A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Clearly the boundaries even of China were near, and when they came to Li-fan Ting, a town of five hundred people with one long clean grey street backed by one long clean blue torrent it looked like ‘the final outpost of Chinese civilisation – the end of all things’. But Chinese officialdom, she discovered, did not end there, rather it expanded in several last gasps of wilful obstruction. Two runners from the local yamen were posted outside her inn-door and she was told that she could go no further. In the wild regions ahead, officials explained, savage tribes were fighting, there were no inns or roads, snow blocked the passes; in short it was no place for an elderly, defenceless foreign lady.

  Next morning, when Isabella quietly prepared to depart – forward not backward – the ‘veneer of politeness’ disappeared, mounted guards appeared and she was more or less confined to her room. The following morning, however, ‘I woke everybody at 4.30 and was ready to leave at 5.30; but it was not to be. The officials were already there frightening the coolies with stories, intimidating them and threatening to have them beaten for disobedience, and there was a violent altercation between them and Mr Kay, in which some very strong language was used on both sides which did not mend matters. When I came out they tried to shut me into my room; but I managed to get into my chair. They told the bearers not to carry me. I told them to move on. The officials then tried to shut us in by closing parts of the outer door of the inn; but Mr Knipe opened them, and held them open till the frightened porters and my bearers had passed through. It was but fifty yards to the city gate. I feared they would close it, but they contented themselves with following us there, crying out, “We wash our hands of you!” and hurling at us the epithet “Foreign dogs!” as a parting missile.’

  Four hours after they left Li-fan Ting for the unknown beyond, they were overtaken by two officials, so Mr. Knipe hurried ahead in order to reach the next village of Tsa-ku-lao before them. Soon, another horseman appeared who evidently had orders to get ahead of Isabella and obstruct her onward passage. She thought this a very unworthy stratagem. So, ‘I jumped out of the chair, and set up my tripod on the narrow road, which he could not pass, and after a long attempt at photography, baffled by the wind, told him … to keep behind me. The horseman kept trying to get in front, but as the path is very narrow and mostly on the edge of a precipice, I managed to dodge him the whole way by holding a large umbrella first on one side, then on the other!’ Isabella’s casual narration of this little incident strains credulity almost to breaking-point. That she, on foot, armed only with a camera and a large umbrella could keep a mounted guard at bay for miles along even the narrowest track, seems fantastic. Perhaps the guard was so fascinated by her masterly improvisations that he couldn’t bear to bring the performance to a close!

  Trouble boiled again at Tsa-ku-lao, but by now Isabella was ‘fairly roused and quite determined to proceed at least as far as Somo’. So proceed she did, with a much-swollen bodyguard, presumably designed both to protect her and to defend the country from her invasion. Each quenched mandarin along the route sent some runners, and there were more chair bearers, for herself, for Be-dien and Mr Knipe, there was a muleteer with ‘three strong, whole-backed, pleasant-faced red mules’ and a young lama. ‘Climbing the Peh-teo-shan spur by a long series of rocky, broken zigzags, cut on its side through a hazel wood, and reaching an altitude of about 9,270 feet in advance of my men, I felt the joy of a “born traveller” as I watched the mules with their picturesque Mantze muleteer, the eleven men no longer staggering under burdens, but jumping, laughing and singing, some of them with leaves of an artemisia stuffed into their nostrils to prevent the bleeding nose which had troubled them … the two soldiers in their rags and myself the worst ragamuffin of all. There were many such Elysian moments in this grand “Beyond”.’

