Part 6
“Who knows? Perhaps he did. Anyway this person will endeavour to show what further fortune befell him.
“After this pious exercise I started away from the town, taking a direction the opposite to that by which I had entered the town from Ten Li. Although a strong man, I still found it not altogether pleasant to march all day without anything to eat, and I was greatly exhausted when, near the hour of sunset, I came to the banks of a large river. This was crossed by a ferry, consisting of a large flat-bottomed boat, dragged from side to side by iron chains laid in the river-bed, and by this means passengers, beasts, baggage, and merchandise were conveyed from one side to the other. Having no money with which to pay my passage across, I sat somewhat disconsolately on the bank and debated with myself whether it were not better to at once end my miserable existence by drowning. Near me crouched a huge gaunt man in tattered garments, whose presence I had failed to notice, owing to my self-absorption, until he addressed me. My melancholy train of thought was broken in upon by his saying—
“‘Honourable stranger, it seems to me that you contemplate suicide. Many people attempt to pass over to their ancestors in this river, but almost invariably before drowning they wish to be saved, and it is then that I come in—in other words, I save them from death, and moreover I will do the same for you, for indeed I am sadly in need of funds. So, fair sir, I beg of you to do the deed speedily, for night approaches.’
“I explained that I was indeed an unhappy person, and at that very moment had contemplated suicide, being absolutely devoid of even a single ‘cash.’ At this he altered his tone, and said that if I were without money then I had his full permission to drown, for that nothing put him in a worse temper than to save people who were unable to requite him for his services. I liked the fellow for his honesty, and begged him to explain further. He then told me that his profession was one of life-saver, that people frequently fell into the water at the ferry, that he was always at hand to pull them out, and that by the gratitude of those he thus saved he made a living, but that unfortunately of late travellers were few; for days no one had tried to cross the ferry, and that should trade continue to be in its present stagnant state he would surely starve. His tale excited my sympathy. Here was a fellow-creature in as sad a case as myself, and for some time I sat by him in silence, idly gazing at the muddy stream, and seeing the blue-clothed people returning by the stone-paved path at the river’s side from their day’s work in the fields. Suddenly an idea seized me. I jumped up.
“‘Wait,’ said I to the sad man by the ferry, ‘and you shall yet earn some money by nightfall.’ With which I ran in apparent great haste up the causeway by the river bank. I kept on at my topmost speed, and people made way for me on the narrow pathway, but singling out the better class of wayfarer, I apparently by accident charged into them and hurled them into the stream. On I kept, in spite of the cries and execrations behind me. My large bulk and strength forced all to go into the water whom I deemed worthy of being rescued, and so I continued until quite exhausted and the darkness was almost complete. I must have pushed some eight or ten people into the river by the time I stopped, and then, wishing to rejoin my new friend, I too jumped in, and was rapidly carried, with little effort, towards the ferry. As I drew near the spot, swimming just to keep afloat, I heard wild shouts from the bank, and almost at once I felt myself seized by the collar, my head was thrust under the water, I received several severe kicks in the back, and when quite exhausted and almost drowned I was dragged ashore, and found that the person who had ill-used me so severely was none other than my friend the life-saver. His annoyance at finding that it was me he had saved soon gave way to feelings of gratitude for the services I had rendered by supplying him with material on which to exercise his professional skill. Of the seven people he had saved all had some money with them, and the few who had escaped him and had drowned he trusted possessed nothing of value. So, greatly cheered, we two retired to the village and dined together in the inn, and over a bottle of samshu that night we formed a compact to be partners in saving life.
“Being a stranger in the neighbourhood, it was for a few days easy for me to push people off the tow-path, and we did a good trade, but soon people became careful and suspicious and would not walk singly near the river-side. My partner was a man of hasty temper, and his manner became more and more disagreeable towards me as trade became worse. It became daily more and more difficult to earn a living, and one night, my partner having made some disparaging remarks about the zeal with which I carried out my part of our agreement, I determined to make a desperate effort the next day to supply him with subjects on which to practise his professional skill. Warily I trudged near the tow-path, but only the most indigent dared to use it. I went further afield, but could meet no one who was unaccompanied. At last, desperate and hungry, late in the afternoon, I struck away from the river bank towards the foothills. Some mile and a half from the river I found a woodcutter. He fled from me, but I rushed on and pounced upon him. A sharp struggle ensued, no one was by to help him, and his cries passed unheeded. My strength soon overpowered him, and I carried him screaming and shouting to the deserted river bank, and with a supreme effort hurled him into the muddy current. Then, thoroughly exhausted, I wearily made my way back to the ferry. On arriving there I found my partner in the most evil temper I had ever seen him in; in fact, he was in such a towering rage with me that he could scarcely speak. He had saved the man, but it appeared he was an indigent second cousin of my partner, and so far from being able to reward he had signified his intention of remaining with and living on his rescuer, arguing that the person who had prolonged such an unhappy life as his had incurred the responsibility of keeping that life going, and that henceforth, if he died of starvation, then his death would lie at the door of his rescuer. I think some unreasonably offensive remarks were hurled at me on this occasion, both by the rescuer and the rescued, so I left their company and that night slept unfed and uncovered in the fields.”
