Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 6

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Market-Town-By-The-Swinging-Bridge deserved its name. Its market-place was not much, nor its market, when So Wing reached them. But the long, low bridge was beautiful, and undeniably it swung; its light, easy motion—whenever feet crossed it, whenever wind buffeted it—as sure and graceful as an Indian’s well-balanced birch-bark canoe on the St. Lawrence.

The suspension bridge was the one outer doorway into the town it had christened; for a crinkled loop of the twisted river made the overgrown village nearly an island. The bridge had neither arches nor roofs. Its low, open sides and their top rails were bamboo loosely threaded; its floor was bamboo-plaited, steel-wired pine. It swung securely from four great pillars cut out of the solid limestone boulders that there banked both sides of the river. “Lions” and monkeys—two of each—life-sized, beautifully moulded out of solid bronze, clinched and supported both the bridge’s ends to the limestone pillars. Dozens of small bronze monkeys, half a score of copper “lions,” as beautifully made as the four large ones, played or lazed on the handrails. They who had made Under-Mr. Red Coat’s Protection Bridge had loved it well. And it must have had its lovers now who gave it no niggardly service; all its beautiful decorating animals—they served no other purpose—were devotedly cared for, scrupulously groomed. Not a copper hair was grimed, not a bronze paw was caked.

When So Wing reached the bridge he paused to read its name. The coolie boy was not all coolie-born or all coolie-nurtured. So Wing could read and write. Not all the richer Yün-nanese can do either.

The characters that told the bridge’s name were deeply cut in a slab of stone honourably placed at the left of its entrance.

Almost every Chinese bridge has its own name; every bridge of even semi-importance has. Names play a great rôle in China. Many a Chinese river has innumerable names, and changes them as abruptly and as reasonlessly as London streets do. And this in a country so peculiarly short of surnames! The Chinese barely have a hundred surnames.

So Wing grinned as he read the bridge’s name. Chu I is one of the God of Literature’s two inseparable companions. Mr. Red Coat is a very learned god indeed; almost as accomplished and erudite as Wên Ch’ang himself. And of all China Yün-nan is the most illiterate province. So Wing doubted if there were ten, yes—or three, in this market town who could read—let alone write. But scholarly Chu I, too, is the God of Good Luck. And that, So Wing reflected, is enough to secure him popularity and devotees everywhere—and not least of all in land-locked, undeveloped Yün-nan.

So Wing crossed the bridge, passed between the town’s principal buildings, on to the gate. The town was walled, but as more often than not it is so in Yün-nan, the best and largest houses stood outside the walls, but close enough to let the dwellers scurry in before the gate was locked, if foes approached.

On the wall, near the gate, two human heads—one still raw from the headsman’s sword, one old and wizened in death—hung in their bamboo cages; a warning to all that Market-Town-By-The-Swinging-Bridge dealt well and promptly by those who broke the law. So Wing scarcely gave them a glance, nor did the children trotting and playing beneath them. Half the city-gates in Yün-nan dangled just such gruesome fruitage.

The gates that would be shut and barred at sunset were hospitably wide open. The great gods painted on the gate’s now-outer inner panels were smiling, ingratiating monsters. When the gate was shut its outer panels would show twin frowning gods, threatening and forbidding.

It was market-day; every fifth day is in almost every minor market town in Yün-nan. Vendors jostled each other noisily but good-naturedly on the town’s one street and in its square, squatted beside their wares wherever they could find or squeeze the space inside the town and out here beyond it.

So Wing looked about him curiously. It was his habit to be industriously observant always, but he accosted no one, and jog-trotted on until he reached the square halfway down the town’s one shop-and booth-lined street.

The long street was wide, pleasantly paved with huge yellow pebbles that centuries of human feet had worn and smoothed into one comfortable surface. Here and there the shade of a great tree at a house or shop door cooled it. All the street was gay with gorgeously painted signs—red, green, black, blue. A few of the signs were charactered; and there is little on earth more arrestingly decorative than large, clearly executed Chinese characters. But most of the flat wooden signs were pictorial; a surer method of advertising in the province of illiteracy. The cheaper shops wore their bright paper signs pasted over and beside the doorways; the better shops had swinging wood signs flapping a little more than head-high across the street.

