CHAPTER XXXVII
Early as the Chinese rise always, the Sêns were up well in advance of that the next day.
Guests of importance were coming.
And one of the two finest of all Sên Pling’s and Sên Yolu-sun’s Burmese fighting fish was going to kill the other.
Two events of such moment electrified the never slothful household. Long before the Hour of the Hare there was more bustle and industry in the big house-core of Sênland than had been since Wash-the-Cats.
No Fee pelted from k’o-tang to courtyard, from courtyard to terrace, clambered up into one of the great wall’s thirty watch-towers hours before breakfast rice-time, and pelted back again giggling, half crying, her little gold earrings (that every Chinese woman wears) almost dancing out of her ears.
Sên Yolu-sun and Sên Pling hung over their two favorite fighting fish anxiously. All the other Sên men—masters and servants—were gathered in groups betting gravely but eagerly on the fray’s result. Many of the women and children had “something on” too; and Sên Ruben—privileged to go where he would, do what he would here—filled a wallet with pressed duck and cakes of spiced meal and salted nuts that La-yuên provided him with, tucked a book in his sleeve, and sauntered off unobtrusively to spend most of the day in the camphor grove and to explore a gulch far afield where the wild grapes—ripe now—grew sweetest and the fireweed grew reddest and highest.
He would not see one small demented fish slaughter another, and probably die of its own wounds in agony soon after it had; and he would not meet the C’his until it was no longer avoidable—particularly Miss C’hi. Meet her, he knew that he must, for No Fee had made it abundantly clear that C’hi Yamei would not confine herself to the “flowery” precincts; but he chose to postpone, and proposed to curtail as far as he might, his acquaintance with the emancipated and greatly independent lion-hearted lady. Hers was a type he disliked in English women; in Chinese women he felt it nothing short of an abomination, a desecration of all that had made Chinese womanhood loveliest and China strongest and most admirable and desirable—the country of countries, the race of all peoples.
Out through the first hinted dawning Sên Ruben took his quiet way, soaking his padded embroidered shoes in the heavy dew-drench of the long fragrant grasses. There was mist and moisture everywhere. Festoons and threads of mist hung from the tree branches, the convolvulus kept her lovely flower-cups still twisted close in their night-time spirals; the violets still slept on their green leaf beds. Ten thousand roses slept on bush, wall and trellis, the clover gave out its fragrance a little coldly, the ferns looked chill. Fantastic human-shaped twisted trees—prayer trees, oak trees and gigantic hoary laurels—looked like deformed and desolate ghosts; the tiger lilies showed somber in the gloom-gloam of before dawn; the turquoise bird still hid under the warm shelter of the castor-bean’s broad thick leaves. It was no longer night—it was not yet day. The stillness was exquisite—almost a music in its peace and unbroken harmony.
Sên Ruben trod softly as he went, reverencing the chastity of the young unspoiled day’s virginity.
He had thought the star-riven night, when the great sky-lantern hung down a ball of living gold and a nightingale broke its heart in song, the loveliest hours in China’s daily cycle of time. Incomparably this was lovelier; Earth bathed in purity—Heaven just apeep through its gray purdah of Earth’s sleep-time; peace and silence everywhere.
“Hush!” Heaven commanded. And the world obeyed in utter silence, silence that heard and worshiped but scarcely breathed while China slept pillowed on Nature, a child sleeping on the bosom of its mother.
A tender shaft of glory slit through the darkness.
Sunrise saluted Ho-nan.
And Sên Ruben went his noiseless way where often his father had in his carefree boyhood. Sên Ruben loved it as young Sên King-lo had.
And Sên Ruben blessed and thanked his mother that he was Chinese—that he went here among the sunrise-dappled woodlands, across the fragrant brook-ribboned meadows by birthright.
Sên Ruben kept his tryst with Nature and his kinsmen at the homestead gathered to the fish fight, jesting and betting; and the women, busied in the great house in elaborate preparations for the honored guest that had approached the great gate before dawn, waited while they toiled—waited to hear whether Sên Yolu-sun’s fish had killed Sên Pling’s or Sên Pling’s had killed Sên Yolu-sun’s.
