La-yuên the concubine had not overpraised it; Ya Tin had not
overpromised it when she had said to Sên King-lo at their parting, “I
will raise a _pai-fang_ for thy pardon of our gods; I will build a
great temple on the hill where the peach-trees cram the melons on its
slope and the cypresses wear the winter snow on its crest.”
In all China--where man’s hands have achieved the most--no lovelier
thing than this ever was achieved; not even when Marco Polo, whose eyes
had surfeited on the sumptuous beauty of Venice, saw Hangchow the jewel
city of earth, as it was.
Ruben had seen it before in his dreams. For often Kow Li had boasted
and crooned to him of the pearl-of-all-temples.
But Ruben Sên had not seen this!
Matched to the reality, the dream was poor and cheap; for the boy
dreaming in London had had but his knowledge of the tawdrier buildings
of Europe from which to filch the fabrics of his dream temple.
High on the hill slope, in a garden of peach trees, Ya Tin had builded
of marbles and ivory the temple whose incredible cost was small in
comparison to its beauty; a great low, one-storied temple that lounged
on the peach-tree hill like a great sprawled, sun-drunk dragon of ten
thousand glittering jeweled scales.
Winds and rains and the heat-torrents of summer had stained the twisted
ivory columns a delicate apricot, but the marbles of the alternate
pillars--white, pink, green, one blue, one gold, two red-veined black,
one of gold-stone from Kokonor, two the color of blood--were as
undiscolored as when Sên Ya Tin’s workmen had heaved them into place,
fresh and virgin from mallet and chisel.
The few broad steps that led up to the temple door were of solid
malachite, their edges encased in lead open-work. The temple’s
windows--four at the East to welcome the day-star’s coming, four at
the West to hold the stain of his going as long as they could on
the temple’s lacquered floors--were latticed with lace insertions
of silver, threaded with wires of gold and paned with painted and
embroidered silk.
The temple roofs of pale-bronze tiles looked like tents of scaled
gold. Little beasts of clay and of pottery squatted and perched and
lolled on its ridge poles and corners. Long tassels of iridescent glass
dangled from the roof’s up-curved lips, lamps and lanterns of elaborate
workmanship hung and swung from its eaves. The under-sides of the
fluted out-jutting roofs were intricately carved and inlaid, their very
edges delicately scalloped.
About three of the great outer pillars enormous metal, clinging
dragons twisted and writhed, their heads of gold thrust out, their
open, coral-lined snarling mouths and angry red-lacquer tongues
menacing all evil-comers, their restless jeweled eyes aflame in the
sunlight.
Two great pelicans--one of burnished steel and copper and bronze,
one of chisel-feathered stone--stood on either side of the temple’s
approach. One held in his polished beak the chains of a gong, the
other a hanging incense-holder; and the pelican of stone itself was an
incense-burner so cunningly contrived and wrought that up through his
feathers always twisted thin spirals of perfumed smoke-burning incense
never suffered to burn out and die; for Sên Ya Tin dying nearly a dozen
years ago had willed and charged it so.
The sky above was cloudless molten blue; the trees behind were a
tapestry of splendid greens, from the nearly black of the cypress trees
to the apricot-green of the peach-trees’ baby leaves; jade and emerald
bamboos, moss and sea-greens; a lovely jumble of green that ravished
the eye and rested the soul and mind; a gentle, quivering, imperial
arras behind the loveliest temple in China, built by a Chinese woman
for a Chinese man who had erred in marriage, and strayed and stayed in
barbarian heathen lands and ways.
Beyond the temple a _pai-fang_ spanned a gurgling stream that sang and
danced over its bed of pebbles beneath soft banks of violets and ferns,
forget-me-nots and tiny musk roses sewn thickly with little wild lilies
and nodding, head-heavy daffodils.
Sên Ruben could not hear the music the brook made, but he saw its
bubbling dance of green and blue and gold and pearl. He knew his father
had dabbled baby hands in it. He knew that temple and costly crimson
_pai-fang_ were a prayer for the peace of his father’s soul.
Sên Ruben gazed and knelt, looked long, and covered his face with his
sleeve.