  And so, for the last time, during that ragamuffin-free journey from Tsa-ku-lao to Somo Isabella relived many of the most intense, sublime and dangerous joys that had formed the quintessence of her life’s wanderings. Hillsides rioted in the lush colours she had once seen in the Sandwich Isles: ‘A free-flowering, four-leaved white clematis, arching the road with its snowy clusters, looped the trees together, and a white daphne filled the air with its heavy fragrance. Large peonies gleamed in shady places. White and yellow jasmine and yellow roses entwined the trunks of trees…. Maples flaunted in crimson and purple, in pale green outlined in rose-red; the early fronds of the abundant hare’s-foot fern crimson on the ground; there were scarlet, auburn and old-gold trees …’ And the ground below them ‘was starred with white and blue anemones, white and blue violets, yellow violas, primulas and lilies … and patches of dwarf blue irises.’

  She stayed among the Mantze and described their congenial everyday clutter and clatter with enthusiastic interest as, in former days, she had written about the Ainu, the Kurds, the Koreans. While her men slept, she, invigorated and alert, stared out from a village granary over moonlit valleys and thought, as she had sometimes thought before in like circumstances, that ‘Anything might happen afterwards, but for that one day I had breathed again the air of freedom and had obtained memories of beauty such as would be a lifelong possession.’ At 10,000 feet altitude she came into her own as usual and bustled about while coolies collapsed around her and ‘my umbrella split to pieces, shoes and other things cracked, screws fell out of my camera (one of Ross’s best), my air-cushion collapsed, a horn cup went to pieces spontaneously, and celluloid films became electric and emitted sparks when they were separated!’ Higher yet, at the Pass of Tsa-ku-shan, the eyes of mortal danger flashed at her. Owing to Mr Kay’s considerable ineptitude they did not start to cross this pass until three o’clock on a cold afternoon, and they climbed ‘to a considerable height by a number of well-engineered zigzags, meeting Mantze travellers armed with lances and short swords, and journeying in companies from dread of the notorious banditti. Some of my men had armed themselves with lances. As darkness came on the coolies were scared and begged me to have the mule bells taken off. They started at every rock and asked me to have my revolver ready! … When we got into mist and broken shale and snow, after stumbling and falling one after the other, they set the chair down, very reasonably I thought and no arguments of Mr Kay’s addressed either to mind or body induced them to carry it another step.

  ‘It was then 8.30 and very dark. A snowstorm came on, dense and blinding, with a strong wind. I was dragged rather than helped along, by two men who themselves frequently fell, for we were on a steep slope and the snow was drifting heavily. The guide constantly disappeared in darkness. Be-dien, who was helping me, staggered and eventually fell, nearly fainting – he said for want of food, but it was “Pass Poison” and he was revived by brandy. The men were groaning and falling in all directions, calling on their gods and making expensive vows, which were paid afterwards by burning cheap incense sticks, fear of the bandits having given way to fear for their lives – yet they had to be prevented from lying down in the snow to die.

  ‘Several times I sank in drifts up to my throat, my soaked clothes froze on me, the snow deepened, whirled, drifted, stung like pin points. But the awfulness of that lonely mountain-side cannot be conveyed in words: the ghastly light which came on, the swirling, blinding snow-clouds, the benumbing cold, the moans all round, for with others, as with myself, every breath was a moan, and the certainty that if the wind continued to rise we should all perish for we were on the windward slope of the mountain. After three hours of this work, the moon, nearly at her full, rose, and revealed dimly through the driving snow-mist, the round, ghastly crest of the pass, which we reached and crossed soon after midnight when the snow ceased. I have fought through severe blizzards in the Zagros and Kurdistan mountains, but on a good horse and by daylight…. On the whole this was my worst experience of the kind.’

  But it did not kill her. Travelling – even through snow blizzards over 12,000-foot-high passes when she was sixty-four years old – could not kill her. Life, it seemed, had yet more to demand and more
to offer, and in this she acquiesced.