The street was draggled and grey; every booth and every building was dilapidated; but every sign was whole and was fresh with paint, or even with gilding. You had to see and to realise what the shopkeepers had to sell.

The square was a shrill-voiced human jam. It had a lily pond at one end, an old acacia-tree at the other end; for the “square” was oblong, not much more than a wide outswelling of the street it halved. The pawnshop was larger than the Headman’s house and offices; the granary was twice the temple’s height, more imposing than aught else the square boasted; but flowers bloomed in pots and hanging baskets on all the pawnshop’s balconies, a pretty painted face smiled at one of its windows; a cheerful, friendly place the pawnshop. You could buy a pipeful (and smoke it) there any time you had the price or the credit—despite the stringent new opium laws.

The temple was small and dingy, huddled ignominiously in a corner between the butcher’s slaughter place and the disheartened booth of toys that few were rich or extravagant enough to buy.

Often the old square was deserted, almost uncannily quiet. But now, the mid-hour of market-day, all was noise and bustle.

Many non-Chinese races have made their lairs in the Yün-nan jungles beside the Yang-tsze since the Chinese, more than a hundred centuries ago, came into the valley of the Yellow River. Almost everywhere the actual aboriginals have died off or been exterminated, or been absorbed. But in Yün-nan many tribes, and even several races, of them have held their primitive own, and still prosper and live their lives out in almost complete independence of China. They have their own country—a country within a country—their own languages and customs; all strikingly unlike those of the Chinese. It is not safe to visit them uninvited. But the less wild and less hostile among them journey into Chinese Yün-nan occasionally to buy and sell. A Yün-nan market-place, on market-day, rarely is quite without a few strolling aborigines.

There were scores of them here to-day. They added strikingly to the already striking human picture. The white kilts of the Miao women, the long dark felt cloaks of the Lolos, mingled with the dull blue and black of Chinese workaday clothes and the brilliantly coloured brocades of the gay clad Chinese rich. There were bare-footed Annamites, most of them dressed in brown, all of them with their long abundant hair twisted into great top-knots at the far back of their heads. Most of them wore immense bamboo and palm-leaf hats, the women’s flat and larger than ordinary cartwheels, the men’s smaller in circumference but rising up to a sharp point two or three feet above the head; handsome creatures, stalking proudly from stall to stall, the women as fearless and free as their menfolk, and doing most of the bargaining and all of the final deciding. There were stray human sprinklings of many other tribes, all distinctively and grotesquely clad. The Chinese, So Wing noticed, seemed on good terms with them all. But this was market-day; racial animosities gave place to greed for trade, and to hope of profit.

Everyone was busied—everyone but one.

In the dimness of the square’s one quiet and tree-shadowed corner an old man under an umbrella squatted on the temple steps—a bamboo basket beside him, a long, narrow table of painted wood knee-high before him; on it a small gong, an empty bowl, a tray of charactered bamboo splints: a fortune-teller who had seen better days. His once splendid robe was faded and frayed. He neither solicited clients nor invited alms. He sat as immovable as a graven Buddha, silent, uninterested.

The chattering, hurrying throng passed and repassed him. If he saw or heard them he gave no sign. More than one threw him greeting as they passed him; a man dropped a coin in the old man’s pay-bowl, asking nothing in return; a woman took a tiny melon from the market-pannier at her hip, and laid the fragrant fruit on the psychic’s table; he took no notice.

So Wing paused and watched, oddly interested in the motionless old man.

Then—for the hours passed, and his business pressed—So Wing moved on with a tolerant shrug. But as he was passing, without looking at him, the other hailed him.

“Stay!” the old man commanded. “Rescuer, linger but while the cloth-vendor’s abacus counts ten, and hear the wisdom this wise one will give you.”

Well—the man was very old; and So Wing had heard his mother say that the fortune-tellers spoke truth-words sometimes. So laughed not unkindly, searched his wallet, found his smallest coin, and laid it politely in the prophet’s bowl.

And the strangest thing that ever has happened in China happened. The shabby old seer refused the coin.

