CHAPTER XXXII
Sên Ruben gave a cry when they had passed the loquats. So smothered in wee white roses, in creeping columbines, and imperial wistaria that its thatched roof scarcely showed at all, a tiny reed hut lay in an acre of peach trees—peach trees in bloom! Low criss-crossed bamboos fenced house and orchard. Blue and amethyst hills backed it; a tiny silver stream danced laughing through the peach trees; ferns of many sorts nodded delicately at the gnarled trunks’ wide roots. The little grayish house—for the well-kept reeds were old—was flanked by a wide well and a sheltered dung-heap. A memorial-truth-stone with pink and red pampas grass on either side stood at the threshold. The tiny hut looked comfortable and cared-for; the orchard looked a wealth of prosperous agriculture—was exquisite wealth of beauty. And it was prodigality of incense. Never yet did prayer-sticks belch such sweetness.
It lay alone, apart, the peach-sweet place. Ruben caught a sense of imperative isolation about it. No cat or dog, not even a painted god or dragon, guarded its gate; a leg-nimble urchin could have vaulted its low fence of low-cut bamboos; but Sên Ruben heard the whole place say, “Enter not. There is no welcome here.” And for all it smelt so sweet, its voice that forbade was acrid and stern; for all that it looked a suntrap of prosperity and luster, Sên Ruben felt cold air swirl and hiss about him, a chill that snapped at his face like bullets, as if forbidding him to come nearer, defying him to enter and trespass. At its West, beyond its low green fence, a line of tall cypress trees stood grim, grew deep and thick: the sentinel trees of the burial place of the Kows, Sên Ruben believed them. If they were those, a few li beyond them lay the scraggling one-street Village-of-the-Kows-Whose-Women-Spin-Well-and-Bear-Many-Sons.
Sên Ruben knew village and grave-place well, but never had approached either through the Walnut Grove or by the direction Sên Toon had brought him here to-day. In the old moss-grown village he had sought out and greeted for Kow Li each living Kow of Li’s generation and remembrance; and at the graves of Li’s ancestors he had made for Kow Li obeisance and worship long and profound. But he never had heard of Kow Lôk or of her paradise of peaches. Why? He had told them he was anxious to see all the Kows, that he might take word of them to Kow Li. And he had charged Kow Yong Shu to guide him to every Kow home near enough for their journeying. Why had they kept him from old Kow Lôk?
He caught his breath and his pulse quickened at the beauty of the blossomed, hill-cupped place.
Ruben spoke at last. “You called her witch? Do you believe her that?” Sên Ruben loved all the old tales that the peasants told, but all superstition, even Chinese superstition, was abhorrent to him.
Sên Toon chuckled. “Of course not. We Chinese pretend to believe a great deal that we do not believe at all. Confucius was the great agnostic, far more deeply agnostic than the Ingersoll I heard so much of when I was at Yale. Most of our sash-wearers are agnostics, at least the men-ones. Women will believe everything, everywhere, I think. But we who are men cling to the old superstitions for love of them, love of their color and story, and for the use we make of them with the ‘babies.’ For example of it, Li Ch’un. You came to us at Greeting the Spring, you remember. The peasant ones could not be taught, or grasp, the scientific processes upon which we base its predictions. Tell them as we do that the Spring Ox is supernaturally painted, in Peking, and they believe it, heed his message and profit by it—as do their crops. It is, often as not, kneaded together of water and flour and covered with straw. Sometimes it is put in a well-barred room of the Astronomical Board, with paints and a brush near it, and when it is taken out again the next day indubitably Ox has been painted—and painted by spirit fingers or by a blind man, the babies believe. At the end of Li Ch’un, if a magistrate-one lays on it his hand or his wand of office in a temple courtyard, they fall upon it and batter it to bits and each of the silly-ones pads off with as much Ox as he can to mix with his manure that his millet and corn cannot fail to thrive. Explain to them the processes of reasonable weather forecasting, and you pour a cupful of water on to a sea-sucking desert. No Sên believes that Kow Lôk is a witch—no Sên man—or that there are witch-ones. But she is clairvoyant; she does and tells strange things. That is past denial. She is blind—but she sees; she is deaf—but she hears. You yourself shall know that she does, if she does not drive us from her presence. For I am going to take you in to her.”
