Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 7

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The ruined pagoda was oddly placed. It did not mark some spot of special beauty, as if put there to catch for the scene it piously punctuated every wayfarer’s eyes—to catch and bid them linger and enjoy. Nor did it stand near some crowded mart, that it so might convenience the casual prayers and the sparse worship of busied men as they hurried to and fro. It served neither of those two chief offices of Chinese pagodas.

It stood alone, desolate and broken, in a flat, wide stretch of almost barren desolation; crumbling, discoloured beauty no longer beautiful, in a scene of natural ugliness. All its bells were gone; its roofs were shattered and gone; not a “lion” remained; time and neglect had blurred the blue and citron from its tiles—for it had been porcelain-faced once. Most of its tiles had peeled off, and lay in fragments and in dust on the ground.

A few sturdy red-flowered eucalyptus-trees grew some yards away. A few loyal and persistent bamboos still grew at the almost dry “sea’s” other side. All else was grey, sad nothingness; the ruined pagoda was greyest and saddest of all. For it had been a thing of rare beauty, a gleaming blue and lemon porcelain flower of human piety, all despoiled by human neglect.

The Chinese are the master-builders of the ages. But they will not preserve or mend. They patch their garments until not a thread remains that will hold or survive a needle’s gentlest stitchery. But they leave their splendid roads (the broad old highroad from Yün-nan to Sze-ch’uen was one) to Time’s ruthless rutting, leave their lovely, priceless buildings to years’ and weather’s devastating ruin. Sometimes a house-proud mandarin kept his chia repaired and burnished. Imperial dwellings were kept fit and cared-for caskets of the Imperial human jewels that lived in them. But those were the exceptions that proved the bad rule of reprehensible, unaccountable, cruel neglect of temples and walls of incredible cost and beauty.

The broken pagoda looked a drab, drunken hag; boasted no faintest trace of its once radiant loveliness. It sagged lop-sided almost as does Pisa’s leaning tower, and far more dejectedly.

Why had the fortune-teller sent him here?

Why had he come?

There was nothing to do here; nothing to hope, attempt, or accomplish. Human action felt paralysed in such scene of irrevocable decay. There was nothing to see here, except what sorrowed sight.

And the tatterdemalion old mystic had bade him find fortune here!

He was dolt to have been caught in the claptrap springs of the other’s cheap trickery and fraudulence! All So Wing’s native incredulousness and sharp scepticism reasserted themselves in cold anger and gripped him hard. So Wing had lost face in his own proud estimate; he was furious.

True, the old fraud-one had named his birthplace, and had read him with startling accuracy, had read him proud and ambitious. Well, what of it? Coincidence, lucky guessing; only those. Such always the mental refuge of the sceptic confronted by aught he can neither explain nor understand. Just lucky guesswork.

Then—but why had the fortune-teller refused his proffered dole? So Wing gave that up, shrugged sourly, and retightened his loin-cloth—loosened by his long, bootless tramping from the market-square to this arid goal—and braced his a-little-wearied body to plod back again to fulfil his now-belated business in Market-Town-By-The-Swinging-Bridge.

Then—what were those twin greens that glared hatred at him from that tottering crevice?

What bird-thing gave that one piteous cry of futile agony?

The green eyes moved. Watching, with all his mind as well as all his eyesight concentrated on that dusky crevice where the twin greens had blazed him hatred, So Wing saw an almost worm-like narrow mass striped and tawny worming its slow stealthy way up the leaning pagoda’s ragged face.

It was a cat! Thinner than any cat So Wing ever before had seen—in China the land of emaciated cats—longer, less catlike, yet So Wing knew it of the cat tribe. House cat or wild cat, cat of living skin and fur or ghost-cat; it was a cat.

“Foul cat!” the old-one had said.

Again the terrible bird cry.

Something fluttered up there on the pagoda’s utmost jag of broken brick: a bird’s white wing.

The old fortune-teller was less discredited now.

Stealthy as it, as determined and almost as footsure, So Wing followed the great cat-thing.

Twice the pagoda’s once-carved outer edge gave beneath So Wing’s weight, staggered and almost threw him. But he went on intrepidly. Again and again he slithered down, all but toppled over; but for the most part he went up—painfully, perilously, slowly, but up! His feet in his rough, spike-studded sandals were bruised and welted. His fingers bled from the blistering of the bricks they gripped but to crumble. So Wing pressed closer towards the crawling cat. It turned and hissed at him. So Wing pressed on, closer and closer to it.

