When Ruben tore himself away from Peking he still was wearing English
dress.
Chinese as he was, and still more Chinese as he liked to believe
himself, there was considerable Englishman in Ruben Sên--Sên Ruben. Had
there been none, he could not have fitted so perfectly into English
life as he had at public school and ’varsity, in the counties and in
London. Half his blood was English, and sluggish as it ran now, it
took some toll of his inclinations. Habit chained him--to his London
tailor among other things. And English schoolboy-like, he knew himself
a little shy of “fancy dress,” especially of petticoats and rampant
colors. But chiefly he still dressed as he always had, because both Sir
Charles Snow and Kow Li had advised it--at least until he reached the
interior where Young China was both less existent and less clamorous.
Both had advised it as a diplomatic compliance with the sartorial
edicts of that same Young China which both disliked and distrusted
almost equally. For Snow knew that the strident new dispensation
must run its course--brief or long; and Kow Li quoted the old saying
that he who rides a tiger must sit very tight, and dismount with
great discretion. Nothing would be served by antagonizing any Chinese
faction in these days of broil and flux, they both counseled. And Sir
Charles had had another reason--he had seen no cause to state it--for
urging his young kinsman to discard neither boots nor trousers. Snow
remembered how the pallid-skinned American missionaries had been
despised for wearing petticoats and “pig-tails” in Shanghai a decade
or two ago--how it had offended many of the very Chinese they aped
to propitiate. And Sir Charles knew that white-skinned, blue-eyed,
fair-haired Ruben would look not more but even less Chinese clad in
Chinese raiment.
But Ruben had no mind to cross his fathers’ threshold wearing Western
garments.
In the guest-room of a little hill-perched temple, at which he lingered
some days--partly that his chairmen might rest, partly because in some
odd way the eerie place seemed to claim him--he changed into some of
the garments that Kow Li had given him in London lest his young master
might find such shopping an embarrassment in China, and prove inept
at it, if not quite helpless. Kow Li knew what a Sên lord should wear
in Sênland, and he was tremulously anxious that Sên Ruben should be
branded by no avoidable solecism.
Sên Ruben had made perhaps a third of his slow cross-country journey
from Peking to his father’s birthplace in Ho-nan, when he looked up and
saw the tiny cloister built on the crest of a low hill, smiling in the
sunrise.
It called him.
Sên bade his bearers lower his litter, and leaving it bade them
wait--he might be some time.
Little loath his retinue--they were a score, all told--lit their
brazier of charcoal, glad of its warmth, for the dawn was chill, and
squatted about it smoking and chattering while their kettle-pot boiled,
and their fish and rice cooked; and Ruben went alone to make his way
to the temple, knock on its gate, and crave to rest and, if he might,
explore. Zigzagging steps of flat irregular stones--but easy enough,
save for their length--led through hills of churned and broken rocks up
to the little cloister. It was a small rectangular encampment, walled
in here and there, of one-story tent-roofed buildings--all small. The
monks’ gardens were outside, one of vegetables and pot-herbs, one of
lusty flowers, and the hills behind, misted and soft in the early
pearl-tinted light, were verdure clad.
The monks had hewn their path and builded their steps through the
up-thrown belt of rocks belched up æons ago by some fever of earth;
hewn and builded so perhaps to remind that those who would climb to
the plane of the gods must go on foot, almost in single file, and must
tread a hard, rough way.
It was poor enough a place as Chinese temples go. Not many monks
could house here or live on such scant garden produce. But the softly
sparkling sunrise and its own jumble of picturesque lines gave it
beauty, and an old majolica pagoda, that the centuries scarcely had
tarnished, gave it character and dignity--and too, Ruben thought,
significance and individuality. Such pagodas are not built in China
now, and have not been for several centuries. The up-tilt-roofed low
buildings clustered about it might have been run up yesterday.
