CHAPTER XXX
But neither Jo Hiêsen nor Sên Ruben went a-warring. Several of C’hian Fan’s predictions were fulfilled, before either graybeard or stripling had quite decided which of the several Chinese armies of the moment to join.
Intermittent and contradictory shreds of war-news trickled in. Thousands of Ho-nanese mercenaries marched off to do battle in the battalions of Wu Pei-fu fighting against Chang Tso-lin at Hangchow and in Kiangsu. Sên Jo Hiêsen cackled of it proudly, and Sên C’hian Fan gave his full approval. Ho-nanese soldiers are by long odds the best in China—best in valor, best in soldierliness, best in discipline; and C’hian was glad to have them show the world their prowess and reap their war pay, if they could collect it, so long as no sash-wearers and above all no Sêns went with them. Then the wind of policy blew the war flame out, a president resigned, a general lost his corps and his head, two were banished, Western journals lost a topic of which they had made the most, and every one shook hands with or at each other—according to whether they were old-school or modern. C’hian Fan had as little faith in the sudden peace as he had had in the civil war it quelled; but he saw no necessity of saying so. And even Jo Hiêsen was content to smoke once more the long-stemmed pipe of peace, and to fall back again into a subsidiary place in the councils and doings of the family.
But Sên Jo Hiêsen remembered how Ruben’s face had glowed, how the young blue eyes had lit as Ruben had vowed that he too would go to the wars, he too fight—and, if it chanced, die—for China.
Jo Hiêsen sometimes chatted with Ruben now, and pleasantly; advised him upon the advantages of concubinage, and gave him freely for his very own an old blind frog upon which the graybeard doted. It had dined and slept with him for years, and spent most of its waking hours in the old man’s sleeve or on his shoulder. Ruben accepted it with effusive gratitude, and contrived to return it with great delicacy a few days later, with apparent reluctance, on the moving plea that the frog-one was pining for its beloved master. There were other reasons—and they were, at least equally, as true. But Sên Ruben did not state them. And all three were pleased at the humane reversion—the two Sêns and the frog-one.
And Sên Ruben had won Sên Jo Hiêsen. It would have gone ill with any who spoke ill of Sên Ruben, voluntary soldier and tender friend of frogs.
For all he had scoffed at it, the recent “war” stayed longer in C’hian Fan’s thought than it did in Ruben’s or in Jo Hiêsen’s. The old-one, flash-in-the-pan-tempered, had not always a retentive memory, and a heaven-sent bolt from the blue drove all warfare and other ugliness far from the thought of young Sên Ruben.
Loyal, stubbornly loyal as the rule of Sên C’hian Fan was to all the old ways of China, and cordially as all the clan agreed with him in it, Sên Ruben was not shut out of the women’s “flowery” quarters, but was made as free of them as Sên Ya Tin’s will had made Sên King-lo when he had brought his English wife to their homestead. In fact, men of the blood often are fairly free of the women’s quarters in such Chinese homesteads. The prohibitions of consanguinity are so imperious and so adamant and so far-reaching that they relax and permit almost as much as they forbid. Like a Carmelite convent (though not like it in much else) a Chinese harem is not a prison but a sanctuary.
Ruben had formed almost instant friendship with Sên No Fee, the youngest and only unmarried daughter of Sên Kai Lun, a gay and saucy beauty, somewhat overdue for marriage, since she was sixteen, but still her father’s close companion because she willed it, and very much his tyrant.
No and Ruben went together where they would within the wide walls; fished and hawked and chattered. More than once the minx told Ruben that, if only he were not her cousin, and his poor colorless face less hideous, she would have married him, and Ruben had retorted that he required a tame wife, not a colt-wild one, a wife of dignity and sweetness.
But he loved his cousin right well; and long tales he told her of Europe when she questioned him, which was often. Little laughing Sên No Fee had more approval of the new Chinese dispensation (of which she knew little but had heard much from girls more traveled) than had any other of these Ho-nan Sêns.
Ruben found her a glorious playmate; and she distinctly had a look of Ivy—a lesser beauty but oddly like.
No was an ignorant little thing, but she could beat him at chess without half trying, and her wits were as nimble as her education was scanty. All the pretty arts of Chinese courtyard ladies she had at her tiny fingers’ tips, but she was proficient in none of them—nor keen to ply them. Sên No Fee was a tomboy; her heart, Ruben found, as warm as her manners often were naughty.
More than once they raced together hand-in-hand up and down the Hill-of-the-Cherry-Trees. That they did it hand-in-hand was scandalous, which was what sweetened it to Sên No Fee; but in spite of that her wee fingers tingled disagreeably when Ruben clasped them closely in his, lest her scraps of binded feet stumble and throw her as they ran. Holding hands, which she did because she ought not, in itself was disagreeable to the Chinese girl, so deeply had the centuries drilled her that her hands were not for any other’s touching. Ruben had romped and tussled too often with his sister Ivy in their Surrey garden to think much about it. But he too knew that in China it was forbidden; and he was young enough and masculine enough not to like it the less for that!
He wrote and told his mother what a ripping good sport his cousin No was, how much he liked her, and that thanks to her he soon would be able to hold his own with most of the other Sêns when they flew their kites on the flat crest of the long persimmon hill, so given over to that manly pastime that it was called Fly-the-Kites Hill. And many of No’s confidences to him Ruben repeated to his mother in the long letters he wrote constantly, and started off to her by a runner to the treaty port post-office beyond the borders of Ho-nan as often as he could.