The Project Gutenberg eBook, Profiles from China, by Eunice Tietjens

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Title: Profiles from China

Author: Eunice Tietjens

Release Date: August 5, 2004 [eBook #13118]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROFILES FROM CHINA***

E-text prepared by Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

PROFILES FROM CHINA

Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior

by

EUNICE TIETJENS

1917

To My Mother

CONTENTS

PROEM
  The Hand

FROM THE INTERIOR
  Cormorants
  A Scholar
  The Story Teller
  The Well
  The Abandoned God
  The Bridge
  The Shop
  My Servant
  The Feast
  The Beggar
  Interlude
  The City Wall
  Woman
  Our Chinese Acquaintance
  The Spirit Wall
  The Most-Sacred Mountain
  The Dandy
  New China: The Iron Works
  Spring
  Meditation
  Chinese New Year

ECHOES
  Crepuscule
  Festival of the Dragon Boats
  Kang Yi
  Poetics
  A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
  The Son of Heaven
  The Dream
  Fêng-Shui

CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
  Reflections in a Ricksha
  The Camels
  The Connoisseur: An American
  Sunday in the British Empire: Hong Kong
  On the Canton River Boat
  The Altar of Heaven
  The Chair Ride
  The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject
  The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
  In the Mixed Court: Shanghai

Proem

Profiles from China

The Hand

As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
    new bronze.
I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
    is made visible.
Who shall read me your hand?

You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
    hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
    by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
    fingers bend backward.
Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
    with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
    eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
    nail is fastidiousness made flesh.

Very skilful is your hand.
With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
    glints of hidden beauty. With a little
    tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
    milky jade.

And cruel is your hand.
With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
    exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
    that Torquemada never glimpsed.
And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
    glide over golden thighs…. Bilitis had not
    such long nails.

Who can read me your hand? In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from the cigarette between your fingers which are the color of new bronze. The room is full of strange shadows. I am afraid of your hand….

From the Interior

Cormorants

The boats of your masters are black;
They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the
    canals on which they float they give forth an evil
    smell.
On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over
    the scummy water—you who should be savage
    and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath
    of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong
    storms of the sea.
Yet you are not held.
Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
    lurching and half asleep.

Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
    that you may swallow only small things, such as
    your masters desire.
Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
At the word of your masters the parted waters will
    close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
    of yellow streams.
Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
    you will pounce on the silver shadow….
Then you will rise again, bearing in your beak the
    struggling prey,
And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
    throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
    place a puny wriggler which can pass the gates of
    straw.
Such is your servitude.

Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
The boatmen shout one to another in nasal discords.
    Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
    built for the sky;
And you yawn….

Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
    filth!
You grow lousy like your lords,
For you have forgotten the sea.

Wusih

A Scholar

You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius. On your head is a domed cap of black satin and your supple hands with their long nails are piously folded. You rock to and fro rhythmically. Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal monosyllables, flows on steadily, monotonously, like the flowing of water and the flowering of thought. You are chanting, it seems, of the pious conduct of man in all ages, And I know you for a scoundrel.

None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable, and your voice pleasant. I listen attentively….

Wusih

The Story Teller

In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target
    for many eyes.
The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
    their faces no lamp burns; only their eyes glow
    faintly with a reflected light.
For their eyes are on his face.
It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under a sun
    of bronze.
The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his
    cheek and jaw. His eyes cut upward from a slender
    nose, and his quick mouth moves sharply out
    and in.

Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and
    full of guile. When he draws back the bow of
    his lips his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with
    teeth of pearl, fantastic, terrible….
What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?
Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a
    scholar to his doom?