Nine-storied, up-tapering, the pagoda, like the temple and out-houses,
was angular; like them its roof dipped down in delicious curves, but
jutted out sharply to East and to West. A small company of “lions”
and birds made of stone and of clay, such as are seen on almost
every orthodox Chinese roof, sat upright and vigilant on the roof’s
ridges--guarding and befriending the humans that dwelt beneath--and the
gods housed there. They were queer little symbolical animals jaunty and
fierce, China’s domestic dogs of spiritual war--often so tiny that a
casual glance may not see them, but greatly essential to all that dwell
beneath a Chinese roof.
The pagoda was bell-hung, and the two middle stories were windowed and
balconied with rectangular lattice-work. Except the roofs, all its
lines were straight and sharply angled.
There was no temple-gate, and Ruben hesitated to strike on the metal
gong that swung at the open door; for, soaked as his mind was, and
had been for years, in the ways and manners of China, yet he wondered
whether the gong stood there on the temple’s doorstep as a convenience
for visitors or was a household utensil by which the abbot summoned
his monks from their outer tasks to rice or to prayer. More likely
that, he thought, for he suspected that few from “the world” ever came
here. The temple stood alone and remote, far from even such half-beaten
paths as Ho-nan can boast. Ruben had traveled by compass--as nearly
as impassable barriers of rock and of turbulent streams would let
him--rather than by any sort of roadways; which is how most who foot it
in China must journey. The canals and streams are the roads of China.
He rather thought that the gong was not for wayfarers; he would wait,
at least for a time, until some one came. It was pleasant here on
the steps, and he was Chinese enough to feel neither in haste nor
impatient. He squatted him down near the huge incense-holder of carven
stone that stood at the temple’s entrance, and lit a cigarette. Why
not? The temple priests smoke their pipes so--when they have the
tobacco.
Matins! The priests were singing in the temple.
The rite was not long; and presently they came to sniff the early day’s
fragrance or to forecast the day’s humor.
They were four, all yellow gowned: a fine-faced old abbot, a
squat-faced boy novice, two others--one old and jolly, one middle-aged
and sear; the entire community.
Sên Ruben rose, and bowed them the obeisance of respect.
Three returned it but the novice only stared.
As it chanced, none of them ever had seen a European or European
garments before; but, except the uncouth boy-priest, they showed no
surprise, no embarrassment and no displeasure--perhaps because being
Chinese, their courtesy was entire and an instinct; perchance, because
their life had disciplined and drilled them against resentment of aught
the gods or earth-years sent them; a little, it may be, because a guest
or chance wayfarer so rarely came to fleck the gray monotony of their
solitude with a gleam of the outer world that any guest--even the
oddest and most incomprehensible--was welcome; a drink in the desert.
They made him welcome. The abbot, surprised and pleased that one who
looked so amazingly strange could speak their tongue, bade him stay
as long as he chose; there was rice to spare, the temple boasted a
guest-room, the room a mat and pillow.
The novice boy was sent down the long way Ruben had climbed to bid the
traveler’s servants wait while their master who, at least, would lie in
the holy house to-night, tarried here. And the lad went readily enough
to carry a message to the Chinese coolies below; scampered off with
little of priestly dignity and with no reluctance at all to gossip a
while with peasant-ones who lived in the world from which his parents’
poverty had driven him.
Three days, three nights Sên Ruben lived the guest of the temple
priests; anxious to reach his goal--the home of his fathers--yet glad
to postpone so long what he knew might prove an ordeal. Both Snow and
Kow had warned him of that, warned him that he might have to win and
earn his welcome before his kinsmen gave it him--now that Sên Ya Tin
was dead.
He was glad to serve a novitiate of his own here, in place and
circumstance so peculiarly Chinese; and in serving it, to tune himself,
he hoped, to the Chinese home to which he had crossed the world in
pilgrimage.
