Profiles from China Part 1

Profiles from China.

by Eunice Tietjens.

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 ca.n.a.ls on which they float they give forth an evil smell.

On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over the sc.u.mmy 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 pa.s.s 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? Is an unfilial son tortured of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with her eunuchs?

I cannot tell.

The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes burn dully with a reflected light.

I shall never know.

I am alien ... alien.

Nanking

The Well

The Second Well under Heaven lies at the foot of the Sacred Mountain.

Perhaps the well is sacred because it is clean; or perhaps it is clean because it is sacred.

I cannot tell.

At the bottom of the well are coppers and coins with square holes in them, thrown thither by devout hands. They gleam enticingly through the shallow water.

The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous faces above the coping as my copper falls slantwise to rest.

Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?