Ruben spent a week in Hong Kong, and then went slowly to Peking.
Ho-nan was his objective; but he wished to seem less a stranger in the
Sên-land than he could hope to seem just yet, and he felt, as both
Snow and Kow Li had counseled, that he should see Peking first--the
throne-place for so many centuries of all the vast domains of Han.
Peking baptized Ruben Sên with fire.
He knew that to himself he never again would be Ruben Sên but--as he
was recorded on the tablets of his race--Sên Ruben.
He would not emphasize it in Europe, for he knew that while she lived
he would do nothing that he believed would hurt his mother.
But he had definitely taken his place among his people, his father’s
people, when he reluctantly passed through the Ch’ien Mên and joyously
took his way to Ho-nan.
Much as Peking had hurt him, it had given him his manhood.
He had come to Peking adolescent; he left it full grown, adult, as a
Chinese of twenty should be.
He was barely nineteen in England, but here, a Chinese in China, Sên
Ruben was twenty, since he had been one year old at his birth, in
the somewhat illogical way that the Chinese count the years of human
lifetimes.
He found his patriotism there. It was the Western encroachments and
devastations that stung it into life, and ripped from him the European
garments that not only his body but his soul, of necessity, had
somewhat worn until now.
Sên Ruben discarded Europe in Peking.
He was going back to England presently, to companion and cherish his
mother in the environment she preferred. It never would occur to
him to evade or delay doing that. But his own life was garnered up
in China--now--and he knew that wherever his husk of life might be
spent, its core of being would be grappled to China, and that in his
mother’s drawing-room in Kensington _he_ would be in China as truly as
he was to-day standing in the lee of the Ch’ien Gate’s battlements,
on the Wall’s broad footway, looking down on garden squares, on the
yellow-tiled roofs of the vast Imperial Palaces, and on the hideous
encroachment of ugly Western-like buildings huddled assertively up
against the Sacred Gate.
Scarcely a self-centered, self-absorbed European, standing on the
Peking outer wall, could look down on that storied tapestry of stone,
wood and gleaming colored tiles, great patches of liquid green where
squares of verdure interspersed houses and temples, quite unmoved;
towers, pagodas, gleam of many waters, roofs of many colors; Tartar
City, Chinese City, Manchu City, Forbidden City each segregated by its
own wall; picturesque rectangles all girdled by Peking’s sumptuous,
outer Great Wall.
To Ruben it was greatly more than it can ever be to any non-Chinese.
It was an epitome of China and all her story. Its beauty enswathed and
electrified him; but, too, his very soul was gripped and his pride
embittered by old landmarks gone, old monuments torn and desecrated,
Western interspersements that blotched and disfigured.
The patriotism that Peking engendered in Sên Ruben was a gritty
patriotism that quickened with big intention: a more conscious love
of country than many of the family-absorbed Chinese consciously felt,
or, if they felt it, defined, until the un-Christian stranglehold of
Christian peoples, and of a people nearer and less liked, far less
scrupulous, cut into them a belated understanding of their entire
country’s peril and need. China has called her sons about her by the
trumpet-call of impertinent, self-seeking internationals. England for
one? Of course not. England never “slipped” into Wei-hai-Wei, or forced
China to borrow at usurious rates, did she? America for one? No! The
streets of San Francisco never ran red with Chinese blood, did they?
America has not misdealt with the Chinese in Honolulu and Manila, has
she? Japan for one? Certainly not. Japan can do no wrong. Japan is the
one perfect flower of Asia; to her own incomparably greater virtues she
has added all our smaller virtues--and already betters and outstrips us
in every one of them.
A pacific son of a pacific people, Ruben’s most urgent thought as he
walked on the o’ertowering machicolated walls of old Peking, day after
day, was that he longed to _fight_ for China--not to fight in one of
her own fratricidal wars, but to fight those who had despoiled her, had
interrupted and deflected, and had tainted the old flow of her ways.
In his heart he could have performed the seven labors of a Chinese
Hercules for China. He forgot that he was English. He thought of Sir
Charles Snow as a true and valued foreign friend, not as his kinsman,
and his mother, never for a moment forgotten, he thought of as the
White Rose of China.
He could not fight for China, perhaps. Indeed, for China’s sake,
he hoped that he could not. She was not ripe for any advantageous
or possibly decisive warfare yet. Her loins were not girded; fresh
raw sores not healed; wearied, overstrained sinews not rested or
strengthened. Her purse-pouch hung flat at her lean hungry side, her
commissariat was not now--or soon to be--on an adequate war-footing.
International chess was the hidden warfare for China now; hers to play
a waiting game, and a watching, on the World’s great gaming board.
Well, he could live for China--a greater, longer tribute to pay. He
made his vow that he would. It might not be here in China that he could
live for China, probably could not be--at least for long years, for
not for one moment, in the exquisite birth-pangs of this new quivering
patriotism that came as he strolled at sunset on the Great Wall of
Peking watching the javelins of gold and green pelt down from the going
day-star on to the pink walls of the Forbidden City, did Ruben forget
his mother, or his hot boy-soul contemplate that he could--even for
China--forsake or displeasure his mother. That was no part of Chinese
patriotism. His mother had given him birth; his father’s death had
made him his mother’s guardian, and doubly her vassal. But living with
her, sharing her English life, clad again in Bond Street tweeds and
broadcloths, he could live for China, serve China, work for China. He
would sacrifice environment and outer seeming for his mother if he need
and while it was her need, but the seed of his being, the wish of his
soul, he need not sacrifice.