CHAPTER VI
Nancy's sincerity shocked her companion into silence for the moment. But it was not likely to be a long silence. When they had shaken off the glamour of that golden afternoon and walked moodily home, stilling even Edward's chatter by a dumbness for which he could divine no reason, Kuei-lien began to recover the spirits which Nancy's perverse temper had dampened. "A nun!" The joke was too good to keep. Supported by the comfortable materialism of the dinner table with its bowls of steaming white rice, she could wax merry at Nancy's expense; the ghosts of blue flowers could not enter here to throw their depressing spell. Kuei-lien was like a man who has been through great fear and now tries to preserve the illusion of courage by laughing at the meagre thing that had frightened him.
Edward readily became her ally and laughed louder than any at his sister's new whim.
"You mustn't eat any meat," he jested, pushing the bowl of pork balls out of Nancy's reach, "and you must shave your head. Bring a knife, amah, and some incense and we'll make her a nun now. It will be lots of fun burning the nine spots on her head. Ah, but you will be a pretty sight, Nancy, just like a bald-headed old woman. When you come begging, we'll give you rice crusts. O-mi-t'o-fu! O-mi-t'o-fu!"
Nancy took his teasing good-naturedly, avoiding his attempt to seize her hair and making a nimble raid on the pork balls with her chopsticks; she was not yet Buddhist enough to forgo the delights of meat. She did not even resent the aspersions uttered against her future calling and listened composedly enough to tales about the depravity of nuns. They were all bad or ignorant women, said Kuei-lien, and became nuns because their parents were simpletons. No respectable girl ought even to talk of nuns, and if she became one her family could never lift up their heads again, such would be the disgrace she had brought. The old nurse had her share to add to the bantering: they were such dirty creatures. How could they have time for prayers when they were being consumed by vermin? And you can't kill the vermin, hai! that was forbidden; you must let them eat till they were fat. What was the holiness of being eaten by bugs?
The old nurse had been contaminated by the Western veneration of the bath.
Nancy listened to it all with the amused smile of one who enjoys being the topic of conversation. She was not seriously touched by their dissuasion because her latest ambition was still far from taking deep root. Suddenly attracted by the purity of heaven and earth and growing things, she had put into words an unformed wish, but the wish had no kinship to the sordid details of the dining-room gossip. There was momentary longing to be caught up from the turmoil of humankind, but the longing did not persist. Nancy was glad enough to jest with Kuei-lien and the amah, she needed the sight of Edward's cheerful face and relished the savoriness of the evening meal. It was good to be well fed and comfortable, good to sleep soundly in a warm bed. So Nancy felt no urgency to resist those who teased her, even though the impulse remained more faithful than she guessed, a passion to become one with the clean beauty of the sunlight and the blue sky.
She went to bed happily tired, but a glimpse of the stars, after she had puffed out her candle, was like seeing a golden net overspreading the earth to make her dreams captive.
Herrick alone did not ridicule Nancy's wish.
"Why shouldn't she be a nun if she wants?" he asked Kuei-lien, when the girl jokingly mentioned his daughter's new ambition.
"You encourage a freakish ambition like that?" exclaimed Kuei-lien, unable to believe her ears.
"I don't say I encourage it; I haven't thought of it at all. But if Nancy with all her heart chooses to be a nun, I shouldn't stop her."
"Nuns are bad, dissolute women."
"Some may be, but not all."
"'Ten nuns: nine bad, and one mad,'" scoffed the concubine.
"Are you happy?" asked the man, giving the argument a disconcerting shift.
"Madly happy," Kuei-lien replied, hiding by a smile of curious irony not only all signs that the question had startled her but every hint as to what she meant by her answer.
"Well, I am not, and I'm sure I don't wish to deny Nancy her own way of seeking peace when mine has failed."
Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders over the bad taste of such frankness.
"You take her child's notions too seriously," she said.
"Yes, but what am I to do with her?" inquired Herrick, openly acknowledging his perplexity over the problem he would not admit had been vexing him.
"Do you ask advice from the lowest of your servants? Surely her poor wisdom cannot solve matters of such difficulty."
