CHAPTER IV
Nancy got away gladly; she stumbled quickly into her room. The episode had made a rent across her childhood so that she could never again be the careless, innocent creature she was. The kiss was bad enough, an intolerable defilement, but the method of the kiss was so beastly that her mind had been wounded past the help of any quick remedy. Her part had been merely an accident; she could not wash away, however, the uncleanness, the sense of incest in the kiss she had received from her father.
She did not want the day to come now. She had no courage to meet the laughing person of Kuei-lien. The concubine very clearly was not embarrassed by the memory of last night's mishap.
"What a laughable business," she cried, "to be kissed by your own father! And how angry he was!"
"Do you call it laughable?" asked Nancy solemnly.
"Pooh!" said Kuei-lien, "don't take the thing so seriously. It was just play. If you choose to go mooning on a dark terrace you can't blame anybody for making mistakes. It was funny the way you fought—and your own father, too. What romantic sensations you must have had. Did you think the Emperor was kidnapping his beauty? What a violent lover he must have seemed."
Nancy blushed.
"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "It was shameful."
"How innocent you are," said Kuei-lien, still unabashed. "Shameful! It was disappointing, I admit, but not shameful. And such words from you, who have been so curious about marriage. How do you think husbands and wives spend their time? Writing scrolls, like you and Edward? You can be as fine a poet as you please, my dear, and paint charming pictures, and sit in a bamboo shelter with your teacup and your flute and your ink-stone like the heroines you read about, but your husband won't marry you for those things. He'll marry you for your face and your body, for this—and this—and this—" She touched the girl playfully on her cheeks and shoulders and thighs.
"That may be the way barbarians marry," objected Nancy; "that isn't our Chinese way."
"Our Chinese way!" Kuei-lien laughed. "Our Chinese way! What are you? You are not Chinese. Aren't you a barbarian yourself? You are English, and that is the English way."
"How do you know? You are not a wife. You are only my father's mistress. Your experience doesn't prove how a husband treats his wife. You have to do these things; that's what he bought you for."
Nancy's temper had got the better of her tact. Yet Kuei-lien controlled herself to a degree truly extraordinary for a Chinese woman. There was a dangerous flash in her eyes, but the concubine was content to treat the remarks as the petulant outburst of a child.
"Pooh! you are younger than I thought. You don't understand. Some day you will kneel to me for these words."
There was a gravity in this last comment so unlike the usual birdlike frivolity of Kuei-lien's that it left Nancy very much shaken. In her heart she recognized tacitly that the other girl was right. The episode of the night had shown the great gulf interposed between Kuei-lien's experience and her own. It was true: she did not understand. Nancy began to distrust her own defiant protests, the distinctions she had drawn between marriage and the harlotry of concubines, and remembered a hundred hints from the free-speaking women of the Herrick family, things which she had apprehended in the figurative way of a child. She did not have the optimism of Western maidens to help her. Love was not bound up with the myth of the "right man," so that Nancy, although in the first ardent flush of youth, picturing imaginative romance with some chosen stranger from that male world of which her father and her brother were the only representatives she had seen, had no real support against what seemed suddenly revealed as life hopelessly ugly.
In a night Nancy had become a rebel. But rebellion gave her no relief because it offered no hope. There was no bold plan to perform. Nancy never thought of escape to the West because the West meant nothing to her but a strange barbarous country with which she always was angry to hear herself connected. No taunt so roused her as the name of Englishman. The only fallacy she still retained was her trust in the superior refinement of Chinese ways. She saw nothing absurd in saying, "our Chinese ways," yet she and Edward were a race of their own, a race quite unique, who were entitled, not like Eurasians to the defects of two bloods, but to any advantage that might be gained from being Western-born and Chinese-trained.
Even their father was excluded from these privileges. He was an Englishman attempting imperfectly to assimilate the East. Nancy and Edward, without knowing it, made allowances for his case, and, in the midst of being fond of him, were subtly condescending over the little ways in which he failed to adapt his mind and his body, just as they remarked instantly the slight flaws, the little mistakes of accent and grammar, in his remarkable use of Chinese.
When the girl heard the next day that she with her brother had been summoned to an English class, she began to bristle. She went, of course, because she could not throw off in a moment the thought that the will of her father was law; nor could she alienate Edward's sympathy by an attitude she was too embarrassed to explain. But she went, inwardly protesting. Timothy Herrick was not noticeably different in his manner. He did not show, perhaps, quite so much of the whimsical amusement he usually evinced when glancing at his two sober little pupils. Nevertheless he sat unperturbed and Nancy, while envying his calmness, hated it.
