The Sêns were washing their cats.
The Sêns were not cat worshipers, but a royal-born Sên woman had
been, and the clan revered her memory, and clung to her old custom
religiously--and half in prank. They washed their cats once a year. A
Chinese cat rarely is loved--but almost invariably it is cherished.
The older and uglier the cat, the greater its value; for the old and
ugly ones are those efficacious in their performance of the destiny
for which they are born--the driving off and holding at bay every evil
demoniac influence that threatens the dwelling’s outer gate or door.
Old cats are sacrosanct, most especially those that are fierce-faced,
loud-voiced and ill-tempered; kittens are tolerated. For it is as
difficult to achieve an old and venomous cat without the antecedent of
kittenhood as it is to make an omelette without breaking an egg or two.
The Sêns were proud of their birds and their dogs, their cattle and
deer, and were fond of them too, but they had scant affection for their
cats--except here and there an indiscriminating little toddler who
“liked little pussy” because its coat was soft and warm and its temper,
not yet infuriated by the bondage and indignity of being chained, was
bent on frolic. But since cats are a necessary adjunct of every great
Chinese establishment, the house-and-yard-proud clan liked their cats
to be particularly well kept. And to-day--the second day after _Li
Ch’un_--was a great day in the princely Ho-nan homestead.
Like every great function in China, Wash-the-Cats had begun almost
before dawn’s first faint crack.
The wash place steamed and smelt of soap. More than a hundred cats
yowled--not in unison. Most of them struggled, many of them scratched,
some of them bit.
The Sêns, a great and puissant family, enormously rich, cultured for
centuries, squatting on the ground or kneeling, vigorously labored at
scores of small wash-tubs. They were doing it with serene good-temper
and with as much gentleness as the struggling and squirming of five
score well-soaped and soaked cats allowed.
Because their Wash-the-Cats was somewhat sacerdotal, men, as was fit,
were doing the work, while the women lounged about them, watching,
advising, criticizing and chattering almost faster and shriller than
yowled and swore the angry and disgusted cat-ones.
The children ran and toddled and crawled in and out among their
mothers, between the tubs, off to the flowers; chasing the butterflies,
romping with each other, trying to romp with the puppies and dogs; but
that could not be accomplished to-day! The most frolicsome dogs in
Ho-nan had something far more delectable than playing with children and
babies to-day! The day of the cats’ martyrdom was the great joy-day
of the dogs. Each kept as close to the soapy fray as it was allowed,
and watched with delighted, bulging eyes, gloating over the suffering,
angered cats. Even the puppies were tense and quiet, held tight and
fixed in the leash of their own appreciative excitement. Not that the
Sên dogs ever annoyed, much less tortured, the cats of the place; the
Sên dogs were too well bred and far too well trained for that. But the
ancestral enmity that had raged and waged when China was a manless
forest of wild things, perhaps, persisted despite the human discipline
that veiled it; and the Sên doggies loved “Wash-the-Cats” and hugged
as close as they could to its strident core, feeding fat the ancient
grudge of the old primeval days.
It was a busy scene, unique perhaps in Earth’s civilization; such a
scene as only one country--China--ever shows; and there only to be seen
in such great and conservative households as this, a family of Chinese
nobles earnestly washing their cats--doing it carefully and gravely;
men whose fathers had been kings, whose nursing mothers had been queens
before China was an empire.
It has been said, in Western print, that there is no caste in China.
In every essential sense no land has ever had more caste than that
greatest of all the democracies, the Chinese Empire. Though to-day no
longer an empire in name it is not yet in soul--perhaps never will
be--the social tatterdemalion that the gossipy press of Europe and
America judge and report it. Caste in China is not as caste in India,
even less as caste in Europe, but it exists, and it is adamant. Wealth
does not touch it, poverty cannot tarnish it; ancestry, education and
character make and uphold it--nothing else enters into or approximates
it at all. Even the Chinese cats have caste. Chinese dogs are demarked
by it sharply; from the flea-bitten and flea-biting pariah-mongrels of
wharf-side and alley to the sleeve-dogs accouched by royal midwives and
reverently portrayed by China’s greatest artists. But Chinese cats wear
their caste with a difference. One cat passes through many castes; some
Sên cats through as many as the ages of man once were counted on Avon.
But the seven castes of these being bathed may be roughly grouped into
three: the kittens not yet promoted to active service, the slayers of
mice and rats, the door-and-gate guardians.
Mere servants were washing the kittens, those callow, untried,
mischievous youngsters not yet trusted or tested in either of the two
honorable cat industries--the slaughter of vermin and the keeping out
of evil spirits. The younger and lesser Sêns were washing the mousers.