“Shall we get in?”
“There is nothing to keep us out; neither bolt, bar nor guard. Not a peasant in all the province would enter even the edge of her yang-lao-ti unless she gave them welcome. They believe her a witch-one of tremendous and infernal power. They believe that demons come at her bidding, always at night, do her errands, bring her food and prepare it, tend her orchard, gather her peach crop when it is ripe, cart it and sell it—such as we do not come and entreat for, and pay her much price for.”
“Who does? Works in this wonderful orchard, brings her food and prepares it?”
“She does.”
“Impossible—one feeble, bed-ridden old woman!”
“Yes,” Sên Toon asserted, but his eyes were dancing. “Kow Lôk is paralyzed, has not risen from her mat for years—the babies will vow it. Not one of them will pass by her bamboo fencing after the Hour of the Hen. But this person who speaks to you has seen her do it. One must be stealthy to watch her unseen and unsuspected. Sên Toon has accomplished it. No doubt she sleeps much by the daytime. But she rouses at the lightest footfall, and she plies a brisk trade from her sleep mat. She will sell you a love philter; I am not sure that she will not sell you a poison, if you will pay enough for it. I have wished to see Kow Lôk and have feared her welcome. When Kow Lôk chooses to be dumb, no force, cajolery, or gold will make her speak. And always she curses the Sêns. You in your English clothes she will not know for a Sên or think Chinese. She will grab any gold you will give her and will speak to you, I think; she may let fall to you a word of value to me—hurl one at me even, if she is in her holiday mood, as she is sometimes and is apt to soften at the touch of gold.”
“Why does she hate the Sêns? I thought all the Kows were our bondsmen in love even as in our old feudal holding of them.”
“Sên Ya Tin took her lover from her; bought her, as Lôk believed, in betrothal to one Kow and married her to another. Our sainted old-one did it in her wisdom, but for it Lôk has cursed all of our blood ever since the bridegroom substitution was forced upon her. I will tell you the story as we take our homeward way. Come, we will go to her now. Have a care that you speak before her only in French or English. I will interpret; so shall we baffle her of her hatred of you as a Sên-one, and, too, you will hear twice all she utters, and so doing hold it in your memory the longer and surer. Remember, Sên Ruben, you are going to have audience of one of China’s greatest clairvoyants. I hold nothing of witchcraft—it is silliness—but there are Chinese sibyls who can unveil both past and future. All the gods grant that Kow Lôk will see and tell for us to-day!”
The woman looked a hundred, huddled on her mat. But she turned her head sharply as they stepped over the hut’s raised door-sill—raised to keep floor draughts out, as in better Chinese houses than this one sills usually are. Chinese floors are chill places, usually carpetless.
Her eyes looked sightless, overgrown with the darkness of age or disease. Her nostrils quivered angrily. Did she see, Ruben wondered, by the sense of smell?
Her face snarled, and she sprang to her height and stood facing them both defiantly, enraged and forbidding.
“So?” she exclaimed before Sên Ruben could speak, before Sên Toon would, “the white Sên has come home, home to the Queendom of Sên Ya Tin!” She spat out their old-one’s name as it were venom.
Was it clairvoyance? Had gossip reached her? Or did she see and guess? Ruben thought the last; Toon believed the first. But they both felt an icy gust enwrap and sting them, though the hot afternoon sun poured in through the hut’s one fan-shaped window.
“White son of the grandson of ruthless Sên Ya Tin, what have you here? What seek you of Kow Lôk?”
“Mother, I bring you gold.”
Before Sên Toon could translate, she had held out her hand. “This person will count it.”
Ruben was well provided. He laid generous largess in Lôk’s skinny palm, and saw as he did that her hand and her arm were sinewy as a plowman’s. And he had seen the vigor with which she had sprung to her feet, and had marveled. She was attenuated, clear-eyed, her scant, draggled hair was white as new snow; but this was no weakling, paralysis never had touched her. Ruben saw her strong as sound whipcord, stronger than many men at their prime.
The woman did not finger the gold; she held it contemptuously in her coupled hands, shaking them slowly once and again. Then, “You pay well,” she said, and named to a yuan what Ruben knew he had given her.
