CHAPTER XVII
PING-PONG
DAWN brought proof that the shore was not uninhabited, after all. There materialized gradually—apparently from the reeds—eight men, four old women, three grass-cutters, some beggars, countless half-naked children, and a scattering of lean dogs. Where they came from was a question; what they intended to do was another.
"Let 'em goggle," said Mark. "They won't even have the satisfaction of seeing the strange and unusual diet of the foreigner. Look lively with your rice-pot, O Honorable Brother."
But the crowd manifested such interest in the boys' method of eating rice with their fingers (they preferred these to the greasy chop-sticks of the departed crew) that at last Alan jumped up and made for the mooring-rope.
"I'm sick of this exhibition breakfast idea," he said. "I vote we eat as we go."
"Well, let's do a proper send-off, for luck," Mark said. "They're really a friendly lot, and we might as well give 'em their money's worth."
So, with a banging of the big gong astern, the little Sham-Poo got under way, her square sail creaking as it went up. One or two of the Chinese on the bank shrieked "Yang-k'wei-tse!" (foreign devil!) but most of them grinned amiably enough. Some of the children ran down the bank a little way, and then the whole group was lost to sight around a bend. Mark and Alan were off on another day of their adventure.
They still had no intention of leaving the comparative safety and certainty of the boat to seek favor of authority ashore in any of the huddled towns they passed.
"No more dealings with the heathen Chinee," Mark had said. "They may be all right if you know 'em—but we don't. At least this hollow bamboo our castle is, and I mean to stick by it."
This remark was made during what the boys were pleased to call dinner-time. The dismal sameness of their meals made morning, noon, and evening seem strangely alike.
"Do you blow up, or anything, if you eat nothing but rice?" Alan inquired.
"If you do," Mark grunted, "the Chinese Empire—Republic, I should say—would be blown off the face of the map by this time. I must say, though, they don't all boil it in mud."
"And think of Mr. Huen's dinner!" Alan sighed.
"Don't think of it!" Mark counseled. "It's your trick at the yulow. Up and doing, now!"
It was during that day that they met Ping-Pong. (She was thus named, afterward, by Mark.)
She was, perhaps, two years old, and she was floating placidly down the stream in a boat surely made for no one larger than herself. It was not exactly a boat, though it was boat-shaped, and it floated rather lopsidedly.
"What in the name of the biggest joss in China!" said Alan, who was at the bow.
The Sham-Poo was overtaking the strange apparition ahead. Mark leaned out from the yulow to look.
"It seems a bit unsafe, to me," he said. "How come?"
"Unsafe!" Alan cried. "That's putting it in a mild—Hi!"
For at that moment the baby, suddenly spying and snatching for a floating leaf, capsized her box and disappeared under the muddy water with a small wail. Mark was absolutely unhesitating. With one swift look to gage the distance, he dived off the stern of the Sham-Poo, and reappeared, sputtering, with the ship-wrecked infant clutched under his arm. Alan hauled them both on board the Sham-Poo, which, her helm abandoned, had run herself gently aground on the bank.
"Now what?" said Alan to his brother, who stood wringing the water out of his clothes.
"Well, you couldn't let the thing drown, could you?" Mark demanded. "We'll hand it over to the next old woman we run across on the bank."
"I was afraid you might want to add it to the expedition," Alan said.
"Law!" said Mark. "This boat is in trouble enough without Chink babies crawling around in it."
"I wonder how on earth she came to be barging along in her private pinnace à la Lady of Shalott, anyway," Alan mused. "Her mamma must be in a stir."
But they did not know the ways of China. They did not know that in this vast land of fearful poverty and teeming life, when there is not enough rice for the whole family, girl babies must go—in spite of Western law and Western disapproval. For what good is a girl! Can she intercede, after one is dead, with those august ancestors? Can she light at one's grave the needful incense? What is she but a burden to the household, a useless emptier of the rice-pot? She must be thrown out that the illustrious sons may live. Poor mother, who had sent this baby to sail down the stream! If she drowned, the woman would not know. That she might grow to happy womanhood somewhere and marry a prince of the province was a possibility which might be held fast in the imagination.
