CHAPTER I
The clear sun of July shone through the garden foliage, making circles of light on the grass wherever the inter-woven branches of the locusts allowed its passage. Summer rains had washed the air of all dustiness, swept the flags of the courtyards neat and clean, given new life to the climbing trumpet flowers and a mossy springiness to the path round the overflowing pool, into the waters of which the strong confident sunbeams seemed to plunge deeper than they had ever before dared dive, and to stay, joyfully exploring the green underdepths which matched the opulent color of the garden. For the garden too promised joyful exploring. One had to pass through courtyard after courtyard, through many large-timbered doors swinging on wooden axles and through each hallway of the Chinese house, sprawled out in section upon section, before entering this remote spot where the walls of gray tile shut out the city so completely and gave the impression of such space hidden in what really was quite small compass.
Here, like a hundred other wealthy families in their own unseen gardens, the household were able to enjoy rest from the urgent life of Peking yet never stray beyond the gates of the Tatar city. There was a sheltered pavilion in which to sip hot tea, a zigzag bridge of wood crossing the pool at its narrowest, shady nooks to suit the lazy reflective moods of the angler, best of all—if there were children—a labyrinth of stones, all heaped into grotesque mountains, through which the child, his imagination nimbly excited, could follow the circuitous path, absorbing the landscape of miniature lakes and tiny waterfalls and diminutive pagodas, and descend into the darkness of dripping grottoes as if he were the hero of them all.
Children there were; from behind a round moon gate came the clamor of their voices. But one stopped, astonished at the sight, for they were not the sedate children, the long-gowned boys and gracefully clad girls, one expected in so meditative a garden. They were not the offspring of Ming scrolls, as they should have been, transferred into life itself from the leisurely brush-strokes of old paintings, but strange barbarians, violent in their play, electric in the energy with which they defied the sun and its heat.
The moon gate opened on a place apart, a place of shrubs and formal pathways, but with two large pine trees, gnarled and misshapen as though they had outgrown human efforts to distort their branches, and with bamboo brake on all sides springing up in untidy profusion, yet with the mystery of its deep shadows making the walls seem more distant than they were.
In one of the middle branches of a pine tree sat a girl, swinging her feet mischievously as she dropped cones on the boy who lay at full length on the ground below. Whether he was trying to read or to write or even to sleep was not quite apparent, for, though he lay amid a litter of books and paper, with a stick of ink precariously balanced on the edge of an ink-stone and an unsheathed brush close to his elbow, his one endeavor was to defend himself with as little motion as possible from the bombardment above. This he did chiefly by agile wriggling, seeming to anticipate the course of each projectile by some sixth sense that spared him the trouble of looking up and, when a well-aimed cone struck his neck or his feet, strengthening his defense by racy Chinese abuse.
Yet it was not the sportiveness of the children which was so astonishing as their scantily free clothing and the fact, at once remarkable, that they were not Chinese children at all. The girl was easily fourteen or fifteen, but she swung on her bough with the unabashed grace of a tomboy. Her few garments suggested a creature that had grown up wild and untrammeled, for they were quite out of keeping with the delicate restraint of the garden or with the decorous attire the Chinese prescribe for their women. She wore only a loose gauze vest and a pair of white drawers fastened at her waist by a scarf of red silk. Her slippers had been flung off at the foot of the tree. Except for the heavy braid of hair tossed over her shoulders and the rounded curve of her breasts this strange maid might have been mistaken in her straight coolness for a boy in disarray. But the abiding memory of her, after even a moment's glimpse, was that she was not Chinese; the abiding memory was of arms and legs too white for the Chinese skin, even for the creamy ivory hue of the aristocrat, of a body longer, more fully built, feet more amply turned, of cheeks livelier flushed than the face of the ruddiest Chinese maiden, for the blood was not softened by that darker tinge of the complexion which makes one think of youth's picture painted on old silk. It was a miracle that under so ardent a sun the girl should have kept this spring-like clarity of skin. Unless in the deep color of her hair and her eyes she seemed to make no concession to the tropical warmth of July but to belong to forests where cold streams from the mountains pass amid trees.