  The offering was Somo, capital of the Mantze, golden as Malacca, enchanted as Hilo, remote as Leh, eccentric as Seoul – the last town out on Isabella’s road. ‘The first view of it sleeping in the soft sunshine of a May noon was one never to be forgotten. The valley is fully one mile wide, and nine miles long, and snow peaks apparently close its western extremity. All along the “Silver Water” there were wheat fields in the vivid green of spring; above were alpine lawns over which were sprinkled clumps of pine and birch, gradually thickening into forests which clothes skirts of mountains, snow-crested and broken up here and there into pinnacles of naked rock. At short distances all down the valley are villages with towers and lamaseries on heights – villages among the fair meadows by the bright swift river, with houses mounted on the tops of high towers, which they overhang, their windows from thirty to fifty feet from the ground – and stretching half-way across, a lofty, rock spur, then violet against a sky of gold, developed into a massive double-towered castle, the residence of the Tu-tze of Somo, the lord of this fair land. In the late afternoon it looked like an enchanted region –

  ‘Where falls not hail or rain, or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly.

  The warm spring sunshine blessed it, the river flashed through it in light, the sunset glory rolled down it in waves of gold, its beauty left nothing to be longed for.’

  She could have died there, with nothing left to long for; ‘I was much prostrated,’ she confessed at last, ‘and also suffering from my heart from the severities of the night on the Tsa-ku-shan pass’. But perhaps it would have been too easy an escape. As things were, she merely suffered, the coolies all came down with fevers, food supplies were low, the authorities were absolutely determined that she should go no farther. So she stayed about a week in Somo and learned what she could about the Mantze. They were a semi-autonomous people who paid annual tribute to China; they were ardent Buddhists of the Tibetan variety; they had a refreshingly un-oriental belief in the absolute equality of the sexes; they were noisy and amiable, ‘taking this life easily and enjoying it and trusting the next to the lamas’. The women were dark, large-eyed as Latins and with hair twisted into dozens of thin waxed plaits; the men, similarly dark and ruddy, shaved their head sand wore woollen caps, but in olden days used to coil their hair into a horn ‘as long as a hand’. Both men and women were robust and walked with springy zest; but they never washed, and a corpse was termed ‘a twice-washed’, having received one post-natal and one post-mortem ablution. They were hospitable, amoral, quite blissfully ignorant. ‘Their views are narrow, their ideas conservative, and their knowledge barely elementary. England is not a name to conjure with in their valleys. They know of China and Tibet, and have heard of Russian but never of Britain’.

  Britain, that ‘dim pale island’ as she had long ago called it, unknown and unmissed by so many, still waited, though it did not beckon. It was the only place she could possibly call home, it was where her duty lay and God had spared her to return to it. And so, reluctantly, she turned her face away from the desirable Tibetan frontier and, with Mr Knipe, Be-dien, the bearers, porters and muleteers, wended her way down from the heights. When she reached the Chengtu plain it was sizzling in the summer heat, buzzing with sand-flies and mosquitoes, heaving with a million groovy, sweaty Chinese and buffaloes. ‘She left Chengtu’, says Anna Stoddart, ‘on May 20th, with the mercury at 90°, in a small flat-bottomed wupan, with a partial matting cover, drawing four inches of water. This was the beginning of the last river journey of 2,000 miles, “back,” as she says, “to bondage.”’

  CHAPTER XI

  Bondage

  IN a letter written while on the Sea of Japan early in 1897, just before she left the Far East for the last time, Isabella told her publisher, ‘The high pressure of life in all departments, whether of work or pleasure is tremendous. I dread returning to England, for though I shall try to keep out of the season and must do so from necessity, the mere rush of the movements about me will I fear be more than I could bear, and I shall have to leave home again.’ Still, she would try to ‘settle’ in some nice ‘old-fashioned cottage within an hour of London (not Waterloo or Liverpool Street) close to a purely agricultural village’ where she hoped to rest for a while and see hardly anybody. But the prospect was unappealing: ‘Indeed I am returning to England with a very bad grace. I am far more at home in Tokyo and Seoul than in any place in Britain except Tobermory, and I very much prefer life in the East to life at home …’

