CHAPTER XXVI
The seventh moon waxed and waned in a succession of trivial days. The interest of the summer, so far as Nancy was concerned, had ended with her triple battle waged against Ronald and the twins and her father. Chatter with Kuei-lien, perfunctory excursions with a wary eye lest she blunder into Ronald, whom she did not trust herself to meet again, filled in the tale of days. There was but one high moment, the Feast of Souls, when she and Edward secretly sacrificed to the spirit-tablet of their mother. Theirs was a fervid little cult which had grown up unmentioned except between themselves, a worship of the alien mother whom only Nancy dimly remembered. It signalized the bond which had always kept them from feeling quite kin to the rest of their father's family, an aloofness of origin which centred naturally round the legend of their mother.
Guided by reticence quite unusual to the communal life of the household, they had never been willing to drag their secret into the open gossip of the courtyards, but kept up this worship as an act and a habit too sacred to be divulged, too far apart from the noisy ostentation of the sacrifices which the women from time to time offered. Their shrine was holy ground, and when they made their sober childish prayers before the gilded tablet, the boy and girl, so shyly, fondly devoted to each other, seemed orphans indeed, shut out from the world around them by their still tenser devotion to the mother who was little more than a memory and a shadow.
Their worship this year was also, on Nancy's part, a farewell. She was saying good-bye to the spirit of her mother, whom she would not be entitled to worship next summer when the festival of All Souls once more quickened love and regret for the dead. For she must give up her own forefathers, give up even her mother, when she went out from home to the strange halls of her husband. Thenceforth his ancestors would be hers, and in place of the dearly loved tablet which she and Edward had fashioned so loyally between themselves, she must bow her head before a row of cold names which were not even dead to her because they never had been alive.
With grave seriousness she bequeathed the trust to Edward, envying him his right to worship his mother undisturbed until the end of his days. So passed the Feast of Souls, and one by one the days of the ghostly seventh moon slipped away.
Tedious, Nancy found them, for she was very much alone. She dodged close talk with her father, an attitude for which he was grateful, because neither he nor his daughter wished to touch again upon matters which in an incomplete, unspoken way they had left settled. The father stayed drowsily with his books, slept and dozed through the afternoons, realizing with taciturn dismay the fact that he was old and that his thoughts were empty of comfort. He tried some walking, but his heart complained. Undue exercise taxed his strength, sent the blood to his head. One thing he had set his will not to do: to give way to Kuei-lien's enchantment—not till his daughter was married. This was a promise he had made silently with himself, a little way of being fair to Nancy, and he stuck heroically to his agreement, although there were moments when the vacancy of the books over which he nodded made this ascetic life almost too tiresome to be borne.
"I don't understand you, Nancy," Kuei-lien said more than once, enjoying the comfortable sleepiness of the afternoons in Nancy's room. Her fear of the t'ai-t'ai had been growing less and her sympathy with the betrothed girl more. "I am not so blind as you think I am. This marriage is your making; I can see that, but I can't see why."
"One has to be married," was Nancy's usual defense, when the subject was forced upon her mind.
"Yes, but why this particular marriage, when your father has given you so many opportunities to get out of it? You are not one of us, Nancy, even though you believe you are. Your father would have liked it best if you had stayed with your foreign friends."
Kuei-lien, from her talks with the amah, knew more than the girl dreamed of the pressure the Ferrises had brought to keep their guest. In idle moments she could not help toying with the last year's plan.
"That is finished," said Nancy decidedly.
"If I had been your father's daughter," laughed the concubine, "I should have managed things much better. Your father would give every cent he has promised the t'ai-t'ai to be rid of this match. Why don't you fall sick or cut off your hair so that you have to become a nun? Then you would save everybody's face. Even the t'ai-t'ai would be satisfied, if she got her money—"
"She will get her money, whatever it is, in the way we have promised," announced the girl.
"I believe you are holding the old woman to her bargain just to spite her," vowed Kuei-lien. "You know her whole family is afraid of the daughter-in-law they are getting. If it weren't that they had been bribed by your dowry, they would just as soon marry their priceless son to a fox-spirit. They will think it a miracle if you don't bear him four-legged sons; it will be a miracle with such a donkey for their father! What are you going to do when you go to them? Are you going to play handmaid to your father-in-law's water pipe and sew out your eyes on underwear that is greasy from your mother-in-law's unwashed body?"
Against her own conscience Nancy was amused by the racy way Kuei-lien dealt with topics that were held to be sacred. She knew quite well that the parents of her husband were not proper game for these irreverent shots, yet she relished every impudent hit at their expense. It was one way of settling scores for the travail these unknown personages had given her. She was in a mood, as Kuei-lien perceived, to be spiteful. And she was curious to get every chance inkling of what her life was to be.
