HEART ACHE
But it was summer again before he went. The mandarin was taken ill soon
on their home-coming, and all through the cold northern winter only
just lived. Death means little to the Chinese, but somehow, for all his
relentlessness of purpose, for all his iron of will, the old man could
not bring himself to part with the child while his megrim was sharp.
With spring he grew better, and when the great tassels of the wistaria
were plump and deeply purpled he sent the boy with his tutor to Hong
Kong.
They took their parting in a room in which they had passed much of
their close and pleasant companionship. James Muir understood that
the old man avoided, both for himself and the lad, the strain of the
parting, long drawn out, that the cross-country journey must have been.
And Muir suspected also that the mandarin did not dare the bodily
fatigue of such a journey, no matter how easily and luxuriously taken.
Muir was right. But chiefly, Wu chose to say good-by in their home--the
home that had been theirs for generations and for centuries.
Except a few pagodas there is not an old building in China. The
picturesque houses, with their pavilions and their triple roofs,
flower-pot hung, curling and multicolored, spring up like mushrooms,
and decay as soon. Houses last a few generations--perhaps. Great
cities crumble, disappear, and every trace of them is obliterated
in a brief century or two. The Chinese rebuild, or move on and
build elsewhere, but they do not repair. Their style and scheme
of architecture never alter. The tent-like roofs (or ship-prow
survivals--have it as you will, for no one knows), painted as gayly
as the roofs of Moscow, make all China tuliptinted, and looking from
a hillside at a Chinese city is often oddly like looking down upon
the Kremlin. It is very beautiful, and it looks old. But unlike the
Muscovite city, it is all new.
But this house of Wu, where both the old man and his grandson had been
born, was far older than a house in China often is. The Wus were a
tenacious race, even in much that their countrymen usually let slide;
and here, in these same buildings, or in others built on the same site,
the Wus had made their stronghold and kept their state since before the
great Venetian came to China to learn and to report her and her cause
aright.
And it was because of this, far more than because his old bones ached
and his breath cut and rasped in his side, that Wu Ching Yu chose to
take here what must be a long and might well be a last farewell.
The actual “good-by” was said standing beside the costly coffin which
had been the man’s gift from his wife the year their son was born. Wu
the grandson had played beside it when still almost a baby. He knew its
significance, its great value, and that there was no finer coffin in
China. The precious Shi-mu wood, from one solid piece of which it had
been carved, was hidden beneath layer after layer of priceless lacquer
and Kweichow varnish, both inside and out. And little Wu, who knew
each of its elaborate, fantastic details as well as if it had been a
favorite picture-book, had never been able to determine which was the
more gorgeous--the vermilion of its surface or the gold leaf of the
arabesque that decorated it.
The old man laid one thin claw-hand on the casket, the bleached and
taloned other on the young shoulder. “I hope that you will be here to
stretch and straighten me in it at my ease when my repose comes, and I
take my jade-like sleep in this matchless Longevity Wood. If so, _or
if not_, remember always that you are Wu, my grandson, a master of
men, the son and the father of good women, and a Chinese. You have
always pleased me well. Now go.”
The boy prostrated himself and laid his forehead on the old man’s foot.
The old man bent and blessed him. The child rose.
“Go!”
Without a word, without a look, Wu Li Chang went. And James Muir,
waiting at the outer door, noticed that not once did the child look
back--not when they came round the devil-protection screen, not
when they passed the ancestral graves, not when they went beneath
his great-grandmother’s memorial arch, not when they crested the
hill--nowhere, not at all, not once. He folded his hands together in
his long sleeves and went calmly, with his head held high and with a
sick smile on his pale face. They were to sail from Hong Kong in a few
days, but that was a small thing: this was his passing from China and
from childhood.
And as they passed south, bearing east, the boy said little. He neither
sulked nor grieved--or, if he grieved, he hid it well. But he wrapped
himself in reticence as in a thick cloak.
His eyes went everywhere, but his face was expressionless and his lips
motionless.
Villages, cities, gorges, lakes, hills, highways and by-ways, he
regarded them all gravely, and made no comment. Even when they crossed
the Yangtze-Kiang, he looked but showed no interest. And when at last
Muir pointed into the distance, the boy just smiled a cold perfunctory
smile, and bent his head slightly in courtesy; nor did he display a
warmer interest when the exquisite island lay close before them.
* * * * *
The old rock that used to be the Chinese pirates’ stronghold and
tall look-out, but on which England has now built Greater Britain’s
loveliest holding--there is no lovelier spot on earth--sparkled in the
hot sunlight. The bamboos quivered on the peak, the blue bay danced and
laughed. The sampans pushed and crowded in the harbor, the rickshaws
rolled and ran along the bund, Europe and Asia jostled each other on
the streets and on the boats.
Muir stood on the ship’s white deck holding Wu Li Chang’s hand, and
taking a long last look at the city of Victoria and at the old island
it threatened to overspread, and in parts did, bulging out into and
over the sea. His thoughts were long thoughts too. He had come to Hong
Kong little more than a boy, academic honors thick upon him, but life
all untasted. Few Europeans had seen China as he had, and almost he
sickened to leave her. He was going home. In a month or two he would
see his mother, who was very much to him. But China quickened and
pulled at his heart. He knew that he would not forget China.
The boat slipped slowly off, backing like a courtier from the queenly
place. And the man and the boy stood without a word and watched the
unmatched panorama dim to nothingness. The small yellow hand lay cold
and passive in the big, warm, white one. Presently Wu drew his palm
gently from his friend’s, and turned quietly away and walked to the
saloon stairs. Muir turned too, and watched the quaint, gorgeous figure
as it went--so pitifully magnificent, so pathetically lonely--but did
not follow. He understood that the boy wished to be alone. And he
himself was glad to be alone just then.
Two hours later, when the dressing warning went, he found his charge in
their cabin. Wu had no wish for dinner. He had been crying--almost for
the first time in his life; the Chinese rarely weep--and besides, he
was very sick. Muir dressed without speaking much, and when dinner was
served mercifully left the boy to himself and his pillows.
* * * * *
Across China an old man in shabby robes left his rice untouched, and
bowed long before the ancestral tablets of his race.
And that night in her sleep Wu Li Lu gave a little cry; she had cut a
tooth.