Halfway up, through a wide break in the old neglected masonry, So Wing saw the terrified bird that the starved cat was stalking: a great white crane standing at bay beside its nest.

How had the bird made its way up to that nesting-place? How had it found its nest materials in this desert place; how dragged them, or flown with them, up to that ledge of peril?

What manner of bird was it? Was it a ghost-bird? Were there crane-birds in Yün-nan? So Wing believed that there were none.

Gods! Its breast was pink as courtyard roses. Kwan! One crimson feather splashed the breast of rose!

So Wing’s pulse lost its beat—but not for long.

So Wing pressed on—with doubled vigour, with twice-doubled caution. He must not slip back again. The cat almost had reached its prey.

Inch by inch they crawled.

The great lank cat kept its frenzied eyes on So Wing; its gaunt ghoulish head turned towards him as it crawled and climbed, but even so its nostrils quivered hungrily towards the trembling bird, as if tasting in the anticipation of gluttonous scenting the bleeding meal it stalked.

The man was gaining on the robber cat. He drew his knife from his loin-cloth, and clutched the knife securely.

They reached the mother-guarded nest—so hopelessly guarded, so desperately defended.

There were eggs in the nest.

Already a bantling beak was pricking feebly through the eggshell that had wombed it.

So Wing raised his arm to strike.

The bandit cat lifted to spring—bared its fang-like teeth; aimed them at the throat of So Wing.

The white crane had turned to stone—frozen in fear, but valiant still in tortured motherhood.

The cat was quivering with rage. The man was tense with purpose.

The cat sprang. The man struck.

They closed.

And there they fought it out, on the crumbling outer edge of the nine-story pagoda; fought to the death; no thought of surrender or of quarter. Both knew that one of them must die. Perhaps the frenzy-frozen crane knew it, too!

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth; but it was the other’s throat each aimed and schemed to reach.

So Wing’s breast was scratched—not deeply; So Wing’s lacerated left arm poured blood. The cat fought on with a broken leg. Its back was slashed.

The sharp point of So Wing’s flint-bladed dagger reached its goal; So Wing’s right hand drove the knife in, drove it in with all the man’s force; drove it up, drove it down.

The wild beast’s throat was slashed from chin to breast. It would never scream or snarl again; its wind-pipe dangled out a tattered rag of blood.

A moment longer the gaunt thing writhed before the mad eyes glazed. Then it pitched back so suddenly that it took So’s precious, cherished weapon with it as it lurched convulsively down, and lay broken-backed and stark on the ground far below.

So Wing shrugged—in satisfaction; stood panting a while, the sweat dripping from his scratched, spent body.

When his lungs were his again, So Wing laughed proudly. It had been a good fight—a man’s game. Then he turned towards the nest—towards the high-perched nest-home and its growing family; for two diminutive beaks nosed now through the snow of the mother’s covering feathers.

She had watched with frozen terror the fight while it lasted. As the cat lurched and fell, she had squatted back on her nested eggs, eager and relieved. There she sat now in palpable contentment. Perhaps she thought So Wing a god who, having defended her, would defend her always.

Birds, as a rule, do not have affectionate eyes. Cranes’ eyes are peculiarly hard and uneloquent. Her eyes lit with unmistakable affection as So Wing bent over her. He bent lower, and stroked her companionably; she took it companionably and serenely.

Even when he fingered her pink breast and clutched, with all the gentleness he could, the one red feather she did not wince or protest.

So Wing hated to pull or twist—but he had to have that crimson feather.

It came out easily—perhaps she was moulting. Relieved in his turn, So Wing hid the feather carefully in his loin-cloth, stroked the hen again, and again she preened her head against his fingers gratefully.

It must be in the Hour-of-the-Sheep now, So Wing thought, by the sun. He must go. Yet he lingered several minutes, looking down and about on all of Yün-nan that he could see from the old pagoda’s slanting top.

And there was much to see. Dull and barren as the pagoda’s site had looked when he had reached it, down below, up here it showed him panorama. For this was one of the innumerable high, if flat, plateaux so peculiarly characteristic of Yün-nan. It looked low and flat. It was flat; but its flatness was high-perched. He was looking down now, not only on the unpicturesque “sea,” but on wide, undulating sweeps of natural verdure and of teeming prosperity. Blue-hazed green hills rose beneath the plateau’s flattened altitude; orchards filled the hollows, and climbed the hillsides, villages showed radiant in the day’s sparkling radiance; the unimportant market town he’d come from at the psychic’s bidding looked proud and prosperous; all its roofs gilded by the orange sunshine, all its draggled shabbiness hidden by its distance. It was grey and dirty; it looked white and golden. And suddenly the naked peasant boy saw it a new world, and saw it a world to conquer.

