THE VERMILION PENCIL
[Illustration]
THE VERMILION PENCIL
A ROMANCE OF CHINA
BY
HOMER LEA
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE McCLURE COMPANY
MCMVIII
_Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company_
Published, March, 1908
Copyright, 1906, by Homer Lea
_All rights reserved_
_To
My Father and to Fred Phillips
This Book is Dedicated_
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE
THE TYPHOON 3
BOOK I. A WOMAN
CHAPTER
I. IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOUNTAIN 25
II. THE VICEROY 34
III. THE WIFE 43
BOOK II. TWO UNKNOWNS
I. THE YOUNGER 53
BOOK III. THE BEGINNING
I. PRO DEO ET ECCLESIA 65
II. THE SCHOLAR 72
III. HOMO! MUTATO! 80
IV. A DRAGON AND THE GROTTO 88
V. THE MONSOON 98
VI. A GIFT 111
VII. DAWN 121
VIII. THE DELUGE FAMILY 128
IX. THE DERELICT 144
X. TWILIGHT 155
XI. NIGHT 172
BOOK IV. THE NEMESIS OF FATE
I. THE WANDERER 185
II. WORD FROM THE UNKNOWN 198
III. DAWN AGAIN 205
IV. THE GROTTO OF THE SLEEPLESS DRAGON 211
V. THE PROPITIATION OF THE GODS OF THE WATERS 218
VI. The Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters (_Continued_) 238
VII. THE WHITE LAMB AND YELLOW WOLF 260
VIII. AND SO IT ENDED 276
IX. JUDGMENT 291
X. A FRIEND 305
XI. ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACTHANI 314
PROLOGUE
THE TYPHOON
From the city of Yingching an old road runs northwestward to the
mountains of Loh Fou—that indescribable mass of grandeur and mystery, in
whose gorges unnumbered monasteries slumber, from whose peaks and cliffs
temples gaze benignly down through the somnolent shadows upon the
thoughtful progeny of Panku—the World-Chiseller. This slab-worn road,
after it leaves the suburbs clustering around the East Gate of
Yingching, follows right-obliquely across the rice-fields to the foot of
the White Cloud Hills.
To the residents of Yingching these hills have always been a source of
delight, and for uncounted ages multitudes have crowded at sunset the
towers and pavilions of the city walls to watch their glens and slopes
become veiled in a filtering of delicate shades—lilac, amethyst and
violet, until, through a deep of purple, they vanish into night—a
fluttering of gorgeous shadows.
Up over these hills the old road climbs laboriously until it disappears
through a gorge of its own wearing. After crossing the southern slope it
winds through deeply wooded ravines in whose alcoves Buddhist and Taoist
monasteries sleep away the fretful ages of man, forming retreats for
scholars, who come from Yingching, to escape in their brook-splashed
groves the clatter and nagging of men.
This ancient highway struggles on through the White Cloud Hills,
mutilated, uncertain; past the great monastery of Kingtai below the
southern summits; past reproachful ruins in whose crumbling shadows
solitary monks remain to propitiate the spirits of those that once dwelt
in their cloisters; past the Silvery Rush Brook whose foam the banished
statesman, Su Tungpa, compared, some centuries ago, to human greatness.
Crawling, halting along its deep-worn way the old road gropes through
gorges, over mountains, across torrents and under the splash of
cataracts until it reaches the green, undulating plains of Tsang Tsing.
Thence it goes straight through canebrakes, past villages and tombs,
under orchards of lichee, past ruins hid beneath creepers and cities old
and new.
Below the market-town of Chingkwo the ancient way crosses the Lung Mun
River, and, entering the mountains of Loh Fou, is untangled into a
hundred strand-like paths leading to monasteries that are hidden among
the shadows of every gorge, and to temples hung on the shelves of
cliffs. One path goes to the Monastery of Fa-Shau, in its deep pit of
shrubs and lanwhui; another climbs up among boulders and cataracts to
the Temple of Wa-Shau, thence three thousand feet higher to the Royal
Monastery of Putwan, while yet another threading path goes on a thousand
feet above where the Temple of the Moon clings to a mountain peak and
whither companies of chanting bonzes go from the monasteries below to
offer up prayers when the harvest moon is full.
The antiquity of this old road extends back beyond the records of men,
but it is known that, centuries after its trace had been deeply scarred
through the White Cloud Hills and across the plains of Tsang Tsing, it
was made into a king’s highway and paved with granite blocks, eight feet
long, two feet broad and often a foot in thickness. Yet the long bare
tread has not only eroded them away, but hills have been worn down and
cañons have been made by these century streams of men’s feet, treading
to and fro and dwelling by it for so long that their comings and goings
are unknown. For babes were born on this way and reared by its trace
long before the she-wolf suckled Silvia’s twins on the old road by the
Tiber’s bank. And like the road of Cenis, it has been traversed by
armies of different ages; it has resounded with their triumphant march;
it has echoed with the furtive footfall of their flight; the pageants of
Emperors have passed over it—and long files of sighing beggars.
One September afternoon on this old road, past the ruins of Kingtai and
near the southern summits of the White Cloud Hills, were seen neither
porters nor farmers nor beggars nor the retinues of mandarins. The road
was deserted other than by two men climbing slowly to the summit.
The sultry heat of the afternoon was choking, and at short intervals the
men halted to gain their breath and wipe the perspiration from their
faces. An oppressive, nervous lassitude weighed down the air; neither
from bush nor tree, from hillside nor glen, was to be seen or heard a
living creature.
The two men, approaching the top of the White Cloud Hills, were as
silent as their surroundings, and, until they reached the summit, when
the Valley of the Chu Kiang and the City of Yingching lay below them,
they appeared as unconscious of each other’s presence as they were
apparently oblivious to their surroundings. But when they came to the
bare mountain top, the manner of the older man changed; anxiously he
scanned the sky, the horizon, the fields and the river below them as if
to find in the wide estuary of the Chu Kiang some cause for alarm.