The old men and those of established influence were washing the
“guardians.” Sên C’hian Fan himself was struggling with the temple cats.
Sên King-lo was not the only man of his blood who had gone afar and
had sojourned in the West. Sên P’ei-yü, home-come but yesterday, had a
Harvard degree; Sên T’sung had spent three years in Oxford and two in
St. Petersburg. And two here had served the Manchu at European courts.
Sên P’ei-yü still wore the Western garb he had journeyed in; he was
not washing, and Sên T’sung smiled a little grimly as he bent over
the almost boiling soap-suds in which he was rubbing and scrubbing
a wild-eyed striped black-and-white that lashed his hands fiercely
with her tail. It was the best fight she could put up, because she
was securely muzzled and her feet were securely tied in thick socks;
a precaution that had to be taken with several of the older and more
embittered cats, lest human eyes pay the penalty of lost sight for the
observance of an old custom.
Sên C’hian Fan was washing the most honorable and honored of all the
hundred-odd, a mild-faced, venerable tortoiseshell, so imperially
yellow that it was named “Palace Sun Flower,” kept its state on a
chain of gold at the foot of the Ancestral Temple steps, had a cushion
to lie on, several cat assistants to keep watch and ward when Sun
Flower slept, was pampered in diet, often caressed, wore a jewel in
its left ear, and twice a day was let at large in the netted-over
cattery-courtyard. But the mildest cat may turn. The Flower, turning
his handsome leonine head suddenly to see how his friend and light
o’ love, a silver fiend named “Perversity,” was enjoying her bath at
the hands of Sên Tom Young, Sên C’hian Fan’s sponge and hand slipped,
almost blinding poor old Sun Flower with astringent soap; and Sên
C’hian Fan’s hand and arm ran with blood. The honorable Sun Flower-one
was neither muzzled nor stockinged.
It was not the only scratch inflicted as the cleanly work went on; but
the Sêns worked steadily.
If the castes of the Sên cats were few, their breeds were
many--chinchillas, smokes (blue, silver and bronze), silver-flecked,
cream-grays, and several more.
There was a terrible din of fire-crackers and drums. Noise is not
quite so sure a driver-away of ill-spirits as old cats are, but it is
the next best substitute, and wherever a cat was kept on its chain
ordinarily, serving boys were lighting fire-crackers now and beating
drums as fast and hard as they could.
If it could in no way be described as a leisurely function, without
exaggeration it was a slow and long one. More than one Sên would feel
the pangs of hunger before the last cat was washed and dried and
restored to its vocation and chain.
If there were but the long cue of a hundred cats here, there were
four times a hundred tubs, sometimes. Each cat had its own tubs, and
each cat had four; stout little tubs on four or six tough squat legs,
each tub with two flat but spike-like handles standing opposite each
other on its rim, in each handle a round hole through which ropes are
threaded for convenience in carrying away when the good work is done.
Tub number one was the long-soak-and-first-scrub tub. It was filled
with steaming hot water. “Cat” was immersed and held down--all but its
nose, ears and eyes--for several minutes religiously measured by a
diminutive hour-glass that stands on the bathman’s low table of varied
impedimenta. Then a strong hand rubbed a cake of strong soap--sometimes
a ladle of softer and stronger soap--well into fur, skin and crevices.
Cat’s face was washed, a human thumb of a kneeling servant lad held
over each angry eye to save it a painful soaping; washed with a
well-soaped, thoroughly plied rag. Next the impatient sufferer was
lifted out of tub number one and thrust firmly down into tub number
two, a trifle larger, a trifle hotter, and all was done again. A good
massaging the animal got this time from pungent soap and skillful
fingers. Tub number three was the hot-water rinse-tub; a long immersion
this time, and puss was tightly grasped by the back of its neck and its
horrified head plunged in and out of the almost bubbling rinse water a
number of times. Tub number four was filled with almost cold water, for
anti-tuberculous reasons. The yells that went up from those cold water
number four tubs shivered the ears of all who heard them; would destroy
the hearing of ears less inured to the blasting noises of China.
But the worst is over. The well-washed cat is swathed in a hot towel
from stacks ready on a brazier of red hot charcoal. Then number two
hot towel, and cat gets such a rubbing as mere words cannot tell. When
every hair is dry as a tinder, feet, claws and ears are attended to and
eye corners are not forgotten. The toilet of the ears is a terrible
business; a careless pen stated prematurely that the worst was over.
But every sorrow has its end--even in the life of a cat in China.
