Li Ch’un is a movable feast, and the Sêns and all their vassal villages
were celebrating it several moons later than it is most often held. The
month of the Double Cherry had almost passed when they went forth to
meet the Spring.
At sunrise--everything that does not begin earlier begins at sunrise in
the land of the pagoda--the great gates were opened, and Sên C’hian Fan
and all the thousand of his patriarchal household came slowly forth to
wend their way to the eastmost point of the vast domain, to meet and
greet the Spring as she came from Hu-peh to the fields and forests of
their clan: an immense cortège to be swelled and lengthened two-score
times as it wended its slow, ceremonial way--joined and augmented every
few _li_ by the outpouring of some village or townlet; all coming forth
to keep the Beginning-of-Spring festival.
A man who had paused to rest at the white and silver pagoda, not
knowing that as he left his litter not far from there, his foot fell
for the first time on the ancestral lands of his own people, saw the
endless processional coming in the distance, and drew into the vantage
of a great catalpa’s leafy shade, and waited, shadowed there to watch
and listen, wondering what festival this gay-clad multitude was
keeping; for Sên Ruben knew that the year’s first moon was the keeping
time of _Li Ch’un_.
Behind a busied conclave of musicians--horn-men, drum-men, gong-men,
lute-players, music-basket carriers and boys who blew on flutes
and silver-stringed shells--walked ten score of servants carrying
flower-wreathed staves, tiny silken pouches, birds in splendid
cages and trays of paper money, and looking down on them from his
catalpa-shaded hill-slope, Sên Ruben’s heart leapt when he saw stamped
or sewn on each blue coat’s back the servant-crest of his father’s
house.
Women and children had thronged out of the homestead’s gates close
beside the men; women and children had poured forth from every village
and farm with the headsmen and all the headsmen’s tribal following.
But Sên Ruben saw neither woman nor child here. The way had been too
long for all but sturdiest feet. And no woman might go with the joyous
solemn processional to its end, for often miracle is vouchsafed at
the ultimate moment when Spring and China meet; and no miracle can be
consummated in the presence of a cat, a hen or a woman. Women and all
the toddle-feet children had fallen out a few or a score at a time
to wait in the meadows and near the path’s sides, resting, munching
sweetmeats and melon-seeds, gossiping and telling tales until they
straggled back to join the home-returning of the men folk and older
boys privileged to meet the Spring as it came into Sênland through
the plum trees that behind the pagoda screened the Sên’s Eastern
flower-land from the woodlands of the family of Kem.
Inconspicuous--or so he hoped--in his dark plum-colored garments, the
sober, traveling garb of a Chinese gentleman, Sên Ruben risked skirting
the edge of the great jabbering throng, interested in seeing where they
were going, and in watching what they did--more interested in watching
them, for all were his clansmen or their vassals, he made no doubt, and
some among them his close of kin. Which? Sên Ruben wondered.
There were no blue eyes here; he saw no hair that was fair; but
now and then a man passed close to him almost as fair of skin as
he--fair-skinned as his mother. No one had told him that some Chinese
were so nearly white. He was glad to find it so--seeing it for the
first time here in the home province of his own people. He was glad,
because it made him feel his own face less of an ugliness (and Sên
Ruben worshiped beauty); less an offense to other Chinese eyes; less
the bar-sinister that, in spite of his loyal love of his mother, it
always had seemed to him.
They began to sing a hymn of Spring, a welcome-song to the flowers, an
invocation to all the honorable grains--the millet, buckwheat, maize,
rice and wheat; a prayer and a propitiation to sun and rain, soil
and wind, to the spirits that dwelt in them, and ruled them, giving
the command to yield the honorable ground’s best plenty to these the
worshiping sons of Han, or to shrivel the Earth’s fruits in her womb,
that famine and want might stalk through the fields and gardens of
Ho-nan.
Those following there were actors he knew--he had seen too many
pictures of their fantastic head-dresses and elaborate costly
apparel, so unlike the every-day garb of every-day Chinese, not
to be sure of that. They sang and gesticulated as they walked but
Ruben could not catch the words. He had caught most of the Ho-nanese
folk-songs and hymns, and he thought he should have understood
Mandarin, even sing-songed. But the Pekinese the actors chanted he
could not understand, except here and there a word and that it was
Peking-tongue--probably the only one of China’s many languages that the
stage-folk knew, since they are for the most an ignorant lot, though
technically exquisitely skilled. Almost invariably now a Chinese actor
is a native of Pechilli province.
Those carried there in their sedan chairs were gentlemen--not because
their raiment was fine, and they wore jades in their caps--but because
of their great repose, the clear command in their quiet eyes, and the
clean-cut chiseling of features and motionless hands. They were Sêns,
some of them, no doubt; probably most of them; Sêns, and he was a Sên!
