Adrift in Pacific and Other Great Adventures – 17 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Jules Verne
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and his pupil stopped at the principal gate, which opened on the vast enclosure surrounding the various structures of the yamen, and its gardens and court-yards.
If, instead of being the dwelling of a private individual, it had been that of a mandarin, a great drum would have occupied the best place, under the carved roof of the porch over the door, and where, in the night as well as in the day, those of his officers who might have to ask for justice would have knocked. But, instead of this “complainers’ drum,” huge porcelain jars ornamented the entrance of the yamen, and contained cold tea, which was constantly renewed by attendants. These jars were at the disposal of passers-by, a generosity which did honor to Kin-Fo. So he was thought a great deal of, as they say, “by his neighbors in the East and West.”
On the master’s arrival, the servants ran to the door to meet him. Valets-de-chambre, footmen, porters, chair-bearers, grooms, coachmen, waiters, night-watchers, and cooks, and all who compose the Chinese household, formed into line under the orders of the intendant; while a dozen coolies, engaged by the month for the heaviest work, stood a little in the rear.
The intendant offered his welcome to the master of the house, who made a slight acknowledgment with a motion of his hand, and passed rapidly on.
“Soun?” said he simply.
“Soun!” answered Wang, smiling. “If Soun were here, it would not be Soun!”
“Where is he?” repeated Kin-Fo.
The intendant had to confess that neither he nor any one knew what had become of him. Now, Soun held no less important a position than that of first valet-de-chambre, and was in particular attached to Kin-Fo’s person, and was one whom the latter could by no means do without.
Was he, then, a model servant? No: he could not possibly have performed his duties in a worse manner. Absent-minded, incoherent in speech, awkward with his hands and tongue, a thorough gourmand, and somewhat of a coward, he was a true Chinese-screen Chinaman, but faithful on the whole, and the only person, after all, who possessed the gift of moving his master. Kin-Fo found an occasion to get angry with Soun twenty times a day; and, if he only corrected him ten, there was just so much the less to rouse him from his habitual indifference, and stir his bile. A hygienic servant, it is plain to be seen.
Besides, Soun, like the majority of Chinese servants, came of his own accord to receive punishment whenever he merited it, which his master was not sparing in bestowing. The blows of the rattan rained down on his shoulders, but he hardly minded them. What caused him to show infinitely more sensibility was the successive cuttings of his braided pigtail, which Kin-Fo made him undergo when he was guilty of any grave fault.
Probably no one is unaware how much the Chinaman values this odd appendage. The loss of his pigtail is the first punishment offered to a criminal. It is a dishonor for life: therefore the unhappy valet dreaded nothing so much as to be condemned to lose a piece of it. Four years before, when he entered Kin-Fo’s service, his braid, one of the most beautiful in the Celestial Empire, measured one metre and twenty-five. Now there remained only fifty-seven centimetres.
At this rate, Soun in two years would be entirely bald.
However, Wang and Kin-Fo, followed respectfully by the servants, crossed the garden, in which the trees, that were mostly set in porcelain vases, and trimmed in an astonishing but lamentable style of art, assumed the form of fantastic animals. Then the friends walked around the reservoir filled with “gouramis” and red fishes, and in which the limpid water was hidden from view under the broad, pale-red flowers of the “nelumbo,” the most beautiful of the native water-lilies in the Empire of Flowers. They saluted a quadruped in hieroglyphics, painted in violent colors on a wall ad hoc, like a symbolical fresco, and finally reached the entrance to the principal dwelling in the yamen.
It was a house composed of a ground-floor and one story, raised on a terrace which was ascended by six marble steps. Bamboo screens were hung like awnings before the doors and windows, in order to render endurable the excessive heat by airing the interior. The flat roof contrasted with the fantastic roofing of the pavilions, scattered here and there in the enclosure of the yamen, whose embrasures, many-colored tiles, and bricks carved in fine arabesques, were extremely pleasing to the eye.
Inside, with the exception of the rooms especially reserved for the occupancy of Wang and Kin-Fo, there were only salons surrounded by cabinets formed of transparent walls, on which were traced garlands of painted flowers, or inscriptions giving those moral aphorisms with which the Celestials are profuse. Everywhere were to be seen seats oddly fashioned in pottery or porcelain, in wood or marble, to say nothing of some dozens of cushions of more inviting softness; and everywhere were lamps or lanterns of various forms, with glasses shaded in delicate colors, and more encumbered with tassels, fringes, and top-knots than a Spanish mule; and the little tea-tables called teha-ki, which form an indispensable complement to the furniture of a Chinese apartment. One would not have wasted, but have well employed, hours in counting the ivory and shell carvings, the dead bronzes, the censers, the lacquer-work ornamented with filagree of raised gold, them ilky-white and emerald-green objects in jade, the vases (round or in the form of a prism) of the dynasty of the Ming and Tsing, and the still rarer porcelains of the dynasty of the Yen in veined enamel-work of translucent pink and yellow, the secret of whose manufacture is unknown. All that Chinese fancy, added to European comfort, could offer, was to be found in this luxurious home.
Indeed, Kin-Fo—it has been alluded to before, and his tastes prove it—was a progressive man, who was not opposed to the importation of each and every modern invention; and he might be classed with those Sons of Heaven, still too rare, who are charmed by the physical and chemical sciences. He was not one of those barbarians who cut the first telegraph-wires which the house of Reynolds wished to establish as far as Wousung with the intention of learning sooner of the arrival of English and American mails; nor one of those behind-the-times mandarins, who, in order not to allow the submarine cable from Shang-hai to Hong-Kong to be secured at any point whatsoever of the territory, obliged the telegraph-workers to fasten it on a boat floating in the middle of the river.
No: Kin-Fo joined those of his compatriots who approved of the government building arsenals and ship-yards in Fou-Chao under the direction of French engineers; and he was also a stockholder in the Chinese steamers which ply between Tiensing and Shang-hai on government business, and was interested in those boats of great speed, which, after leaving Singapore, gain three or four days over the English mail.
It has been affirmed that material progress found its way even into his home. Indeed, the telephone gave communication between the different buildings in his yamen; and electric bells connected the rooms in his house. During the cold season he built a fire to warm himself without a feeling of shame, being more sensible in this respect than his fellow-citizens, who froze before an empty fireplace under four or five suits of clothes. He lighted his house with gas, like the inspector-general of the custom-house in Pekin, and the immensely rich Mr. Yang, the principal proprietor of the pawn-shops in the Central Empire. Finally, disdaining the superannuated custom of handwriting in his familiar correspondence, the progressive Kin-Fo, as one will soon find, adopted phonography, recently brought to the highest degree of perfection by Edison.
Thus the pupil of the philosopher Wang had, in his material as well as in his moral life, all that was necessary to make him happy; yet he was not so! He had Soun to rouse him from his daily apathy; but even Soun did not suffice to bring happiness.
It is true, that, at the present moment at least, Soun, who was never where he ought to be, would not show himself. He, no doubt, must have some grave fault with which to reproach himself, some awkward act done in his master’s absence; or if he did not fear for his shoulders, accustomed to the domestic rattan, every thing led one to believe that he was trembling particularly for his pigtail.
“Soun!” called Kin-Fo, as he entered the hall into which opened the salons on the right and left; and his voice indicated an ill-repressed impatience.
“Soun!” repeated Wang, whose good advice and reproofs