Sên Ruben, not knowing what next to say, fearing to infuriate, at a loss how to placate, waited her further speech, and as he waited looked eagerly about this tiny room in which a Kow woman lived alone.
The floor was of hard beaten earth. The fireless k’ang, a brazier, a scant array of cooking utensils, a cup, a plate, a wooden dipper by the water bucket, a gong (the babies believed, so Toon told him afterwards, that with it the witch summoned the demons that served her) a cheap kitchen-god, and upon a shelf a valueless vase were all that furnished the meager room.
In the vase were a few cotton flowers, faded and old, and a feather a wild gander had dropped. Ruben’s eyes widened and questioned, and he looked hard and long. He would have questioned her, but he did not dare. The room grew colder and colder; Sên Toon was shivering; and the low afternoon sun beat in hotter and hotter through the open window.
Ruben Sên had seen the mate of that cheap tawdry vase before, just such coarse, crude, cloth flowers and the feather of a mandarin goose in it—in London.
“Wah! Wah!” the woman shrieked, “it smells of blood, Sên blood, and it smells of the blood of a girl’s heart that Sên Ya Tin crushed under her shoe. I’ll not of it! It soils me! Crawl to it,” she cried, “pick it up, pouch it,” she hissed as she hurled the gold down, “or leave it there and it shall feed my cess-pool when my servants come, the imps of hell who come in the dark to serve me.”
They left the gold where it had fallen. Sên Toon smothered a smile, though he was trembling still. Toon had no doubt that the crone would gather it up carefully and hide it safely when they had gone. Sên Ruben believed that the gold he had given would sink low in the cess-pool of Kow Lôk.
Neither hoped to win aught from Lôk to-day. They motioned each other that they would go.
Something strange and ill was happening here. Both had heard (Ruben a little, Toon much) of such uncanny demonstrations, but neither had believed. A dog growled, a cat meowed wildly; neither cat nor dog was here. The room grew dark, but they both could see. Tiny points of light darted hither and thither, darted and snapped. Vermin crawled towards them; the scattered coins looked slimy snakes.
They turned to go.
Kow Lôk laughed, and her laugh was ugly.
“Stay!” she commanded.
They knew that her word chained them.
“You have paid, and you shall have. Not even for my cess-pool will I from a Sên have aught for which I do not give value, and in full measure. One has paid, both shall hear. Thine,” she spoke to Sên Toon, “is the liver of a fool. You spurn joy. It will spurn you in its youth and thine. It will flee from thee down to the Yellow Springs. When it leaves thee thy coward heart will break and never be whole again. Thou canst not escape thy fate, a golden fate while the day-star circles China from now to Pepper Month and to Pepper Month thrice, then will it be accursed. I curse thee, Sên Toon son of Sên Wing-lu.”
She turned to Sên Ruben with a cackling laugh, a withered grin. “Thou hast dared to crave a Chinese maiden, thou who art half-caste and skinless. Thou hast sought and not found. Thou shalt be found. But thou shalt lose. Go from me now, Sên and half-Sên. Come not again. Because of the cup you must drink, a cup I have drained, because of a love that has wrapped you, because of the love you return, love not given by woman, love not given to woman, you, white Sên, I will not curse. You go to woe. Go in peace. But come not again.”
The darkness passed. The gold on the floor was yellow again. Kow Lôk huddled down on her mat and crouched there with a crackled gurgle that might have been pain or mirth or both, or only taunting rage. Sên Toon went at once, but Ruben lingered a moment looking once more intently at the small poor vase.
He would come here again, he resolved, as he followed Toon down the burnished crooked path and out of the unguarded gate.
The Sêns did not speak or look back until they reached the loquat trees. There Ruben paused, and they both turned and gazed musingly at the nourish-old-age of strange Kow Lôk.
In his secret heart Sên Toon felt that they had seen a miracle. Even now he did not believe that the woman was a witch, but she had convinced him that she had barter with the spirits of the underworld. He never had doubted—few Chinese do—that there were spirits that would come back to earth and that wrought there. If most educated Chinese are agnostic, the majority of all Chinese are spiritualistic.
Sên Ruben believed that they had seen trickery, sleight of hand and human frenzy. But the woman appealed to him; he would see her again, and go to her alone.
