Read Ebook: A Short History of the 6th Division: Aug. 1914-March 1919 by Marden Thomas Owen Sir Editor

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Ebook has 593 lines and 48584 words, and 12 pages

I WU CHING YU AND WU LI CHANG 1

II AT RICE 7

V HOMING 27

VI HEART ACHE 31

X NANG PING 58

XX WHAT WU DID IN PROOF OF LOVE 137

XXX SMILING WELCOME 220

XL A GUEST ON HIGH 292

XLI "JUST WITH US" 294

XLII THE DUST OF CHINA FROM THEIR FEET 300

XLIV THE SOUND OF A CHINESE GONG 312

MR. WU

WU CHING YU AND WU LI CHANG

A look of terror glinted across the eyes slit in the child's moon-shaped yellow face, but he stood stock still and silent--respectful and obedient.

The very old man in the chair of carved and inlaid teak wood saw the glint of fear, and he liked it fiercely, although he came of a clan renowned for fearlessness, even in a race that for personal courage has never been matched--unless by the British, the race which of all others it most resembles. Old Wu adored little Wu, and was proud of him with a jealous pride, but he knew that there was nothing craven in the fear that had looked for one uncontrolled instant from his grandson's narrow eye--nothing craven, but love for himself, love of home, and a reluctance to leave both; a reluctance that he was the last man in China to resent or to misestimate.

Wu the grandfather was eighty. Wu the grandson was ten.

Rich almost beyond the dreams of even Chinese avarice, the mandarin was warmly wrapped in clothes almost coolie-plain; but the youngster, who was but his senior's chattel, would have pawned for a fortune as he stood, a ridiculous, gorgeous figure of warmth and of affluence, almost half as broad as long, by virtue of padding. His stiffly embroidered robe of yellow silk was worn over three quilted coats, silk too, and well wadded with down of the Manchurian eider duck, and above the yellow silk surcoat he wore a slightly shorter one of rich fur, fur-lined and also wadded. The fur top-coat was buttoned with jewels. The yellow coat was sewn with pearls and with emeralds. Jewels winked on the thick little padded shoes and blazed on his little skull cap.

For himself the mandarin took his ease in unencumbered old clothes, but it pleased his arrogant pride and his love of the gorgeous that his small grandson should be garbed, even in the semi-seclusion of their isolated country estate, as if paying a visit of state to the boy Emperor at Pekin. As little Wu was of royal blood himself, he might indeed by some right of caste so have visited in no servile r?le, for on his mother's side the lad was of more than royal blood, descended from the two supreme Chinese, descent from whom confers the only hereditary nobility of China. Perhaps the yellows that he often wore hinted at this discreetly. The sartorial boast was well controlled, for true yellow was the imperial color, sacred to the Emperor, and young Wu's yellows were always on the amber side, or on the lemon; and even so he might have worn them less in Pekin than he did here in the Sze-chuan stronghold of his house.

The room was very warm, and seemed no cooler for the scented prayer-sticks that were burning profusely in the carved recess where the ancestral tablet hung, and as he talked with and studied the boy, whom he had studied for every hour of the young life, the upright old man with the gaunt, withered, pockmarked face fanned himself incessantly. Little Wu had run in from his play in the bitterly cold garden, all fur-clad as he was. The mandarin had sent for him, and he had not stayed to throw off even one of his thick garments. Old Wu was not accustomed to be kept waiting or the grandchild to delay.

"Well?" the old man demanded, "you have heard. What do you say?"

The quaint little figure kotowed almost to the ground. It was wonderful that a form so swathed and padded could bend so low, wonderful that the jewel-heavy cap kept its place. His little cue swept the polished floor, and his stiff embroideries of gem-sewn kingfisher feathers creaked as he bent. He bent thrice before he answered, his hands meekly crossed, his eyes humbly on the ground: "Most Honorable, thou art a thousand years old, and, O thrice Honorable Sir, ten thousand times wise. Thy despicable worm entreats thy jadelike pardon that he pollutes with his putrid presence thy plum-blossomed eyes. Thou hast spoken. I thank thee for thy gracious words."

"Art thou glad to go?"

"Thy child is glad, Sir most renowned and venerable, to obey thy wish."

"Art glad to go?"

The boy swept again to the ground, and, bending up, spread out his pink palms in a gesture of pleased acceptance. "Most glad, O ancient long-beard."

The grandfather laughed. "Nay, thou liest. Thou art loth to go. And I am loth to have thee go. But it is best, and so I send thee." He held out his yellow, claw-like hand, and little Wu came and caught it to his forehead, then stood leaning against the other's knee, and began playing with the long string of scented beads that hung about the man's neck.

"Well," the mandarin said again, "say all that is in thy heart. Leave off the words of ceremony. Speak simply. Say what thou wilt."

"When do I go?" It was characteristically Chinese that such was the question, and not "Must I go?" or even "Why must I go?" The grandfather had said that he was to go: that point was settled. From that will there was no appeal. The boy scarcely knew that there were children who did not obey their parents implicitly and always. That there were countries--in the far off foreign-devils' land--where filial disobedience was almost the rule, he had never heard and could not have believed. Of course, in the classics, which even now he read easily, there were runaway marriages and undutiful offspring now and then. But the end of all such offenders was beyond horror horrible, and even so little Wu had always regarded them as literary makeweight, artistic shades to throw up the high lights whiter, shadows grotesque and devilish as some of his grandsire's most precious carvings were, and scarcely as flesh and blood possibilities.

In all their ten years together there had been between these two nothing but love and kindness. No child in China had ever been more indulged; no child in China more strictly disciplined. The older Wu had loved and ruled; the younger Wu had loved and obeyed always. They live life so in China.