Nothing could have been more peaceful or beautiful. The sky was
cloudless, the horizon faintly hazy, while the slanting rays of the sun
cast a golden sheen upon the great river and the rice-fields that
extended from it to the hills. These fields, in different shades of
green and brown, interlaced with canals, were like a great shimmering,
silken quilt stitched together by threads of gold. Far eastward, on the
left, they merged into banana plantations, orchards of olive and lichee;
westward they ended at the edge of the eastern suburbs of Yingching.
The city, seen from the summit where the two men stood, appeared a vast
expanse of reddish roofs, shaded here and there by groves of banians. A
great old wall encircled the old city, but dimmed by distance, its
broken merlons were not seen nor the ravages of war, nor the erosions of
a thousand years, nor the veiling draperies of maiden-hair fern that
hung from the chipped interstices. These huge, aged and lichen-warted
walls loomed up black, impregnable. Outside of them the eastern suburbs
could be seen extending from under the East Gate obliquely in direction
of and along the bank of the river, while the western and southern
suburbs were hidden by them. Above the city, on the heights where
climbed the northern wall, rose the Great Sea-Guarding Tower. Just south
of it, within the walls, was the wooded peak of Yueshan surrounded with
the clustering courts and temples of the Goddess of Mercy—that
many-handed Goddess, who is so great in pity and compassion, saving from
misery and from woe, and who is ever listening to the cries that come up
from the world. Below the Temples, near by, in the centre of the city,
two pagodas pierce the sky, one round and tapering, the other octagonal.
Geomancers squinting up at them, say that this city is like a junk; that
these two pagodas are her masts and the broad, five-storied tower on the
north wall her stern sheets, and that the city is thus sailing
southward, toward the island of Honan, which lies on the other side of
the river, or beyond where rice-fields shimmer and the sky-line is
serrated by low, ragged hills.
Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their
paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden
under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the
two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their
left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.
It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed
the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and
diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat
crept furtively along its southern bank. The fields were without men or
oxen; the city and all the tree-veiled villages, which were scattered
about among the fields, were silent, and a thin blue haze hung
motionless over them.
For some time the two men looked down upon the delightful yet ominous
panorama spread out beneath them; the older man troubled and uneasy, but
the youth affected in no way, neither by the beauty nor the dumbness of
it.
When they began to descend the elder left the old road sloping gradually
along the hills toward the city, and led the way down by a steep path
that, on reaching the level, meandered along the paddy banks in the
direction of the river. But before they came to the river’s high
embankment the sun had set, and as they turned westward along the top of
the bank the older man suddenly stopped. Directly over the part of the
horizon where the sun had disappeared hung a great halo, the under part
of which gleamed red, the top was shrouded in black while between
scintillated iridescent colours; below the black lay a cold mottled grey
and above the red glowed a pink like the cheek of a young girl.
For some moments these colours hung distinctly over the misty horizon
then commingled—the corpse-grey with the cheek of the maiden—and over
all, the pall of black. The halo became ashen; wavered—vanished.
As the youth started to go the older man placed a detaining hand on his
shoulder and pointed toward the sky-line where but a moment before the
halo had hung.
Presently from where the sun had sunk were seen spreading enormous rays
of light. Upward they unfolded, stretching finger-like, clear across the
sky until they dipped their tips below the eastern horizon. At first
these great fingers shone red as though dyed with blood, then vermilion,
changing gradually through all the gold shades to an orange-saffron.
When the finger-rays burned red, the intervening spaces were violet;
when saffron, the sky was a pale green.
The youth watched dreamily these fingers tremble, coruscate, and change.
“It is God’s benediction,” he murmured.
“Or the Devil’s,” growled the other.
* * * * *
The two men waited until the great crepuscular rays, changing every
instant their gorgeous colourings, had disappeared, leaving a red
diffused light blotting the western sky, while a faint spectral mist
crept along the eastern horizon. Troubled, the older man watched this
whitish haze creeping along until it covered the eastern sky, then he
hastened toward the city and the youth followed meditatively after him.
When they reached the edge of the suburbs they found all the field
workers, women and oxen passively huddled about their mud-walled
dwellings. Boatmen had drawn up their sampans and fishing craft high
upon the bank. And in the doorways frightened faces peered uneasily down
the river while everywhere rustled that restlessness, a fretfulness that
is known by its silence. The children alone made their accustomed
noises. Nothing could disconcert them. They played tag with Death and
cried:
“You are it!”
As the two men entered the suburbs these children were in the midst of
that bubbling, which marks the end of a day’s play. They were having
unusual sport.
Along the coast of Southern China, among the many warnings that foretell
the iron whirlwind’s approach none is more peculiar than the actions of
dragon-flies, which seem to seek the companionship of men. They swarm
into villages, fasten themselves on every projection, even lighting on
the heads and shoulders of the inhabitants. Children, regardless of what
they portend, seize upon them, and tying strings to their long abdomens,
turn them loose amid laughter and cries. It was this easy conquest of
the myriad-eyed monsters that aroused their wild mirth as the men
approached.
The mothers of these gamins were burning incense-sticks in stone basins
beside their doorways, and sometimes strips of red paper on which were
written prayers. In the sampans and fishing boats, women were also
making propitiatory offerings—the boat’s prow serving as an altar. In
one place on the river bank, a party of old leathery boatwomen chattered
garrulously over a stone slab on which were placed a row of bowls
containing rice, fowls, sweets and wine. Near by stood a large paper
boat and a basket of miniature boats. One of these old women took two
pieces of wood shaped like an half pear and engraved with a number of
characters. These she tossed into the air so that they fell before the
stone slab. Five times were the symbols cast, then the old women
launched the bright-hued paper-boat and set fire to the basket of small
boats. The smoke ascended in a straight, unwavering column.
Standing by the water’s edge, the older man continued to look intently
down the river; neither noticing the children at play nor the prayers
ascending from the thresholds, nor the offerings of the boatwomen to the
gods of the winds and waters.