Herrick knew that Kuei-lien was jeering at him behind her studied modesty.
"Don't talk this farcical nonsense to me," he cried, brusquely impatient of the Eastern ways it had been his habit to extol. "If your poor wisdom is able to criticize the girl's own plan, it is able to suggest something better."
"Why shouldn't she marry? No father who loves his daughter neglects to have her married. She isn't sick; why should she be a nun?"
"Marrying is not easy and you know it. Suppose I call the matchmaker; what will she find for me? Can she find a son-in-law good enough for my daughter, a son-in-law with the same learning, the same training?"
"That was your fault in wasting money to have her taught."
"The money wasn't wasted. That's not my meaning at all. What I mean is that families of her rank and education will be afraid to betroth their sons to her because she isn't Chinese. Yet in speech and ways, even in the color of her hair, she is as thoroughly Chinese as any girl they could get. Healthier too and better looking. But the good families would be too conservative to consider the match and even a swaggering squint-eyed upstart of a returned student would think he was doing Nancy a favor to be her husband."
"Why marry her to a Chinese? Haven't you men in the West?"
This was the obviously pertinent question Herrick himself had been facing. He made up for argument by an outburst of temper.
"Why do you think I have gone to all this trouble these many years to have my children reared as Chinese?"
"I don't know," confessed Kuei-lien.
"Because the West has nothing but a beastly machine-ridden civilization, nothing but thoughts of merchandise and profit, fattening the bodies and thinning the souls of its people. A Westerner couldn't live in these mountains, for example, without wanting to dam the stream and make an electric plant. He wouldn't see the color of the hills, the light of the dawning sun shining on stones and trees; he would suffer an unbearable itch to change them, to make them useful. Bah! Every one of them is a materialist; none of them know the finer relationships of life. I haven't brought up my daughter to be the wife of a bank clerk."
"Oh," said Kuei-lien blankly, implying by her colorless response to Herrick's enthusiasm that she considered him a palpable fool.
"No, I won't destroy all she has learned," the man went on, "I won't make her a Western barbarian by marrying the girl to a man who can talk of nothing but golf and horses and the fluctuations of rubber shares. She would much better be a nun. Some day I think I shall divide everything I own between you—that would be more seemly than having the five of you fight for it after I die—then I'll go into the mountains with Nancy and Edward and enjoy a hermitage of my own."
"I'll go with you," mocked Kuei-lien. "You won't be happy without women in your hermitage."
"You'll go where the money goes. I am too old to be deceived by sweet phrases. Any man can be let alone if he is poor enough. It is only the rich who are burdened with women."
Kuei-lien was intensely amused by this expression of contempt.
"What a funny man you are," she exclaimed, laughing merrily, as she threw her arms round his neck in the foreign way she had needed small prompting to learn. "You are not a hermit yet; ai ya, you pitiable fellow, to be so heavily burdened with women!"
Herrick, like Nancy, was content to postpone his dreams of the monastery.
Not to forget them, however. When a chance offered, he called for Nancy in order to question her. He had never discussed marriage with the girl; it was not the custom for a father to mention such subjects to his daughter. But to raise the question in English seemed excusable. So the man, seeking help from Nancy herself on the difficult problem of her future, found she listened decorously in the Western tongue to matters she would have blushed to hear, had they been proposed to her in Chinese.
"They tell me you wish to be a nun," said the father, smiling while he spoke.
"I made some undutiful remarks," acknowledged the girl, afraid her father would laugh at the enormity of her desire. "I cannot go against my father's wishes."
"Very properly said," exclaimed Herrick, not really at ease in his role of a Confucian father. He had not been born to it. He could never quite believe Nancy's filial attitude was genuine; the words, sounding so odd in English, were like speeches rehearsed for a play. He at least was consciously theatrical, when he answered them. "Very properly said," he approved, "but a father's wishes are those which will make his daughter happy."
This was the way he expressed himself, solemn words comporting the dignity of a parent, though what he really would have given worlds to say was, "Kiss me, child; sit on my knee, rub your hands through my hair, and let's stop pretending we're grown-ups. We've years before we need bother over a frivolous subject like marriage." Alas, the Confucian canons did not permit such playfulness.
