In Red and Gold. Merwin Samuel

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “He’s pretty old – still, I’d hate to go up against him myself… Say, you ask him, Cap!”

      “I’ll think it over. He’s a little… I’ll tell you now he wouldn’t stand for your making a show of it. If he did it, it ‘ud just be for exercise.”

      “Oh, that’s all right!”

      Miss Means awoke with a start. It was the second morning out, at sunrise. The engines were still, but from without an extraordinary hubbub rent the air. Drums were beating, reed instruments wailing in weird dissonance, and innumerable voices chattering and shouting. A sudden crackling suggested fire-crackers in quantity. Miss means raised herself on one elbow, and saw her roommate peeping out over the blind.

      “What is it?” she asked.

      “It looks very much like the real China we’ve read about,” replied Miss Andrews, raising her voice above the din. “It’s certainly very different from Shanghai.”

      The steamer lay alongside a landing hulk at the foot of broad steps. Warehouses crowded the bank and the bund above, some of Western construction; but the crowded scene on hulk and steps and bund, and among the matting-roofed sampans, hundreds of which were crowded against the bank, was wholly Oriental. From every convenient mast and pole pennants and banners spread their dragons on the fresh early breeze. A temporary pen-low, or archway, at the top of the steps was gay with fresh paint and streamers. In the air above were scores of kites, designed and painted to represent dragons and birds of prey, which the owners were maneuvering in mimic aerial warfare; swooping and darting and diving. As Miss Means looked, one huge painted bird fell in shreds to a neighboring roof, and the swarming assemblage cheered ecstatically.

      Soldiers were marching in good-humored disorder down the bund, in the inevitable faded blue with blue turbans wound about their heads. It appeared as if not another person could force his way down on the hulk without crowding at least one of its occupants into the water, yet on they came; and so far as our two little ladies could see none fell. Fully two hundred of the soldiers there were, with short rifles and bayonets. Amid great confusion they formed a lane down the steps and across to the gangway.

      Next came a large, bright-colored sedan chair slung on cross-poles, with eight bearers and with groups of silk-clad mandarins walking before and behind. Farther back, swaying along, were eight or ten more chairs, each with but four bearers and each tightly closed, waiting in line as the chair of the great one was set carefully down on the hulk and opened by the attending officials.

      Deliberately, smilingly, the great one stepped out. He was a man of seventy or older, with a drooping gray mustache and narrow chin beard of gray that contrasted oddly with the black queue. His robe was black with a square bit of embroidery in rich color on the breast. Above his hat of office a huge round ruby stood high on a gold mount, and a peacock feather slanted down behind it.

      Bowing to right and left, he ascended the gangplank, the mandarins following. There were fifteen of these, each with a round button on his plumed hat – those in the van of red coral, the others of sapphire and lapis lazuli, rock crystal, white stone and gold.

      One by one the lesser chairs were brought out on the hulk and opened. From the first stepped a stout woman of mature years, richly clad in heavily embroidered silks, with loops of pearls about her neck and shoulders, and with painted face under the elaborately built-up head-dress. Other women of various’ ages followed, less conspicuously clad. From the last chair appeared a young woman, slim and graceful even in enveloping silks, her face, like the others, a mask of white paint and rouge, with lips carmined into a perfect cupid’s bow. And with her, clutching her hand, was a little girl of six or seven, who laughed merrily upward at the great steamer as she trotted along.

      Blue-clad servants followed, a hundred or more, and swarming cackling women with unpainted faces and flapping black trousers, and porters – long lines of porters – with boxes and bales and bundles swung from the inevitable bamboo poles.

      At last they were all aboard, and the steamer moved out.

      “Who were all those women, in the chairs, do you suppose?” asked Miss Andrews.

      “His wives, probably.”

      “Oh…!”

      “Or concubines.”

      Miss Andrews was silent. She could still see the waving crowd on the wharf, and the banners and kites.

      “He must be at least a prince, with all that retinue.”

      Miss Andrews, thinking rapidly of Aladdin and Marco Polo, of wives and concubines and strange barbarous ways, brought herself to say in a nearly matter-of-fact voice: “But those women all had natural feet. I don’t understand.”

      Miss Means reached for her Things Chinese; looked up “Feet,”

      “Women,”

      “Dress,” and other headings; finally found an answer, through a happy inspiration, under “Manchus.”

      “That’s it!” she explained; and read: “‘The Manchus do not bind the feet of their women.’”

      “Well!” Thus Miss Andrews, after a long moment with more than a hint of emotional stir in her usually quiet voice: “We certainly have a remarkable assortment of fellow passengers. That curious silent girl in the middy blouse… traveling alone…”

      “Remarkable, and not altogether edifying,” observed the practical Miss Means.

      CHAPTER II – BETWEEN THE WORLDS

      TOWARD noon Miss Means and Miss Andrews were in their chairs on deck, when a gay little outburst of laughter caught their attention, and around the canvas screen came running the child they had seen on the wharf at Nanking. A sober Chinese servant (Miss Means and Miss Andrews were not to know that he was a eunuch) followed at a more dignified pace.

      The child was dressed in a quilted robe of bright flowered silk, the skirt flaring like a bed about the ankles, the sleeves extending down over the hands. Her shoes were high, of black cloth with paper soles. Over the robe she wore a golden yellow vest, shortsleeved, trimmed with ribbon and fastened with gilt buttons. Over her head and shoulders was a hood of fox skin worn with the fur inside, tied with ribbons under the chin, and decorated, on the top of the head, with the eyes, nose and ears of a fox. As she scampered along the deck she lowered her head and charged at the big first mate. He smiled, caught her shoulders, spun her about, and set her free again; then, nodding pleasantly to the eunuch, he passed on.

      Before the two ladies he paused to say: “We are coming into T’aiping, the city that gave a name to China’s most terrible rebellion. If you care to step around to the other side, you’ll see something of the quaint life along the river.”

      “He seems very nice – the mate,” remarked Miss Andrews. “I find myself wondering who he may have been. He is certainly a gentleman.”

      “I understand,” replied Miss Means coolly, “that one doesn’t ask that question on the China Coast.” They found the old river port drab and dilapidated, yet rich in the color of teeming human life. The river, as usual, was crowded with small craft. Nearly a score of these were awaiting the steamer, each evidently housing an entire family under its little arch of matting, and each extending bamboo poles with baskets at the ends. As the steamer came to a stop, a long row of these baskets appeared at the rail, while cries and songs arose from the water.

      The little СКАЧАТЬ