HOMING
But the homeward journey was even more delightful than the journey
coming had been. The mandarin was very good to the boy, even a little
kinder than his wont, watching him narrowly with a gentle smile
glinting in the narrow old eyes.
The air was pungent with the smells of coming autumn. In the wayside
orchards the trees bent with ripening fruit and were heavy with thick
harvest of glistening and prickly-sheathed nuts.
There were still strawberries for the gathering, and the raspberries
and blackberries were ripe. The wayside was flushed with great waxen
pink begonia flowers and fringed by a thousand ferns. The air was sweet
and succulent for miles from the blossoms of the orange trees, and on
the same trees the great gold globes hung ripe. And the feathery bamboo
was everywhere--the fairest thing that grows in Asia.
They passed groups of girls gathering the precious deposit of insect
wax off the camellia trees--blue-clad, sunburnt girls, singing as they
worked.
Once--for a great lark, and just to see what such common places were
really like--Wu Li Chang and Muir had tea at an inn, a three-roofed
peaked thing built astride the road. The mandarin did not join them,
but stayed to pray at a wayside shrine dedicated to Lingwun--the soul.
One day the three friends (for they were deeply that) saw the great
Sie’tu, the Buddhist thanksgiving-to-the-earth service, in a great
straggling monastery that twisted about a mountain’s snowcovered
crest, and blinked and twinkled like some monster thing of life and
electricity, for its dozen tent-shaped, curling roofs were of beaten
brass.
The Scot got a deal of human sight-seeing out of that return
journeying. But it was its silent pictures and its wide solitudes that
the boy, child though he was, liked best. They moved on homewards
through a pulsing sea of flowers and fruit and ripening grain, of
song and light and warmth and vivid color, but above them towered the
everlasting hills, imperial as China herself, white, cold, snow-wrapped.
The soul of China pulsed and flushed at their feet; the soul of China
watched them from her far height: China, Titan, mighty, insolent, older
than history; China, lovely, laughing, coquetting with her babbling
brooks, playing--like the child she is--with her little wild flowers.
There was a tang of autumn in the air, and the cherries were growing
very ripe.
Often at night they lit a fire of brush beside their wayside camp,
and sitting in its glow the old man talked long and earnestly to the
child. To much of their talk Muir listened, smoking his sweet cob in
silence. Some of it was intimate even from his trusted hearing. Nothing
was said of the voyage to England or of the years to be lived out
there. It had been said for the most already, and almost the subject
was taboo. But of the home-coming to follow and the long years to be
lived at home the old man said much. And most of all he talked to the
boy of--women. Again and again he told him, as he often had even from
his cradle-days, of the women of their clan. There are several great
families in China noted above all else for their women, and the Wu
family was the most notable of all.
Most of the ladies Wu had been beautiful. Many of them had been great,
wise, gifted, scholarly. Their paifangs speckled the home provinces.
One had been espoused by an Emperor and had borne his more illustrious
Emperor-son. All had been virtuous. All had been loved and obeyed. To
treat their women well was an instinct with the Wus; to be proud of
them an inheritance and a tradition.
Wu Li Chang just remembered his own mother, and his father’s grief at
her death. The father had died before he had laid aside the coarse
white hempen garments of grief that he had worn for her. The epidemic
of smallpox that had pitted the mandarin’s face for a second time had
killed the only son--the father of this one child.
A great-great-aunt of the mandarin had been a noted mathematician.
Another ancestress had invented an astronomical instrument still used
in the great observatory at Pekin. On the distaff side the old man and
the boy could prove descent from both the two great sages--descent in
the male line from whom alone gives hereditary and titled nobility
in China, except in such rare, Emperor-bestowed instances as that of
Prince Kung. Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang were descended through their
mothers from Confucius and from Mencius. One foremother of theirs had
written a book that still ranked high in Chinese classics, and one had
worn the smallest shoes in all the eighteen provinces.
They had cause to be proud of their women, and to boast it intimately
from generation to generation.
Li--perhaps in compliment for the tortoise--had given his son-in-law
a tame trained bear and a skilled juggler, and Mrs. Li had presented
Wu Ching Yu with two of her husband’s choicest concubines. The
older mandarin had graciously appointed them attendants upon his
granddaughter and to stay with her in Pekin. But the bear and the
juggler were traveling with the home-returning Wus; and when the
inevitable chess-board and its jeweled chessmen and the flagons of hot
spiced wine were laid between Muir and the mandarin, Bruin--Kung Fo
Lo was his name--danced and pranced in the firelight for the boy, who
clapped his hands and shook with laughter; the heart of a man-child
cannot be for ever sad for a baby-girl, known but two months and not
able to crawl yet. But Wu Li Chang did not forget Wu Lu. He often
wished that she might have come with them. He’d willingly have traded
the dancing bear for her, with the juggler thrown in (he had two better
jugglers at home); and for permission to forego the journey to Europe
he would have given everything he had: his favorite Kweichow pony (a
dwarfed survival from the fleet white Arabs that the Turkish horde
of Genghis Khan brought into China), his best robes, the little gold
pagoda that was his very own, everything except his cue, his ancestral
tablets, and his grandfather’s love and approval--yes, everything, even
his wife.