"When do I go?" was all the boy said.

"Soon after your marriage moon: the third next moon, as I plan it."

The child's face glowed and creamed with relief. He was only ten, and--at least in that part of the Empire--older bridegrooms were the rule. If the dreaded exile were not to begin until after his marriage, years hence, all its intricate ceremonial, all its long-drawn-out preliminaries, and happily to be delayed again and again by the astrologers, why, then here was respite indeed.

"Nay," the mandarin said, shaking his old head a little sadly, "think not so. Thy marriage will be when the cherry trees in Honan next bloom."

"Oh!" the boy just breathed his surprise.

"I think it best," the old man added. "Your wife was born last month. The runners reached me yesterday with the letter of her honorable father."

Little Wu was interested. He had read of such marriages and he knew that they really took place sometimes. He rather liked the scheme--if only he need not go to England for hideous years of wifeless honeymoon! He had heard none of the details of his exile--only the hateful fact. But his Chinese instinct divined that in all probability young Mrs. Wu would not accompany him. Yes, he rather liked the idea of a wife. He was desperately fond of babies, and often had two or three brought from the retainers' quarters that he might play with them and feed them perfumed sugar-flowers. He hoped his grandfather would tell him more of his baby-betrothed.

But the grandfather did not, now at all events, nor did he add anything to the less pleasant piece of news, but rose stiffly from his chair, saying, "Strike the gong."

The boy went quickly to a great disk of beaten and filigreed gold that hung over a big porcelain tub of glowing azaleas, caught up an ivory snake-entwined rod of tortoise-shell, and beat upon the gong. He struck it but once, but at the sound servants came running--half a dozen or more, clad in blue linen, the "Wu" crest worked between the shoulders.

"Rice," the master said, and held out his hand to the child.

"Lean on me, lean on me hard," pleaded the boy; "thy venerable bones are tired."

"They ache to-day," the octogenarian admitted grimly. "But untie thyself first, my frogling. Thou canst not eat so--we are going to rice, and not into thy beloved snow and ice."

The child slipped out of his fur, and cast it from him. His quick fingers made light work of buttons, clasps and cords. Garment followed garment to the floor, and as they fell servants ran and knelt and picked them up almost reverently, until the boy drew a long free breath, clad only in a flowing robe of thin crimson tussore: a little upright figure, graceful, and for a Chinese boy very thin. Then the old man laid his hand, not lightly, on the young shoulder; and so they went together to their rice.

AT RICE

James Muir was waiting for them in the room where their meal was served. There were but two meals in that household--breakfast and dinner--or rather but two for the mandarin and those who shared his rice; the servants ate three times a day, such few of them as ate in the house at all. But there was a fine mastery of the art of dining, as well as a good deal of clockwork, in the old Chinese's constitution; and Muir, at liberty to command food when and where he would, found it convenient and entertaining to eat with his pupil and his host.

For three years the young Scot had held, and filled admirably, a chair in the University of Pekin. The post had been well paid, and he had enjoyed it hugely, and the Pekin background of life no less; but old Wu had lured him from it with a salary four times as generous, and with an opportunity to study China and Chinese life from the inside such as prond the 18th Infantry Bd before, and far more complete and intimate than the no mean opportunity afforded by his professorship in the capital.

Chinese to the core and Chinese to the remotest tip of his longest spiral-twisted and silver-shielded fingernail, Wu Ching Yu, astute and contemplative even beyond his peers, searching the future anxiously saw strange things ahead of this native land of his burning love, and he had boldly mapped out an unique education for his grandson.

Europe was coming into China. It was too late to prevent that now; Wu Ching Yu doubted if it had not always been too late. Well, what would be would be; Confucius had said so. Europe was coming into China, and Wu Li Chang, his grandson, should meet it at an advantage which other Chinese were not wise enough to prepare for themselves. Wu Li Chang should know Europe before Europe came to reap the wealth of Shantung and Peichihli and to fatten on the golden harvest of four thousand years of Chinese thrift, frugality, and sagacity. The boy should have an English education and a facile understanding of English thought and of English ways.

Quietly, remorselessly, the grandfather had studied the individuals of the Aryan races already permeating in official and mercantile trickles into Pekin, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hankow. The Germans commended themselves to him in much. His Chinese thoroughness liked their thoroughness. His concentration liked theirs. But they had other qualities he liked less. The French and the Americans he understood least, and he somewhat under-estimated both. He liked the Russians; but he gauged them to be threatened by the future rather than being themselves seriously threateners of China.

Mandarin Wu had met Muir in Pekin, had studied and liked him. And Wu's great crony, Li Hung Chang, knew the Scot and respected him. The rest was easy; for Wu was masterful, diplomatic, and the length of his purse was almost endless. Muir had lived with the Wus for three years now, and had known from the first what little Wu had only learned an hour ago: that the boy was going to England and Oxford.

Not for a moment had the mandarin neglected the Chinese furnituring and decorating of the boy's mind. Such a course would have been unthinkable. Already almost the lad might have been presented at the great national examination, and very possibly ennobled as one of the literati, but the mandarin had not thought it necessary. The boy could recite the Li Ki and recite it without mistake or hesitation; he could write decorous verse, paint swiftly and accurately the intricate Chinese characters, and he knew his people's history. He could wrestle and tilt, and once he had beaten his grandfather at chess.

He had worked well with Muir, and Muir with him. They liked each other. And after three years of constant drilling, always followed industriously and often enthusiastically, the young Chinese had a glib smattering of European lore, dates, grammar, facts. Europe itself--real Europe--was a closed book to him, of course. The mandarin understood that. But a few years in the West would mend all that: and then the beloved boy should come home, to serve China and to rule his own destiny.

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