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I
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It was in northern Hopei. The clouds had failed to gather in their season, and the time of showers has passed without rain. Parched by the midsummer sun, the earth was a dull beige in color. We had traveled three days over plains, valleys, and hills and seen nothing green except in the artificially irrigated plots near hamlets.
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The ancient stone-paved trail led up along a narrow ledge. We waited at the foot for a line of pack coolies to come down. They were heavily laden with inland produce which they were transporting to the coast for foreign export. The containers roped on their backs towered high above their heads. Yet, despite his burden, the foremost man swerved out suddenly to the very edge of the cliff, and, as they came on, each of the nine men behind him did the same.
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When they had passed us, we began our climb. My pack coolie was before me. When I came up to the place round which the others had swerved, he had squatted down and was pouring the last of the contents of his drinking canteen into a crevice in the paving. There, through the dust between the stones, a wild rose had grown—a slender fragile tendril with five pale leaves and an open flower. A perfect flower, beautifully tinted, and sweetly fragrant. “It is from such a one as this,” my coolie said, “that we learn fortitude.”
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II
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It was in the province of Kwangtung. The temple had once been beautifully furnished, but was now dirty and neglected. I chided the abbot concerning the dust on a Buddha’s face. He did not answer me immediately. He led me across two courtyards and along a dark narrow passage.
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At the end of the passage he opened a door and motioned to me to pass him and go through it. Beyond the door, I stood in a tiny garden above a deep ravine. All was neat and tidy there. No weeds grew in the rich, much-worked loam. A low wall of carefully placed rocks kept the garden from sliding down the mountain side.
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In his garden, the abbot spoke to me, saying, “The furniture on an altar is but the symbol of religion … in the face of a flower the heart of God is revealed.”
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I had no answer. At my feet were tall white lilies, each with a golden heart. Over my head a magnolia was in bloom.
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Lifting a clump of pansies with a careful trowel, the abbot planted them in an earthen pot, “Take this home,” he said.“If you are one who sincerely seeks the truth, by living with a flower you will find it.”
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III
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Bald-the-third, my serving matron, was stiff with anger. A filthy beggar had erected a mat shed against the wall of our residence at Nanking, and settled down to live just by the gate which led from our garden to the hill path.
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He would have to go, she declared. Disease would be carried over the wall by every breeze. We should all be sick. Probably Small Girl would die of cholera.
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Bald-the-third went out to clear him away. Sometime later I discovered her seated on the sewing-room floor hemstitching a sheet, an occupation she often uses to calm herself when she has been overwrought.
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“Has the beggar gone?” I asked.
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“No—he is still there,” she answered.
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“Oh! He defeated you in argument, did he?” I pressed her.
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“I did not speak to him,” she said. “He has a sprig of jasmine growing in a broken pot, and has given it the least drafty place in his miserable shelter. He certainly hadn’t much tea, but he was sharing what he had with the flower. I do not think that such a man will do us any harm. People can be too concerned regarding physical health and neglect the health of the spirit. I’ve sent him out a gift of rice and fish.”
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IV
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The Chinese love of flowers has been rewarded by genius in their cultivation. Certainly this is a transcendent capacity for taking trouble. Aided by their lovers’ patient skill, blossoms open for their festivals all over the land despite the diversity of climate which makes the weather below zero in some districts when it is swelteringly hot in others.
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Flowers are coddled, nursed, and coaxed. They are fed religiously. There is a vast lore of wisdom passed orally from generation to generation concerning the whims and peculiarities of different plants—also a voluminous detailed gardening literature in which the observations of centuries are garnered. In the House of Exile library there are forty books, considered classics, on the culture of chrysanthemums only, and nearly as many relating to dwarf trees.
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In heat, plants are sheltered in the coolest places in the homestead, and shades are erected for blossoming trees, vines, and flowers which are stationary. I have seen people sit all through the breathless tropic noon fanning a drooping flower. In cold, plants are housed in paper shelters, their roots set in loam warmed by subterranean air pipes heated by buried charcoal.
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These are constructed to-day exactly as decreed by a ruler of the State of Wei who lived more than two thousand years ago. He ordered that they should be so simply designed that even the poorest and the stupidest of his people might make one. In the most severe weather, florists clothe buds in little paper coats perforated with breathing holes.
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Although they perform an infinite amount of toil in bringing their flowers to perfection, florists charge astonishingly low prices. A florist once explained this to me. He told me that a country in which flowers—a necessity for the refinement of the heart—were priced so as to make them a luxury was a country which had yet to learn the first principles of civilization.
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V
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