Most of them were old enough to remember his father, to have been at
home with Sên King-lo there when he had brought Sên Ruby, the White
Rose of China, to his home and his people here in Ho-nan. Sên Ruben’s
soul kindled.
Another cohort of musicians followed the litters; musicians playing
softly as they went, softly as if to woo the timid spring from her
vestal hiding behind a veil of snow-gauze from the crabbed breath of
winter.
Hello! What was that?
Not--but it must be--the Spring-Ox! So--this was _Li Ch’un_, the great
greeting-of-Spring festival, oddly belated till now.
The gigantic, grotesquely painted Ox, which, for all that body and
bones, was but paper, was carried by more than twenty men and its
weight required them all.
Sên Ruben did not smile at the weird absurd Spring-Ox, for he knew what
it meant--and he was Chinese.
If ever he had doubted that in England, he did not doubt it now as his
heart leapt to the Spring-keeping of his race. And his English mother
could not have doubted it, never again could have doubted it, if she
could have watched him now, as his eyes leapt, and his fair face lit.
Sên Ruben had come home.
Sên Ruben knew that he had come home.
The soft dry air, still with a gentle tang of racier Winter in its
sweet bouquet, that rippled through the varnish-trees and elders,
was mother’s milk to the eager, quivering sense of Sên Ruben. The
place, the time, the thronging Chinese people, the eager, symbolical
procession--all were sacramental to him.
Standing here, quick to it all, he thought as he watched his kinsmen’s
leisurely litters, of taxis in Piccadilly, trams on the Embankment,
’buses in the Strand. His lip curled a little. He thought that Ho-nan
kept the seemlier, manlier pace, and he saw more reasonableness,
more health, more dignity, many times more beauty in this bedecked
and musicked threading of life’s twisted maze than he ever had in
the push and tangle of London’s harder ways, London’s more emphatic
thoroughfares.
Sên Ruben did not follow on with them to the climax and end of their
road. He felt that a Sên should not do that on foot. He did not care
to stand there in the crush of the outer crowd. He would present
himself to his kindred, as a home-returned prodigal should, within
the walls that girdled the dwelling house, or at the great ceremonial
gate. He would not stand aside with their retainers--still less with
the peasants and villagers not of their blood, but only of their
thrall--nor would he intrude his presence and kinship upon them, the
seniors of his clan, until they had accepted his credentials and
anointed him with welcome.
Next year perhaps--some year certainly--he would ride with them, his
litter carried among theirs, as they went in state to meet and welcome
the Spring.
He knew every item of the climax of the ceremony when at the Eastern
edge of their land they met the Spring. Another year he would share it,
have in it his part, return to the great house with them, pass in with
them to the great decked garden, help to beat the Ox, to drive it to
work hard and well--a symbol that all the agriculturists who tended the
fields and orchards of Sên would be industrious through all the moons
of planting, tending and reaping, until the Feast of Lanterns came to
give a nation of faithful husbandmen almost a moon of festival and
holiday. He would help to slaughter and burn the gigantic Ox and the
_Mang-Shên_--the huge paper man that was following it there, its driver
and plowman, the hardworked god of agriculture.
For all the Chinese gods work; they have but little playtime; less even
than the busy-bee people of China do; and of China’s many gods the god
of agriculture and _Ts’ai Shên_, the god of wealth, work hardest of
all. _Mang-Shên_ rarely rests, _Ts’ai Shên_ never rests at all.
The head of the Ox was painted a glowing yellow, a sign to the watching
peasants that the coming summer would be greatly hot. But there would
be days of heavy rain, too, for _Mang Shên_ was hatless, but wore
very stout shoes. The inordinate number of _Mang’s_ garments repeated
the yellow-headed Ox’s promise of intense heat; the scarf of white
that belted _Mang Shên’s_ coat and loins promised long moons of good
health--for the gods are spirits, and reverse all the sartorial customs
of men, wearing white for joy and red for woe.
Sên Ruben was glad to see _Mang_ girdled with white, and was glad of
the promise of heat that the Ox and its driver gave; Sên Ruben rejoiced
in heat.
Not to-day would he seek or ask admission into that great home of his
that shone down there in the wood-girthed meadows like a jewel in an
exquisite setting of green--not to-day when all the vast place was
a-seethe with the keeping of _Li Ch’un_.
His home-coming should be in some tranquil hour of quiet.
To-night he would lie where his chairmen were camped beside a
willow-hung gurgling stream where the pink-backed trout were snoozing.
Sên Ruben, with a last long wistful look after his kindred as they
went, turned and slipped away, his going as unnoticed, he thought, as
his presence had been unmarked.