Her brother was equally foreign to the baked sandy plains of Peking. He was possibly thirteen, with dark hair and dark eyes like the girl on the branch above him and with the same inviolable fairness of skin. He had reduced the encumbrance of garb to its limits and lay contentedly naked except for cotton trousers which he had rolled half-way up his thighs. So intent was he in countering pine cones with wordy retorts that he let a whole column of ants explore his shoulders unresented till suddenly his patience broke; he leaped to his feet, as swift as any untamed animal, and scrambled up the tree to grapple with his tormentor. The girl was too quick even for him and escaped from limb to limb, taunting him with her bare feet for his impudence in hoping to seize her.
The boy broke into English, most alarming English, violent curses such as foreigners in China use to loose their wrath on servants who luckily cannot understand, mixed with phrases he could have learned only in books—he showed at once that he had not acquired the tongue from playmates of his own age but was speaking it from the need to say something portentously terrible, something which to his youthful consciousness would answer the purposes of blasphemy.
"You filthy devil, Nancy," he shouted, "I will strike you dead! I will cause you to fall!"
Nancy answered him by peals of laughter. She stood poised with tantalizing ease, her hands held up to the branch above her, and swayed back and forth without fear of her brother's threats. She exposed to derision the bookish mould of his words.
"Oh, you naughty boy, Edward, you will cause me to fall, will you?"
Before the boy could move out upon her precarious platform, she had let go her hold, doubled her knees, and shot from bough to bough down the tree like a white cascade or like snow shaken free from overladen branches.
Edward, seeing his enemy had escaped, was satisfied in his turn to pelt her with cones and was vigorously at battle when a third child, even younger, emerged from the bamboo and protested at the noise of their quarreling. This child, a girl, was decidedly different from the others. She had Chinese complexion, Chinese features; she was dressed in the hot-weather négligé which girls of her age could wear in the privacy of the home, long loose trousers, stockings, slippers, an apron, cut so that it covered the front of her body and held in place by strings round her back and her neck. When she came up to Nancy, however, and stood beside the taller girl, there was immediately apparent a resemblance between the two children, a resemblance baffling to decipher, for, even when allowance was made for four years' disparity in age, no one could say it consisted definitely in eyes or mouth or even in the slightly un-Chinese prominence of the nose, yet the resemblance was latently noticeable and was a likeness which included the boy as well. This second girl, then, gave some clue to the history of these strange children; she was certainly their half sister, and it took no great powers of deduction to surmise European parents for them, the same father and a Chinese mother for herself. Exactly this was the case.
Timothy Edward Oliver Herrick had been the subject of Peking scandal twelve years before. He had, to the shocked astonishment of his friends, "gone Chinese," which was another proof, to those who hated the drudgery of turning the pages of Giles's heavy dictionary, that too much study of Chinese makes men mad. He had come to China at the early age of twenty—that was thirty years back—and risen quickly from post to post in the Imperial Customs, passing his examinations brilliantly, learning much in all the ports of the Middle Kingdom, charming society out of its stiffness by his wit and tact, penetrating the aloofness of the mandarin, winning distinction in diplomacy and sport, orders, badges, medals, cups, a whole roomful of trophies, and marrying a girl fresh from her schooling in England, the daughter of a consul and undeniably the loveliest, in a decade, of those damsels who return to enjoy a brief season with exiled parents in the East. So for four years they had lived, favored by wealth, honor, love, the ingredients of a fairy tale, till on a sudden Nancy Herrick died,—cholera that year struck down even those in high places,—while her husband retired into a seclusion he never again broke.
In appalled whispers it was mooted through Peking that Timothy Herrick, with his two children, had taken house in an obscure hutung of the Tatar city and that the beautiful Nancy Herrick had been followed not by one Chinese wife only but by several.
