Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 8

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The old missionary looked up with a smile as Q’ūo Ssu came into the courtyard. Everyone who came to him was welcome. Perhaps he welcomed the sinners who sought him out even more than he did the saints, because it was the trespassers who the more surely needed his help. There was not much he could do for those that needed nothing, those who were happy and well and safe. But always he could find some service to do one who sorrowed or suffered.

But the old man’s theory and rule of welcome had an inconsistent exception. For, of all in Yün-nan—all in China, for that matter—Q’ūo Ssu was most welcome of all in the courtyard of Mr. Kwan.

He never was too busy or too absorbed to welcome Q’ūo Ssu, never too sad to play and laugh with her, always ready to tease her and to be teased by her.

For all that her father spoiled her, Q’ūo Ssu was carefully guarded and watched as a rule. That she was allowed to visit Born-before Kwan as often as she chose, to stay alone with him here in his courtyard or in his house, tells a great deal of him—tells all of the Chinese estimate in which the American missionary was held.

He had been a very young man when he had come here, years before Q’ūo Ssu was born; now he was old. Tolerated, at first, rather than accepted, tolerated with Chinese courtesy, reserve, and coldness; now the Chinese loved and revered him; and, too, did the Lolos among whom he journeyed often and freely. The long years had proved him; and his Chinese name, the name the Chinese he lived among had given him, was Kwan’s Brother. Chinese lips and hearts could give no higher title.

And the man who for love of a friend and love of a woman had fled branded from home and kindred in his young long-ago deserved his Chinese name. He, too, was a Hearer of Cries, his eyes, too, were ever bright and ever kind.

Perhaps foreigners are more disliked in Yün-nan than in any other province of China—and this American missionary was the most loved man in Yün-nan. Why? Because he had earned it. The Chinese pay their debts.

He had made few “converts,” if any. The Yün-nanese cling to their old gods—as far as religion can be said to have any serious acceptance with them. Perhaps he would have made more if he had belonged to one of the missionary societies—perhaps not. He worked alone. He preached little doctrine, he attacked nothing Chinese. He merely lived there alone, and worked and waited alone. He gave them the baptism of love and sympathy, shared with them the sacrament of respect. He had coaxed many a peasant to wash, many a man to be kind, he had healed many a sore body, ministered to many minds and hearts that were troubled, he had taught little Chinese children, held epidemics at bay, pacified and settled scores of long-standing, bitter quarrels.

And so sunnily he lived among them that only he himself ever suspected that sometimes, sitting alone in his Chinese courtyard, he was homesick, bitterly homesick for a land more raw, less beautiful, less packed with human interest—only he himself, and—it may be—his sister Kwan Yin-ko.

If he preached little doctrine, he cast a wide net of subtle propaganda. He taught chiefly by example, believing it the surer, sounder teaching. He taught such of his sacred message as he found that he could get a little through; and left the rest to riper time and to the God to whom he not only had vowed, but had truly given himself long, long ago. He taught cleanliness, believing it halfway to God. He taught, to his utmost, the essentials of Christianity; and cheerfully let names and creeds go. He neither attacked the gods of China nor despised them. This wise man accepted them for the symbols they were. Life had purged him terribly, but had in no way soured him, or embittered. Humble, as all great souls are, he still was delightfully human. He gratified all his own innocent desires, indulged all his own wholesome creature appetites as far as he thought right, and as far as the segregated, dedicated life he had chosen permitted. And he had two vanities; knew he had, and did not starve them. He was vain as well as proud of his homestead and of the name the Chinese had given him. House, courtyard, and garden, Mr. Kwan’s Yün-nan homestead was eminently comfortable and distinguishedly beautiful. And to be known as Kwan Yin-ko’s brother he held a precious crown of life; love given by faithful Chinese hearts; gratefully accepted, proudly worn. He had not forgotten his own name; he was sane, and he already had reached manhood when he first came to China. But he had been called “Mr. Kwan” so long—even by the missionaries and the few other Europeans he very occasionally met—that even in his own thought he had come to claim and to own it as simply and as naturally as once he had his birth-name.

The old missioner had not discarded his own name. For years now he would have told it to anyone here who had asked it. None did; and it gradually had slipped away from him—laid away now in the rue and rosemary of his memories. He believed that in all China only he himself still knew it; he cared neither way. But often, sitting alone here in his Yün-nan courtyard, the old man wondered if any still living in Virginia and in Maryland remembered it—ever thought of him?

