CHAPTER XXI
Li Ch’un is a movable feast, and the Sêns and all their vassal villages were celebrating it several moons later than it is most often held. The month of the Double Cherry had almost passed when they went forth to meet the Spring.
At sunrise—everything that does not begin earlier begins at sunrise in the land of the pagoda—the great gates were opened, and Sên C’hian Fan and all the thousand of his patriarchal household came slowly forth to wend their way to the eastmost point of the vast domain, to meet and greet the Spring as she came from Hu-peh to the fields and forests of their clan: an immense cortège to be swelled and lengthened two-score times as it wended its slow, ceremonial way—joined and augmented every few li by the outpouring of some village or townlet; all coming forth to keep the Beginning-of-Spring festival.
A man who had paused to rest at the white and silver pagoda, not knowing that as he left his litter not far from there, his foot fell for the first time on the ancestral lands of his own people, saw the endless processional coming in the distance, and drew into the vantage of a great catalpa’s leafy shade, and waited, shadowed there to watch and listen, wondering what festival this gay-clad multitude was keeping; for Sên Ruben knew that the year’s first moon was the keeping time of Li Ch’un.
Behind a busied conclave of musicians—horn-men, drum-men, gong-men, lute-players, music-basket carriers and boys who blew on flutes and silver-stringed shells—walked ten score of servants carrying flower-wreathed staves, tiny silken pouches, birds in splendid cages and trays of paper money, and looking down on them from his catalpa-shaded hill-slope, Sên Ruben’s heart leapt when he saw stamped or sewn on each blue coat’s back the servant-crest of his father’s house.
Women and children had thronged out of the homestead’s gates close beside the men; women and children had poured forth from every village and farm with the headsmen and all the headsmen’s tribal following. But Sên Ruben saw neither woman nor child here. The way had been too long for all but sturdiest feet. And no woman might go with the joyous solemn processional to its end, for often miracle is vouchsafed at the ultimate moment when Spring and China meet; and no miracle can be consummated in the presence of a cat, a hen or a woman. Women and all the toddle-feet children had fallen out a few or a score at a time to wait in the meadows and near the path’s sides, resting, munching sweetmeats and melon-seeds, gossiping and telling tales until they straggled back to join the home-returning of the men folk and older boys privileged to meet the Spring as it came into Sênland through the plum trees that behind the pagoda screened the Sên’s Eastern flower-land from the woodlands of the family of Kem.
Inconspicuous—or so he hoped—in his dark plum-colored garments, the sober, traveling garb of a Chinese gentleman, Sên Ruben risked skirting the edge of the great jabbering throng, interested in seeing where they were going, and in watching what they did—more interested in watching them, for all were his clansmen or their vassals, he made no doubt, and some among them his close of kin. Which? Sên Ruben wondered.
There were no blue eyes here; he saw no hair that was fair; but now and then a man passed close to him almost as fair of skin as he—fair-skinned as his mother. No one had told him that some Chinese were so nearly white. He was glad to find it so—seeing it for the first time here in the home province of his own people. He was glad, because it made him feel his own face less of an ugliness (and Sên Ruben worshiped beauty); less an offense to other Chinese eyes; less the bar-sinister that, in spite of his loyal love of his mother, it always had seemed to him.
They began to sing a hymn of Spring, a welcome-song to the flowers, an invocation to all the honorable grains—the millet, buckwheat, maize, rice and wheat; a prayer and a propitiation to sun and rain, soil and wind, to the spirits that dwelt in them, and ruled them, giving the command to yield the honorable ground’s best plenty to these the worshiping sons of Han, or to shrivel the Earth’s fruits in her womb, that famine and want might stalk through the fields and gardens of Ho-nan.
Those following there were actors he knew—he had seen too many pictures of their fantastic head-dresses and elaborate costly apparel, so unlike the every-day garb of every-day Chinese, not to be sure of that. They sang and gesticulated as they walked but Ruben could not catch the words. He had caught most of the Ho-nanese folk-songs and hymns, and he thought he should have understood Mandarin, even sing-songed. But the Pekinese the actors chanted he could not understand, except here and there a word and that it was Peking-tongue—probably the only one of China’s many languages that the stage-folk knew, since they are for the most an ignorant lot, though technically exquisitely skilled. Almost invariably now a Chinese actor is a native of Pechilli province.