Suddenly a breathless expectancy fell upon those that were waiting and
upon those that were sending their prayers heavenward in fragrant smoke.
Far away, somewhere to the east and south, came a gentle murmur. At this
sound some crowded into their houses; others came forth. Only the
children did not heed this murmur, which at times became a moan to cease
a sigh. The people on the water front and along the eastern rim of the
suburbs peered over the rice-fields toward Lung Mun and down the river
to where it broadened out into a vast expanse of yellow waters. What
they saw filled them with terror.
Across the eastern horizon opened an enormous crack. Many looked into it
for an instant then ran and hid themselves in their hovels while those
that remained shuddered. This abyss into which they looked commenced
several degrees above the horizon; the bottom black, the top ashen; the
river, bearing on its mighty current the boatwomen’s fragile offering,
disappeared into it.
The crack widened. Awestricken, the people crowded together on the
suburb’s edge and water front to watch it open.
The thin blue stems of sandalwood smoke, ascending from each doorway
shrine, wavered.
The sky became overcast.
Suddenly the crowd swayed: backward, forward, backward, then scrambling,
vanished—a drop of rain had fallen.
For a moment there was twilight, which was ghastly—then night, which was
impenetrable.
A gust blew in from the sea and it was like a blast from a furnace. This
sirocco that came from the ocean was the first breath of the typhoon.
The elder seizing his companion by the arm pulled him along the narrow
streets toward the city. In the blackness they could see nothing but the
dying embers of sandalwood dully glowing in spectral clusters by each
threshold. These red, weird eyes peering out into the darkness blinked
and grinned joyously. They were friendly with the hot wind and the
harder it blew and the more they winked the more they coaxed the two men
along the tunnel-like streets.
Suddenly the wind ceased and rain began to fall slowly in great drops.
One by one the lights of the doorways went out. By their glow it had
been possible to distinguish the alignment of the houses, but now what
lay before them was cavernous. They were in a black labyrinth of winding
streets: some leading into the river, while in the floors of others were
wells; some extended a few feet, then ended. Familiar as the older man
was with these suburbs, he stumbled along uncertain; the youth lagged.
Both were stifling, for the scorching wind had started again with
increasing severity, causing them to cover their faces with their silken
sleeves.
There are winds that freeze, winds that burn, winds that tear and cut,
but this wind that precedes the typhoon, chokes. It fills a man’s
nostrils with so much burning air that he gasps for breath; he staggers,
sometimes blood oozes from the eyes and ears, he strikes at the wind,
claws the air, starts to run, stumbles and falls to the earth. Skeletons
have been found with skulls clasped round in bony arms—strangled by this
breath of the iron whirlwind.
The older man, aroused to the danger, stopped, and pounding on a door
begged for admittance. There was no answer, and they crouched together
on the threshold.
Presently the wind began to hesitate, to ebb, then it became quiet. But
as they hurried along the black street a sound like a cough fell upon
their ears, distant, piteous, wind-torn. They listened, and what they
heard was terrible—the muttering of a typhoon.
Perhaps if the howl of a hell were known, the muttering of the typhoon,
though dulled by distance, might be compared to it. As the Great Wind
approaches this muttering grows louder and louder until it becomes a
gigantic gibber; when at hand, the heavens are filled with multitudinous
screams, howls, laughter, moans, and shrieks—a stir of sounds that is
frightful.
The outer whirlwind now seized the men. Sometimes they were picked up by
its clutching fingers and hurled forward; again they tried to move and
could not; reaching out to see what opposed them they felt nothing;
turning a corner they were often thrown against a wall and glued there
as flies.
They had made but a short way in their struggle when the blackness began
to lighten and become livid. Everywhere shone a ghastly glimmer, which
was more impenetrable than the black night. With this light the wind and
rain increased in violence.
Suddenly out of the livid blackness a flame darted: for a moment there
was silent hesitancy, then the heavens burst into a conflagration. The
typhoon was upon them. Floods now fell from burning clouds and tongues
of fire spat out torrents.
In time, the thick mud walls of the surrounding houses began to
collapse, undermined by the water tearing along the narrow streets.
Sometimes a wall fell outward and the lightning showed terrified
families crouching upon the floor; when it flared again there was often
only a pile of brick, a heap of shattered tiles.
Thus they were driven from the shelter of one doorway to another and as
the houses began to fall more frequently, they were kept in the middle
of the streets breasting the storm with that strength remained to them.
The older man, dragging the youth along by the arm, struggled in the
direction of the great city wall under whose sheltering corners they
could alone find safety. But to get out of this suburban labyrinth was
difficult, doubtful, since its windings were becoming more choked and
impassable by the debris of falling houses. Sometimes they made their
way forward only to find the street blocked and themselves exposed to
the full swish of the storm. They retreated, but eventually their rear
was also choked with houses that had fallen after they had passed and
which formed just such a barricade as had turned them back. Hemmed in
with houses falling first on one side, then on the other, they stumbled
backward and forward in a continually narrowing space. At any moment an
overhanging wall might crash into the street and then it would be empty.
* * * * *
No one can hope to wholly describe a typhoon, that great wind, which is
to the cyclone of the American plains what the tornado is to a little
whirlwind adrift down a dusty road. Slaughter as well as destruction
marks its path, for the typhoon is made up of flames and floods as it is
of winds, and what escapes death or ruin from its cyclonic breath is
devoured by its fires or swept away by its torrents. No one hopes in a
typhoon, and men flee but a little way from it.
Nothing is more frightful than this iron whirlwind, nothing more
wonderful. It has the cunning brutality of the inanimate and its
treachery; the bloodthirstiness of some gigantic beast, the grandeur of
God. It is horrible, yet sublime.
This monster of nature is born somewhere out of the huge womb of the
South Pacific, upon whose bosom it strays aimlessly and recklessly
about, romping, wrestling, growing, until it gets into a temper and
buffets its mother, the sea. Becoming cyclopean, it spits at
heaven—petulant it departs.
