Wang the Ninth: The Story of a Chinese Boy

by B. L. Putnam Weale

When the North wind was blowing, and the highways were bare of traffic, it was not so bad to sit at this task and have the blaze of the white-hot embers warm him. Then the slow, regular pant of the bellows fused with the clang of hammer on the anvil and seemed to him the very incarnation of energy—of a force that drives things along. The boy would sit with his ugly, expressive face gazing straight in front of him. Grasping the wooden handle of the bellows firmly in both hands and stretching his legs wide apart, he would work mechanically, lost in his dreams. All sorts of things would pass in procession before the little leaping flames, the heat affording him a certain sensual satisfaction which expressed itself in the laziness with which he answered his father's occasional remarks.

He would dream that he was lying on soft cushions with all his heart's desires scattered around him. He would tip over piles of coins and watch them idly roll around too indifferent even to pick them up. Barmecide feasts of a nature satisfying even to his voracious appetite would rise before him—mutton and roast ducks and all manner of browned pork heaped on great platters just as they were at the marriage feasts of rich men. Sometimes these fancies became so real that the saliva would trickle down his chin; and his father, noticing it, would inquire what was the matter.

"I am hungry," he would answer laconically, refusing to make any confidences and returning to his dreams.

That was when the weather was bad and the bitter North winds blew.

But when the sun shone, even in cold winter it was almost impossible to keep the boy at his task; he escaped by the use of amazing stratagems, disappearing beyond all quest and only returning when it was dark. He would never tell his father where he went; even a beating would not make him confess. Why should he give away his secrets—all the wonderful hiding-places he had discovered, where he went with an impudence and a cunning that were sublime?

He knew, for instance, by going along the ice of the Imperial Canal, how to slip under the bars of the magnificent barge-house where the Imperial barges were docked all winter. He had at first not dared to do more than peer in—pretending, when any one appeared even in the far distance, that he had fallen down whilst indulging in the delectable pastime of sliding on the ice by means of an iron runner fastened to one foot as all the boys in the neighbourhood did. But that was in the early stages of the game. Soon he accustomed himself to pushing open impudently the sliding-bars; and then by creeping right inside along a narrow stone parapet he finally was actually on the barges. There he would sit himself on the broad comfortable seats, and for want of something better to do would roll about on them like a dog. Once he had asked a pedlar friend what would happen if any one were found inside the Imperial barge-house.

"He would be promptly killed," had answered the man. "But then nobody would dare such folly."

The reply had set him pondering. Of course, the guards might catch him one day: he did not wish to be killed.

After the pedlar's remark he used always to loiter past the guard-houses to see what the guards were doing. It was their amazing sloth which led him step by step to complete indifference. They were always sleeping or eating or going off into the city leaving the youngest recruit nominally on duty. Once he surprised them all drunk as a result of a weight-lifting contest with great stones, in which the losers had to pay the forfeit in wine. They were lying around the guard-house so stupefied that it would have been easy to enter and rob them of their arms!

One summer he conceived the audacious plan of viewing from a safe hiding-place the whole Imperial Family as it embarked on the barges for the beautiful lakes in the Hills. Every one in the neighbourhood was talking about it: as usual the great ones would leave the city in the sixth month when the great heat had commenced. On such occasions every soul of the common herd was shut indoors to permit the cortège to pass in perfect seclusion. Blue cloth screens were hung along the roadway, and although many declared that by putting their eyes to cracks in their windows they had caught glimpses of the magnificent sedan-chairs and the hosts of retainers, not one of them had ever looked on the face of the great emperor or the great empress.