Authors: Claudius Bombarnac
The dining car has resumed its restaurant appearance, and here is the
wedding banquet, instead of the usual fare. Twenty guests have been
invited to this railway love feast, and, first of them, my lord
Faruskiar. But for some reason or other he has declined Ephrinell's
invitation.
I am sorry for it, for I hoped that good luck would place me near him.
It occurred to me then that this illustrious name was worth sending to
the office of the
Twentieth Century
, this name and also a few lines
relative to the attack on the train and the details of the defense.
Never was information better worth sending by telegram, however much it
might cost. This time there is no risk of my bringing a lecture down on
myself. There is no mistake possible, as in the case of that pretended
mandarin, Yen-Lou, which I shall never forget—but then, it was in the
country of the false Smerdis and that must be my excuse.
It is agreed that as soon as we arrive at Sou-Tcheou, the telegraph
being repaired at the same time as the line, I will send off a
despatch, which will reveal to the admiration of Europe the brilliant
name of Faruskiar.
We are seated at the table. Ephrinell has done the thing as well as
circumstances permit. In view of the feast, provisions were taken in at
Tcharkalyk. It is not Russian cookery, but Chinese, and by a Chinese
chef to which we do honor. Luckily we are not condemned to eat it with
chopsticks, for forks are not prohibited at the Grand Transasiatic
table.
I am placed to the left of Mrs. Ephrinell, Major Noltitz to the right
of her husband. The other guests are seated as they please. The German
baron, who is not the man to refuse a good dinner, is one of the
guests. Sir Francis Trevellyan did not even make a sign in answer to
the invitation that was tendered him.
To begin with, we had chicken soup and plovers' eggs, then swallows'
nests cut in threads, stewed spawn of crab, sparrow gizzards, roast
pig's feet and sauce, mutton marrow, fried sea slug, shark's fin—very
gelatinous; finally bamboo shoots in syrup, and water lily roots in
sugar, all the most out-of-the-way dishes, watered by Chao Hing wine,
served warm in metal tea urns.
The feast is very jolly and—what shall I say?—very confidential,
except that the husband takes no notice of the wife, and reciprocally.
What an indefatigable humorist is our actor? What a continuous stream
of wheezes, unintelligible for the most part, of antediluvian puns, of
pure nonsense at which he laughs so heartily that it is difficult not
to laugh with him. He wanted to learn a few words of Chinese, and
Pan-Chao having told him that "tching-tching" means thanks, he has been
tching-tchinging at every opportunity, with burlesque intonation.
Then we have French songs, Russian songs, Chinese songs—among others
the "Shiang-Touo-Tching," the
Chanson de la Reverie
, in which our
young Celestial repeats that the flowers of the peach tree are of
finest fragrance at the third moon, and those of the red pomegranate at
the fifth.
The dinner lasts till ten o'clock. At this moment the actor and
actress, who had retired during dessert, made their entry, one in a
coachman's overcoat, the other in a nurse's jacket, and they gave us
the
Sonnettes
with an energy, a go, a dash—well, it would only be
fair to them if Claretie, on the recommendation of Meilhac and Halevy,
offers to put them on the pension list of the Comédie Française.
At midnight the festival is over. We all retire to our sleeping places.
We do not even hear them shouting the names of the stations before we
come to Kan-Tcheou, and it is between four and five o'clock in the
morning that a halt of forty minutes retains us at the station of that
town.
The country is changing as the railway runs south of the fortieth
degree, so as to skirt the eastern base of the Nan Shan mountains. The
desert gradually disappears, villages are not so few, the density of
the population increases. Instead of sandy flats, we get verdant
plains, and even rice fields, for the neighboring mountains spread
their abundant streams over these high regions of the Celestial Empire.
We do not complain of this change after the dreariness of the Kara-Koum
and the solitude of Gobi. Since we left the Caspian, deserts have
succeeded deserts, except when crossing the Pamir. From here to Pekin
picturesque sites, mountain horizons, and deep valleys will not be
wanting along the Grand Transasiatic.
