But neither Jo Hiêsen nor Sên Ruben went a-warring. Several of C’hian
Fan’s predictions were fulfilled, before either graybeard or stripling
had quite decided which of the several Chinese armies of the moment to
join.
Intermittent and contradictory shreds of war-news trickled in.
Thousands of Ho-nanese mercenaries marched off to do battle in the
battalions of Wu Pei-fu fighting against Chang Tso-lin at Hangchow and
in Kiangsu. Sên Jo Hiêsen cackled of it proudly, and Sên C’hian Fan
gave his full approval. Ho-nanese soldiers are by long odds the best
in China--best in valor, best in soldierliness, best in discipline;
and C’hian was glad to have them show the world their prowess and reap
their war pay, if they could collect it, so long as no sash-wearers and
above all no Sêns went with them. Then the wind of policy blew the war
flame out, a president resigned, a general lost his corps and his head,
two were banished, Western journals lost a topic of which they had made
the most, and every one shook hands with or at each other--according to
whether they were old-school or modern. C’hian Fan had as little faith
in the sudden peace as he had had in the civil war it quelled; but he
saw no necessity of saying so. And even Jo Hiêsen was content to smoke
once more the long-stemmed pipe of peace, and to fall back again into a
subsidiary place in the councils and doings of the family.
But Sên Jo Hiêsen remembered how Ruben’s face had glowed, how the
young blue eyes had lit as Ruben had vowed that he too would go to the
wars, he too fight--and, if it chanced, die--for China.
Jo Hiêsen sometimes chatted with Ruben now, and pleasantly; advised him
upon the advantages of concubinage, and gave him freely for his very
own an old blind frog upon which the graybeard doted. It had dined and
slept with him for years, and spent most of its waking hours in the
old man’s sleeve or on his shoulder. Ruben accepted it with effusive
gratitude, and contrived to return it with great delicacy a few days
later, with apparent reluctance, on the moving plea that the frog-one
was pining for its beloved master. There were other reasons--and they
were, at least equally, as true. But Sên Ruben did not state them. And
all three were pleased at the humane reversion--the two Sêns and the
frog-one.
And Sên Ruben had won Sên Jo Hiêsen. It would have gone ill with any
who spoke ill of Sên Ruben, voluntary soldier and tender friend of
frogs.
For all he had scoffed at it, the recent “war” stayed longer in C’hian
Fan’s thought than it did in Ruben’s or in Jo Hiêsen’s. The old-one,
flash-in-the-pan-tempered, had not always a retentive memory, and a
heaven-sent bolt from the blue drove all warfare and other ugliness far
from the thought of young Sên Ruben.
Loyal, stubbornly loyal as the rule of Sên C’hian Fan was to all the
old ways of China, and cordially as all the clan agreed with him in it,
Sên Ruben was not shut out of the women’s “flowery” quarters, but was
made as free of them as Sên Ya Tin’s will had made Sên King-lo when he
had brought his English wife to their homestead. In fact, men of the
blood often are fairly free of the women’s quarters in such Chinese
homesteads. The prohibitions of consanguinity are so imperious and so
adamant and so far-reaching that they relax and permit almost as much
as they forbid. Like a Carmelite convent (though not like it in much
else) a Chinese harem is not a prison but a sanctuary.
Ruben had formed almost instant friendship with Sên No Fee, the
youngest and only unmarried daughter of Sên Kai Lun, a gay and saucy
beauty, somewhat overdue for marriage, since she was sixteen, but still
her father’s close companion because she willed it, and very much his
tyrant.
No and Ruben went together where they would within the wide walls;
fished and hawked and chattered. More than once the minx told Ruben
that, if only he were not her cousin, and his poor colorless face
less hideous, she would have married him, and Ruben had retorted that
he required a tame wife, not a colt-wild one, a wife of dignity and
sweetness.
But he loved his cousin right well; and long tales he told her of
Europe when she questioned him, which was often. Little laughing Sên
No Fee had more approval of the new Chinese dispensation (of which she
knew little but had heard much from girls more traveled) than had any
other of these Ho-nan Sêns.
Ruben found her a glorious playmate; and she distinctly had a look of
Ivy--a lesser beauty but oddly like.
No was an ignorant little thing, but she could beat him at chess
without half trying, and her wits were as nimble as her education was
scanty. All the pretty arts of Chinese courtyard ladies she had at her
tiny fingers’ tips, but she was proficient in none of them--nor keen to
ply them. Sên No Fee was a tomboy; her heart, Ruben found, as warm as
her manners often were naughty.
More than once they raced together hand-in-hand up and down the
Hill-of-the-Cherry-Trees. That they did it hand-in-hand was scandalous,
which was what sweetened it to Sên No Fee; but in spite of that her
wee fingers tingled disagreeably when Ruben clasped them closely in
his, lest her scraps of binded feet stumble and throw her as they ran.
Holding hands, which she did because she ought not, in itself was
disagreeable to the Chinese girl, so deeply had the centuries drilled
her that her hands were not for any other’s touching. Ruben had romped
and tussled too often with his sister Ivy in their Surrey garden to
think much about it. But he too knew that in China it was forbidden;
and he was young enough and masculine enough not to like it the less
for that!
He wrote and told his mother what a ripping good sport his cousin No
was, how much he liked her, and that thanks to her he soon would be
able to hold his own with most of the other Sêns when they flew their
kites on the flat crest of the long persimmon hill, so given over to
that manly pastime that it was called Fly-the-Kites Hill. And many
of No’s confidences to him Ruben repeated to his mother in the long
letters he wrote constantly, and started off to her by a runner to the
treaty port post-office beyond the borders of Ho-nan as often as he
could.