Within three days his father had set up a forge inside this rude hut at
the city gate and had commenced turning out quantities of coarse iron
nails for the cart trade. The clang of his hammer sounded far into the
night, and the child fell asleep to that jarring music just as he often
awoke to it. The steady pant of the bellows--worked by a small boy who
was paid three farthings a day for his labour--and the glowing heat of
the charcoal, were as much part of his life as the sparrows chirping on
the waste outside the door. Very early he understood the trick of
picking up live embers in his fingers as his father often did: if you
are quick that is as easily done as putting your hand into ice-cold
water.
There was food in plenty, too; the boy could eat all day long, and he
grew stronger and bigger almost visibly. Not only was there food at
home; there was plenty to be picked up along every foot of the stretch
of highway leading to the frowning battlements of the city. No one
would begrudge a child a bite when he announced as calmly as little Wang
always did that he was hungry.
Soon he became friends with fifty men who gained their living by
peddling cakes to the tide of traffic which endlessly swept in and out
of the capital. When their baskets were sold out, it was always he whom
they allowed to pick up the morsels from the bottoms until every crumb
was gone. His quickness and his wisdom, in spite of his baby ways,
delighted a people who see truth in common-sense.
Sometimes, too, he found money--those holed coins of infinitesimal value
which the people used. He early discovered that if he searched carefully
just beside the roadway, sooner or later coins which had been dropped by
country bumpkins, coming out of the city the worse for their
holiday-making, would be brought to light. He soon evolved a system of
his own for working over the rutted roadway as a miner pans the gravel
of a gold-bearing stream; and whenever he made a find his joy and
excitement were amazing.
Each day and each month taught him something new. The other children of
the city gate were filled with open admiration for everything he did: he
learnt so fast every lesson from the great Book of Life spread before
his eyes that he grew apace in wisdom. Always attentive and observant,
nothing escaped him.
Especially remarkable was his power over animals. All living things
seemed to claim relationship with him, and he never abused these ties.
Before he was seven he knew how to catch rats with his bare hands, and
how to approach vicious camels, who if you are not careful can display a
savagery terrifying to all but their drivers. As for birds he had the
strange power of talking to them until their fears were gone. Then, as
warily as a cat he would pounce on them, catching fledgelings as easily
as a man with a line will catch fish.
Everybody here kept birds and trained them to fly from their tasselled
bird-sticks into the air and catch grain and seeds cast up to them. The
whole population gave itself up to this sport. In the summer evenings a
stream of men carrying cages or tasselled sticks, with their birds
lightly tied to them, came out of the city with their pets, and there
were great competitions with an amazing rivalry aroused, particularly in
singing and grain-catching. Hooded falcons, with their cruel eyes
looking sharply at everything, might also still be seen in numbers in
those days; they were carried by richly-attired men far out into the
country where they were cast at sparrows, the greatest zest being shown
in this cruel sport.
In such surroundings the boy never lacked companionship; every hour had
its adventures, just as every season had its especial delights. The
cruel winters, with their fierce winds brought ice and snow, but then
there was ice-sliding on a frozen pool in which he soon excelled.
Summer, with its blinding sunlight, allowed him to run naked and
discover teeming life in every stagnant pond. He knew that the first
thunder-storm would magically turn the whisking tadpoles into croaking
frogs. And after the thunder-storms would come the soft rains. Then, he
would sit hunched up singing to himself a rude little rhyme which all
the children sang in imitation of the frogs:
_Qua-qua,
Chi'rh hsia
Mi'rh hai hsia:
Qua-qua,_--
Which was simply:
"Today it rains, oh, frog;
Tomorrow it will rain also."
Sometimes he would sing this so long that he would lull himself to sleep
by his music; and waking up with a start he would find that night had
come....
In cursing, too, he became royally proficient. Before he was eight he
could out-curse any camel-driver, often bringing a clumsy lout
half-asleep between the humps of his beast to the ground frantic with
rage at the insults hurled at him for no reason at all by his shrill
treble. His father would then beat him if he happened to be near; but he
was swift of foot and very nimble--and hard to catch.
Sometimes, too, unaccountable gloom would come upon him. That was mainly
because his father, being tired of work, would drink heated wine in a
little pewter cup until he was quite drunk and then sit taciturn day
after day only bursting into words to upbraid his wife for her base
desertion of him years ago. A sort of family loyalty and pride forbade
the boy from mentioning this to any one, although the neighbourhood knew
all about it. Indeed he would fight any one who brought up the subject:
one day he attacked a giant of a man, who had made some remarks about
his maternity, biting him on the knee so badly that he was picked up and
thrown fully fifteen feet for his pains and nearly crippled from the
experience.
And yet even that rude awakening never taught him prudence. For the
whole region round the city gate was his domain and impelled him to
adventures and combats. There were camels and temples and fields and
encampments of armed men, and pilgrims and caravans--all the primitive
bustle of the fourteenth century living on at the very threshold of the
twentieth century and demanding his attention. Before he was nine he had
seen a score of men publicly executed by a man in a red coat with a huge
sword, and had watched with strangely staring eyes the stricken heads
roll in the dust. Everything that happened was to him a phenomenon
demanding inquiry; and on each and everything he bestowed the flexible
methods of the empiricist, thereby gaining in natural wisdom. He
insulted the schoolboys going to school with their school-books under
their arms, because instinctively he believed that the knowledge they
were acquiring was only a conceit which carried them away from the
workings of nature around them; he insulted them in many ways and with
many words until one day a youthful scholar who was tired of his tirade
turned on him and called back: "You--do you know what category you
belong to? To the animals who merely hunger and thirst and know no
books--"
It was the ironical laughter of the passers-by which henceforth made him
leave youthful scholarship alone.
He suddenly realized that there might be something in learning.