“But what’s all that got to do with your never laughing?” says Jack.
“And I don’t believe that story,” adds Dorothy. “You wouldn’t drown the puppies the other day, so I’m certain you never pushed people into a river.”
It was true. Hong, as a Buddhist, had scruples about the taking of life, and had recently failed to do away with certain blind puppies that were considered superfluous in the Consular household. If it were possible for a Chinaman to look disconcerted, then Hong would have looked it at that moment, with the eyes of both children fixed on him. His love for talking to them and engaging their attention had led him into spinning an endless yarn, but now he was brought up suddenly with a round turn.
“It is true, high-born one, this miserable individual had forgotten; but wait, and soon, Excellencies, you shall learn how this despicable individual was taught not to laugh. It being necessary for me to live somehow, I tried to earn a few cash by reciting passages from my plays at any small village where I could gather together an audience. I found that my fine declamations of heroic parts met with but little favour; but when I repeated some of the ancient jests of our comedian I met with some slighter success. It so happened that one day, starving and miserable, I stood on the cement threshing-floor before the inn of a small village, reciting the funniest jests I could remember, in a melancholy voice, to a dull and unappreciative audience of rustics, when, unnoticed by me, a high official, accompanied by his retinue, had ridden up to the outskirts of the crowd. It appeared that he listened to my merry jibes, and at the same time carefully scrutinised my miserable and utterly woe-begone appearance, and when I had finished my recital and collected what I could from my audience he entered the inn and summoned me to his presence by one of his servants. On entering the great man’s presence in the guest-room of the inn, he informed me that it was his pleasure to take me into his service, that I was to attach myself to his train, and that my duties would be made plain to me later on. Being in sorry straits I was willing to accept any fate, and so journeyed with his retinue to Foh Lin, of which town and district I found my new master to be magistrate. Arrived at his Yamen, I was given a room to myself and a generous meal, of which I stood greatly in need; after which I felt once more a man, my old confidence in myself returned, and when later a servant entered and burst into uncontrollable laughter, I felt ready to join in his merriment could I but learn the cause of it.
“‘Come,’ I said, ‘speak! Why this outward seeming of internal merriment?’
“After several ineffectual attempts to explain, he managed in the intervals of laughter to tell me that to laugh was the greatest privilege imaginable in that Yamen. He then further explained that the magistrate was a man who had never experienced any of the emotions common to ordinary mortals, that he was the most amusing person himself; he knew no fear, no sorrow, no pain, and had never been known to laugh. The sound of merriment was most objectionable to him, and was invariably visited with the most rigorous punishments in the case of anyone who so far forgot himself as to laugh in his magisterial presence. That he had singled me out as fitted for his service because I could apparently tell funny stories and at the same time preserve a countenance like a well-worn boot.
“I also learned from the fellow that my new master was in every way most excruciatingly funny himself, that his retainers suffered agonies daily from suppressed amusement at his humorous remarks, and that to smile at them was a grave offence, but to laugh was a crime punishable by death. His latest jest had been to build a superb summer-house in his grounds, and when completed he had taken his mother-in-law to see it. When asked her opinion of the structure she had, womanlike, offered criticisms and suggested improvements. The magistrate feigned to agree with her, and flattered her into making a suggestion as to how the building might be rendered perfect. She thereupon suggested some sculpture or figurehead in the centre of the roof as a fitting rounding-off of the structure. The magistrate concurred in her opinion with enthusiasm, and suggested her own head as a suitable finish-off of the concern. In vain his mother-in-law protested that she possessed insufficient beauty for such an honour, and suggested her daughter’s head—his wife’s—as being eminently more suitable. He carefully argued the matter out with her, and so wittily withal that she shook with uncontrollable merriment till the moment the executioner’s sword curtailed her giggles.