If naked So Wing, already life-calloused, could read and write moderately, he had touched but few books, his keen young mind was scantily furnished, he knew little of the world beyond its few parts he had lived in, its few paths he himself had trod. But he had that great natural asset that not improbably was the foundation of Shakespeare’s own greatness: So Wing loved to listen, and he listened well and intelligently. He had, too, the almost universal gift of Chinese minds, the gift of a great and exact memory. Too, he never was ashamed to question. He had a lif-long trick of making everyone better educated than he whom he met his teacher. He had known little of Yün-nan a moon ago in Sze-ch’uen; but now he knew how large it bulked on China’s map, knew it the Chinese province nearest the sunset, knew something of its history and of its still bosomed, undeveloped treasure, knew of its oil-wells, its salt-wells, and mines. He knew how highly reputed were its amber, hams, and scented tea. He knew its value to China; knew its international importance. He even knew where India was, knew very hazily what India was. He had learned something of the French, of the railway from Yün-nan Fu that they had built with almost Chinese ingenuity, endurance, and persistence. He knew the rivalry between France and England for predominant Western “influence” in Yün-nan. He knew that “three empires met” at Kien-hong on the Mekong: a geographical eloquence that stirred him oddly—perhaps prophetically. He knew that this Yün-nan he was looking down on was the last link in the long chain that more and more linked India and China.

He saw and sensed a wide world stretched about him—a world of worlds for wise and strong men to conquer; such men had done that from the beginning of history—would do it till time’s long scroll was rolled and ended.

Ambition leapt hot and mighty in the soul of naked So Wing the coolie; ambition no longer unconscious or formless.

Why should not he grow a great-one; strong in achievement and prosperity; the owner of fat lands; soft-fed, rich clad?

Thinking it, he resolved it.

Other men, as ill-equipped by fate and birth-accident as he was, had made them place and power; why not he? He was young and strong. What had others achieved and amassed that he could not?

So Wing’s nostrils quivered, his eyes gleamed. And he swore himself an oath; gave the brooding bird a last caress; and went.

So Wing slid him cautiously down into the pagoda’s roof’s opening; it would be cooler going back that way—if the stairs held!

Very slowly he began his descent, and the mother bird’s eyes, soft and human in gratitude, followed him until the pagoda’s maw had gulped and hidden him. She craned her long neck to watch him the longer; but she did not leave her nest, or stir on it.

The old stairs in the pagoda’s interior were deplorable, but on the whole better conditioned than the tower’s broken outside. Most of the steps were broken, several were missing, all were somewhat tottery. So Wing had good reason to negotiate his down-going carefully. More than once he had to swing himself over where a step should have been but was not. But no frenzied cat foe was racing him. So Wing was free to take his own time, set his own pace; climbing down an old broken pagoda’s shattered inner stairs, climbing up his life’s first high rung.

Twice he slipped. He grazed his hands again. But he did not misstep or fall.

The safe open his again; curious, he found the cat-corpse where it lay mangled and broken; its spine snapped by its fall, its whitening lips snarled back from its sharp teeth-fangs, the great, sightless eyes still wide and green and angry in death.

“Bring to me the foul cat.”

Well, the old-one should have it. Prophecy exceeding true should be paid that way—since so the now recredited soothsayer had commanded.

So Wing wrenched out his knife, cleaned it, put it back again in his loin-cloth, then slung the lank and hideous burden across his naked shoulder, and plodded back to the market-square; back to the soothsayer’s temple pitch, and to the shop of Hsüeh-hsün.

Evening rice was over; the Q’ūos and perhaps a score of their retainers and slave-ones were gathered at the fire when So Wing came in a little awkwardly, and trying not to show it; So Wing almost splendidly clad, smarter coat-and-skirted than Q’ūo Flee or Q’ūo Toon or Q’ūo Hsien, and wearing the black silk skull-cap—a button of red braid its ornament—that is the all but universal headgear of Chinese men and boys.

So Wing had spent all but all of his hoarded earnings in the market town.

They welcomed him without comment. Comment would have been impoliteness. Q’ūo Ssu had started slightly as she looked up and saw So Wing’s covered shoulders, looked down instantly. And only So Wing saw her sudden, violent blush.