Wilfred and Seryozha felt as if they were walking backward for a moment as they compared their progress with the sweeping speed of the eagle’s shadow across the valley. But they marched stoutly on. The river, broad, polished and set in a pale bed thinly shaded with pink-twigged osiers, ran beside them through the clear light. The whole broad valley was so clearly lighted by the white sun that every stone, tree, and village on the yellow-green mountains stood out with the flat significance of such details in a good nineteenth-century chromo-lithograph.
The colors of the Koreans’ clothes were like bright pins all over the valley, catching at—almost scratching at—the indifferent sight. Koreans in Kanto are worn by custom to the same fine transparency as birds and other lovely and common furnishings of the scene; they are to the eye what the gentle ticking of a clock is to the ear. Yet , since it was a Korean holiday, the Korean wanderers were so gayly dressed as to catch even an accustomed eye. Favorite colors were arsenic green, poison pink, apple green, and a cheap crude blue—all very unflower-like colors, yet they sowed the roads and fields and paths with an effect of flowers. The little Korean girls wore wide, semitransparent, gaudy skirts hung from the shoulders by embroidered braces—and they wore nothing else. The little boys wore red-flowered silk Eton jackets ending abruptly at the fifth rib—and they wore nothing else. Décolleté for girls down to the waist—dejambé for boys up to the navel. In either case, if the purpose of clothes is to conceal, the purpose was most inadequately fulfilled; if the purpose is to decorate, decorated indeed the wearers were.
The distant paths, plaiting, splitting, and raveling like threads on the hillsides, invited the eye. Some paths look as if they lead away and never come back, but these paths, spotted with gay holidaymakers, seemed to lead in—to lead home—or, at least, to lead out into the flowery sunlight under promise of leading home again soon—home to nights of good food, good digestion, good sleep, and good wives. Comfortable little domestic paths, in spite of their dancing informality.
Round every Korean grave—each a mere bunker on a grass slope—a group of merry descendants chatted, laughed, and ate. It must be delightful for the dead to know that the grassy lumps beneath which their bones lie are rendezvous for joking, feasting friends—are just extensions of the scenes of their living hospitality, now made immortal like their souls. It must be good for the lonely dead to know that their names will never be a wet blanket on laughter and horseplay, and that once a year they may count on being hosts and householders once more.
“These heathens,” said Wilfred Chew, “have no proper respect for the dead. They don’t appreciate the awful position of a dead man after a life of heathenism and sin.”
Seryozha thought a little. It always irritated him to hear any criticism of what was physically natural. “Let them be, let them be,” he wanted to say. “Let them be—why—simply because they are.” But he could not remember any English words that would express this feeling. “Nyet sin,” he said, vaguely, waving his hand vaguely toward the sinner-speckled hills.
“You mean,” said Wilfred, who always felt it was his business to explain to people what they meant, “that the heathen cannot help their dreadful darkened condition, if they have not been given any opportunity to see the light. But, Mr. Malinin, every heathen now, I believe, has heard the message of Christianity. Schools like the Wesleyan Academy at Yueh-lai-chou—though not all, perhaps, quite so excellent—are everywhere. Devoted teachers of the Word travel upon bicycles, donkeys, Ford’s motorcars, trains, junks, steamboats, and Peking carts in all directions among the heathen—though I admit that men of such great saintlike influence as Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett are rare. Look at my own case. At the age of thirteen I am called to my father’s side—my father was a very wise man, an official in the Sanitary Department of Canton, spending the retirement of his well-earned old age at Yueh-lai-chou. ‘English,’ says my father, ‘is the business language of China. Christianity is a part of English. You shall learn English at the Wesleyan Academy and so be fitted for a life full of advantages. Christians have many advantages in this life.’ Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett, when I told him this, laughed his usual merry, hearty laugh and said, ‘Not so many as in the life hereafter.’ Be that as it may, look at the result of my father’s wise Christian ruling. Instead of
