Читать книгу Wang the Ninth - B. L. Putnam Weale - Страница 7

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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.