Like a loosened monster it allows itself every liberty, and wanders with
the greatest ease in any path. It sucks up the sea and snatches
lightning from the clouds; it fills its belly with floods and its breast
with fire. Headlong it falls upon every obstacle; ships become as dust
motes in its breath. It devours towns and babies with the same ease, the
same glee. It laughs and screeches simultaneously. It is full of joy and
rage at the same time and its joy is the more terrible. Sometimes it
gets into traps and difficulties from which it can scarcely extricate
itself; then it becomes frantic, shrieks, lingers and mutilates.
But in spite of all this gyratory brutality, this iron-toothed monarch
of all winds cannot ravage far from the sea, though in its blind rage it
never hesitates. Falling upon the coast it hurls ships into rice fields
or upon hillsides; the sea front it covers with wrecks; fishing fleets
are crunched into splinters and towns are strewn about as picked bones.
So the two struggled feebly against this monster backward and forward in
the midst of falling houses, until finally, bruised and bleeding, they
tottered into an open court surrounded by high massive walls. Near the
centre of the court stood a low crucifix, a tub, and two black stones.
Against the windward wall was built an open shed, and into this beyond
the crucifix they tottered and lay exhausted, while the typhoon raged
and destroyed around them. The lightning burned steadily and the noises,
which once muttered and cried about them, were lost in the terrifying
grind of the iron wind; a wind that picked up great logs like rice
straws, and sometimes sent rice straws with such force that they pierced
wood as steel needles—a wind that in its antics screamed, and in its
butchery laughed.
The two men under the shed lay still, apparently oblivious to the storm
wrack until the older man rose to his knees and began to feel around for
his companion. Beside him, lit by the lurid glare from without, were a
number of headless corpses, and among these lay the youth.
“Where are we?” he asked meditatively when the older man had aroused
him.
“In the Execution Grounds.”
“What are these?”
“Corpses.”
“Ah! their souls may now be with God.”
“Or in Hell.”
The storm was abating; the moans and cries from the heavens ceased; the
lightning grew less violent. Suddenly all became an absolute calm and
the men crept out from among the corpses under the shed.
A faint, uncertain light glimmered in the darkness above them; enormous
black masses of clouds could be seen rolling close to the earth, but
directly overhead was a circle of clear sky, darkly blue, and almost in
its very centre shone a star of marvellous brilliancy. The youth gazed
up at it in gratitude.
“It is the Eye of God.”
The elder also regarded the star, but said nothing.
“Let us go,” said the youth, “the storm has ended.”
“Not while the Eye of God is in the heavens.”
For some time they stood still and silent, watching the low black clouds
roll around the clear circle of sky.
“What is that?” asked the youth thoughtfully, pointing to the low
crucifix, the tub and the black stones showing dimly under the pale
light that came from the Eye of God overhead.
“_Lingchee_,” growled the older man; “on that an adulteress salutes the
world and passes on.”
For a long time both looked meditatively yet intently at the low
crucifix, the tub and the black stones beside it.
“They tie her naked upon it,” growled the elder, more to himself than to
the youth, “and then cut her into pieces. The first three cuts are
called the strokes of mercy, and are no doubt dedicated to the
many-handed goddess. The first stroke the executioner draws his knife
across the brow and a fold of skin drops over the eyes, which is
merciful, for it shuts out the sneering faces around her.”
The elder, looking up, saw that the Eye of God no longer shone in the
heavens. Above and around them fell unfathomable darkness.
“Then the ears are cut off, which is also merciful, for jeers are no
longer heard.”
A wolfish giggle came from the abyss about them; a drop of rain fell and
their wet garments flapped heavily.
“Her tongue is cut out next,” continued the growl in the darkness, “and
this is the crowning stroke of mercy, for it stops her piteous cries.”
Again came an interrupting roar, low and sullen. The typhoon was near at
hand but the older man raised his voice above the distant roar.
“Then they cut off her breast, where——”
Gnashing, grinding, the iron-toothed wind fell again upon the hapless
suburbs, revolving in the opposite direction. It is what sailors call
the return storm, when its cyclonic revolutions are reversed and the
typhoon returns to complete its devastation. Going, the typhoon is a
monster; returning, it is in addition, a maniac. What it has failed to
destroy, it returns to mangle. The terrible winds now came from the
northwest through the open side of the court, and the two men were no
longer protected. The shed that had sheltered them was shattered by the
first returning blast. Helpless and bleeding they were hurled together
with the headless corpses into a corner of the court, making altogether
a hideous pile but wherein the cadavers protected them from the debris
that was hurled into the corner. It often happens that in these storms
the dead succour the living.
The typhoon continued to shriek and to laugh triumphantly in the black
and fiery abyss overhead. It was as if hell had been turned upside down
and out of its vast chasm its green fires were being poured and all
those bruised noises that are said to resound there.
The typhoon was making its departure, which is not less terrible than
its coming. Screaming, hovering and hastening it makes its retreat;
mangling what it has heretofore destroyed. In time it weakens and begins
to linger, then exhausted it hesitates, stops, and whispers. Frenzied,
it again wanders uncontrollably about; revolving always in the same
circle and moving whimsically hither and thither until its strength is
gradually expended. Quivering, shuddering, whimpering, it at last
disappears again into the mother sea—a prodigal returned.
BOOK I. A WOMAN
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOUNTAIN
Just south of where the Yangtse River empties into the ocean lies the
Province of the Winding Stream—venerable and beautiful, with a history
written back almost to that long hour when the world was yet supposed to
be unmade by the hand of God—a nebulous vapour adrift in the night.
This province is one vast park of alternating hills and valleys, where
peaks, cascades, and woodlands intervene in a fascinating confusion;
where walled cities and temples rise majestically on all sides; where
canals and watercourses, alive with boats, form a silvery network among
fragrant hills and tree-hid hamlets, making it altogether just such a
land as the imagination conceives belonging alone to the sunlit East.
