Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 4

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So Wing put his sacrificed bird to cook, and lit his pipe.

When he had eaten he stretched himself under the low dome of mat, and slept.

The sun was gone when So Wing woke; there had been just half a pinch of poppy in his last blissful pipeful; his stomach had been very comfortably furnished; he had slept long and well.

He rose and lit three lanterns and hung them on his mast.

Soon Q’ūo Chung or Q’ūo’s servants signalled back with a half-score of crimson candles that suddenly burned on the branches of an acacia-tree.

So Wing poled his boat to the bank and tethered it to an iron ring fastened there securely for such purpose. But he made no move to land. He would not do that until the truant day-star had come back to China, and not until Q’ūo Chung had sent him welcome and word to land. For Q’ūo Chung was rich and powerful, not to be treated lightly.

The truant sun came back to Yün-nan promptly. So Wing woke as promptly, only stretched once, and crawling out of his low sleep-place on the drying deck, jumped up to his full height as the first javelin of light pricked the dark, and looked about him more attentively than he had done yesterday. He had been very tired then, and clamorously hungry. Now he was perfectly rested and well fed. His strong arms and legs did not even remember how they had strained and ached in the Yang-tsze’s churning danger.

He had not been here before. Not before this had he been entrusted with business of such importance.

On the river’s right bank (reading it from south to north) verdure-swathed hills rose up to the barren higher gypsum-cliffs. Every possible foot was richly cultivated. Vegetables and fruit-trees grew close up to the pine-trees that walled the family burial-garden. A wide oil-tree orchard, plum-trees, cherry-trees, and peach-trees spread across the green and fertile upland that stretched above the white cliffs farther than eye could see. Bamboos trembled in the sunrise, eucalyptus tanged the early air, palms edged the mulberry grove, and pricked through it here and there like grey-green pagodas.

It was May—warm for that month—a June-warm May. The poppies were ripe for their harvest; mauve and white poppies and a few that were scarlet. Young wheat trembled in the early breeze. On the tall corn the silk-tasselled cobs, sweet and milky, still hid in their sheaths of green. The early clovers—white, pink, crimson, speckled and streaked, purple and yellow and mauve—were bursting with sweetness. Bean-vines were heavy with fragrant pink flowers. The first strawberries were ripe. The raspberries were ripening. The tall Yün-nan “privet” was all snowy with its thousands of tiny white blossoms. Every inch of the fructive prosperous place spelled indefatigable industry. And not an inch that could be cultivated was not. The ponies though shaggy were sleek, the pigs were fat. But the white-flowered, wax-insect-trees were most. For Q’ūo Chung’s well-tended domain lay in the great wax-insects belt at the edge of Ta Liang Shan, the independent Lolo land.

Even the great bare white boulders and cliffs of gypsum, that looked so gaunt and barren, were richly productive. Flakes hammered off them, ground and then mixed with the boiling soy-bean cream which they curdled and wheyed, made the nutritious teofu which is the daily bread of half China’s life—the most sustaining food in Asia—perhaps in the world. It is chiefly teofu that enables millions of Chinese peasants who rarely taste meat to toil incessantly, and to thrive on toil.

Q’ūo Chung’s house was high-perched way up at the very top of his highest hill. It was barricaded and fortified, strongly enwalled. A wide deep moat surrounded the wall’s outer side. Q’ūo Chung was ready and vigilant to anticipate and to resist the not infrequent Lolo raids; as there was every need to be in that part of Central Yün-nan.

The house itself was rough and unpretentious; built of dun-coloured adobe, rudely thatched with boards and planks; a casual flat roofing that had to be renewed every few years.

At one end rose a large square white tower. So Wing had seen scores of them yesterday, almost as many the day before; the sturdy watch-towers necessary to every home on the Chinese side of the pirate-infested river across which bandit Lolos and destruction might sweep at any moment. On clear days, from his own hill-top Q’ūo Chung could count all but seventy other such watch-and safety-towers.

The tower’s lower story had no windows. Its one solid outer door was but a slit, ponderously masonried, ponderously bolted inside. Another very small door led directly into the low dwelling-house, that the women and children might escape under cover into the tower, if warned that the Lolos were coming to pillage and burn.

The five-storied tower’s three lower stories were thirty feet square. Then it diminished by half its size to its turret-like upper stories’ squat pointed roof of solid stone. The lower roof, just a broad belt of roof, slanted up sharply to the base of the wide, square turret. But the turret’s roof had more than a hint of the delicious down-and-up-sweeping curves that are the most noticeable characteristic of typical Chinese roofs, and their loveliest. But both roofs wore “lions” and scorpions on their corners, quaintly hewn out of stone; the guardian demons of every self-respecting roof in China. Its solid walls were full four feet thick—almost invincible to any arms or ammunition within the Lolo hordes’ command.

In times of peace the watch-tower of retreat and defence was Q’ūo’s principal storehouse and granary. When the Lolos came it was Q’ūo’s citadel. Then the women and children, with all the treasure they’d have time to gather and strength to carry, took refuge in one of the upper rooms. And the men put up their fight from roof and windows. There was great store of heavy round stones kept in readiness (as there was on the walls inside the moat) to pitch down crushingly on any Lolo who came within aim. Not even a Lolo could live on whom one of those stone missiles had crashed squarely down. There were spears and guns, battering rods, and deadly boathooks stored in that tower. At wartime ducks and chickens, ponies and pigs were crowded in between sacks of grain and tubs of water, a cooking pot or two, boxes of gunpowder.

The Lolo marauders did not have it all their own way when they made bandit war on Q’ūo Chung.

But all was peace here to-day.