They did not speak of her again until they had made their way half through the forest of walnut trees.
“You promised me her story.”
“Kow Lôk was born in Shen-si; her father was a boatman, one of the poorest. He broke some law, got deep in some questionable embroilment; I never knew just what. The man was tight-lipped, and his wife and children were too ignorant to tell, or dared not. Probably the wife herself did not know the truth; certainly the children were too young to know. They fled to Ho-nan, found their way and made it somehow. For years they were beggars by our waysides, but they were frugal. Little by little they got work: errands to run, odd fragments of toil to do. They attached themselves to no one, none to them; but at last they established themselves near a tsa hsing village; little by little by the slow growth of industrial companionships they grew in friendly touch with the villagers though never of them. The girl-child, growing to womanhood, grew inordinately beautiful. ‘Peach-blossom’ they called her. Our old men have told me that her loveliness might have gained her purchase into many a mandarin’s harem. But the old waterman her father lacked the wit to negotiate with a mei jên to move in it. He was old and broken—homesick perhaps—and his wife died. She—the girl—was working at the edge of a paddy bed one day when Kow Li saw her—”
Sên Ruben did not start, was scarcely surprised; almost he had sensed it. And the vase had whispered it. Yes; he would see Kow Lôk again.
“—he was a comely stripling, I have heard, already marked in Sên Ya Tin’s mind, for the service of her favorite grandson, your honorable father, destined King-lo’s body servant, if he proved worthy. In truth Kow Li the peasant boy had been Lord Sên King-lo’s servant since first they two had toddled about under our queen-one’s wise watchful eye. Li greeted her, Lôk answered. It grew. Often they met; at day by open accident, at night by stealth and unobserved. It flared—the love between them. Kow Li’s father had consented. The girl’s father made no objection. Nothing stood between the marriage but the necessary formalities of betrothal and the consent of our old queen-one. No one knew how often they met, and no one cared. The peasant girls, who must toil while they still smell of their mothers’ milk until they are coffined, cannot have the seclusion of the courtyard maidens. Scarcely a peasant man who saw Lôk but would have taken her to wife, to be his number-two, if already he had a number-one; scarcely a sash-wearer but would have been willing to buy her for his slave girl. But Lôk scowled at them all, and her father was too lazy and decrepit to force her. She had but one love in her being, and she had given it to Kow Li. Kow Li gave her love and longing, but he loved also one other, Sên King-lo his master; loved his young lord intensely. Many moons went. The girl had no dowry; Kow Li was well-waged, but, as is our custom, Li’s father pouched Li’s pay-cash and was ill-stomached to return it for the big bridal expenses without which all the Kow kindred would have lost face forever. At last Kow Li, aching with waiting, being in attendance on our old queen-one, threw himself at her footstool and with his face on her carpet, prayed that he might speak; poured out his story; begged for advice.
“Sên Ya Tin was furious—but she strangled the outgoing of her rage. She had intended that Li should not take in marriage for years yet: she wished from him undivided service—a doting bridegroom could not give it. But she was just and she had wisdom, two qualities so rarely woman’s that perhaps it was that that welded her power, made her sovereign here. In her wisdom she knew that unwilling service is poor service. Sên Ya Tin wished none such for Sên King-lo. And her heart—oddly kind at times—told her that Kow Li had earned no punishment for listening to the clamor his hot heart made between his ribs. She told him what she wished and had planned for him. Next moon Lord Sên King-lo journeyed far, would be long away, in the Whites’ strange and distant country. Would he, Kow Li, go with him his servant, never to leave or fail him? Or would he stay behind in their homeland—and wed with Peach Blossom? Freely she gave him his choice, commanded him to take it freely. If he chose to go with his lord-one, his exile would be long and painful, and his service must be lifelong, and for many years wifeless. If he stayed she herself would dower the girl-one suitably and their marriage should lack nothing, neither bride-cakes nor fire-crackers. Kow Li chose instantly. As he came from our queen-one’s presence he was weeping. Ere the next moon was ripe he went to England with his lord—your father; went without seeing Peach Blossom. He made the lesser sacrifice, I doubt not; he never faltered in it. But he lacked the courage to see Lôk before he went.”
“Did he never see her again?”