His old friends would not have recognized their slim debonair acquaintance of former years in the portly gentleman who was presiding over this classroom. There were more alterations than dress could account for, more alterations than the exchange of tweeds and flannels for flowered silk could explain. The Chinese dress with its gown of pale blue silk and its jacket of cut velvet was the more picturesque, but to those who had known the careless elegance of the past there must be apparent a marked falling off in pride of appearance, hints of slovenliness, in proof of which it was hard, none the less, to cite any convincing detail. Nor could increased age explain why an Englishman known for his alertness, his quick tact, had given way to the heavy pompousness of the mandarin. The rotund belly, the puffy cheeks, the bristling moustache seemed to betray a man whose heart was cowardly, who was trying to disguise by his bluff exterior the real truth, that he had relaxed his standards and amended his life to the pleasures that were easily obtained.
Nancy went through her lessons with an unobliging surliness which Herrick could not but see. He met his daughter's defiance in the same spirit. Herrick had been autocrat so long that it was abnormally hard for him to see mishaps from any side but his own. He was angry and aggrieved at last night's mistake, but more because it had put him to ridicule than because he could conceive the force of the shock to Nancy's pride. It was preposterous to have been fooled thus into kissing his own daughter; Herrick was thoroughly annoyed by his own loss of face; but what right had the girl to sit in judgment over her own father, as she seemed all too palpably to be doing? What right had she even to think of finding fault? His conduct was not hers to criticize. The kiss was only a kiss, nothing to her to brood about; but her temerity in spying upon her father, that struck at the very roots of obedience.
"Nancy, I have a few words to say to you," he said, beckoning Edward to go. The girl rose. Herrick did not like the candor of her clear eyes.
"Has your teacher taught you to stare at your father?" he asked sharply.
Nancy looked down, but not humbly. Herrick surveyed her with a curious detachment. Ought she not to kneel, he wondered—the precedents for Chinese behavior failed him at times. Perhaps it was enough that she should stand. There was no harm, at least, in allowing a few moments of silence to make his ensuing words impressive. So he turned to his water pipe and gurgled a few puffs of blue smoke while the daughter remained in rigid but none the less sullen attention. At last the man ended the silence with well-chosen Chinese phrases.
"I ordered your lessons this morning," he began, "because I wished to see by your behavior whether you were ashamed of the very great offense you have done. For a daughter to spy upon her father—that is unpardonable. You are sixteen; I am fifty. What I do is no concern of yours; what I do you cannot be expected to understand. Your place is in your own room at night; it is a scandal for you to be anywhere else. Yet I find you following me around, causing me shame by your immodest curiosity; and not only that, but all this morning you have sat here stiff-necked, stubborn, seeming to reproach me, as though I were answerable to you for my conduct. What excuse can you offer for your shameless behavior?"
"I was not spying," replied Nancy.
"You were not spying? Then what were you doing there at two o'clock in the morning?"
"I could not sleep. I was looking at the moonlight."
To allow such an excuse would have undermined Herrick's just cause for anger. He could not hear of it.
"Who taught you to lie?" he sneered. "I have no patience with such nonsense. Your business is to answer me, not to argue with me."
Greatly restraining herself, Nancy said nothing.
"Of course you were spying," Herrick continued, "and you haven't had the grace to be sorry. Now, by way of making amends, I want you to kowtow three times to me."
"It is right that a daughter should kowtow to her father," said Nancy simply, "but I am not sorry."
"Then you may stand here till you are sorry."
He had asked the impossible. After two hours of silence, during which the girl stood like a rigid statue, Herrick realized that there was a sturdiness in his daughter's nature which he might break but assuredly could not bend. He began to admire the endurance of the child while he grew more and more oppressed by the discomfort of his own position.
"Well, that will be enough," he said, trying to gloss the fact of his defeat, "I think you have learned your lesson and have been punished sufficiently. You needn't stay any longer: you may go."
To his amazement, Nancy knelt down and bowed her head to the ground three times.
"I am sorry I could not obey my father," she said.
"What is the child!" wondered Herrick, when she had gone. "Just when I think she is hopelessly English, she outvies the spirit of the Analects themselves. Is she English or is she Chinese?"