There was utter silence here.
The bamboos bent and swayed as if in welcome and kindly attendance.
The foliage of oak and cinnamon-maple stirred a little in the Spring’s
pleasant air. Violets and anemones quivered gratefully in the grass. A
squirrel watched shyly, very still up in a silver-stemmed red beech.
Sên Ruben looked again.
His face was as still as the squirrel’s, almost as soft and shy, but
his heart was quivering; his being shook.
The beauty over there on the hill of peach-trees with tiny green,
new-come melons lumping the vines and cluttered between the peach-tree
trunks moved him; but a thousand times more he was moved because of
what _pai-fang_ and temple said to him.
They spoke; he heard.
Sên Ruben thought that his father Sên King-lo and old Sên Ya Tin, who
had loved and not misunderstood, stood on the temple porch and smiled
at him.
Who shall say?
* * * * *
Sên Ruben rose.
The dress he wore no longer seemed strange to him. He drew his fan from
his sash and gestured with it respect and fealty--and smiled.
“Can you lead me there?” Ruben asked, without turning his head or his
eyes.
“This slave can lead you, flower-like lord,” La-yuên did not turn
towards him or lift her eyes from the ground as she spoke.
“I would go,” Ruben murmured.
“It is no too far,” the woman answered.
“I would lie there to-night--alone. I wish that none may know.”
“No one need know,” La-yuên told him. “It is this same concubine
widow-one who feeds at sunset the belly of the incense pelican. She
will lead you, sir; and when at the Hour of the Hen she has filled it
with adequate powdered sandalwood, she will leave her lord, not to
return to him until the hour he has bade that she should.”
“To-morrow’s morrow at the Hour of the Snake I would go as I have
come--unseen, unknown.”
“It shall be,” La-yuên said.
“Lead me the way.” Ruben turned to her.
And La-yuên lifted then her face and looked at the lord Sên Ruben--and
she smiled. No one had seen La-yuên smile since Sên Po-Fang had
died--not even Sên O-i-t’ing her son, for the babe she had borne her
dead lord had died at its birth and lay in an unmarked grave at a far
edge of the Sêns’ garden of tombs.
Then La-yuên--when she had ko’towed, once to Sên Ruben, twice to the
temple Sên Ya Tin had builded of marble and jasper, of ivory and brass
and lead, jade, malachite, and of prayer and love--turned and went
through the lemon and _ginko_ trees, on through the camphor trees,
through a glade of golden willows, through a world of wild white roses,
over a meadow of violets until they came to a vine-hidden lane that led
to the temple.
La-yuên’s heart sang as they went--as it had not since her lord had
died. But the heart of Sên Ruben was so full that it ached.
The tender, red-tipped leaves of the peach-trees were uncurling in the
warming spring; here and there on their glossy stems of spray a little
soft clot of velvet thickness, the size of a baby nut, was a peach that
before Autumn had come would swell into a wrinkled ball of luscious
meat covered in sumptuous colors of ripeness. Blue and jade butterflies
were taking their first flight. The grass belched out the sweetness
of mignonette, thyme and verbena underneath the easy crunch of their
padded feet as the man and woman went across it, and in Ho-nan even the
grass is sweet.
Neither spoke as they went. It was not for La-yuên to speak to the lord
she guided unless some word or gesture of his bade her speak; and Sên
Ruben was speechless.
The day-star marked the Hour of the Hen on the temple eaves and stained
its gold on the green of the temple steps.
Sên Ruben stood and watched the woman while she replenished the
fragrant smoldering fire stored in the gray stone pelican’s body.
Then she left him without a word passing between them.
He knew that she would come as he had bade. La-yuên knew that he would
keep his vigil alone.
And the woman knew that he would fast here at his lord father’s temple
and arch. It was not for her to bring him food here. His thoughts and
his pious fealty would feed and strengthen him.
Sên Ruben would not touch coarser food than meditation and prayer
here. But perchance he would bathe his brow and his wrists, and would
drink at the bubbling silver brook that danced and laughed between the
crimson shafts of Sên King-lo’s _pai-fang_.