by Willa Cather
“In the name of Ptahah and of your fathers’ souls, pull!”
It was the voice of Kufu. Slowly, like men awakened from a dream, the slaves drew up that swinging stone, and he that stood upon it. Below the king stood, his hands clutching the front of his chariot, and his eyes strained upon the stone. When the slab reached the top of the shaft on which the pulley hung, it was swung back over the pyramid, and the descent began. The slaves, sick with fear, lost control of it, and the great stone plunged down faster and faster. I wondered if the mortar spread upon the top was thick enough to break its fall. Just as it struck the top in safety, he who stood upon it, gathering all his strength leaped high into the air to break the shock and fell motionless upon the stone. Then such a cry as went up, never before roused old Nilus from his dreams, or made the walls of the city to tremble. They bore him down from the tomb and placed him in the chariot of the king. Then the king’s trumpeter sounded, and then Kufu spake:
“We have this day seen a deed the like of which we have never seen before, neither have our fathers told us of such a thing. Know, men of Egypt that he, the Shepherd stranger, who has risen upon the swinging stone, shall build the great pyramid, for he is worthy in my sight. The king has said.”
Then the people cheered, but their faces were dark. And the charioteer of the king lashed his horses across the plain toward the city.
Of the great pyramid and of the mystery thereof, and of the strange builder, and of the sin of the king, I may not speak, for my lips are sealed.
A SON OF THE CELESTIAL.
A CHARACTER
Ah lie me dead in the sunrise land,
Where the sky is blue and the hills are gray,
Where the camels doze in the desert sun,
And the sea gulls scream o’er the big blue bay.
Where the Hwang-Ho glides through the golden sand,
And the herons play in the rushes tall,
Where pagodas rise upon every hill
And the peach trees bloom by the Chinese wall.
Where the great grim gods sit still in the dark,
And lamps burn dim at their carven feet,
And their eyes like the eyes of the serpent king
Flash green through the dusk of the incense sweet.
Though deep under ground I shall see the sun,
And shall feel the stretch of the blue overhead,
And the gems that gleam on the breast of the god.
And shall smell the scent of the peach—though dead.
Most of the world knew him only as Yung Le Ho, one of the few white haired Chinamen who were to be seen about the streets of San Francisco. His cue was as long as that of any other John, and with the exception of wearing spectacles, he adhered strictly to his national costume. He sat all day long in an open bazar where he worked in silk and ivory and sandal wood. Americans who had lived there long said he must be worth a vast deal of money, for Yung was the best workman in the city. All the ladies who were enthusiastic over Chinese art bought his painted silken birds, and beautiful lacquered boxes, his bronze vases, his little ivory gods and his carved sandal wood, and paid him whatsoever he demanded for them. Had he possessed a dozen hands he might have sold the work of all of them, as it was, he was very skillful with two. Yung was like Michel Angelo, he allowed no one to touch his work but himself; he did it all, rough work and delicate. When the ship brought him strange black boxes with a sweet spicy odor about them, he opened them with his own hands and took out the yellow ivory tusks, and the bales of silk, and the blocks of shining ebony. And no hands but his touched them until they were fashioned into the beautiful things with which the ladies of San Francisco loved to adorn their drawing rooms.
Day after day he sat in his stall, crosslegged and silent like the gods of his country, carving his ivory into strange images and his sandal wood into shapes of foliage and birds. Sometimes he cut it into the shapes of foliage of his own land; the mulberry and apricot and chestnut and juniper that grew about the sacred mountain; the bamboo and camphor tree, and the rich Indian bean, and the odorous camelias and jagonicas that grew far to the south on the low banks of the Yang-Tse-Kiang. Sometimes he cut shapes and leaves that were not of earth, but were things he had seen in his dreams when the Smoke was on him.
There were some people beside the artistic public who knew Yung; they were the linguistic scholars of the city—there are a few of these, even so far west as San Francisco. The two or three men who knew a little Sanskrit and attacked an extract from the Vedas now and then, used often to go to Yung to get help. For the little white haired Chinaman knew Sanskrit as thoroughly as his own tongue. The professors had a good deal of respect for Yung, though they never told anyone of it, and kept him completely obscured in the background as professors and doctors of philosophy always do persons whom they consider “doubtful” acquaintances. Yung never pushed himself forward, nor courted the learned gentlemen. He always gave them what they wanted, then shut up like a clam and no more could be gotten out of him. Perhaps Yung did not have quite as much respect for the gentlemen as they had for him. He had seen a good many countries and a good many people, and he knew knowledge from pedantry. He found American schoolman distasteful. “Too muchee good to know muchee,” he once sarcastically remarked. Of course Yung was only a heathen Chinese who bowed down to wood and stone, his judgment in this and other matters does not count for much.