Gossip, for once, was true to the facts, probably because society could think of no exaggeration more dreadful than the truth. At the back of twisting lanes, behind bright blue doors studded with brass, Timothy Herrick had created a new world of his own in the spacious security of a Chinese house and there with his wife and his concubines he lived the life of a mandarin. He had discarded Western clothes, Western ways, discarded his British nationality, taken to a moderate use of opium, and now passed his time between an erudite searching of the Buddhist scriptures and the composition of severely classical poems.
Yet this placid consolation for sorrow, this refinement of the patriarchal life which has stood the Chinese race so well for centuries, had one or two irritants. The first, seemingly small yet vexing, was Herrick's chagrin at his failure to grow a queue or, rather, at the futility of a brown queue in a land of black-haired people. He remembered the ridiculous figure of a missionary who had tried this, and knew that while his own florid face, with its heavy eyebrows and moustaches, bobbed up oddly from the collar of his lavender jacket, it would look none the less incongruous if his square forehead were shaved and the back of his head ornamented by a dwindling tail. The Revolution, however hateful its other changes, did at least solve this problem of how to be completely Chinese by making the queue unfashionable.
The second irritant was of another kind and quite another degree; it grew in seriousness with the passage of years and vexed the quiet of his sleep. It was the fate of Nancy and Edward, the two children of his first marriage. For his other children, he did not worry; there were several of them, from Li-an, a girl of eleven, down to an infant son still being bumped in his cradle, but they were all more Chinese than foreign and with the help of generous betrothal gifts could be assimilated by the country of their birth. Nancy and Edward were different. Although they never knowingly had seen, apart from their father, another member of their own race and in twelve years had left their compound only on the rarest occasion and then in a covered mule cart to visit the Western Hills, there was no disguising their foreign blood.
It had seemed easy, when they were babies, to mould them to their environment by education and custom and speech, but there was a stubbornness inherent in their nature which had resisted the Orient and kept the girl and the boy exotic. They had lost claim to any country and grown up disinherited by West and East alike. The father saw this more and more plainly and regretted his selfishness in keeping them when it would have been so easy to send them to his kinsfolk at home. At the time of his first wife's death he could not bear to part with them. They were the only relic of a woman he had loved so well that his whole after life had become a slow descent, because his heart told him the hopelessness of living again on the plane he had reached with her.
He had deliberately turned away from that life because it was ended, cut short, impossible of being renewed. He had chosen in preference a life which would ask no comparison with the past; the tale of his success was being revealed in the relaxing lines of his mouth, the sensual fullness of his chin, a hardening of the eyes. The more serenely burned the memory of his wife,—the years never changing the austerity of her beauty, something perfect like the imperishable beauty of jade,—the more contemptuous did he grow in his thoughts of women, as if to mark her apartness, and give rein to the amorous cruelty of a tyrant. One by one the children had seen the household increase as some new young girl was bought to satisfy the whims of their father, and one by one they had seen these favorites, after serving their time as mistress and mother, relegated to the women's quarters, which were daily becoming more expensive a luxury.
But Herrick remained uncomfortable amid it all. He could not be morally at ease while these two wide-eyed strangers from the West reminded him of his troublesome duty. They were holding him back from that complete immersion in the indolent life he had chosen. He could not swallow the opiate of peace. Their faces seemed to reproach him for neglect; they were uncomfortably knowing. He imagined them talking between themselves in the candid youthful way which appraises too exactly the faults of parents. Theirs had been a curious education because Herrick had made it plain from the first that they were not to be interfered with by the Chinese women of his household.
Trouble had begun after Li-an was born, the stepmother, with a child of her own to advance, having tried to cow these children of an alien mother by petty acts of jealousy, which it was fortunate for Nancy and Edward they had the championship of their old nurse to resist. This nurse had been with them all their lives, and, by fighting tooth and nail each effort to reduce their position, had won for them a freedom from the quarrels and intrigues of the family. As Li-an soon had other rivals to dispute her inheritance, her mother had trouble enough in wielding her sway over the rank of inferior wives and was content to let the foreign girl and boy go their way alone. So they were in the family but not of it, intimately subject to the direction of only one person, the old amah, who humored and spoiled them, telling them always that they were superior beings and secretly undoing their father's attempt to make them Chinese.