Meanwhile, the baby lay in the stern of the Sham-Poo and blinked her very black eyes at the boys. Her hair was very black, too; it lay in wet wisps against her round little olive face. She had on no clothes at all, and the river-water dripped off her smooth, plump, little person.
"She's shivering, the poor little toad!" said Mark.
He fetched the blue coolie coat, which hung, dry, over the stern. Measuring his protégée with a judicial eye, he cut its sleeves jaggedly with Chun Lon's knife till they were of a length more suited to the baby's small arms.
"She's muddyish," he said, pausing in his tailoring. "Mop her up a bit, will you, Alan?"
"If you think I'm going to play nursemaid to your heathen infant, you 're mistaken," said Alan, pushing the Sham-Poo's nose out from the bank.
"Bosh!" said Mark. He did the mopping himself, and Ping-Pong curled her toes and gurgled.
"Oh, you like being mopped up, do you!" Mark inquired of her. "Here, stick in your fist. This is an elegant garment I've made for you, Miss."
Happed up in the abbreviated blue linen coat, Ping-Pong did present a quaint figure. Mark considered her proudly, his head on one side.
"She 's a jolly little piece of work," he said. "Look at her! Wake up, you old stick, and look at her!"
The baby crawled toward Alan, who was regarding her dubiously, and made a few monosyllabic remarks which might have been youthful attempts at almost any language. Mark slapped his knee.
"There 's a discovery!" he said. "All babies talk Chinese to begin with, and branch out into other tongues later on. Here's proof!"
"Oh, pshaw!" said Alan. "This isn't any time for idiotic theories. Do something about sailing this boat, and keep your weather eye out for that old woman."
"What old woman?" Mark asked.
"The old woman we're going to hand over the kid to," his brother said.
"Assuredly," said Mark. "Port, there, you lubber, or you'll have us up a tree. Whoa, Ping-Pong! Stop climbing up my leg!"
But old women seemed scarce along these shores; indeed, none of the people they saw were within hail. Then Alan suddenly pushed the helm hard over, and the Sham-Poo lurched half up the bank, almost on top of a group of indignant working-people trotting home from the fields. Their voices rose in shrill protest, which grew when Mark appeared holding the now sleepy Ping-Pong, whom he offered them over the boat's side.
"You take!" he begged, with eloquent gestures of explanation.
But the clamor grew louder. The cries of "Yang-kwei-tse!" waxed more shrill. A clattering shower of stones hopped about the Sham-Poo's deck, and a slap of sticky mud landed on her roofing an inch away from Alan's eye.
"We or she or both or all are evidently unpopular," Mark said. "Shove! Shove like a good fellow, Alan!"
He put Ping-Pong down hastily and joined his brother in pushing off from the bank.
"Perhaps we didn't go at it right," he mused, in mid-stream. "I wouldn't blame them for not liking the way you charged right into them, old scout. When I said, the next old woman we run across, I didn't mean run into. Better luck next time."
But "next time," which was at the slimy jetty of a small and dirty village, brought no better result; indeed, the stones were larger and the yells louder.
"These are all the lowest kind of river-folk," Mark said. "If we could get hold of some one intelligent, it would be all right."
"You've done it again, my lad," Alan muttered. "We're saddled with your precious Ping-Pong for the rest of the trip."
"I'd rather have her for shipmate than Chun Lon, any day in the week," Mark commented.
"Oh, well," Alan said, hauling at the yulow, "if you're going to be absurd!"
Ping-Pong had curled herself to sleep on a mat, with a thumb in her mouth. She sighed at intervals, just like any baby asleep.
"But she's too yellowish," Alan objected.
"What's the diff?" Mark yawned. "I think she's jolly, even if complicating."