There was one American whom Yung took to his heart and loved, if a Chinaman can love, and that was old Ponter. Ponter was one of the most learned men who ever drifted into ’Frisco, but his best days were over before he came. He had held the chair of Sanskrit in a western university for years, but he could drink too much beer and was too good a shot at billiards to keep that place forever, so the college had requested his resignation. He went from place to place until at last he drifted into San Francisco, where he stayed. He went clear down to the mud sills there. How he lived no one knew. He did some copying for the lawyers, and he waited on the table in a third-rate boarding house, and he smoked a great deal of opium. Yung, too, loved the Smoke; perhaps it was that as much as Sanskrit that drew the two men together. At any rate, as soon as Yung’s bazar was closed, they went together down to his dark little den in the Chinese quarters, and there they talked Buddah and Confucius and Lau-tsz till midnight. Then they went across the hall to the Seven Portals of Paradise. There they each took a mat and each his own sweet pipe with bowls of jade and mouthpieces of amber—Yung had given Ponter one—and pulled a few steady puffs and were in bliss till morning.
To Ponter, Yung told a good deal of his history. Not in regular narrative form, for he never talked about himself long, but he let it out bit by bit. When he was a boy he lived in Nanking, the oldest city of the oldest empire, where the great schools are and the tallest pagoda in the world rears its height of shining porcelain. There he had been educated, and had learned all the wisdom of the Chinese. He became tired of all that after awhile; tired of the rice paper books and of the masters in their black gowns, of the blue mountains and of the shadows of the great tower that fell sharp upon the yellow pavement in the glare of the sun. He went south; down the great canal in a red barge with big sails like dragon’s wings. He came to Soutcheofou that is built upon the water ways among the hills of Lake Taihoo. There the air smelt always of flowers, and the bamboo woods were green, and the rice fields shook in the wind. There the actors and jugglers gather the year around, and the Mandrins come to find brides for their harems. For once a god had loved a woman of that city, and he gave to her the charms of heaven, and since then the maidens of Soutcheofou have been the most beautiful in the Middle Kingdom, and have lived but to love and be loved. There Yung dwelt until he tired of pleasure. Then he went on foot across the barren plains of Thibet and the snowcapped Himalyas into India. He spent ten years in a temple there among the Brahamin priests, learning th
e sacred books. Then he fell in with some high caste Indian magicians and went with them. Of the next five years of his life Yung never spoke. Once, when Ponter questioned him about them, he laughed an ugly laugh which showed his broken yellow teeth and said:
“I not know what I did then. The devil he know, he and the fiends.”
At last Yung came to California. There he took to carving and the Smoke.
Yung was rich; he might have dwelt in a fine house, but he preferred to live among his own people in a little room across from the Seven Portals. He celebrated all the feasts and festivals with the other Chinamen, and bowed down to the gods in the joss house. He explained this to Ponter one day by saying:
“It is to keep us together, keep us Chinamen.”
Wise Yung! It was not because of the cheapness of Chinese labor that the Chinese bill was enacted. It was because church and state feared this people who went about unproselyting and unproselyted. Who had printed centuries before Guttenberg was born, who had used anesthetics before chloroform was ever dreamed of. Who, in the new west, settled down and ate and drank and dressed as men had done in the days of the flood. Their terrible antiquity weighed upon us like a dead hand upon a living heart.
Yung did not know much about English literature. He liked the Bible, and he had picked up a copy of Hiawatha and was very fond of it. I suppose the artificialness of the poem appealed to his natural instinct and his training. Ponter was much disgusted with his taste, and one night he read the whole of Hamlet aloud to him, translating the archaic-phrases into doggerel Chinese as he read. When he finished, Yung stared at him with a troubled look and said in Chinese:
“Yes, it is a great book, but I do not understand. If I were a young man I might try, but it is different. We cut our trees into shape, we bind our women into shape, we make our books into shape by rule. Your trees and women and books just grow, and yet they have shape. I do not understand. Come, let us smoke, the Smoke is good.”
Ponter threw the book on the floor and arose and paced the floor shouting angrily:
“O yes, d—n you! You are a terrible people! I have come as near losing all human feeling and all human kinship as ever a white man did, but you make me shudder, every one of you. You live right under the sun’s face, but you cannot feel his fire. The breast of God heaves just over you, but you never know it. You ought to be a feeling, passionate people, but you are as heartless and devilish as your accursed stone gods that leer at you in your Pagodas. Your sages learn rites, rites, rites, like so many parrots. They have forgotten how to think so long ago that they have forgotten they ever forgot. Your drama has outlived pathos, your science has outlived investigation, your poetry has outlived passion. Your very roses do not smell, they have forgotten how to give odor ages and ages ago. Your devilish gods have cursed you with immortality and you have outlived your souls. You are so old that you are born yellow and wrinkled and blind. You ought to have been buried centuries before Europe was civilized. You ought to have been wrapped in your mort cloth ages before our swaddling clothes were made. You are dead things that move!”
