CHAPTER XXXIX
Sên Ruben’s first move was to pay court to C’hi Ng Yelü, the father of C’hi Yamei, and to win his favor if he could. It is not much use to love a Chinese girl unless you can gain her father’s approval. Though he had speech with her freely, and companionship, Sên Ruben realized almost at once that her slight Westernism was but a garment and no part of the lady Yamei; that at core she was as Chinese as he; more deeply Chinese than Sên No Fee. She had called him “Mr. Sên,” offered him her hand, spoken to him in English, in exquisite courtesy to a somewhat solitary and presumably homesick stranger in a strange land—an Englishman alone in China, alone in a place and among a people so sharply different from his own that it was incredible that he was not both miserable and awkward. It was her way of offering him China’s best and kindest hospitality that had caused her to meet him on English social terms.
He knew that no suitor would appeal to her who approached her except through her father and with C’hi Ng Yelü’s approval. Only after marriage could any lover woo C’hi Yamei.
But though courtly, genial C’hi Ng Yelü—on the social surface as cosmopolitan as the daughter—met Sên Ruben’s respectful advances cordially, Ruben’s design of ingratiation was frustrated.
The “bonfires,” as C’hian had called them, of civil broil flared up anew, burst into mightier flames and spread. It looked as if the great war had come. And all the household spoke of little else, even Sên C’hian Fan who indeed, Ruben knew, had thought less lightly of the “bonfires” than he had chosen to own to bellicose but decrepit Jo Hiêsen.
In truth both Sên C’hian Fan’s apparent apathy, and his quite sincere desire to keep out of it all, were more a distrust of all the warring factions, dislike and contempt of their leaders, than an altogether slight estimate of the seriousness of China’s recurrent and present upheaval. Why fight for any side when all were corrupt?
But, still as undecided as he had been which of all the unworthy leaders (with the just possible exception of Feng Yu-hsiang) was the least bad, the least traitor to the ultimate general welfare of China and her security among the nations, Sên C’hian Fan was sorely troubled now. Each day some runner, or some camp straggler, brought news to the Sên gates that added to C’hian’s anxiety without in any way lessening his perplexity.
C’hi Ng Yelü, with a wider outlook, because of his long years of travel and of Western sojourn, shared both Sên’s perturbation and his indecision. C’hi Ng Yelü, not yet an old man, was as ready to fight as the next, and as indifferent to death as almost every Chinese man is, but he had no stomach to enroll himself under any leadership he despised—and he saw no other.
Long and low were the counsels that Sên C’hian and C’hi Ng Yelü took together, all the other adult Sên men gathered with them, listening to them eagerly, contributing now and then something to the consultation of the two headmen—all the adult Sên men but Jo Hiêsen and Sên Ruben.
They two were excluded—Jo Hiêsen not suspecting that he was, Ruben rather more than suspecting it.
By C’hian Fan’s order, all the war news—most of it more rumor than true news—was minimized to Sên Jo Hiêsen, and when Jo Hiêsen came upon them as they consulted and argued earnestly together they swung their talk to lighter, sunnier themes; not difficult to do in a Ho-nan August where every patch of the great estate was a picture, every vista, every flower, every concerted bird-trilling a book of love songs, a thesis for philosophy. C’hian Fan had no mind that the dear old graybeard should throw his life away upon the field of unworthy battle. Sên C’hian loved the fierce, half-palsied dotard, and moreover it would be a great family calamity were the old man’s body lost and not found—and the burial and bewailing, which alone could secure him immunity from Hell and entrance into Heaven, be so made impossible. Then the sons and grandsons of Sên Jo Hiêsen would be deprived of the direct ancestor to worship that is every Chinese’s most sacred right—even more important, if that is conceivably possible, than male progeny to bewail and worship them in their turn.
Sên C’hian Fan’s reluctance that Sên Ruben should become actually embroiled in the present fighting—fortunately none too near Sênland—was less uninvolved, perhaps less clear in his own mind.
Sên C’hian Fan had thought ill and bitterly of Sên King-lo’s marriage. And when she had been among them here C’hian Fan had formed none too high an opinion of Sên Ruby. He had read her dislike of China, her disgust at Sên ways, her pity of Sên women, close as Mrs. Sên had thought that she veiled it from her husband’s kindred, and Sên C’hian Fan had disliked her for it. He had deemed Sên Ya Tin over indulgent of the white woman whom Sên King-lo had thrust among them; the only criticism of mighty Sên Ya Tin that C’hian Fan ever had allowed him. And never had he voiced it, not even to his favorite wife; though the favorite wives in China hear all their lords’ secrets—as do favorite wives in the Occident. Yet—C’hian Fan thought of widowed Sên Ruby waiting for her son to return to her, and since the woman, despite her old dislike of Ho-nan, had let Ruben come to them, the Sên felt in honor bound to her that no damage should come to her son so entrusted to them. Sên Ruby herself had written to him, asking him to receive and welcome Sên Ruben. Of course, the Western woman loved her son-one passionately. It could not occur to Sên C’hian Fan that there was a mother anywhere that did not dote upon her son and hold him always in her tenderness; it does not happen in China.
