AT RICE
James Muir was waiting for them in the room where their meal was
served. There were but two meals in that household--breakfast and
dinner--or rather but two for the mandarin and those who shared his
rice; the servants ate three times a day, such few of them as ate in
the house at all. But there was a fine mastery of the art of dining, as
well as a good deal of clockwork, in the old Chinese’s constitution;
and Muir, at liberty to command food when and where he would, found it
convenient and entertaining to eat with his pupil and his host.
For three years the young Scot had held, and filled admirably, a chair
in the University of Pekin. The post had been well paid, and he had
enjoyed it hugely, and the Pekin background of life no less; but old Wu
had lured him from it with a salary four times as generous, and with
an opportunity to study China and Chinese life from the inside such as
probably no Briton had had before, and far more complete and intimate
than the no mean opportunity afforded by his professorship in the
capital.
Chinese to the core and Chinese to the remotest tip of his longest
spiral-twisted and silver-shielded fingernail, Wu Ching Yu, astute and
contemplative even beyond his peers, searching the future anxiously saw
strange things ahead of this native land of his burning love, and he
had boldly mapped out an unique education for his grandson.
Europe was coming into China. It was too late to prevent that now; Wu
Ching Yu doubted if it had not always been too late. Well, what would
be would be; Confucius had said so. Europe was coming into China, and
Wu Li Chang, his grandson, should meet it at an advantage which other
Chinese were not wise enough to prepare for themselves. Wu Li Chang
should know Europe before Europe came to reap the wealth of Shantung
and Peichihli and to fatten on the golden harvest of four thousand
years of Chinese thrift, frugality, and sagacity. The boy should have
an English education and a facile understanding of English thought and
of English ways.
Quietly, remorselessly, the grandfather had studied the individuals
of the Aryan races already permeating in official and mercantile
trickles into Pekin, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hankow. The Germans
commended themselves to him in much. His Chinese thoroughness liked
their thoroughness. His concentration liked theirs. But they had other
qualities he liked less. The French and the Americans he understood
least, and he somewhat under-estimated both. He liked the Russians;
but he gauged them to be threatened by the future rather than being
themselves seriously threateners of China.
It was the British, he decided deliberately, who most threatened China
and promised her most; they, above all others, were to be dreaded as
foes, desired as friends. He thought that they had staying powers
beyond all other races save his own, honorableness and breeding. He
disliked their manners often, but he liked the quality of their given
word. He suspected that the English would win in the long run in any
contest of peoples to which they set their shoulders and their will:
and it was to England that he determined to send his boy, that there
the child might learn to hold his Chinese own in China in the years to
come, let come to China from the West what would. Cost them both what
it might--and would--of heartache, the boy should go, but he should go
with such equipment, such armor of _savoir faire_ as was possible
or could be made possible. He should learn to speak English, to ride a
horse English fashion, and to use a fork before he went. And so James
Muir was selected and secured as tutor, mentor and general leader to
the little yellow Chinese bear.
Mandarin Wu had met Muir in Pekin, had studied and liked him. And Wu’s
great crony, Li Hung Chang, knew the Scot and respected him. The rest
was easy; for Wu was masterful, diplomatic, and the length of his purse
was almost endless. Muir had lived with the Wus for three years now,
and had known from the first what little Wu had only learned an hour
ago: that the boy was going to England and Oxford.
Not for a moment had the mandarin neglected the Chinese furnituring
and decorating of the boy’s mind. Such a course would have been
unthinkable. Already almost the lad might have been presented at
the great national examination, and very possibly ennobled as one
of the literati, but the mandarin had not thought it necessary. The
boy could recite the Li Ki (the old, old Book of Rites that has had
more influence than any other secular book ever written, and has done
more to make and shape Chinese character and Chinese customs than
have all other books put together) and recite it without mistake or
hesitation; he could write decorous verse, paint swiftly and accurately
the intricate Chinese characters, and he knew his people’s history.
He could wrestle and tilt, and once he had beaten his grandfather at
chess.
He had worked well with Muir, and Muir with him. They liked each
other. And after three years of constant drilling, always followed
industriously and often enthusiastically, the young Chinese had a glib
smattering of European lore, dates, grammar, facts. Europe itself--real
Europe--was a closed book to him, of course. The mandarin understood
that. But a few years in the West would mend all that: and then the
beloved boy should come home, to serve China and to rule his own
destiny.