Early as it was the lord C’hi and his daughter had come. And when they had taken the sweet hot wine and salted rice of honorable welcome, Chi Ng Yelü strolled with Sên C’hian Fan towards the amber pool at the edge of the woodland, and old Sên Jo tottered along beside them, anxious to do so noble a guest all honor, and bloodthirstily keen to see the fish fight.
It was a pretty fight; granted! It was a pretty fight the little fish put up—if human eyes that marked it had no compassion.
It was a lovely arena; the amber-edged alabaster pool of limpid, dimpled water, ringed by hundreds of anxious, excited Chinese faces, hundreds of men and boys, blue-clad and brocade-clad figures, leaning over the veined-marble edges that circled the pool—gesticulating, betting. They were betting on the “first blood,” betting on how long both the combatants would be game, betting on how long the victor would survive the vanquished, betting, of course, on which would win—betting on everything that would be, might be, or could be construed to be detail or adjunct of the fight. To a unit their excitement was tense and seething, to a unit they were courteous and good-natured. It was fine fun—the playtime of the Sêns—and, if they took it brutally, they also took it finely and lightly.
Behind the jubilant human throng stood a loose wall of ancient trees—oak, soap, laurel, camphor, giant willow trees, delicate bamboos.
The day-star was near to its rising.
“Yah! Yah!” they whispered hoarsely.
The fish were coming, each carried carefully in his tub of cedar.
Plunk! Yolu-sun’s “Shark” was in the pool.
Plunk! Plunk! Pling’s “Javelin” too was in the arena.
How soon would they sense each other! How many heartbeats before they dashed to combat?—two little gray fish, no longer than a man’s hand, inert, uninteresting and uninterested.
There was awesome silence.
No Fee peeping from her hollow tree-trunk held her breath lest the others hear it; a little frightened by the utter silence.
Sss-s-ez! Javelin was swelling!
He had seen his foe, or smelt him.
Shark moved a tiny fin.
Then they darted.
Gray? Inert? Not now.
They were intensely colored—red, orange, hot violets and pulsing greens. They were iridescent—swelling larger and larger. Tiny threads of flame spurted from their crimsoning distorted bellies.
The fighting fish locked, each gripping with his own the other’s jaws.
Locked so, and teeth pierced—disputing every iota of the way—they dragged each other back and forth half across the pretty placid pool.
They were fighting fiercely. There would be no quarter.
Blood trickles trailed them. These little Burmese fighting fish were not “white blooded.”
No Fee’s hands were icy, flaming red patched her face, her little mouth was trembling.
Old Jo Hiêsen fumbled in his pouch, found an opium pellet and mouthed it; else his excitement must have mastered his manners, caused him to cry out—like a coolie. Several of them—the blue-clad “babies”—were gasping noisily.
Back and forth, up and down, and their blood-trails with them, the struggling fish pulled and pushed.
They leapt far above the water. One of Shark’s fins hung by a thread. Javelin’s bursted belly belched blood and entrails. But their jaws held.
Under the other, then above him, in turn; turn and turn about they waged their blistering battle mercilessly, unfalteringly.
They fought as if each knew that this first fight would be his last, and had set his fish soul to die the victor.
Suddenly they threw each other off.
Shark turned and darted away—his torn fin dragging red and helpless beside him.
Javelin darted after, panting and exultant.
But the Shark was only feinting. He underturned as the other reached him, and like a sharp knife a pointed, shark-like nose had ripped the Javelin open—open wide from mouth to tail.
The fight was over.
Javelin floated dead and dismembered on the scale-strewn pool of battle.
A little frightened Chinese girl was sickening in the hollow soap-tree.
The servitors were babbling wildly. The Sêns were smiling. It had been a good fight, and Sên Pling was congratulating Sên Yolu warmly as they turned away laughing together.
A coolie leaned over the marble side, netted up the dead fish, and tossed it contemptuously into the fail-bucket—a dilapidated old bamboo bucket—and padded off towards the fertilizer sheds.