This province is like an endless garden; whereever the eye reaches is
seen not only a luxuriant vegetation but one that has been tended and
reared by man for his uses. Patches of pink orchard blossoms alternate
with grey thickets of mulberry; clumps of feathery bamboo flutter as
plumes by the edges of rice fields; plane trees with their snowy
blossoms alternate with orchards of pumelo, while along the lower hills,
forming wide and densely shaded tracts, spread groves of silvery olive
and lichee with delicate pink leaves and strawberry-like fruit.
Throughout all of these hills and orchards wind rivers, brooks, and
canals, over-spanned at short intervals by high curved bridges of stone.
Under their arches innumerable boats glide from dawn until night. In
some places the country is covered with tea plantations, and from each
willow-whipped cottage rises the fragrant breath of burning tea. Here
and there on hills thick with cypress and pine are seen the carved
gleaming roofs of temples, while on the paths leading to them every crag
and turn has its miniature pagodas and grottoes. Again, the hills in
many places are covered with groves of oil-bearing camelias, whose
graceful shape and dark green foliage add an indescribable charm to the
landscape.
But Che Kiang is not more famous for the charm of its countryside than
it is for the beauty of the women, who dwell among its hills and
valleys, working in the midst of their tea shrubs, rearing cocoons,
spinning silk; and are no more thought of than the azaleas that brighten
the hillsides or the purple lanwhui that scatters its perfume on the
bosom of the careless passing winds. In the Tien Mu Mountains, toward
the southwestern part of the province, these women have a peculiar
hauteur and independence of their own, a vivacity and laughter, which is
found nowhere else in China.
It was among these mountains and forests of the Tien Mu Shan that that
tireless spider, Fate, set to weaving one of its innumerable webs of
invisible strands: a net fragile yet terrible. Unseen or half seen, a
spirit-glint in the azure heavens, it is a barrier through which and
from which the little man-fly never breaks.
So the spider webbed in the Valley of the Fountain, and before this net
is finally torn and shattered by the bluster of Time there shall be
found in it those that did not know of its weaving.
One spring morning, probably about the same hour when a melancholy
Breton and an unknown priest were setting out from the Mission of
Yingching upon their errands of mercy, a mandarin’s retinue moved slowly
along the Tien Mu Mountains and before the night mists had entirely
cleared away the path brought them to the upper heights of a small
glade, known as the Valley of the Fountain. Around this vale the rugged,
broken mountains were clothed in trees of various sorts. The bright
golden leaves of the camphor and amber mingled with the purple foliage
of the tallow, while over these rose the deep soft green of pine and
arbor vitae.
As the sun rose and sent its broadening beams down into the purple
Valley of the Fountain the lower mountain sides became a gorgeous mass
of red and yellow azaleas; on every hill-bank whereever the eye could
reach spread a flower mantle of dazzling brightness. From the valley
came the fragrance of tea; from the ravines, the breath of lilies and
lanwhui.
As the retinue moved slowly down the tortuous path there rose from a
thicket of tea shrubs on a round slope to the right an outburst of song
not unlike that of the mocking bird in its sweet intensity and freedom
but vibrant with the melody of human passion. And, as this wild song
rose with supreme impulse and passion above the tea thicket, the
mandarin’s retinue stopped.
Never was an auditorium more suitable to song than this amphitheatre of
flower-packed hills that surrounded the Valley of the Fountain. The
sun’s rays were just stealing through a purple haze and turning the dew,
which lay heavy upon the flowers into myriads of opals; the murmur of
ravine-hidden cascades, the chorus of bird-song in the still-aired
morning, all seemed but part of the song that rose from the tea thicket.
This tempestuous outburst made the hills ring with its echoes, calling,
scorning, pleading, threatening; now bubbling like the wood-warbler with
cadences of silvery notes; now rising, exultant as the night-lark, to
the ear of heaven; triumphant, declamatory, beseeching, full of
defiance, of mockery and laughter until at last it ceased, dying away
among the neighbouring gorges, as soft as a kiss.
“What was that?” demanded the mandarin excitedly, putting his head out
of the sedan.
“That is Ma Shue’s daughter,” said several voices at once, “the girl
with a tongue of a hundred spirits.”
“On with you and stop your chattering,” cried the mandarin.
Ma Shue, the old farmer of the Valley, stood watching from the door of
his rice-thatched cottage the procession winding down the mountain path.
“Where is she?” demanded the mandarin, stepping hastily from his chair.
“How greatly honoured is my poor and miserable abode,” murmured the old
farmer, bowing repeatedly.
“Where is she?” demanded the mandarin again, as he peeped about the
corners of the cottage and through the open door.
“I am ashamed to set before your honourable self the wretched food we
live upon,” apologised the old man as he followed at the heels of the
mandarin.
“Go get her,” commanded the mandarin impatiently as he peered into the
cottage.
“Yes, yes,” murmured the farmer hastily, “but for the poor our food is
not sufficient; how can it be tasted by——”
“What are you talking about, old coxcomb? Have you not a daughter?”
“Alas, Great Sir, it is true, I have been unfortunate——”
“Go get her at once, at once,” interrupted the mandarin excitedly.
“How can I, how can I?” asked the old man, bowing with trepidation.
“How can you?” mocked the mandarin scornfully. “How can you? Because I
ordered it. I, Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.” And Ho Ling,
Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, scowling with dignity, stepped back and
folded his hands majestically on his stomach.
When the farmer returned he bowed mutely before the mandarin.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I told her; yes, yes,” cried Ma Shue, “she is coming.”
“When?”
“She said,” and the old farmer looked uneasily at the feet of the
mandarin, “she said——”
“Well?”
“When she got ready——”
It was a long time before a soft patter was heard in an adjoining room
whence came low, amused laughter; then a light flutter of garments, and
the tea-farmer’s daughter entered. Casting a hasty glance at the
mandarin she turned her back on him with a haughty but almost
imperceptible toss of her head.