“Purse again your money, Born-before Rescuer.” He lifted his eyes, and looked into So Wing’s. “I who sit here always, I who look into all the future and know all the past, I who read the souls of men and can read at a glance the follies of women, I who can write your horoscope, and can give talismans that fail not take no coin from the far-come Born-before who has journeyed even from the Great Wall to rescue my townsmen from the evil that has dogged them for two hundred poisoned years. Take up your coin, I, your worm, will have none of it. To you I give. To you I do not sell. From you I do not take—not even the rescue you have journeyed from beyond the tomb-palaces of the Mings to give; for me the cat will not fang, me it cannot harm. Shang Ti has given me, his minister, immunity from all the devil-ones that prowl and infest the earth disguised in beast-shapes.”

So Wing—little loth—took up the coin he had given, and repouched it. And while he did the soothsayer watched sharply to see that So Wing took only what So Wing had given, moved no finger towards the other coin lying in the pay-and-beg bowl.

“Venerable, distinguished Born-many-centuries-before-me who am contemptible, base, ignorant, and new-born, why said you I had journeyed even from the Great Wall?”

“All life is a journey,” the fortune-teller replied, “and you were born in the very shadow of the Great Wall.”

And So Wing wondered, greatly amazed. For it was true; he had been born close to the Great Wall.

It was true then: there were those whom the gods gifted with second sight. So Wing never before had believed it. In every land, in every class, there are instinctive sceptics. The educated Chinese inherit scepticism almost as inevitably as the Chinese peasants inherit superstition. And in the country of Confucius, even among the peasant “babies” there is now and then deep-rooted agnosticism, ingrained scepticism—vigorous, rational mentalities.

So Wing was amazed.

But the day grew, presently it would wane, and his business pressed. Again he moved to go.

Again the old psychic stayed him.

“What you foolishly seek here will still be in Hsüeh-hsün’s shop when you return; and Hsüeh-hsün will accept a less price then, after long profitless hours. Your way lies over yonder hill where the honourable walnuts and elder-trees grow. Take your way there. At the edge of the lonely sea you will find the red feather that she-who-will-forget so boisterously craves. Go and pluck it from the white crane’s pink breast. Bring to me the foul cat. It will I accept, and for it will I bless and reward you.”

So Wing suddenly felt shiveringly cold, though the midday’s heat was at its pestilent hottest.

Was this a man? Was it a god—or a demon?

So Wing was sore afraid.

So Wing’s hard mind trembled, as scepticism itself does everywhere when confronted with refuting evidence, or what it deems such.

How had the old-one been enabled to name so accurately So Wing’s far birthplace? No one in Yün-nan, no one in Sze-ch’uen, So Wing believed, ever had learned where So Wing had been born, or ever had suspected that So Wing once had come from farther north than Peking. And how had the old-one divined that again and again Q’ūo Ssu had clamoured to So Wing—but never save when they were alone—that above all else that she desired (and truly her desires were many) she longed to own and wear in her coat on festival days the crimson feather that was said to be in the breast of a fabulous crane that nested high up in a deserted leaning pagoda a li or more from Market-Town-By-The-Swinging-Bridge?

There was no such bird. There could not be. And yet—what was this teller-of-fortunes-one?

“Go!” the necromancer repeated. “Follow your star; heed my voice. The first rung of the long and perilous ladder of fortune that your soaring ambition so pants to scale is the entrance of the crumbling pagoda, whose nine stories are reflected in the desolate, fish-less, boatless hai-tse, where the bamboo and the grey eucalyptus live in loneliness. Eat—lest you faint. Then go. You who so crave great fortune, turn not away from its path which I have so accurately indicated to you.”

And the fortune-teller added directions so definite and detailed that they were a map in the mind of So Wing.

So Wing hesitated—and obeyed.

He bought tea and dumplings from a street-cook, and, crouching on the crowded wayside, ate and drank in the shadow of the cook’s outspread awning. And when he had scraped the last morsel from the food-box, drained the last drop from the tea-bowl, So got up, stretched himself, grunted out his stomach’s satisfaction and turned him to the farther journey that the fortune-teller had bidden him; and So Wing went it half amused, half self-vexed, wholly curious.