CHAPTER VI

THE PAGODA

He was spared that inconvenience.  The untimely rain and cold, some persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril.  But accounts varied, reasons were plentiful.  Soldiers had come down from the chow city, two-score li inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a great shout of victory.  A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil, then cut it adrift in the sky.  A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness, and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night, in flame.  A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run throughout Nature.  For any or all of these reasons, the town was delivered.  The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.

The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker.  To escape and survive,—­the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran.  The interim had been packed with incongruity.  There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich’s; another, and a worse, at Nesbit’s; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four o’clock on melon-seeds, tea, black yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ended at three in the morning on rice-brandy and betel served by unreal women with chalked faces and vermilion-spotted lips, simpering and melancholy.  By day, there was work, or now and then a lesson with Dr. Earle’s teacher, a little aged Chinaman of intricate, refined, and plaintive courtesy.  Under his guidance Rudolph learned rapidly, taking to study as a prodigal might take to drink.  And with increasing knowledge came increasing tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo-milk.

Then, too, came the mild excitement of moving into his own house, the Portuguese nunnery.  Through its desolate, lime-coated spaces, his meagre belongings were scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for thought.  The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a cry from the river, or the sing-song of a “boy” improvising some endless ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray to flowing brass;—­all these, and nights between sleep and waking, when fancy peopled the echoing chambers with the visionary lives, now ended, of meek, brown sisters from Goa or Macao, gave to Rudolph intimations, vague, profound, and gravely happy, as of some former existence almost recaptured.  Once more he felt himself a householder in the Arabian tales.