For some moments the mandarin looked at her in astonishment, yet with
intense satisfaction.
“Maid.”
“Man.”
The mandarin started, his eyes opened to the utmost of their narrow
width and he glared at the old man shivering in his chair.
“Did I not hear you singing this morning?” he demanded severely.
“Your knowledge should be greater than mine,” she replied coldly.
“Were you singing?”
“I am always singing.”
“Were you not in a tea-thicket?”
“I should be at my work now.”
“Then it is settled. I heard you singing. You see I am quick in my
judgment as well as sagacious. Will you sing for me?”
“Sing for you?” she repeated in soft, amazed tones. “Sing for you? Why?”
“I am Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank——”
“I never sing for mandarins,” she interrupted decisively.
“What?”
“My song,” she replied in cold, careless tones, “is for the birds and
tea-pickers of the Valley, but not for wolves or tigers of the Yamen.”
The mandarin became rigid; the old father’s pipe fell from his hand and
the daughter, casting a fleeting glance at him continued, her voice
becoming suddenly gentle and humble:
“But your coming down into our valley is as the turning of raindrops
into pearls.”
The mandarin’s countenance beamed with pleasure.
“By my Fifth Button,” he exclaimed, “I believe you could be taught
something.”
“I am afraid it is impossible,” she murmured contritely.
“Never! You allow these rustics——” and Ho Ling glared his challenge
around the room.
“Yes,” she continued meditatively as she turned her head slightly toward
him, “a shrub may appear lofty in the desert and a tea-plant among the
tea-plants is not small but,” she looked at him out of the corner of her
eye, “I am only a fragile weed in the shadow of the luxuriant pine.”
“Yes, it is true,” he replied, settling back in his chair with supreme
satisfaction. “It is true. I am Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.”
The farmer’s daughter with unconscious coquettishness turned her head
slightly toward him so the rose brown of her cheek and her full lustrous
eye were visible.
Suddenly, in the midst of the mandarin’s self-contemplation, a chime of
laughter pealed through the room. Tossing her head, the child of the
Tien Mu Mountains glanced roguishly at the astounded mandarin and darted
laughing through the doorway. Again and again came the birdlike notes,
until in the distance they ceased in a silvery echo.
“Call her!” shouted the mandarin, rushing to the door.
The old man bowed excitedly.
“Call her! Get her!” cried the mandarin, turning fiercely on the old
farmer.
“What can I do?” he mumbled pathetically. “She is gone. You do not
understand, she moves as the kin deer, she is as wild as the pheasant.”
The mandarin returned to the doorway and remained for a long time in
moody silence. Presently he turned to the farmer.
“Let it be known that Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, will depart.”
And the old man skipped gleefully from the room.
CHAPTER TWO
THE VICEROY
Hangchau, the capital of Che Kiang, rests haughtily upon its hills in
full view of the ocean. Its granite walls, more than thirty miles in
circumference, higher than a four-storied building and wide enough on
top for four vehicles to drive abreast, extend north from the river
Tsien toward a vast plain that stretches out an unending garden threaded
with a thousand strands of silvery waterways. South of the city along
the blue waters of the bay is another mighty garden spotted with clumps
of trees, covered with luxuriant crops and villages nestling in groves
of feathery bamboo; westward is the lake of Si Hu, and beyond, a wide
amphitheatre of wooded hills and mountains.
Hangchau, like Che Kiang, has an antiquity of its own and though it
stands to-day one of the world’s great cities, so it has stood for
innumerable ages, more or less, in the manner Marco Polo saw it in the
thirteenth century, “pre-eminent to all other cities in the world in
point of grandeur and beauty as well as from its abundant delights.”
In that uncertain antique age when Babylon rested securely within its
hundred-mile wall pierced by eighty brazen gates; when the massive town
of Troy frowned down upon the troubled waters of the Xanthus, and Darius
peered anxiously from Persepolis across the plains of Merdueth, even
then was Hangchau a city. And now while Babylon is but a mud-mound on
the willow-fringed banks of the Euphrates, Troy a myth, and jackals come
forth when the moon is high to howl where once kings commanded—yet
Hangchau lives, thrives, and is great.
Another wonder of Hangchau other than its antiquity and greatness is the
Lake of Si Hu, a lake transparent as a diamond, its brilliant surface
gleaming and fluttering amongst dark green hills for many miles in
irregular circuit. On the north, west, and southwest rise picturesque
mountains whose slopes along the lake’s edge are laid out in groves and
gardens, beautiful though fantastic; having here and there temples,
palaces and pagodas, while numbers of fanciful stone bridges are thrown
across the arms that reach out among the hills. About over the waters
great numbers of barges gaily decorated, sail to and fro, the passengers
dining, smoking and enjoying the breezes which blow down from the higher
mountains, as well as the gay scenes, the whimsical gardens, palaces,
pagodas, and overhanging groves.
This lake, so like a jewel in its brilliancy, is studded with
innumerable islands adorned with palaces and temples and on one of the
larger islands, near the north shore, is a viceregal palace used as a
suburban dwelling by the Viceroy of Chukiang.
One spring afternoon, when the pink petals lay strewn about, the Viceroy
sat in the sun on a marble terrace thoughtfully munching his melon
seeds, occasionally throwing one to the goldfish and turtles that
crowded toward the terrace bank, snuffling, flopping but impatient to be
fed. On a high ebony table beside his pipe and tea bowl lay a package of
papers and at intervals the Viceroy re-perused some part of their
contents, then placidly resumed his melon seeds, gazing over the lake to
the hills bright in their spring foliage, to the slopes pink with
blossoms, to the lake’s edge, fringed with the feathery bamboo. The
shadow of a wutung tree slowly creeping across the terrace passed over
the table and, hiding his bare grey head from the warm rays of the
spring sun, aroused him from his meditation; again he looked over the
papers then raised his hand.
In a moment Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, came from an adjoining
pavilion and bowed before him.