Yung answered never a word, but smiled his hideous smile and went across to the Portals of Paradise, and lay down upon his mat, and drew long whiffs from his mouthpiece, slowly, solemnly, as though he were doing sacrifice to some god. He dreams of his own country, dreams of the sea and the mountains and forests and the slopes of sunny land. When he awakes there is not much of his dream left, only masses and masses of color that haunt him all day.
“Ponter,” said Yung one day as he sat cutting a little three-faced Vishnu in ivory, “when I die do not even bury me here. Let them go through the rites and then send me home. I must lie there while the flesh is yet on my bones. Let the funeral be grand. Let there be many mourners, and roast pigs, and rice and gin. Let the gin bowls be of real China, and let the coffin be a costly one like the coffins of Liauchau, there is money enough. Let my pipe stay in my hand, and put me on the first ship that sails.”
Not long after that, Ponter arose from his mat one morning, and went over to waken Yung. But Yung would not waken any more. He had tasted his last ounce of the Smoke, and he lay with the mouthpiece in his mouth, and his fingers clutched about the bowl. Pouter sat down by him and said slowly:
“A white man has got pretty low down, Yung, when he takes to the Smoke and runs with a heathen. But I liked you, Yung, as much as a man can like a stone thing. You weren’t a bad fellow, sir. You knew more Sanskrit than Muller dreamed of knowing, and more ethics than Plato, a long sight, and more black art than the devil himself. You knew more than any man I ever saw, more good and more evil. You could do a neater job with a knife and a piece of bone than any man in civilization, and you got away with more Smoke than any yaller man I ever saw. You were not a bad fellow Yung, but your heart has been dead these last six thousand years, and it was better for your carcass to follow suit.”
He went out and got the finest lacqured coffin in ’Frisco and he put old Yung inside with a pound of rice and his pipe and a pound of the best opium in the market. Then he nailed him up singing: “Ibimus, Ibimus, Utcumque praecedes, supernum, Carpere iter comites parati,” softly as he hammered away.
He took the body to the graveyard where the Chinamen went through the rites. Then they loaded Yung on an outbound steamer. Next day Ponter stood on the docks and watched her plowing her way toward the Celestial shore.
THE ELOPEMENT OF ALLEN POOLE
I.
“Seein’ yo’ folks ain’t willin’, sweetheart, I tell yo’ there hain’t no other way.”
“No, I reckon there hain’t.” She sighed and looked with a troubled expression at the thin spiral of blue smoke that curled up from a house hidden behind the pine trees.
“Besides, I done got the license now, an’ told the preacher we was comin’. Yo’ ain’t goin’ back on me now, Nell?”
“No, no, Allen, of course I hain’t, only—” her mouth quivered a little and she still looked away from him. The man stood uneasily, his hands hanging helplessly at his side, and watched her. As he saw the color leave her cheeks and her eyes fill, up he began to fear lest he might lose her altogether, and he saw that something must be done. Rousing himself he went up to her, and taking her hand drew himself up to the full height of his six feet.
“See here, Nell, I hain’t goin’ to make yo’ leave yo’ folks, I hain’t got no right to. Yo’ kin come with me, or bide with ’em, jist as yo’ choose, only fo’ Gawd’s sake tell me now, so if yo’ won’t have me I kin leave yo’.”
The girl drew close to him with that appealing gesture of a woman who wants help or strength from some one, and laid her face on his arm.
“I want yo,’ Allen, yo’ know that. I hain’t feelin’ bad to go, only I do hate to wear that dress mighty bad. Yo’ know Pap bought it fo’ me to wear to the Bethel camp-meetin’. He got real silk ribbon fo’ it, too, jist after he sold the sheep, yo’ know. It seems real mean to run away in it.”
Don’t wear it then, I kin get yo’ plenty o’ dresses, wear what yo’ got on, yo’ surely purty enough fo’ me that way.”
“No, I must wear it, cause I ain’t got nothin’ else good enough to marry yo’ in. But don’t lets talk about it no mo’ dear. What time yo’ goin’ to come tonight?”
“Bout ten o’clock I reckon. I better not come too early, yo’ folks might hear me. I lay I won’t go fer away today, them revenue fellers is lookin’ fo’ me purty sharp.”
“I knowed they would be, I knowed it all along. I wish yo’ wouldn’t still no mo’. I jist am scared to death now all the time fo’ fear they’ll ketch yo’. Why don’t yo’ quit stillin’ now, Allen?”
“Law me, honey! There hain’t no harm in it. I jist makes a little fo’ the campmeetin’s.”
“I don’t keer ’bout the harm, its yo’ I’m feerd fo’.
“Don’t yo’ wor
ry ’bout me. I kin give ’em the slip. I’ll be here tonight at ten o’clock if all the revenue officers in the country are afer me. I’ll come down here by the big chistnut an’ whistle. What shall I whistle, anyhow, so yo’ kin know its me?”