  When she reached England a few months later, Mrs Bishop took rooms in London, worked hard at some articles on Korea, attended a Queen’s Assembly, sat on the committees of several missionary societies, dined out constantly and delivered a lecture on West China to the Royal Geographical Society – the first woman ever to address that august, masculine body at such length. Tireless, unrelenting, she also spoke to audiences in Birkenhead, Winchester, Birmingham, Carlisle, Aberdeen, and Dublin on the need for medical missions, to the British Association on the Mantze tribes, to a Church Congress in Newcastle, to Chambers of Commerce in Southampton and York on spheres of influence in China, to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society on Tibet and Korea. ‘I wish I could avoid undertaking too much,’ she complained to her publisher, as she hurried from one engagement to the next, sometimes losing her own door keys in the rush and arriving unexpectedly at the Murrays’ hospitable house in Albemarle Street for a night’s shelter.

  The book on Korea was a toil and tribulation also, and she made more work for herself by allowing it to reach quite inordinate lengths. John Murray protested, as sheaves of new material poured into his office, ‘I believe I am correct in saying that 257 pages of your manuscript may be taken as two-fifths of the whole MS? If so, and as 141 pages of manuscript equals 156 pages of print, the whole book willl work out to 430 printed pages plus illustrations, index, contents etc. – in fact a volume of five hundred pages. Of course this is impossible.’ So it eventually appeared in two volumes, for Isabella was reluctant to cut it, even though she considered that Korea was ‘a dull, remote subject’ that could only interest the few ‘who do not read for amusement but for information’. Once again her forebodings were unwarranted: Korea and Her Neighbours was published on 10 January 1898 and within ten days a second impression was being printed. Over two thousand copies sold in the first year, and Isabella made a profit of about £550 from its sales. All the reviews were ‘monotonously favourable’ and praised the perspicacity of her observations and the ‘magic’ of her descriptive powers. ‘No other book is so satisfying in its presentation of the facts of nature and man in Korea today,’ applauded the Nation; and Isabella was ‘amused’ to find herself ‘transplanted in to the ranks of political writers and quoted as an “authority on the political situation in the Far East”’. In fact, she told her publisher in confidence, ‘the reviewers are so ignorant of the subject that they are afraid to commit themselves by fault-finding!’

  But apart from this warm sense of well-earned achievement, financial and professional success as a writer had little to offer Isabella. She had no personal extravagances to indulge – objets d’art, elegant clothes, fine furnishing held no charms for one so incapable of ‘settling’; she took no delight in the comfort or status of luxury hotels, aristocratic drawing-rooms or fashionable watering-places; her friends were, as they always had been, worthy, intelligent professional people – retired diplomats or missionaries, the remnants of her Scottish circle, friends of her youth – and she had no ambition to move in the sophisticated literary or artistic circles of the day (and in any case, her brand of slow-spoken, well-informed, earnest discourse was not to everyone’s taste). So early in 1899 she determined to escape from the ‘high pressure’ of urban life that she had dreaded and retire to that ‘old-fashioned cottage’. After much searching, she took the lease (she never bought a house in her life) of a large, damp, gloomy residence called Hartford Hurst on the banks of the River Ouse: ‘
It is a very unideal house in an unideal neighbourhood,’ she wrote, ‘but the next parish was my father’s, and I spent there a happy youth from sixteen to twenty-seven [happier, perhaps, when gilded with a retrospective glow] and it is less trouble to go into a neighbourhood which I know intimately. … At all events, it is a pied-à-terre so long as I can move about and when I can’t it may prove a haven. It is very odd to look at all things in the light of old age and I am trying resolutely to face it, thankful all the time that my best-beloved never knew it and that they had neither to live nor die alone.’ Her description of Hartford Hurst suggests that it would prove, as it did, the final blunder in her series of home-making disasters. The isolation, the overpowering nostalgia, the flat damp of the area depressed her and she ‘faddled away’ most of the time she spent there.