We shall enter China, the real China, that of folding screens and
porcelain, in the territory of the vast province of Kin-Sou. In three
days we shall be at the end of our journey, and it is not I, a mere
special correspondent, vowed to perpetual movement, who will complain
of its length. Good for Kinko, shut up in his box, and for pretty Zinca
Klork, devoured by anxiety in her house in the Avenue Cha-Coua!
We halt two hours at Sou-Tcheou. The first thing I do is to run to the
telegraph office. The complaisant Pan-Chao offers to be my interpreter.
The clerk tells us that the posts are all up again, and that messages
can be sent through to Europe.
At once I favor the
Twentieth Century
with the following telegram:
"Sou-Tcheou, 25th May, 2:25 P.M.
"Train attacked between Tchertchen and Tcharkalyk by the gang of the
celebrated Ki-Tsang; travelers repulsed the attack and saved the
Chinese treasure; dead and wounded on both sides; chief killed by the
heroic Mongol grandee Faruskiar, general manager of the company, whose
name should be the object of universal admiration."
If this telegram does not gratify the editor of my newspaper, well—
Two hours to visit Sou-Tcheou, that is not much.
In Turkestan we have seen two towns side by side, an ancient one and a
modern one. Here, in China, as Pan-Chao points out, we have two and
even three or four, as at Pekin, enclosed one within the other.
Here Tai-Tchen is the outer town, and Le-Tchen the inner one. It
strikes us at first glance that both look desolate. Everywhere are
traces of fire, here and there pagodas or houses half destroyed, a mass
of ruins, not the work of time, but the work of war. This shows that
Sou-Tcheou, taken by the Mussulmans and retaken by the Chinese, has
undergone the horrors of those barbarous contests which end in the
destruction of buildings and the massacre of their inhabitants of every
age and sex.
It is true that population rapidly increases in the Celestial Empire;
more rapidly than monuments are raised from their ruins. And so
Sou-Tcheou has become populous again within its double wall as in the
suburbs around. Trade is flourishing, and as we walked through the
principal streets we noticed the well-stocked shops, to say nothing of
the perambulating pedlars.
Here, for the first time, the Caternas saw pass along between the
inhabitants, who stood at attention more from fear than respect, a
mandarin on horseback, preceded by a servant carrying a fringed
parasol, the mark of his master's dignity.
But there is one curiosity for which Sou-Tcheou is worth a visit. It is
there that the Great Wall of China ends.
After descending to the southeast toward Lan-Tcheou, the wall runs to
the northeast, covering the provinces of Kian-Sou, Chan-si, and
Petchili to the north of Pekin. Here it is little more than an
embankment with a tower here and there, mostly in ruins. I should have
failed in my duty as a chronicler if I had not noticed this gigantic
work at its beginning, for it far surpasses the works of our modern
fortifications.
"Is it of any real use, this wall of China?" asked Major Noltitz.
"To the Chinese, I do not know," said I; "but certainly it is to our
political orators for purposes of comparison, when discussing treaties
of commerce. Without it, what would become of the eloquence of our
legislators?"
I have not seen Kinko for two days, and the last was only to exchange a
few words with him to relieve his anxiety.
To-night I will try and visit him. I have taken care to lay in a few
provisions at Sou-Tcheou.
We started at three o'clock. We have got a more powerful engine on.
Across this undulating country the gradients are occasionally rather
steep. Seven hundred kilometres separate us from the important city of
Lan-Tcheou, where we ought to arrive to-morrow morning, running thirty
miles an hour.
I remarked to Pan-Chao that this average was not a high one.
"What would you have?" he replied, crunching the watermelon seeds. "You
will not change, and nothing will change the temperament of the
Celestials. As they are conservatives in all things, so will they be
conservative in this matter of speed, no matter how the engine may be
improved. And, besides, Monsieur Bombarnac, that there are railways at
all in the Middle Kingdom is a wonder to me."
"I agree with you, but where you have a railway you might as well get
all the advantage out of it that you can."
"Bah!" said Pan-Chao carelessly.
"Speed," said I, "is a gain of time—and to gain time—"
"Time does not exist in China, Monsieur Bombarnac, and it cannot exist
for a population of four hundred millions. There would not be enough
for everybody. And so we do not count by days and hours, but always by
moons and watches."