“In spite of these stories I slept well, and felt ready to meet my new master the next morning with a befittingly lugubrious exterior. Everything passed off well at the first interview, the extreme thinness of my face and my general starved condition making a picture sufficiently unmirthful in the magistrate’s eyes; but as my condition under good living improved, so I found my powers as an actor more and more taxed to maintain my gravity in my master’s presence. I would lie awake all night screaming with laughter, hoping thereby to relieve my feelings of the strain caused by the previous day’s gravity. My master never seemed at a loss for a witty remark or humorous suggestion, and these were always delivered with a Buddha-like impassivity that rendered them the more ridiculous. One after another of his servants I saw degraded for levity, until I stood first in his favour; however, I knew the strain would prove too great for me, my face used to feel like scorched parchment, my eyes burnt like hot cinders, and often I feared to choke, and tears would stream down my face from the enormous efforts I made not to offend. I also became very popular with the other servants, frequently saving them from disgrace by stepping forward and drawing the master’s attention upon myself and from any unlucky one whose merriment had got the better of his prudence. At last I snapped under the strain, having been made weak and nervous by many sleepless nights of laughter. On the day of my downfall the magistrate was in an exceptionally happy vein. He had dispensed justice for five hours, never repeating a jest, and never failing to send a criminal to the potter’s field who did not leave the court convulsed with merriment. It came suddenly on me without warning, falling like a fit of madness, the restraint of months running riot, my pent-up emotions suddenly gave vent to themselves in peals of maniacal laughter. I rolled from side to side, now screaming like a parrot, again whooping like a child with the cough, hiccuping like any drunkard, squealing like an unbroken mule—every sound in the animal kingdom I seemed to reproduce as I rolled on the ground with streaming eyes before the horrified magistrate. He alone remained calm in the face of my shocking exhibition. Having dwelt upon the disappointment I had been to him he condemned me to death, pointing out that my ingratitude was the greater seeing how I had been advanced by his kindness, and having made a few quotations from the precepts of Confucius, which latter he rendered in rhyme, interlarded with some excruciatingly funny puns, he dismissed me, a limp, chuckling mass, from his presence. I now felt certain that I should end my days by a felon’s death, but the relief was so great that I passed the night in the greatest hilarity, enjoying the company of my friends, and entertaining them with a colossal farewell feast. Merrily the wine bowl passed, until the hour for the execution arrived, when I was led in the best of spirits to the potter’s field, and prepared to look my last on this beautiful world.
“Soldiers were drawn up in a hollow square, the executioner stood stripped to the waist in the centre, and a little in advance of the troops sat the melancholy magistrate on a milk-white pony. The world never looked brighter, as the early morning sun shone on the bright uniforms, glittering weapons, and gaudy banners of the soldiery. As a special mark of favour I was allowed to be unbound, and advancing to the centre of the square, I politely saluted the magistrate and thanked him for all his past kindness. He, however, replied with some apt jest, which again aroused my mirth. Now, thought I, I will have my fling. My wits were peculiarly sharpened, and I turned to the executioner and twitted him on his solemn demeanour. The fellow answered me to the best of his dull intellect, but as I made my preparations in a leisurely manner I soon had him hopelessly trembling from a mixture of laughter and fear at offending the great man. Even the soldiers began to snigger at my repartee and the executioner’s obvious distress, when suddenly a change came over me. Why should I die? What evil had I done? A feeling of huge wrath sprang up in me against this unfeeling wretch who never smiled. With the madness engendered by this reaction of feeling, I dashed at the now helpless executioner, wrenched the sword from his grasp, and with a yell of a madman rushed towards the crowd. The soldiers, cowards to a man, drew back before my onslaught. Blinded with fury I bounded towards the hated tao-tai, seated calm as ever on his pony. The sword was raised to strike, and in another moment I should have killed the callous fiend, when something in his face arrested my arm in mid-air. Could it be? Yes it was. He smiled, the smile broadened, and the melancholy magistrate of Foh Lin broke into peals of merriment. I stared like a fool, and let the sword drop, the situation was unique. I felt almost sorry for what I had done, shocked, it seemed to me, that my idol too had been shattered.
“When at last he spoke I listened with bowed head. He, bending a look almost of kindness upon me, addressed me thus—
“‘Brother, all my life I have never felt any of the emotions common to men until now, and now I have felt fear. Undoubtedly you have just held my life in your hands. This, the first emotion of my life, felt so strange that I laughed at the idea. I thank you for it, but you must leave me. Should I ever again wish to laugh you might be unable to afford me that pleasure. So it were better for us both that we parted. Fare you well, brother.’
“Thus, Excellencies, I learned the secret of gravity.”
“Is that all true, Hong?”
“High-born, I would have you ponder this saying of the philosopher—‘A bad liar is a better companion than a deaf mute.’”
THE HUNCHBACK’S PIETY
THE HUNCHBACK’S PIETY
THE people had long laboured and groaned under the oppressive misrule of Hang Ti, the local magistrate. He was, without doubt, a bad ruler, a man possessed of none of the tenderer feelings of humanity, and one who ground the faces of the poor for his own advancement. Under his mal-administration illegal taxes had been super-imposed on salt, likin barriers established where none should exist, the gaols were crowded with those unfortunates who would not submit to his further extortions, and the whole land cried out for redress.