“I am not sure, Sên Ruben. When your father and your honorable mother, whom Sên Ya Tin loved, journeyed to Ho-nan, Kow Li came not with them. He was left in your baby service in England. Before his marriage once Sên King-lo came here, and his servant Kow Li with him. If Kow Li saw Kow Lôk then (she was Kow Lôk then) no person saw or learned it. Whatever it was to Peach Blossom, to Kow Li it was final. Never in his letters to his kinsmen has he asked of her, Kow Sin has told me.”
“And the girl, when he had gone?”
“They rushed her marriage through. By trickery or by force, I know not which, they wedded her to another Kow—a widowman who needed a care-one for his children. Ya Tin believed that sudden wifehood, the glitter of bridal, the dignity of being a headman’s number-one would out-wipe the girl’s young infatuation soonest. And so, the women in our courtyards tell me, it proves times eleven out of times twelve. This time it did not. Kow Lôk loathed her husband and shrieked it daytime and night-time. She bore him no child. Not all women give birth. Or perhaps in that, as in most else, her will proved stronger than his. To his children she never was unkind, and at his death, many years ago—her married life was brief—they would have kept her with them and tended her honorably; but Kow Lôk scorned it. It was her suggestion that they divide their father’s land and goods immediately, as with her consent they could, instead of keeping all intact and sharing dwelling-house, labor and earnings, good luck and ill, until she, their legal mother, died. It suited them right well to divide their patrimony at once, for they had clashing inclinations; already two were wedded and between their wives there was no sweetness. Sooner than it often takes to accomplish such arrangements in China, it all was settled and Kow Lôk was in possession of her yang-lao-ti; she chose it herself. She would have no other.”
Sên Ruben flushed with shame. He had worked so hard to learn, had so loved it, and Kow Li had so labored to teach him. But the ways of China garnered but scantily would fill endless tomes. He did not know what yang-lao-ti was. And he was ashamed to own that he did not.
Perhaps Sên Toon saw the question that had flickered in his cousin’s eye. “Nourish-old-age seems to me an admirable custom. It makes parents too old to work, too old to guide the industry of their children and grandchildren, secure from want and bankruptcy. It enables adult men to work and to think, decide for themselves before their vigor and interest have lost their prime and edge; they are no longer pensioners upon their parents’ bounty, and past-work parents are no longer pensioners upon their child-ones’ industry. It gives age ease and security, and it gives child-ones in their prime incentive and independence, as much independence as a Chinese can have while either of his parents lives. It is not for the girdle-wearers or for the rich, of course, but it is the occasional practice of those who must plant and reap their rice before they eat it; and they often find it a boon—both the younger and the aged—and to the younger it always is an incentive.”
“She chose a lovely yang-lao-ti, a fruitful and prosperous ‘nourish-old-age,’” Sên Ruben said.
“On the contrary. When Kow Lôk said that she would have that portion of the Kow-land or none, it was a barren nothing. There was neither tree nor hut on it. In their love-trysts Kow Li and she had been in the habit of meeting there, and, to give some color of industry to their companionship in so secluded a spot, they had been in the habit of sticking peach-stones in the ground, little thinking that planted so roughly the stones ever would shoot, nor caring if they did or not. Kow Lôk chose her nourish-old-age for remembrance, I think; No Fee—the only Sên the old crone does not hate and revile—asserts it. With her own hands, almost unaided, the widow-one built her tiny hut and thatched it. She was tremendously strong in those days. She planted her bamboo fence. Scarcely had she made her home there, where we saw her to-day, before tiny peach-slips pricked through the ground—through some miracle of gardening and luck, we have believed—through the intervention of the spirits that serve her, the babies believe. Who shall say? Not I, after what we two have seen to-day, Sên Ruben. However, it has come; her orchard has thriven beyond the memory of known husbandry. And in all China no other peach fruit is so sweet and spiced as hers. Yet hers the birds of the air never peck.”
Again they took their way in silence.
Sên Toon was thinking bitterly of a bride that was coming to him from Hu Peh—starting even now.
Sên Ruben was thinking deeply of Kow Li and of Kow Li’s lifelong fealty, passing the fealty of woman, of Kow Li’s fealty to Sên King-lo.