Beside each table of tools and et ceteras, a great wicker cage awaits
the completed toilet, and when a microscopic inspection--a search for
parasites that, to do the Sên cats mere justice, rarely resulted in a
find--had been followed by a prolonged combing, each cat was bolted in
its wicker cage, the cages put in the sunniest places possible, and
the Sêns, weary but triumphant, retired to their own tubs and a really
needed, well-earned breakfast, while the attendants removed tubs,
tables and all the soapy litter of the multiple feline toilets.
But that was still an hour or two in the future--and Chinese hours at
that. Each hour has one hundred and twenty of our minutes.
The sun was rising in splotched and crimsoned splendor. The young pink
and green leaves glistened softly on the beech and walnut trees that
rimmed the great sweep of grass doing duty for bath-room. Birds began
to tweet, then to sing.
An old, old monkey--but impish still and prankish--dangled from the
tallest nut tree, jabbering and pelting cats and Sêns impartially
with twigs and soft just-forming baby nuts. He aimed with fiendish
exactitude, but none rebuked or complained, for Yam Sin had been the
privileged toy of Sên Ya Tin, and since that Queen-one’s going on-High
had neither been chained nor punished.
Sên C’hian Fan spluttered an angry oath. Sun Flower had given him
the slip; Sun Flower the great green-eyed, needle-clawed temple
tortoiseshell. The huge beast was well-nigh as strong as a tiger-cub;
suddenly it had wrenched and wriggled its soap-slippery body out of
Sên’s half-scalded and now half-numbed hands, plunged and hurled itself
free of man and water, overturning its tub as it sprang, drenching Sên
C’hian Fan’s feet, shoes, and quite a length of Sên’s legs too, and
splashing the man’s face, eyes and nostrils with the soapy bath-water.
Then they raced--the cat and the man. The Sêns rocked with
laughter--all but Sên C’hian Fan. Sên C’hian Fan’s well-soaped shoes
slipped on the wet, soapy grass; Sên slid, slipped--fell; measured his
long length face-down on the soap-pooled ground. The first lap was
Sun Flower’s; nine score Sêns and twice as many servitors squealed a
hurricane of glee.
Sun Flower flew towards the temple--the temple that Sên Ya Tin had
builded to Sên King-lo.
Sên C’hian Fan sprawled up unsteadily and made after.
The onlookers were hushed and appalled.
If a cat entered the temple, the temple would be defiled, and from that
the gravest disasters might be piled upon all the clan and crush it to
the dust. Cats are the outer guardians of many holy places, but must
not enter them.
All who dared leave their own immediate charges--the cats they were
tubbing--ran pell-mell by twenty short cuts to head off Sun Flower,
if they could, before he gained the temple steps; for that Sên C’hian
Fan should overtake a cat going at such a pace and with such a start
was palpably impossible. In their frantic eagerness to avert a great
family disaster several had dragged the cats they were washing out of
the water, and gave chase with soaped and squalling wet cats clasped
to their manly breasts--in several instances a valor ill-rewarded, for
more than one lost the wet puss he had so brashly extracted from its
bath and that meant a bath all over again.
The cat won.
Sên dashed after him into the temple.
Again the cat dodged the man, hurtled out of the temple it had defiled,
down the steps and up a lemon tree.
None followed Sên C’hian Fan into the temple--none might do that unless
he, the head clansman, bade it.
Sên C’hian Fan lingered in the temple.
They made no doubt that he was burning prayer-papers and sticks to
purge and purify, kneeling at the altar of Sên King-lo, whom Sên Ya
Tin had so loved; propitiating and beseeching the gods to forgive the
desecration; and they waited with bated breath and grave eyes to learn
when he came to them again if the gods had vouchsafed some sign of
their forgiveness.
They were wrong.
Sên C’hian Fan there in the temple had forgotten the very existence of
Sun Flower, all thought of the peccant tortoiseshell blotted out in the
sharpest amazement he ever had experienced.
He had approached the altar, as the cat scurried out, to make such
atonement as he could. But as he stretched out his still wet hand
toward the prayer box he started, stiffened, his outstretched hand fell
to his side, his eyes were glazed in amazement.
A man lay fast asleep before the altar--a Chinese gentleman by his
garb. Sên C’hian Fan could not see the face snuggled down on a
plum-colored sleeve as on a pillow.
Then he saw the ring the sleeper wore--a signet of the Sêns, centuries
old, an heirloom of great pride that Sên C’hian Fan knew--they all
knew it--that Sên Ya Tin their queen old-one had given to her favorite
grandchild.
And Sên C’hian knew that Sên Ruben the son of Sên King-lo had reached
the homestead of his kindred--knew that Ruben the white Sên had come
home to Ho-nan, for ill or for good.