He shared their “rice”--vegetables chiefly, appetizing enough to the
priests, but always the same--and as he ate, squatted with them on the
floor, he smiled a little, more than once. Thinking of some woman-one,
three of them made no doubt, but the abbot whose mind was sweeter
and shrewder--two human qualities that often go hand in hand--saw
that the stranger’s smile was edged and was quizzical, and it was no
heart-affair or tender dalliance that flitted across Sên Ruben’s face.
The old abbot was right. Ruben had smiled into his basin of carrots and
cabbage chopped up in _soy_ because of a thought that came of London
restaurants, lobster mayonnaise, Perrier Jouet ’76, pêche Melba, his
mother’s _chef_, the service her butler gave.
Eton, Cambridge, and Kensington pricked him now and then as he lounged
smoking on a pagoda balcony the next day watching the monks at work,
almost knee-deep in their paddy bed. And at vespers in the gods-room,
although it stirred him as no service at Queen’s ever had, Ruben Sên
knew that homesickness twinged him--a longing to see his mother and Ivy.
For always the way of the Eurasian is hard and perplexed--a taint of
his blood, a taint in his mind: canker.
The gods-room intrigued Sên Ruben and it rested and soothed even more
than it interested him. It appealed to him more--very much more--than
had the larger, richer god-rooms of the Peking temples; perhaps
because it seemed to him so truly apart from the secular world, so set
apart, remote, dedicated, a little room to which rarely any but the
four priests vowed to its service ever came; the solitary house of a
solitary community, in a place of solitude far from the world.
It was packed with gods though only two or three were of fine
workmanship.
A gorgeous belly-god, whose inordinate paunch was supported by his
sacrificial table, whose ears were elongated balloons, whose very hands
were mountainous with fat, was beautifully molded and exquisitely
colored, and for all the billows of fatness that half hid them, his
eyes, by some deft contrivance of fine artistry, sparkled and laughed.
Sinister, that the starveling four who lived on rough vegetables,
millet, occasional rice, infrequent inferior fruit, should needs serve
the obese belly-god of gluttony; sinister and searching that they
should serve him with chanted prayers, incense, flowers in his vases,
red candles to make his glowing rubicon face still redder, and serve
him with offerings of flesh tit-bits and wine that they themselves
might not taste except at the Lanterns’ once-a-year Feast, and then but
scantily! Such is religion--in the East!
The wealth-god, cut from perfect ivory, had a sweet and saintly face.
His monk-like white robes were severe and simple; he carried a flail in
his thin, priestly hand: a chaste, immaculate figure, as beautiful as
it was ridiculous!
_Lung Wang_, the god of clouds and water, was lacquer, and very lovely.
The other gods--more than forty--were tawdry and hideous.
_Kuan Ti_ above the high-altar was but a fresco, ill-drawn, badly
colored--as were his wife on his left hand and his concubine on his
right.
All the others, cheap and nondescript, little creditable to any heaven,
scarcely creditable to any joss-house, were stacked on shelves, on the
floor and in dark and dusty corners.
But Sên Ruben loved and revered them all for what they symboled; for
the Chinese fellowship they kept; for the service that these loyal
priest-ones paid them.
Thrice from sunset to sunset the second priest struck the temple gong,
and the four “yellow-robes” gathered here for chant and prayer; censed
their gods, offered them wine and meat and cakes, lit their tapers,
made them obeisance, recited droningly their ritual, and proffered
silently, perhaps, prayers more individual and personal, if aught
of personal wish that was more than the animal craving for food, or
anything of true personality, could persist in lives so cramped and
circumscribed.
Ruben doubted it of the younger three. The abbot he gaged higher; a
soul attune to the sweet uses of solitude; a mind capacitated to profit
by the discipline of meditation.