It was now, indeed, a strangely assorted outfit: one native boat, whose eyes at the prow certainly did not aid her in finding her way; two dirty and apprehensive American youths, one of them somewhat damp and muddy; one box containing two hundred thousand taels of treasure; one amiably disposed Chinese baby, origin unknown, destination equally so. There they were, somewhere in the province of Kechiang, and there, so far as Mark could see, they would continue to be for some time.
It is odd how the present fills every chink of the brain, eclipsing everything behind. Resthaven was a dream, the Delphian a memory; the Sham-poo was reality, and Mark's newest problem absorbed him and knit his brow.
"What do you feed 'em?" he inquired, from the yulow.
"Who?" Alan demanded.
"Babies," Mark said.
"Milk," retorted his brother.
"I mean something we have," Mark explained.
"Rice, then, of course, O Thou of Mighty Intellect," Alan chanted.
"I suppose that'll have to be it," Mark agreed. "She is biggish, though, isn't she. When do they stop having bottles?"
"I'm no baby book," Alan said.
"Well, cook it up extra fancified," Mark ordered. "It'll have to do."
"Glory!" Alan said. "It'll be ambrosia. Why, I've seen 'em over here, no bigger than that, chewing on pickled fish-tails or something."
"Miss Ping-Pong chews no fish-tails," Mark stated. "Not after I've gone to all the trouble of saving her from a muddy grave. Chef, prepare the rice."
At dusk, when the brazier beneath the rice-pot made a small creeping glow within the dark recesses of the Sham-poo, Ping-Pong woke and wailed, as any frightened, hungry baby would wail, waking at twilight in a strange place. Mark abandoned the helm and squatted before her.
"That's all right," he said cheerily. "We're all in the same boat, you know. Literally, by Jimminy! Dinner's coming pronto."
But Ping-Pong wailed the more. Mark was about to reach out and pick her up, to bounce her into a good humor, when he caught his brother's stern eye. He sheepishly resumed the tiller, compromising by snapping his fingers encouragingly in Ping-Pong's direction and making surprising faces at her.
A little later they moored the Sham-Poo and lowered the sail, a thing they now accomplished with much more speed and skill than at first. The three of them formed a semicircle around the brazier, with the darkening river behind them, and they began their dinner. Mark, to Alan's disgusted amusement, insisted on taking Ping-Pong upon his knee and feeding her rice before he began his own. Soon she was plunging her own small fist into the bowl and licking her fingers approvingly, while she gazed complacently at her rescuer.
"It's not teaching her the best of table-manners," Mark said, shaking his head; "but that's a minor consideration—very minor."
"What isn't a minor consideration is how much longer we're going to go cruising all over the Flowery Kingdom with our menagerie," Alan remarked.
"Well," his brother said, "as far as I can see, as I've said before, we'll simply have to keep on going till we run across a European settlement in some big place; people who can understand our yarn and believe it when they understand it."
"For all you know, we may be making for the Himalaya Mountains," Alan suggested.
"Not we," Mark said. "I believe the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, and rivers run toward larger rivers or the sea, even in China. We've been sailing steadily in approximately one direction."
"How do you know it's the right direction, though?"
"Well, if this meandering body of water joins a bigger one, there'll be bigger towns on it, and bigger people in them, and— Hi, Miss Ping-Pong, stop flinging rice upon me! If you've done, go and curl up on your mat and go by-by."
But Ping-Pong wished to stay with her friend. When he sought to remove her, she clung to his legs like a small barnacle, so he let her be, and she rolled herself up between his feet with a remark intelligible to herself alone.
"See, she knows I'm her rescuer; she's attached to me," he said, beaming.
"She knows you have the rice-bowl, more likely," Alan commented, laughing. "That's what she's attached to."
"What base motives you give her," Mark objected. "She has higher impulses, I assure you."
"I'd rather have a dog," Alan said, shaking the brazier.
"Plenty along the bank to choose from," Mark suggested. "If you're jealous, you might add one to the establishment."
So they laughed, and their laughter drifted strangely out into the stillness of the Chinese creek and was lost among the oozy sedge. Ping-Pong took her thumb out of her mouth and chuckled solemnly.
"Funny little rascal!" said Alan, unbending.