With ceremony and adjurations of respect and praise another servant, higher-ranked, finer-clad, netted up the dying victor gently and slid it into the lacquered honorable bucket-of-victory. Scores followed the Shark’s triumphant funeral progress. They carried him to the sound of brazen music and the screech and hiss of many crackers. And they would give the very honorable Shark a victor’s grave in a violet-bed. He had earned it, and his honorable remains would be of stimulative service to the fragrant violets.
Sên No Fee did not look towards the disfigured water as she slid out of the old soap-tree—she perforce the last to go—and slipped back to the kuei.
The day-star leapt above the crinkling horizon, and the delicate bamboos swayed joyously in the yellow sunlight.
One bet and another—all told—two hundred thousand yuan had changed pouches since two small fish had met in battle. But that was not much matter; great fun but no catastrophe, for in the essential sense it was one common purse in Sênland. Some of them were poor, some were rich, but there was not a Sên in Ho-nan whose need would not be the give-hour of all the others—succor given gladly, given and taken as a matter of course; as much a birthright to receive as to give, and no less honorable. Nepotism is a sinew of China.
All of which Sên Ruben missed—perhaps weakly, since he had come across the world to see China as she was.
But his day of solitude had laved him, and the tender peace of the early day still lay soft on his face as towards the sunset hour he rose up from where he had been kneeling before the tomb of Sên Ya Tin, and made his slow quiet way to the great dwelling house.
The old Sên graveyard, for all its dignity and monumental pomp, was a spot of almost riotous beauty. Ruben often went there to pray and to rejoice. And he never was there without thinking of the old Surrey churchyard where his father’s coffin lay, and wishing that he might win his mother’s willingness that at her death he might bring her coffin and Sên King-lo’s to Ho-nan and give them Chinese burial here near Ya Tin’s tomb in the graveyard of the Sêns. That later when he too went on-High, not divided from them—the mother he adored, the father he could not remember—his sons would put his coffin beside the graves of his father and mother and of Sên Ya Tin the Old-one.
Unless perhaps that he might find and win the maiden he dreamed of always, there was no other thing which Sên Ruben so desired.
Might it ever be? He wondered.
For he knew that he would not urge it. It was not his mother’s consent he longed for, but her willingness.
Sên Ruben was humming an old English love-tune as he came out of the Sên tomb-garden, and turned through the matted bamboos towards the sunset where the great house sprawled like a resting dragon skinned in jewels.
Ah! Some one was coming towards him. His day of solitude was ended—a little sooner than he had wished, a little sooner than he had intended.
“Who the devil!” Ruben muttered it in English. He had not learned to think in Chinese in moments of young annoyance yet.
It was not No Fee, come to find him, and make her peace with him for her long day’s desertion. This woman was taller than No Fee, and for all its easy suppleness her gait was graver. It was a Chinese woman—palpably and naturally; for what Western woman save Sên Ruby ever had been admitted into Sênland? But not one of his kinswomen, he thought—though of that he could not be sure until they were nearer—and the sunset blazing through the lace-like bamboos blinded his eyes a little.
He could not escape her unless he turned abruptly and noticeably and went back as he had come; the stout-stemmed bamboos grew too close on either side of the narrow path, little wider or more clearly marked than a goat’s track.
No matter. His free time was over now, and he was not afraid of a strange woman, if she was not of him.
She did not seem to be.
Whoever she was she came on confidently, almost as if she chose to meet him.
Sên Ruben wondered how they were going to pass each other—it would be a tight squeeze! And tight squeezes of that sort were not countenanced in China.
The girl came on, neither quicker nor more slowly.
Ruben almost halted, preparing to crush himself as flat as he could against the wall of notched bamboo trunks that looked so delicate but that he knew were, at their low-down girth, so unyielding.
If he had been quite sure that this was not one of his many kinswomen, with all of whom he was on terms of easy speech, he would have glued his eyes elsewhere as she came upon him. But he was not sure, and did not risk seeming unwilling to speak to a kinswoman who would expect it, odd as it was for any one of them—except wild, spoilt No Fee—to be so far from the house-place, and unveiled and unattended.
And Ruben Sên looked full into the face of his lady of the picture.