He knew that he should end his days in China; he did not regret it. For many wondering years he had found life a peculiarly hard nut to crack. But he had cracked it; hammered away at its stiff shell; and he had crushed contentment out of its broken splinters—found its kernel sweet and nourishing. Mr. Kwan had no regrets. But he kept his memories—some of them sad ones; but they all were fragrant. Life had bruised him terribly, but he never had misused or reviled it. And now he was reaping the harvest of his own indomitable, unselfish sowing.

He had come to China because “as well there as anywhere,” and the old empire had claimed him before he realised that he even liked it. Now it chained him; and he knew that it did. Yün-nan was his home now; he wished for no other. The personal nest he had made him here suited him better than our-dreams-come-true often suit us. He loved his garden, joyed in his courtyard; and the queer old solitary was house-proud.

To-day in parts of China—notably in Peking—many Europeans affect Chinese (more or less Chinese) dwellings. No Western did in Central Yün-nan when he had come there. The wise and comfortable fad had not started in Chihli or in Kiangsu. Nor had it reached the banks of the Yang-tsze river yet. Mr. Kwan was the only Western much nearer than Yün-nan Fu. His house was as unique as his life.

Mr. Kwan had bought the place for a song. Its Chinese owner had been on the point of abandoning it; and had been in too much hurry, in too abject panic, to haggle. The soothsayers had pronounced its fêng shui as bad as bad could be, and the owner had fled precipitously, and had accepted almost indifferently the price the Western traveller had offered. No Chinese would have paid any price at all. Why buy certain disaster?

The American had no fear of fêng shui at its worst. He had lived here half a lifetime now, and even the wizards had to admit that no apparent evil had befallen him, or even the place itself that he had bought and lived in in rash heathen defiance of their psychic warnings.

Of its Chineseness the man had robbed the place nothing. He had laid on water, and put in electric light, and, of course, his own plant behind the walnut-trees. He had a bath tub, and he had a good piano and kept it in tune himself. For he cared much for music, and believed it to be the voice of God vouchsafed to men, as flowers were, and the struggles of men who failed or prevailed but persistently tried.

For his convenience he had made perhaps half a dozen interior changes; three rooms made one, one room cut up into two, and so forth. And he had added twice its original size to the house. Nearly half the books in his shu-chia were English, French, German, or Latin. As a rule he still wrote with a pen, and dipped it in an ink-pot. But for most else his was an Eastern home; the Chinese house of a man who loved China much, and who had taken root in Yün-nan—grown into the Orient.

For himself, at home, he usually wore a black soutane-like cashmere robe as comfortable as priestly; it did not look altogether un-Chinese. His home shoes were Chinese. But he wore neither cap nor queue. When he went from home his costume depended upon how far he was going and how; sometimes depended on his mood, or upon whether he had remembered or forgotten to change. He still rode a great deal, and always rode in Western gear.

He had preserved the old wall, but no ammunition lay handy to it, and its gate was never barred. The once watch-tower was a dovecote. Mr. Kwan feared neither Lolo nor bandit. He had no cause to. Everyone loved him, even the other missionaries, some of whom resented his aloofness, most of whom were scandalised that Tsao Shên and Tsao Shên’s wife (not to mention Tsao Shên’s concubine) still were enshrined in his kitchen, and had tapers lit before them more often than not. It was the Chinese servants who burned the heathen incense; but their master did not forbid it, or even rebuke them for doing it—and he owned with a laugh that he liked the smell.

Q’ūo Ssu bobbed respectfully before she ran to him, and squatted down on the flagstones near his bench.

“A gift, beloved and very old master,” the girl announced, laying, quite without ceremony, a lumpy cloth-wrapped parcel on his lap.

The man unknotted the moderately clean cloth and drew the loosened ends apart. The stone-cold big buckwheat cake must have weighed a heavy pound, but it would warm quickly in the ever-ready, straw-stuffed oven beneath Tsao Shên’s shrine.

“Delightful! I accept your bounty with humble gratitude.” He’d have liked to pat the little dark face dimpling up at him, but thirty years in China had taught him better manners than that, and he did not touch the pretty child he loved and who, he knew, loved him, and whose saucy chin was almost resting on his knee.

“We will share it, gracious one,” he added hospitably, “and Tin Bong shall brew us almond tea to drink to it.” He opened his palms to clap them; but before he could, and summon so a servant, Q’ūo Ssu thrust her scarf between his hands to silence them.