At last the long-suffering poor took into their own hands the only means they possessed of calling the “Son of Heaven’s” attention to their pitiable condition. An insurrection was fomented and quickly blazed into serious rebellion. Villages were sacked, whole districts laid waste, and soon accounts of these doings reached Peking. By swiftest messengers a mandate signed with the “Vermilion Pencil” was conveyed to Hang Ti, ordering him to raise troops forthwith and to crush the rebels, at the same time enjoining all peacefully minded persons to abstain from nervous excitability, but rather to pursue the cultivation of all the virtues, more especially those of thrift, energy, and the study of the classics.
Hang Ti’s troops, with their pay long in arrears, no stomach for the fight, and most of them secretly in sympathy with the rebels, were routed at the first engagement, and then the whole province was given up to bloodshed, rapine, and excesses of every description.
A second Imperial Order soon followed the first summoning Hang Ti to the capital, whither he hastily repaired, having first laid his hands on as much of his ill-gotten wealth as he could conveniently carry, hoping thereby to bribe the palace underlings, and so mitigate in some measure the punishment he deserved.
On his arrival in Peking he was not permitted to enter his Imperial master’s presence, but was presented by an official with a handsome silk scarf, a polite hint that he might hang himself and so save his person the greater indignity of decapitation. So Hang Ti passes out of the story, and an energetic officer named Yeh Lok reigned in his stead.
Yeh subdued the rebels with a firm hand, and in three months the district, although somewhat depopulated, was reported to the “Son of Heaven” as being “Happy, contented, and at peace.” Yeh next turned his attention to the administration of his district, and found that there utter chaos reigned in every department. The prisons were overcrowded to a disgraceful extent, and the majority of the unfortunate prisoners had not even any crime registered against them. Yeh’s heart bled for them: this shocking state of affairs had to be at once remedied. The idea of keeping people in prison for indefinite periods without trial revolted Yeh’s every sense of what was right and just. He ordered them, therefore, to be taken out in batches of forty and to be beheaded. Forty each day till the gaols were empty and cleared of all persons wrongfully incarcerated.
Lok Hing squatted in tattered blue cotton garments behind a tin of pea-nuts at the roadside; an old umbrella afforded him a grateful shade from the blazing sun, and his well-ventilated and roomy clothes allowed of his scratching any portion of himself with the least possible effort. He was a man of no ambition, content to earn a few cash by selling pea-nuts and spend his life in a philosophical melancholy. As he sat tapping the tin with an elongated finger-nail and droning out a mournful eulogy of his wares, To Tao, the hunchback, passed.
To Tao by his infirmity was unfitted for heavy manual labour, but his distorted body seemed to be endowed with some marvellous power of rendering natural objects equally grotesque. No one for hundreds of li around could produce small trees in such fantastic shapes and weird eccentricities of growth as he. Hence to all outward appearances almost as poverty stricken as Lok Hing, To Tao was a man of some means, seeing that the wealthy gentry were only too glad to purchase the curious trees and shrubs that resulted from his untiring care and peculiar skill.
As To Tao passed, Lok Hing softly sang: “Forty yesterday, forty the day before, in all three hundred and sixty, and now all are finished.”
“What does my brother mean?” asked To Tao, whose close attention to the cultivation of his plants had left him ignorant of public affairs.
“Forty each day for nine days have been beheaded, and now there remains but one, whom my lord the magistrate will have strangled this day.”
Then Lok Hing told the hunchback of the one remaining prisoner, an old woman whose crime no one knew. She had been about forty years in prison, and had herself forgotten why she had been placed there, and that Yeh Lok had been so moved at the recital of her wrongs that he had vowed neither to eat nor drink until justice had been done her by suitable strangulation.
The hunchback heard the story without any outward emotion, but his heart was heavy within him. He alone knew the old woman’s story. She was his mother. His father had been a notable brigand, and his mother had been seized by the then tao-tai and held as a hostage till the brigand should be caught or slain. To Tao’s father, however, died a natural death at a ripe old age, and now for some years the hunchback had ministered to the material comforts of his remaining parent by sending her food and little luxuries daily in the prison.
There was nothing more to be done now, however, as already the procession was approaching along the dusty road with two stout coolies carrying the old woman in a basket slung on a thick bamboo pole.
Hastily purchasing some pea-nuts from Lok Hing, the hunchback approached the basket and handed them through its wide meshes to his mother. The old dame received the nuts gratefully, and continued to munch them with evident enjoyment until the final tightening of the string round her neck rendered further deglutition not only unnecessary but impossible.
The magistrates, officials, soldiers, and rabble then returned to pursue their several occupations or amusements, and To Tao, with rage in his heart, also departed to his house, where he had long kept a handsome coffin with which to do the last thing properly by his aged parent. This action of To Tao in providing a coffin for the aged prisoner was accounted to him for righteousness, no one being cognisant of the relationship that had existed between the two.