Those carried there in their sedan chairs were gentlemen—not because their raiment was fine, and they wore jades in their caps—but because of their great repose, the clear command in their quiet eyes, and the clean-cut chiseling of features and motionless hands. They were Sêns, some of them, no doubt; probably most of them; Sêns, and he was a Sên! Most of them were old enough to remember his father, to have been at home with Sên King-lo there when he had brought Sên Ruby, the White Rose of China, to his home and his people here in Ho-nan. Sên Ruben’s soul kindled.
Another cohort of musicians followed the litters; musicians playing softly as they went, softly as if to woo the timid spring from her vestal hiding behind a veil of snow-gauze from the crabbed breath of winter.
Hello! What was that?
Not—but it must be—the Spring-Ox! So—this was Li Ch’un, the great greeting-of-Spring festival, oddly belated till now.
The gigantic, grotesquely painted Ox, which, for all that body and bones, was but paper, was carried by more than twenty men and its weight required them all.
Sên Ruben did not smile at the weird absurd Spring-Ox, for he knew what it meant—and he was Chinese.
If ever he had doubted that in England, he did not doubt it now as his heart leapt to the Spring-keeping of his race. And his English mother could not have doubted it, never again could have doubted it, if she could have watched him now, as his eyes leapt, and his fair face lit.
Sên Ruben had come home.
Sên Ruben knew that he had come home.
The soft dry air, still with a gentle tang of racier Winter in its sweet bouquet, that rippled through the varnish-trees and elders, was mother’s milk to the eager, quivering sense of Sên Ruben. The place, the time, the thronging Chinese people, the eager, symbolical procession—all were sacramental to him.
Standing here, quick to it all, he thought as he watched his kinsmen’s leisurely litters, of taxis in Piccadilly, trams on the Embankment, ’buses in the Strand. His lip curled a little. He thought that Ho-nan kept the seemlier, manlier pace, and he saw more reasonableness, more health, more dignity, many times more beauty in this bedecked and musicked threading of life’s twisted maze than he ever had in the push and tangle of London’s harder ways, London’s more emphatic thoroughfares.
Sên Ruben did not follow on with them to the climax and end of their road. He felt that a Sên should not do that on foot. He did not care to stand there in the crush of the outer crowd. He would present himself to his kindred, as a home-returned prodigal should, within the walls that girdled the dwelling house, or at the great ceremonial gate. He would not stand aside with their retainers—still less with the peasants and villagers not of their blood, but only of their thrall—nor would he intrude his presence and kinship upon them, the seniors of his clan, until they had accepted his credentials and anointed him with welcome.
Next year perhaps—some year certainly—he would ride with them, his litter carried among theirs, as they went in state to meet and welcome the Spring.
He knew every item of the climax of the ceremony when at the Eastern edge of their land they met the Spring. Another year he would share it, have in it his part, return to the great house with them, pass in with them to the great decked garden, help to beat the Ox, to drive it to work hard and well—a symbol that all the agriculturists who tended the fields and orchards of Sên would be industrious through all the moons of planting, tending and reaping, until the Feast of Lanterns came to give a nation of faithful husbandmen almost a moon of festival and holiday. He would help to slaughter and burn the gigantic Ox and the Mang-Shên—the huge paper man that was following it there, its driver and plowman, the hardworked god of agriculture.
For all the Chinese gods work; they have but little playtime; less even than the busy-bee people of China do; and of China’s many gods the god of agriculture and Ts’ai Shên, the god of wealth, work hardest of all. Mang-Shên rarely rests, Ts’ai Shên never rests at all.
The head of the Ox was painted a glowing yellow, a sign to the watching peasants that the coming summer would be greatly hot. But there would be days of heavy rain, too, for Mang Shên was hatless, but wore very stout shoes. The inordinate number of Mang’s garments repeated the yellow-headed Ox’s promise of intense heat; the scarf of white that belted Mang Shên’s coat and loins promised long moons of good health—for the gods are spirits, and reverse all the sartorial customs of men, wearing white for joy and red for woe.
Sên Ruben was glad to see Mang girdled with white, and was glad of the promise of heat that the Ox and its driver gave; Sên Ruben rejoiced in heat.
Not to-day would he seek or ask admission into that great home of his that shone down there in the wood-girthed meadows like a jewel in an exquisite setting of green—not to-day when all the vast place was a-seethe with the keeping of Li Ch’un.
His home-coming should be in some tranquil hour of quiet.
To-night he would lie where his chairmen were camped beside a willow-hung gurgling stream where the pink-backed trout were snoozing.
Sên Ruben, with a last long wistful look after his kindred as they went, turned and slipped away, his going as unnoticed, he thought, as his presence had been unmarked.