Between the old Chinese mandarin and the young Scotchman a sincere
friendship had grown--and almost inevitably, for they had so much in
common, and so much mutual respect. Each was honest, manly, and a
gentleman. Each had self-control, generosity, deliberation, taste and
a glowing soul. Three years of daily intercourse, and something of
intimacy, had destroyed completely such slight remaining prejudice as
either had had against the other’s race when they met at Pekin.
Wu the grandfather was never long or far from the side of Wu the
grandson. James Muir had taught one Wu almost as much (though not as
systematically) as he had taught the other. And they had taught him
more than he had taught them: the child unconsciously, the mandarin
with conscious glee. All three had been eager to learn, the men more
eager than the boy; and the teacher who is at home always has a
wide and deep advantage over the teacher who is abroad. Background,
environment, each smallest detail and petty reiteration of daily life,
aid the teacher who instructs in his own country, but impede and thwart
the teacher who instructs aliens in theirs.
Chinese families who live in some state usually eat in the great
hall--the k’o-tang, or guest-hall--of their house, as far as they have
any usual eating place. But more often than not when in residence here
the Wus “dined” (of course, they used for it no such term: it was, as
were all their meals, just “rice”) in the chamber in which the two men
and the child now sat. This house had more than one great hall, and
several rooms larger than this, though it was far from small.
It was a passionate room. It throbbed with color, with perfume, with
flowers, with quaint picked music and with a dozen glows and warmths of
wealth.
High towards the red and sea-green lacquered roof, carved and scrolled
with silver and blue, a balcony of pungent sandal-wood jutted from
the wall. The floor of the balcony was solid, and from it hung three
splendid but delicate lamps, filled with burning attar. The railing of
the balcony was carved with dragons, gods, bamboos and lotus flowers,
and within the railing sat three sing-song girls. They were silent
and motionless until, at a gesture of the master’s hand, the eunuch,
who was their choirmaster and their guardian, spoke a syllable, and
then they began a soft chant to the tinkling accompaniment of their
instruments. One played an ivory lute, one a lacquered flute, the third
cymbals and bells; and the eunuch drew a deeper, more throbbing note
from his chin or student’s lute--five feet long, with seven strings
of silk, its office to soothe man’s soul and drive all evil from his
heart. In the corner farthest from the table squatted, on the mosaic
floor, a life-size figure of the belly-god. He wore many very valuable
rings, an unctuous smirk, a wreath--about his shoulders--of fresh
flowers, and very little else. He was fleshed of priceless majolica,
but his figure would have been the despair of the most ingenious
corset shop in Paris; his abdomen protruded several feet in front of
his knees; his was a masterly embonpoint of glut.
There must have been a hundred big joss-sticks burning in the room--not
the poor, slight things sold in Europe, but Chinese incense at its best
and most pungent.
The mandarin used chop-sticks. The boy and his tutor ate with silver
forks.
The food was delicious, and Muir ate heartily. But the child and the
old man ate little. Both were sick at heart. Five of the mandarin’s
concubines brought in fruit and sweetmeats. The boy took a glacé
persimmon, and smiled at the woman. He knew them all by name (there
were a score or more in the “fragrant apartments”), and he liked most
of them and often played with them. The mandarin paid no heed to
them whatever. Such of their names as he had once known he had quite
forgotten. The old celibate lived for China and for his grandson. But
he kept his Chinese state in China, and always would. And his women
were well clad, well fed, well treated and reasonably happy. And if one
of them died she was replaced, and so was one that took the smallpox
and was disfigured. But one was rarely scolded, and never was one
beaten. Wu Ching Yu rarely remembered their existence. When he did it
bored him. But they were part of his retinue, and it no more occurs to
an important Chinese to discard his retinue than it does to a portly
and decent Scot to discard his kilt in broad daylight on Princes
Street. The one discard would be as indecent as the other. Manners make
men everywhere, and they have no small share in making manhood, in
China as in Edinburgh. They differ in different districts, but, after
all, their difference is but of thinskin depth. It is their observance
that matters: it is vital.
A great snake waddled in and came across the floor--a fat, over-fed,
hideous thing. Muir knew the creature well, and that it was perfectly
tame and harmless, but, for all that, he tucked his feet between the
rungs of his chair. Little Wu flung sweetmeats and bits of sugared
fat pork to the monster, and presently it waddled off again, crawling
fatly, and curled up at the feet of the belly-god, and went to sleep
with its sleek, slimy, wrinkled head under the lea of the god’s wide
paunch.