The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their present sad dilemma.
But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior, tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris, would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese. Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials, especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.
These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools, churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in religious, ways.