“I stay to-day but while a bonze counts six beads,” she said.

Mr. Kwan did not believe her. Q’ūo Ssu always was in a hurry, but she always lingered. Not infrequently she had stayed so late that he had sent a boy hot-footed to her father for the truant’s chair, or—if his leisure served or could be stretched—had had a lantern lit, and with it to light them, had walked with her all the way to Q’ūo Chung’s gate. He put the scarf down, and again made to clap his hands.

“It is truth-word, Ta-gên,” she insisted. “This girl-worm came but to bring you the buckwheat cake. Most very soon I must go. It is of the necessity. You must eat the cake by your loneness, old great-man. It is a buckwheat cake much special. Q’ūo Ssu with these her own hands did make it!”

“You!” The missionary felt less sure of the plump pasty’s toothsomeness, gravely doubted its entire lightness. If Q’ūo Ssu, the spoiled gamin, had indeed made this he was sure it was the first time she had condescended to any form of domestic industry, even the prettiest and lightest. But he never had known her to lie to him; and she had boasted too proudly, he thought, for the boast to be untrue. Q’ūo Ssu had turned over a new leaf indeed. Well, it was high time; and long might it last! But he eyed the portly dainty somewhat askance.

“Each day I will learn me some thing to make cook, or some thing to make mended with a needle,” Q’ūo Ssu said earnestly—so devoutly that Mr. Kwan’s much experienced suspicion was fired.

“Why?” he demanded insinuatingly.

“Against the preparation, if it come that I go in marriage to a poor man. I would not starve him, or see him rag-clad, if he is good and strong and very handsome.” Q’ūo Ssu answered readily.

The missionary’s suspicion was doubled; and it grew a little troubled. Q’ūo Chung had let the girl run wild too long and far too far.

He probed a little farther—very gently. But Q’ūo Ssu could not be drawn again. She described her buckwheat cake making, telling it with a running accompaniment of tinkling giggles.

There are just two sorts of girls in all China; the girls who giggle prettily, and the girls whose giggling is a harassing infliction; they all giggle. Very many of them giggle a great deal. Unfortunately, out of the sash-wearers’ courtyards, the girls who giggle unmusically preponderate. But always little, uncultured Q’ūo Ssu’s giggling was music.

She described dramatically the consternation in her father’s primitive kitchen when she had danced into it, saying that she had come to cook, and that she was going to do a great deal of cooking every day, until she had learned it all. But she would say no more of what her motive had been. Probably it had been just a very new form of prank, Mr. Kwan half believed. And yet!

And he saw that through all her gay impish chatter she watched the sundial.

Q’ūo Ssu always had liked finery, he knew; always liked to wear gay colours. She was finer clad to-day than she usually was when she came unattended and unexpected to see him. Silk is almost common wear in many parts of Yün-nan; but Q’ūo Ssu’s silk coat was costly with embroidery, and its buttons must have cost Q’ūo Chung a good many dollars. Except for the tiny fragrant flowers above her pretty ears, and her lovely glinting stick-pins, she was bareheaded. Q’ūo Ssu never wore the band of black brocaded satin that is the hat of most Chinese women; it was ugly, she said.

To-day she did not linger in the missioner’s courtyard. She told her little kitchen-story quickly and ended it abruptly. Then she jumped up, and when she had stolen a flower for her hair and given her host another for his priestly coat she bobbed him another respectful bending of her body, shook her tiny yellow hands together ceremoniously, and left the courtyard almost before Mr. Kwan could have expostulated, if he’d thought it wise to do so.

Had the girl an appointment?

What sort of appointment?

Kwan’s brother jotted down carefully in his mental engagement-book that he would have a cautious gossip with Q’ūo Chung before many days. Q’ūo Chung was never too busy to give Kwan Yin-ko’s Brother-one cordial welcome. No Yün-nanese ever is too busy to gossip.

Q’ūo Chung liked his pipe—and in companionship that he trusted it loosened his tongue. This very odd missionary did not think quite so drastically of the poppy, used in absolute moderation, as most Western missionaries do. Scandal even said that Mr. Kwan, on strictly infrequent occasions, in sufficient fellowship would draw a friendly whiff or two of “China’s poison.”

And when the American had heard the slander he had laughed, and misquoted, saying: “Poor, notorious poppy is a good familiar creature, if well used.”