On the high-altar, an animal-headed god with attendants guarding it on
both sides, stood a score of gigantic brass and stone candlesticks,
many of them candleless--for the priests were poor; two small
incense-holders, a beaten tray of joss-sticks, beautiful vases crammed
with hideous artificial flowers, a small table-gong and mallet--used
to call a drowsy god-one’s attention; a drum of mother-o’-pearl and
embossed and painted parchment--used for the same purpose; and the
three wine cups of the chief god and his wife and concubine. Near the
altar, tasseled silver lamps hung down low on either side. There were
tassels hanging down from almost every one of the crowded temple’s
ornaments. A few feet from the North and South walls two pillars
supported the arabesqued ceiling, one of rough stone, crudely carved,
one of jasper pricked with gold-stone and bits of turquoise color laid
in in a delicate bamboo-shaped tracery. Around each of the pillars
writhed an open-mouthed dragon, its scaled throat and horned head
thrust out toward the altar, its great claws clasping the pillar firmly.
What did English-born, London-bred Ruben think of it all?
He thought it pathetic--at least, the human life-husks of the
yellow-clad brethren. He thought the heterogeneous gods absurd--but
yet--he thought them eloquent, felt them sacred. They emphasized to
him a great people’s--his people’s--fealty to nature, China’s sense
of communion with wind and rain, things that grow, beasts that stalk,
birds that fly. And he had seen “holy” figures every bit as ugly and
preposterous on the continent of Europe. Sên Ruben was not ashamed of
these gods of China.
One long night through he sat under the cherry trees beneath the
glittering panoply of stars with his host, the abbot. And their talk
was intimate. And when the sun crept up behind the pagoda Sên Ruben had
thought of things he never had thought of before, and had learned, and
learned to sense, things of China that neither Kow nor Snow ever had
whispered to him.
He had gained a lasting memory; he had made a lasting friend, even
though they two never met again.
Something of his story he told to the monk, who heard him gravely and
then warned him, as Snow and Kow had, that his kinsmen might give him
but scant welcome.
“Should it prove so, and you still are loath to leave China, come back
to me, and be my son--while you will. Always your share of our all will
await you here. And, if you come not, always at the Hour of the Dog
prayer-time I will ask of our gods your welfare.”
But Sên Ruben knew that he should not tarry long in China, now; knew
that he should keep his tryst in London with his mother, whether his
kinsmen hailed and claimed him or rejected and forbade him.
Another day he lingered, “worshiping” in the temple prayer-room,
working in the garden with the four priests. Then he left them, clad
in his unaccustomed Chinese garments--beneath his vest a scapular the
old abbot had blessed and given--left them, and went on towards “home,”
determined and anxious; going down the hill stairway a little awkwardly
in his Chinese petticoat.
Ruben felt queer--and looked it.
He wondered if he could carry it off and wished that he had served some
sort of private novitiate for this, by wearing padded shoes and all the
rest of these in the seclusion of Kow Li’s upper room in Bloomsbury.
The novice grinned like the ape he was, the young monk frowned, but the
old head-monk gestured kindly approval, and blessed Sên Ruben gravely,
and bade him gods’-speed.
One of the chairmen giggled like a girl, the others looked at him
sourly, when Sên came into the temple courtyard where they waited for
him. The abbot had sent for them. But the old monk walking beside
Ruben rebuked them sharply and at that their faces turned again
to the accustomed stolid indifference which is the livery of such
servant-faces. They despised the old monk, because he was a monk, but
they had no disrespect for the ill-charms he might work upon them. And
whatever they thought or felt of the foreign devil dressed in finest
Chinese clothes, he would see nothing of it again, for the monk-one had
potentially cursed them hideously. A Chinese will risk most things for
a laugh--but not an unmourned grave or a fire-crackerless burial.
Sên Ruben would not ride while the abbot walked. Presently the abbot
blessed and left wine. Sên seated himself carefully and as easily as he
could wound up in petticoats; the bearers lifted the chair-poles on to
their shoulders and trudged slowly down the rough path and off across
Ho-nan.
The old monk stood in the temple door and watched them out of sight;
then went in to give Sên Ruben the best red candle of their poor votive
store, for he had liked the fair-haired boy who had given them great
largesse, and more courtesy than Chinese monks are often paid.