AMERICAN CHINA.
"The Mandarin had an only daughter, named Li-Chi, who fell in love with Chang, a young man who lived in the island-home represented at the top of the pattern, and who had been her father's secretary. The father overheard them one day making vows of love under the orange-tree, and sternly forbade the unequal match; but the lovers contrived to elope, lay concealed for awhile in the gardener's cottage, and thence made their escape in a boat to the island-home of the young lover. The enraged Mandarin pursued them with a whip, and would have beaten them to death, had not the gods rewarded their fidelity by changing them both into turtle-doves. The picture is called the Willow-Pattern, not only because it is a tale of disastrous love, but because the elopement occurred 'when the willow begins to shed its leaves.'"—Legend of the Willow-Pattern.
Scene—that of the tradition. Season, willow-fall. Hour, sundown.
Li-Chi (sings)—
The poor soul sat sighing by a rum-looking tree,
Sing, once a green willow;
But now all its leaves smell of base £ s. d.;
Sing willow, willow, willow!
The old stream runs by her, not with the old tones,
Sing willow, willow, willow!
But, churned by coarse paddles, it plashes and groans;
Sing willow, willow, willow!
Chang. Ah, yellow and irradiant sunflower of my soul's secret shrine, sing not thus dolefully, I entreat thee. What avails the permission to escape awhile our old ornithological metamorphosis, and revisit once again the glimpses of the Mandarin's country seat, the pavilion, the peach and the orange-tree, the elegant wooden fence, the bridge, the boat, and, above all, the willow, only to sing songs whose spirit-cleaving cadences sting thy Chang more than ever did the angry Mandarin's whip-lash?
Li-Chi (mournfully). What, indeed? But O, sublimated saffron-bag of my spirit's idolatry, who can help weeping at sight of this?
Chang (reading). "National and International Amalgamated Bank!" O, mighty but much-too-free-with-the-whip-hand-of-parental-authority Mandarin of the Middle Kingdom, what would you have thought of this transformation?
Li-Chi. Papa was impetuous. Our—our elopement angered him. But Telegraph-poles, Telephone Exchanges, River Steamers, Banks and Blazing Posters!!—Alas!!!
Chang (hotly). By the isolated button of Celestial supereminence, it is too bad! What can Li Hung Chang, that dragon-claw of the throne, that amber-souled prop of imperial perpendicularity be about, I wonder?
Li-Chi (meditatively). We—e—ell,—perhaps he knows, after all.
Chang. What meaneth the tintinnabulant tea-blossom of my trivial and ephemeral personality?
Li-Chi (archly). The "Heathen Chinee," as the wanton Western scribe insolently calls him, is indeed "peculiar," as perchance even Count Eugene Stanislow Kostka de Mitkiewicz and Mr. Jay-Gould, Hood, Mackay the multi-millionnaire, and Barker Brothers the Bankers, New York Syndicates and Philadelphian Silver Rings, may yet discover as clearly and completely as did Bill Nye and Truthful James of the ribald ballad.
Chang (admiringly). Verily even the orbicular contractility of dexter-optical semi-closure becometh those almond eyes, oh! flesh-enshrined opium-ecstasy of my most transcendental inwardness.
Li-Chi (smartly). I should think it did, indeed! A wink is as good as a nod to a blind lover. "Melican Man" is very 'cute and enterprising; but whether he'll find it quite so easy as he fancies to "run" the Celestial Kingdom, or "exploit" the Flowery Land, remains as the never-sufficiently-to-be-commended-and-left-carefully-unread Kung-foo-tze would say, "to be duskily adumbrated in the spirit-speculum of the yet To-be."
Chang. Quite so. Still, O million-berried mulberry-tree of my mean and inconsiderable soul-garden, to have our own secular love-legend and its many-centuried Scene thus sordidly transmogrified, cannot, O, shining one of my spirit's crepuscular gloom. O, beneficent betel-nut of my supersensual Palate"—
Li-Chi. Well, Chang, after all, novelty hath its charm—after a cycle or two, you know. Marquis Tseng talks about "the awakening of China." As if there was ever a Celestial who, for all his childlikeness and blandness, was not very wide-awake indeed! Why, Li-Chi, if ever we had our time over again, do you think that transmutation into a pair of turtle-doves,—bird-beatitudes, my Chang, are so limited!—would form the acme of our mutual aspirations?
Chang. Well, per—haps not, Li-Chi.
Better fifty years of Europe
Than a Cycle of Cathay,—
—as turtle-doves, you know. Still, that chuckling and cavorting American fowl, that two-headed and vulturine Russo-Polish Eagle, do not quite fit into the Mongolian Arcadia of the Willow-pattern plate; now do they? We have fallen, lily of my life, upon sordid, and subversive, and sceptical times, when millions of taels move our Mandarins to Modernism, when Silver Rings and Syndicates, can set up a Party of Progress in the Realm of the Immutable, and when doubts have been thrown by shallow scribes upon the existence of the Great Wall of China itself!
Li-Chi (shuddering). Dreadful, dear! Let's turn back into turtle-doves at once, and coo ourselves into truly Celestial obliviousness of this colossal Yankee coup, which threatens—perchance prematurely—to fix for all time this preposterously Western and barbaric picture as the Willow Pattern of the Future! [They do so.