"I have been thinking about your marriage," Herrick went on, stumbling pitifully for words after this regretful glimpse of all the demonstrative pleasantries of affection he had lost. "It is time we considered these things."
Nancy became visibly paler.
"These are new times, new manners," he said, momentarily homesick for the schooldays when he first learned the phrase in its noble classical context—how long, long ago that was! Who would have thought he would be quoting it to this strange dark-haired daughter! "New times, new manners. Formerly we arranged these things early"—he was the Chinese father now—"and we looked for peace only when our daughters were safely married. We are a better generation, Nancy, better in a few things at least, and we want peace for our daughters too, not merely selfish peace for ourselves."
Nancy stood entranced. She heard his slow words not because they seemed to have any meaning but because there was a grave rhythm to his speech which suggested peace of another kind from anything the painful stumblings of the human tongue could evoke; his speech went with the drowsy sound of the pines, the noise of falling water in the ravine. Why knit the brows in a feeble effort to conjure up peace when peace encompassed them, when it folded them in the hypnotic embrace of the sunshine, giving these transitory moments their eternal quality?
Herrick struggled to rouse himself.
"How shall we marry you, Nancy?" he asked abruptly. "What kind of husband do you want: 'Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief'?"
What made that jingle come faintly back from the day when he first learned it? He really must stop this silly habit of letting outworn, long-forgotten phrases run through his mind. It was childish. "What kind of husband do you want, Nancy?"
The question cut shabbily into the passionless quiet of Nancy's trance. The sunlight and the wind seemed to have gone on and left her behind them. All that lovable outdoor world was receding as life itself might recede from a dying man. Frantic anxiety rent the girl's heart, a wish to rush out and call on all these things to wait, not to hurry so fast, lest she never again hear the birds singing or play with Edward through the brilliant hours of the morning.
"What kind of husband do you want, Nancy?"
"I don't know," she answered.
"Do you really want to be a nun?"
"I don't know."
Not even that could she answer.
"It is very hard for me to decide," the father complained gently enough, "unless I know what you do really wish."
"I want to stay like this forever—forever!" suddenly blurted out the girl, done with mild evasion, and repeating the last phrase so that she surely must be understood.
Herrick felt old. The interview had sapped his blood of its buoyancy.
"Ah, if we could, if we only could," he muttered. He could hardly trust himself to look at Nancy. She brought to his mind the defiant beauty of her mother; it was no use to-day trying to hold his mind back from rambling through roadways of the past. "No, Nancy, neither you nor I nor anyone can stay like this forever. I thought I could once. We grow up in spite of ourselves, child. The happy times are just a day, a short day at that, and then—finish."
The tension was eased by this last bit of prosiness.
"Well, we're not getting forward with our difficulty," Herrick was able to say in a more matter-of-fact voice. "I won't ask you any more questions because I don't think you know yourself what you wish. I have just one more thing I want you to do; I want you to bring me the most precious thing you have, the thing you like better than anything else, no matter what it is. That will help me."
Herrick waited curiously for his commission to be performed and teased himself imagining what the girl would bring. He would know in what direction her fancy ran more clearly than she could tell him. "Butcher, baker, candle-maker—" How could he stop this accursed rhyme from ringing in his head?
Nancy was gone a long time but at last she returned.
"What did you bring?" her father asked.
The girl held in her hand a flat object wrapped in silk. She took off the covering and to his surprise Herrick saw a little wooden tablet, carved and gilded, and so exquisitely done he could hardly believe Nancy's confession that she and Edward had made it.
"It is the spirit of our mother," she said in Chinese.
Herrick took the fragile object from her hands. He looked at the golden characters so faithfully written. Their meaning he knew well enough, but his eyes seemed too blurred to read the letters distinctly. With great difficulty he restrained himself from falling low before this little thing of wood. The task of deciding Nancy's fate was too much for him. He was tired.
"You are your mother's daughter," he said. "Nancy, Nancy, Nancy—I cannot choose for you."