“I have read these reports,” said the Viceroy gruffly, decisively
tapping the package of papers. “They are guilty, and to-morrow shall
die.”
The mandarin bowed.
“Justice,” continued the Viceroy, “is an excellent thing—when not
delayed; to put off the punishment of the guilty is to destroy the
dignity of the state—a procrastinating Justice is the buffoon of the
populace. Do you understand?” And squinting his eyes, the Viceroy
surveyed inquisitively the mandarin, who bowed repeatedly, uneasily.
“You were one day late.”
The mandarin continued bowing.
“Well!” demanded the Viceroy, impatiently tapping the papers that were
spread upon his knees.
“I stopped——”
“Yes?” interrupted the Viceroy.
“I could not get——”
“Eh?”
The mandarin bowed fervidly.
“Where did you stop?”
“In the Heavenly Mountains,” he answered furtively.
“In the mountains?”
The Viceroy uttered these three words weighingly.
“That is—in a little valley—a very little valley.”
“Ah,” and for a moment the Viceroy looked at him in silence. “What
valley?”
The mandarin became sallow. “My poor memory——”
“I will call your escort.”
“When I think of it,” put in the mandarin hastily and with trepidation,
“the name comes to me—it is the Valley of a Fountain.”
“Why?”
“Great Sir,” answered the mandarin with an excited burst of confidence,
“I am to marry the daughter of this valley.”
“Ah?” A sympathetic inquisitiveness was in the Viceroy’s voice. “I
suppose you will now want a leave of absence?”
The mandarin’s face became suffused with joy. Nothing could have
prevented him from bowing repeatedly.
“Well,” commanded the Viceroy impatiently, “this only daughter, is she
well dowered?”
“Great Sir, I do not know; I do not care!” he cried excitedly.
“What!” demanded the Viceroy, peering at him in amazement.
“O Great Sir, if you could but see her you would understand that she is
richer than wealth itself; it you could but hear her you would
understand how my desires are as spring freshets surging against Time’s
wintry constraint——”
“Ah?” The Viceroy uttered this with a great depth of feeling.
“Yes, yes,” went on the mandarin hurriedly, never lifting his eyes from
the floor, “Fate, the Judge, decreed it, and Fate, the Jailor, pulled me
into it. As I was passing along a mountain path, suddenly from out of
the tea-shrubs came sweeter music than the song of the phœnix—the Song
of Fate. My escort stopped and I was unable to make them amble onward. I
can now understand how the flute of Liang Kiang stole away the courage
of eight thousand men. My escort stood breathless while in vain I
blustered and threatened. I was obliged to send a horseman to find out
the source of the song and I found the phœnix-singer to be a girl living
in the valley. My escort became mutinous, then like a gleam of sunlight
shafted through a black rebellious storm flashed the thought of gain for
Your Excellency—a musician rarer than any in the Middle Kingdom—and it
determined me to go down in the glade.
“When the girl’s father learned that I was Ho Ling, Mandarin of the
Fifth Rank, he told me confidentially—confidentially, that is the way it
was—that his daughter lingered in the outer room tearful to see the hem
of my robe. So I admitted her thinking that I might be of great service
to Your Excellency. When she bowed down before me she trembled with
delight——”
“What was her appearance?” demanded the Viceroy, interrupting the
mandarin’s breathless monologue.
“O Great Sir, if I had all the wisdom of nine times the Nine Classics I
could not describe her. She is not beautiful in the manner of the women
of Hangchau. Her big eyes are round like those of oxen, but charged with
most unoxen fires. She does not dainty along with golden lilied feet as
the women here, but ankled as the kin deer and winged as the wild
pheasant, she derides the very rocks and mountains. Her cheeks of almond
flower the jealous sun has lacquered over with ruddy gold and her
pouting lips are so pent full of ruby blood that they would turn the
honestest man into a thief if he could but perform the subtle theft of
gaining them.
“And yet, Great Sir, I do not know whether you would have called her
beautiful or not before I conquered her, for she had somewhat of the
devil in her.”
“You conquered her?” demanded the Viceroy, eying him doubtfully.
“Yes,” replied the mandarin, scowling proudly into the tree tops. “I
conquered her, but not more by my personality than by stratagem for, as
Your Excellency well knows, I am not unskilled in that contentious art.”
“So you captured her?” queried the Viceroy again, somewhat
sarcastically.
“Yes, she came haughtily into my presence——”
“And kissed the hem of your robe?” interrupted the Viceroy.
“Exactly, exactly, a figure of speech; I have renamed her
humility—haughtiness. But in continuation, when she beheld me and heard
me speak in fluent familiarity the wisdom of the ancients, her
rebellious, warring heart sent at once through every dainty vein its
bold scouts that for themselves did redly dare the combat. Her eyes
became a perfect arsenal and the arched bow of her lips shot from some
inexhaustible quiver shafts divinely smeared with a poppy that would
lull into dreams the most valorously inclined defence.
“Ah, it would have done Your Excellency a world of good if you could but
have seen how her eyes, her lips, and even the shy little dimples, which
hid in her cheeks and chin, contended as jealous allies, each first to
make a breach in the hitherto impregnable fortress of my heart.
“But like a wise general, I simulated dismay, abandoned my outer works,
and retreated to the keep. Straightway the jealous allies scaled the
walls. I opened the inner gates and they, surcharged and petulant with
fancied victory, rushed in. There was a momentary struggle, then she
yielded, and now remains a willing captive in the very donjon of my
heart.”
For some time the Viceroy eyed the mandarin in a manner unappreciative
and in no way to his liking.
“Ho Ling!”
The mandarin started violently.
“You are still an ass.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE WIFE
As Destiny fated it, the Viceroy himself married, that summer, the
daughter of the tea-farmer and not Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.
More than a year had passed since the Viceroy had married this farmer’s
daughter from the Valley of the Fountain, which extraordinary event had
been duly commented upon by the gentry of Hangchau and had been
forgotten. But with the Viceroy it was different. Though many months had
mysteriously vanished he was still an uneasy bridegroom unable in any
degree to resume that tranquil state he had enjoyed years before.