The river’s left bank was jungle-wild. It showed no path. It had known nor spade nor plough nor pruning-hook. The tangled undergrowth grew mat-thick, as it had for countless centuries. For this was Nosuland, as wild and uncultivated as the Chinese bank was tended and urged; Nosuland, as wild and turbulent as the Nosu themselves—to give the “Lolos” their truer and more courteous name. “Lolo” is the name the Chinese give their untamed aboriginal foemen in derision and hatred. Not even Q’ūo Chung dared speak the opprobrious word “Lolo” in a Nosu’s hearing. And Q’ūo Chung was a man of might, known and both feared and respected in all central Yün-nan, and in all Nosuland as well.

Across the river from Q’ūo Chung’s no sign of habitation showed. The Nosu’s crude dwellings, far back, high on the hills, were well hidden. Even their boats, in which they crossed the river at safe, hidden places, the Nosu built far inland. They had few crafts, but much craftiness.

So Wing studied the unkempt left-hand shoreland and the rugged overgrown hills above it almost as curiously and intensely as he had the high and wide piously cultivated home-holding of Q’ūo Chung; for he knew that that upheaped tangle of trees, rocks, shrubs, and vines was Lololand, knew the peril that lurked in its silent fastness, knew the brute breed and the unbroken strength of its wildmen, the wealth of its mines, the super-skill of its wizards. All Western China knows.

Then he turned his face again to the fat homestead of Q’ūo Chung, scanned it greedily. And So Wing, patient of waiting as are all Chinese, but eager for adventure and change as all but decrepit youth always is, wondered why Q’ūo Chung did not send him greeting and welcome to land.

And before the morning rice-hour, Q’ūo Chung did. Q’ūo Toon—the second of Q’ūo Chung’s three sons—came to the boat’s side, called greeting to So Wing, and bade him land.

Nothing loth So Wing clambered over the old boat’s clumsy side and sprang ashore, followed Q’ūo Toon to the dwelling-house, and k’ot-owed at the presence of Q’ūo Chung.

Q’ūo Ssu served her father’s rice. A slave girl served the three brothers and the naked stranger.

Q’ūo Ssu did not look at So Wing. So Wing did not look at Q’ūo Ssu. But for the first time he knew that he was naked, knew that Q’ūo Ssu was fine-and-soft clad; and he envied the sons of Q’ūo Chung their whole, good garments.

He did not look at Q’ūo Ssu, but he saw how tiny her unsqueezed feet were, how delicately she walked, how like moths’ wings her eyebrows, how egg-shaped and egg-smooth her unpainted face. And he knew that she was the girl-one who had giggled at him from the Ch’ung shu-tree yesterday.

If he wondered why Q’ūo Chung let his daughter, and all unveiled, come and go at a strange man’s rice-time, So Wing was well content that Q’ūo Chung did. And So Wing little suspected that he owed to his own coolie-nakedness Q’ūo Chung’s laxity. A gentleman silken-clad and furred Q’ūo scarcely would have permitted sight of Q’ūo Ssu. A coatless, skirtless coolie did not count. This henchman of Ko Ching-lin was but a boy. Q’ūo Ssu was a child still in her father’s lagging estimate. And in Yün-nan not a few Chinese are a little lenient about such things; unconsciously made so perhaps by the constant sight, the example, of the aboriginals—the Man-tzu, Min-chia, Phö, Miao, a dozen others—whose women are as socially untrammelled as the furred and feathered she-ones of the Yün-nan hills and forests. More than this, Q’ūo Chung’s own grandmother had been a Nosu, kidnapped and honourably married by Q’ūo Chung’s grandfather, and afterwards richly paid for with many lumps of silver, to save bloodshed and costly, lasting feud. The Nosu mother had bred some leaning to Nosu ways in her first-born at her breast—leanings Q’ūo Chung himself had inherited. And what did it matter, since no one saw or knew! Q’ūo Chung was omnipotent and undisputed in his own domain; he ruled it all and every creature in it, and no one ruled him, except only laughing Q’ūo Ssu.

The business between Q’ūo Chung and So Wing prospered. Each drove a hard bargain. Day after day they wrangled over the price that Ko Ching-lin—So Wing’s master—was to pay Q’ūo Chung for the many loads of insect-larvæ safely delivered to Ko Ching-lin at Ko’s wax-farm in Sze-ch’uen.

But the wrangling was only the window-dressing of their business; a concession to tradition, an observance of sacrosanct etiquette. Each knew to a cash what the ultimate upshot would be, and each knew that that surety was mutual. But the bargaining had to be well and truly done. Whatever else a Chinese slights, he does not slight that. And So Wing had no wish to hasten.

For fevered hours each day they wrangled and bargained. But there were other hours devoted to smoother (though probably no more enjoyed) hospitality. Because So Wing represented Ko Ching-lin, held a sort of ambassadorial rank from Ko Ching-lin, Q’ūo Chung paid the coatless coolie considerable social attentions. Q’ūo Flee took So Wing hawking, Q’ūo Toon taught So Wing new tricks of tailless-kite flying.

And after evening rice they all gathered about the fire on the stone floor at the great chimney-less room’s far end upon the windswept hill-top—for the May nights had a chill—talked interminably and made queer Chinese music, often a little squeaky, sometimes very sweet, usually gay and provocative, sometimes oddly plaintive.

And Q’ūo Ssu sat on her low stool at her father’s knee. Often the other women, free and slave-ones, too, came and went as they liked, listened to the fun, and even made a share of it.

So Wing had an agile mind and pleasant behaviour. More than once Q’ūo Chung forgot that So Wing was a coolie; Q’ūo Ssu never had thought about it.

Not that that mattered. The poorest, humblest peasant may live to be the greatest man in China, if he has the wit, gains sufficing education, and wins the kindness of the gods.