The Pepper Month (Poppy Month is its other name) came nearer and nearer—already Ruben planned to go, C’hian feared. C’hian was loath to let him go, but if he went, let him go as he had come to them, whole of skin and with all his honorable legs and arms and eyes and ears still with him. Moreover, since the foolish foreign fashion of C’hi Ng Yelü, and Ruben allowed it, it greatly convenienced C’hian Fan that Sên Ruben should see that C’hi Yamei their girl guest-one was not dull or uncompanioned, and took not peril in the wilder woodlands, near the deep and sudden gorges. Roam them she would, and headstrong No Fee with her. It was evident that C’hi Yamei preferred the outer gardens and the wilder reaches beyond them to the harem courtyards. C’hian Fan sighed heavily to see girlhood so degenerated, but the risk was C’hi’s, not his, and it was not for him to chide or remonstrate with a guest who was also his equal, concerning any detail of the other’s harem discipline. No daughter of Sên C’hian Fan’s could take license of liberty as C’hi’s girl-one did, but C’hi allowed it cheerfully, and his host’s part was blind-eyed silence. Nor was C’hian sorry to have No Fee’s greedy ears no nearer their place of frequent serious conference than the gold-fish lake, the cypress hill, the distant fields of fireweed. Where C’hi Yamei went No Fee would follow. It was a safety, though a terrible infringement, that Sên Ruben obligingly went with them. On the whole it convenienced Sên C’hian Fan as much as it displeased him.
It did not inconvenience Sên Ruben.
And among the globe flowers and the pungent velvet roses, the peonies and the willows, a tiny seed sown on Piccadilly throve and grew like the magic fruit trees of on-High and made a Ho-nan homestead a mystic orchard of the golden peaches of immortality, where the first parent turquoise-birds of all that jewel-feathered tribe mated in the sacred peach-trees.
Truly Sên Ruben found it Heaven; too deep in love now to condemn C’hi Ng Yelü for that lord-one’s most un-Chinese laxity.
C’hi Yamei walked among the fragrant-blossomed, fruiting peach-trees sedately; gracious, maidenly and shyly responsive.
No Fee ran and danced apart, giggling like a laughing brooklet for the most part; and Sên Ruben and C’hi Yamei, waiting for her patiently, wiled the waiting with talk. They talked quietly together and forbore to chide her for how long she had kept them when she danced romping back to them.
They talked of flowers and sunrise, of running water and waving reeds—of the rock-crusted mountains, of anemones and red poppies, of the wine-cup of Li Po, of the silks of Hsü Hsi, of the story of the noble Lady of Si-ling, of the lamps-of-mercy that twinkled safety on the mountain passes—talked together of the things that mean most, are dearest and nearest, to the Chinese.
Yamei, speaking softly, told Sên Ruben of her mother who had gone on-High years ago.
Ruben told C’hi Yamei of his mother who was a white rose.
Ruben told her of his sister Sên Ivy, than whom but one maid was lovelier.
“Why when first you said words to me spoke you them in English?” he asked her suddenly one day while they waited for No Fee.
He knew now why she had, but he asked to hear how she would tell it—if she told it.
She did not tell it, but her answer was not untruthful.
“I did not know that you spoke Chinese, Sên Ruben. No one had told me so. No one had told me of you at all, except Sên No Fee—do you think she ever is coming?—and she prattled of you so that the deafness of my ears shut out the sense of most she said—if it had sense.”
“That is improbable,” Sên Ruben remarked gravely.
“It is improbable,” C’hi Yamei agreed as gravely.
“But I wore the garments of our people. Would a man do that who did not speak our tongue? Or one who did not prefer to use it?”
“But that follows not, Sên Ruben. In courtesy to your kinsmen to whom you made your visit it might have been that you did that—and a little for your own convenience; not to be the raree-show in a place where never has been seen the dress of Europe, as Chinese gentlemen now wear English tailoreds in Westminster and on the Strand. It is easier to put on a Chinese brocade and girdle than it is to speak and to understand Chinese!”
“It is the tongue I love; the tongue of my father’s fathers!”
“That I know now, Sên Ruben; but I did not know it then.—Yah! Listen, you; the pigeons are coming home. Why do they? I wonder why it is that they do. It is not the fall of the dew yet, scarcely the mid-time of the Hour of the Monkey, and rarely do they come till the Hour of the Hen is passing. But it is they. I hear the music of the silver whistles under their tails as they fly!”
Yamei was right; in a moment Sên Ruben too heard the soft fluting of the tiny musical instruments that the harem pet-flock wore; another moment and the pretty iridescent “feather-ones” came whirring over the willow trees and bloom-clotted mock-oranges.
Sên Ruben called them with a fluted “coo” not unlike theirs at mating-time, glad to call them and a little proud that C’hi Yamei should know that he had that Chinese knack. One little bird settled itself confidently on his outheld hand, and then another drifted down on to Yamei’s shoulder, considered the girl gravely with its little beads of red-rimmed eyes, saw her cheek so peach-like that it pecked softly at the lovely warm-tinted human fruit, pecked so tenderly with its tender beak that the girl’s exquisite face felt it a caress—which in part it was.
C’hi Yamei cuddled it to her face, and it stayed so a moment before it flew away; the bird on Sên Ruben’s palm rose to it in the air and they followed the homing flock across the field of wild white roses, flying towards their cotes on the Heaven’s-wall of the harem courtyard.
“Would you like to be a bird, Sên Ruben?”
“Nay, C’hi Yamei,” Ruben answered, “I like best that I am a man, and where I am.”
Perhaps he meant in China, perhaps he meant in Ho-nan, in Sênland, perhaps he meant here with the meadow-flowers and trees abloom—with her.
Perhaps C’hi Yamei knew which of these it was that Sên Ruben meant.
No more than such was most of their talk.
But it grew; and Ruben knew that what had been a boyish dream—the dream of a boy, homesick for a home he never had seen, caught, enmeshed by the loveliness of an unknown face exquisitely painted on a canvas—had grown the paramount thing in the soul of a man, the one great need of a man’s life.
Did she answer him at all?
Sên Ruben had no idea.