“Tranquillity of the spirits,” said a guest one day, “is the culmination
of a scholar’s life; it is the essence of propriety; the golden mean
between the heart and the mind.”
“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” replied the Viceroy gruffly, “but there is
no happiness in it.”
So the Viceroy, while by no means tranquil, was happy. And though a year
had rushed hastily away, he still paced restlessly back and forth before
a richly carved screen; waiting, frowning, biting his under lip.
Suddenly stopping in his impatient pacing, he clapped his hands and an
old woman timidly entered.
“Is she coming?” he demanded in a voice of mingled anxiety and doubt.
“Great Sir, she will be here in just——”
“Get out! I will not tolerate this any longer; not another——”
A soft, tinkling laugh from behind the screen caused him to turn,
startled, uneasy; a gentle rustle and the tea-farmer’s daughter entered.
The deer-like freedom of her home was altered; she came slowly into the
room with graceful but restrained hauteur. Her rich, brown skin was now
white as an almond petal; in her cheeks wavered a transparent pink but
her lips were as red as ever and her eyes shone with the same liquid
brightness.
Bowing, she said mockingly, “Most impatient and ungentle Great Sir, you
are angry at my delay?”
“No, no, just bothersome dispatches——”
“Indeed! then I shall leave you to consider them in peace.” Tossing her
head she turned to leave the room.
“Just a moment! Just a moment!” cried the Viceroy hastily. She stopped
with her back to him. “I have a necklace of pearls.”
“Yes?” she inquired carelessly.
“You wish it?”
She could hear the pearls trickling through his fingers.
“Ah, do you not admire it?”
“I have not seen it,” she answered curtly.
“I am seated on the divan here.”
“I am standing by the door.”
“Are you not going to take these pearls?”
“Are you not going to bring them to me?”
The Viceroy got up, hesitated, then came and stood beside her. She held
out her hand and he wrapped the necklace around her palm and wrist,
while a childish happiness dimpled her cheeks as she admired and fondled
the gold-strung baubles from the sea.
“They would be most beautiful,” she said, looking up at him with a smile
that brought a flush to his face, “did not the jewelled kindness that
suggested them dim their brilliancy.”
“Eh? Yes, yes,” his Excellency bowed. “Pearls are a very worthy
jewel—unfortunate——women have not their attributes——”
“What are they?” she demanded, throwing back her head.
“Why, why, Time’s incrustations——”
“Yes?” she inquired, with such a mocking chill in her voice that it
caused him to lower his eyes. “Yes,” she repeated, walking over to a
table where an inkstone lay, “it is quite true that what Time adds
yearly to the pearl, it steals from a woman’s cheek but,” she put the
pearls in the wet ink and with the tip of her tiny forefinger rubbed
them around and around until they were but a blackened mass, “you see,”
she continued naïvely, “that they are alike in a way.”
“Isn’t it strange?” she murmured, still rubbing her little finger tip
among the blackened jewels. “Isn’t it strange?”
The Viceroy stood immovable, while a network of purple veins began to
spread across his face.
The wife’s hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, then seizing his
ears, pulled him down into a chair.
“You are not angry?” she said consolingly.
The Viceroy looked up at her reproachfully.
“I know it was very wrong,” she said with contrition.
He eyed her questioningly.
“Do you think,” she frowned and her tones became threatening, “that my
father did not teach me gratitude?”
“Yes, yes,” answered the Viceroy hastily. “Yes; economy is a woman’s
highest virtue——”
“Economy in what?” she demanded, straightening up and looking down at
him coldly.
He moved restlessly and tried to say something.
“Money!” she repeated with scorn. “I knew you would say that! Money!
Oyah! A pool of filth where men are defiled and drowned—bah!” She
stamped her little foot fretfully, and threw the pearls on the floor.
“Would you let wealth all run away?” he asked pathetically.
“Does not a running stream irrigate more fields than a pond? Is there
not more purity in a brook than in a stagnant pool?”
His Excellency sighed deeply.
“Why don’t you learn other economy?” She leaned over him, pouting her
red lips like a teasing child. “Why don’t you be economical of
punishments, wasteful of mercy, and treat greed as a rogue? Because, my
husband,” and taking hold of his ears, she tilted his head back, “I
think whoever is a miser in punishments and a spendthrift of compassion,
not only hoards up inestimable treasure, but practises the economy of
heaven.”
“That is true,” mumbled the Viceroy, thickly, “very——”
“It is not!” she interrupted, letting go his ears and stamping her foot.
“Not true?”
“It never happens.”
“That is so,” replied the Viceroy in a relieved tone.
“It is not!”
“What——”
“Because you could make it so if you wished.” Speaking these words in
half whispering tender tones, she again took hold of his ears and looked
down into his eyes, serious, begging.
“Will you promise me not to have any more prisoners beheaded this week?”
“Again!”
“Will you promise?” she pulled harder on his ears.
“But—but——”
“Promise!”
“Yes.”
“And you will send away that thin, wicked lictor?”
“Eh? Yes, yes; he is a rogue.”
“And you will rebuild the hospital at Ho Yong?”
“No, no; a waste of money.”
“You won’t?” she pulled his ears again. “Not even for me?” Her red lips
parted and her breath blew warm upon his cheek.
The viceroy moved restlessly, hopelessly.
Her lips, just touching his ear, whispered, “Only that one little
promise, my husband.”
A tremor passed through the Viceroy’s great frame.
“Yes,” he muttered in a thick voice, lifting his hands to clasp her to
him but in that instant she stood beyond his reach, her face flushed and
dimpled with smiles.
Distant she stood, looking at him, smiling, blushing, mocking; then
taking his fat face between her little hands she tilted it back,
laughing softly a laugh like the low notes of a wood-warbler.
He raised his hands.
She frowned.
His hands fell and her smiles came again.