshed on threshing floors, even as Boaz threshed his grain, and all of those millions of acres of grain we passed was cut either with a crude cradle or sickle, or pulled up by the roots; and the farm animals used were the caribou, the ox, and ass.

No fences, no wagon roads. Where one man's land ended and another man's began you'd never guess, viewed from the car windows.

And all that plain defaced with graves! Out in the fields, helter-skelter, here and there. Here a single grave, there two or three, again six in a row. Pa, and ma, and brother John, sister Ann, and Will, and baby Tim, were buried there. Pa had a big grave. Ma's not so large, and tapering down in size to a small one for baby Tim, all of the same pattern; a haycock-shaped mound of earth topped with a wad of mud.

I had it in for the geography I studied as a boy that told me of China's teeming population. That geography told me that China was so full of folks that to support the congested population they loaded dirt onto flat boats and moored those boats in rivers and utilized the ground thus made for gardens--and in that same geography lesson I learned that these boats were called flower boats.

The erudite writer of that geography got mixed in his metaphors. The flower boats of China have been pointed out to me in the rivers of China. They are places where "gilded youth" resort, and it is not garden truck they raise on them, but Sherman's definition of war--but let it pass.

Night shut out the scene, and morning dawned and found us at a city. I was glad to find a city in China, and here I lost my German friend. I regretted the parting, for I could talk to him. We were in a mountainous country now with some vegetation snatched in spots. Not much, but some, and through this strip of meagre land they had good stone houses and wagon roads--and it looked more prosperous and more like folks back home.

For a couple of hours we passed through that kind of country, then came out onto prairies, and as far as the eye could reach the same sparse population, mud huts, and ugly graves, but all tilled like a well-kept garden. I'd lost my German friend for six hours now--and from morning until noon, having had no one to talk to, there had accumulated in me a considerable store of oratory.

We had stopped at a splendid brick station--perhaps some day a town will grow around that spot--and I got out to stretch my legs. A row of Chinese soldiers stood on guard; and in good old United States, the only tongue I speak, I broke loose on one of them: "China is a fine country, sir," I said; "a fine country, sir. The agricultural possibilities of China, sir, are great! Your boundless plains and mighty rivers are grand, sir; grand! Unshackled from your past, you've burst the bands of superstition, lethargy, inertia. You've climbed out of your rut. Unleashed from all your past, you've grasped the pregnant present, and now, with your eyes turned to the mighty achievements yet to come--with this glorious new Republic you've achieved, what the future holds for China is impressive, sir; impressive."

The soldier said something in Chinese.

"This railroad over which I've ridden, sir, is an earnest of greater things in store for China. The rolling stock is fine, the road well built, and wonderfully well ballasted.

"There is little left to be desired in the service on your trains. With the architectural taste displayed in this splendid station house, none but a carping critic could find fault. I'm pleased with what I've seen, sir; pleased--delighted, sir."

The soldier said something in Chinese.

I felt a good deal better after what I'd said, and I think what the soldier said made a hit with him, but we weren't getting anywhere, when, at that moment, there came along a foreigner to board the train. He'd overheard part of my talk. He looked at me and said: "You're from the United States, aren't you?"

"Pretty near," I said.

"Oh, from Canada?" he asked.

"No," I said, "I'm from New York State."

"Why," he said, "I was educated in Oneida County, your State."

"Indeed!" I said. "What institution?"

"Hamilton College," he said.

"And your name is?"

"'John Blank'," said he. With a mighty bound I landed in that man's arms. I fell on his neck and wept.

"Dr. 'Blank'," I said, "you're the one man in China I'm looking for. I have a warrant for your arrest."

We got into the dining car, and dined and talked, and talked and dined, and talked, until we reached Tientsin, four hours later.

We changed cars there and rode into Pekin. All the way it was the same level country, well-tilled fields, mud huts, and ugly graves. From Tientsin, a city of 1,000,000, to Pekin, a city of 1,300,000, is ninety miles, and not one-tenth the population in evidence that you'll find on that ninety-mile ride between New York and Philadelphia.