"Which is more poetical than practical," I remark.
"Practical, Mr. Reporter? You Westerners are never without that word in
your mouth. To be practical is to be the slave of time, work, money,
business, the world, everybody else, and one's self included. I confess
that during my stay in Europe—you can ask Doctor Tio-King—I have not
been very practical, and now I return to Asia I shall be less so. I
shall let myself live, that is all, as the cloud floats in the breeze,
the straw on the stream, as the thought is borne away by the
imagination."
"I see," said I, "we must take China as it is."
"And as it will probably always be, Monsieur Bombarnac. Ah! if you knew
how easy the life is—an adorable
dolce far niente
between folding
screens in the quietude of the yamens. The cares of business trouble us
little; the cares of politics trouble us less. Think! Since Fou Hi, the
first emperor in 2950, a contemporary of Noah, we are in the
twenty-third dynasty. Now it is Manchoo; what it is to be next what
matters? Either we have a government or we have not; and which of its
sons Heaven has chosen for the happiness of four hundred million
subjects we hardly know, and we hardly care to know."
It is evident that the young Celestial is a thousand and ten times
wrong, to use the numerative formula; but it is not for me to tell him
so.
At dinner Mr. and Mrs. Ephrinell, sitting side by side, hardly
exchanged a word. Their intimacy seems to have decreased since they
were married. Perhaps they are absorbed in the calculation of their
reciprocal interests, which are not yet perfectly amalgamated. Ah! they
do not count by moons and watches, these Anglo-Saxons! They are
practical, too practical!
We have had a bad night. The sky of purple sulphury tint became stormy
toward evening, the atmosphere became stifling, the electrical tension
excessive. It meant a "highly successful" storm, to quote Caterna, who
assured me he had never seen a better one except perhaps in the second
act of
Freyschütz
. In truth the train ran through a zone, so to
speak, of vivid lightning and rolling thunder, which the echoes of the
mountains prolonged indefinitely. I think there must have been several
lightning strokes, but the rails acted as conductors, and preserved the
cars from injury. It was a fine spectacle, a little alarming, these
fires in the sky that the heavy rain could not put out—these
continuous discharges from the clouds, in which were mingled the
strident whistlings of our locomotive as we passed through the stations
of Yanlu, Youn Tcheng, Houlan-Sien and Da-Tsching.
By favor of this troubled night I was able to communicate with Kinko,
to take him some provisions and to have a few minutes' conversation
with him.
"Is it the day after to-morrow," he asked, "that we arrive at Pekin?"
"Yes, the day after to-morrow, if the train is not delayed."
"Oh, I am not afraid of delays! But when my box is in the railway
station at Pekin, I have still to get to the Avenue Cha-Coua—"
"What does it matter, will not the fair Zinca Klork come and call for
it?"
"No. I advised her not to do so."
"And why?"
"Women are so impressionable! She would want to see the van in-which I
had come, she would claim the box with such excitement that suspicions
would be aroused. In short, she would run the risk of betraying me."
"You are right, Kinko."
"Besides, we shall reach the station in the afternoon, very late in the
afternoon perhaps, and the unloading of the packages will not take
place until next morning—"
"Probably."
"Well, Monsieur Bombarnac, if I am not taking too great a liberty, may
I ask a favor of you?"
"What is it?"
"That you will be present at the departure of the case, so as to avoid
any mistake."
"I will be there, Kinko, I will be there. Glass fragile, I will see
that they don't handle it too roughly. And if you like I will accompany
the case to Avenue Cha-Coua—"
"I hardly like to ask you to do that—"
"You are wrong, Kinko. You should not stand on ceremony with a friend,
and I am yours, Kinko. Besides, it will be a pleasure to me to make the
acquaintance of Mademoiselle Zinca Klork. I will be there when they
deliver the box, the precious box. I will help her to get the nails out
of it—"
"The nails out of it, Monsieur Bombarnac? My panel? Ah, I will jump
through my panel!"
A terrible clap of thunder interrupted our conversation. I thought the
train had been thrown off the line by the commotion of the air. I left
the young Roumanian and regained my place within the car.