Herrick's desire was one the amah hotly resented. She had the peculiar loyalty of an old servant and, remembering Nancy's mother with an affection close to worship, looked with contempt on the women who had followed. They were trash. She was not going to let Herrick's aberrations of passion ruin the hopes of her foster children. With the servile fidelity of a dog she had attached herself to creatures of an alien race, had wrapped her interests in theirs, till her one wish was to see Miss Nancy and Master Edward restored to their own people, where their station, she was sure, would be almost royal. So she fed them with marvelous tales of the West; of its greatness; tales of their own importance. She waited on their moods like a slave and produced in them a bearing of haughty independence which they never quite laid aside, even when they mixed in play with their half brothers and half sisters or took their part chattily in the gossip of the inner courts.
Their formal education, for a long time, had been only in Chinese, the old classical education to which Herrick was partial. They had learned to recite the Four Books and much of the Five Classics and had passed through the obsolete training of Chinese youth, from the redundant exercises laid like a yoke upon children—the Tri-metrical Classic, the Thousand Character Classic—to the pleasanter fields of T'ang poetry, which their teacher explained to them with unusual interest and skill, so that Nancy and Edward often amused themselves patterning upon the hero and heroines of the Red Balcony in contests for writing verse of their own. They wrote well. They spent hours over characters and could fill a scroll with swift symmetrical strokes. They could draw and paint landscapes which they had never seen, landscapes of mountain and valley, temple and trees, delicately colored after the unwavering tradition of the past. This, except for the few novels their teacher approved, The Three Kingdoms, The Dream of the Red Balcony, and Travels in the West, and the many which he did not approve, novels they begged secretly from the women of the household and which related with utmost frankness every physical detail of intercourse between the sexes,—though the talk they had listened to all their lives left them little need to be enlightened further,—this promised to be the whole of their education till their father began, in a hesitating way, to teach them English.
Timothy Herrick had not intended such instruction. It marked the first timid thought of surrender, a breach in the logic of their training. But Nancy at ten so disquieted him that he could not rest till he had made some amends for depriving her these many years of the birthright of her native speech. If his plans did fail,—he would not admit that they could,—if she and her brother did resist their absorption into Chinese life, he could give them this means of saving themselves. It was the least he could do, but it meant the possibility of sending them to England, should the need come, where among the uncles and cousins and aunts, to whom he had written not a word in a decade, there were certainly some who could take his children in charge.
He taught them, however, with discretion, always reminding them that English was a foreign tongue. So Nancy and Edward, though they learned to speak with a considerable if bookish fluency, looked upon English very much as an English schoolboy looks upon Latin, as a speech dealing with far-off times and manners. They liked to use it between themselves from the sheer mischievous pleasure of mystifying the other children of the compound; there was the spiteful relish of abusing to their faces people who were not a word the wiser. Then again it was a bond with their father, of whom they grew measurably fonder now that he and they constituted a little aristocracy to which no others had access. Herrick himself soon realized this and liked it less; it was another subtle influence helping to tear him asunder. But when once the habit of daily lessons was formed he could not give up the grave companionship of these two children, who, fight the thought as he would, came closer to his heart than all the tumbling black-haired brats of the compound.
Yet the first thoughts of the girl and the boy were always Chinese. Their background was the Confucian background of their long-nailed teacher, though there were side paths of course into Buddhist and Taoist lore, things they learned from the women or from the nuns who came to collect alms. Of Western history and life, of wars and political changes, they knew scarcely more than the Chihli farmer ploughing his sandy fields or the Mongolian camel-driver leading his tinkling caravan on the night road to Peking. What they heard, except from the few colorless English books they were allowed, was the chatter and gossip of the courts. Newspapers did not come into the women's quarters; these were kept in that sombre room, their father's study, where they dared go only when invited. So they felt themselves better than the Chinese they mingled with, but no kin to the prodigious people of the West.
This was both more and less than Timothy Herrick had planned.