"And when you meet them in the morning, will you invite their 'jade toes graciously to approach'? If you do, Nancy, if you jump to fill the teapot and wait up late to put your old grandmother to bed, you will be lost, you will be their slave for the rest of your days. I know these small-livered people. They will live to a hundred just for the pleasure of bullying you, just to let you dust out every wrinkle of their sagging faces. If you have a daughter, it will be your fault because she isn't a son; if you have a son, it will be your meanness of heart that kept him from being twins. Faugh! the stupidity of having babies so that other people can cackle as if they were the hen that dropped the egg! I don't hold with these old-fashioned notions. I am a new Chinese, newer than you with all your foreign blood. And heaven help you if you have a white-haired brat!"
She said these unspeakable things so wickedly that Nancy could not keep from laughing. The betrothed girl watched the scornful twist of the lips by which the concubine expressed more aptly even than by words her pouting contempt for the Chous and all their clan. Kuei-lien's odd turns of sarcasm were pleasant to hear. The warm afternoon imparted its sense of lazy security even from the family to which she was promised. Nancy gazed with easy pleasure at her own white knees as she sat, half clothed, on the bed. She clasped her arms tightly round them and rubbed the soft skin with her cheeks, feeling almost as lazily content with summer and sunlight as she used to be in her more careless child days.
"What did Mencius say?" demanded Kuei-lien, continuing her tirade. "'At the marriage of a young woman, her mother admonishes her, accompanying her to the door on her leaving, and cautioning her with these words: You're going to your home. You must be respectful; you must be careful; do not disobey your husband.' Hm-m, I suppose your worthy old teacher put circles next to those characters, didn't he? He would. And what did the father say to his son? He 'admonished' him. That was all. The Sage didn't explain that part of it. The Sage was a man. I don't believe in sages."
Nothing was sacred to Kuei-lien in her mocking moods. She had never let Herrick be sacred even to himself.
"I don't believe in sages. I don't believe in nuns. I don't believe in priests. I don't believe in gods. And I don't believe in being respectful to a husband. You haven't a mother, Nancy; I'll be your mother. I will admonish you, I will accompany you to the door when you leave, I will caution you. Yes, indeed, you are going to your home. Very well, let them know from the first that it is your home and that you are not grateful merely for a place near the k'ang, like the chickens that peck rice off the floor. Remember, you will have the family purse in your hands, but only because they'll want you to produce twice the money that's in it, find cash for your father-in-law's opium and your mother-in-law's mah-jongg debts, and board and lodging for their third and fourth and fifth cousins and for all the children they can squeeze without cost under your roof. Stop that from the beginning; be as niggardly as they would be in your place. They will hate you, anyway, because you're a foreigner and because you're different and because they'll think if only they could have been bribed into taking your money without your precious self they might have secured a Yang kuei-fei in your stead. So you might as well give them good reason for hating you and, better still, for fearing you. Then, when you've scolded them till their ears are like wax and made them shake in their slippers every time they see your shadow crossing the courtyard, they will be only too happy to let you go back to your father, to the moon if you wish; they will press upon you the need for a long vacation and, while you're safely out of the way, they will find another wife, a nice quiet-tempered girl, for your husband, who can bear a dozen children and choke the house with the dust from her broom and pick bugs with nimble finger nails from the seams of the quilt in which your illustrious parents-in-law have been pleased to sleep for four thousand sweaty nights."
Nancy held up her hands in protest, but Kuei-lien laughed at her qualms.
"You can do it so easily," she said; "they will expect nothing better from you because you are a foreigner. Anything you do will be only what they expected. If only you browbeat them from the beginning, before they have got breath enough to browbeat you, then you will have your own way. You can go back to your father's and stay for sixty years and they will not be sorry; they will bless the spirits of their ancestors for having delivered them after their own folly in bringing a devil and a termagant into their midst. Aren't my words true? You will be happy, they will be happy, your father will be happy; everyone will be happy except the unlucky girl who takes your place. You can trust them to take revenge on her for all the injuries they have suffered from you. I don't envy her the time she'll have of it. But that's not your fault. Better somebody else miserable than poor me: that's the way to look at the foolishness of this world."
Many letters had been coming from the t'ai-t'ai, urging her husband to bring Nancy back to Peking. There were so many things to be done: the bridal furniture had to be sent, the wedding dress cut, the gifts procured. But Herrick refused to budge till the time he had set. With the coming of the eighth moon he could no longer postpone the claims of his wife. He roused himself unwillingly from this torpor of indecision and packed his reluctant family back to Peking. He had waited upon fate as long as he could, but fate offered him no help.
With their arrival in Peking, the t'ai-t'ai took vigorous command of the household. The momentum of her energy carried everyone before her, most of all Nancy, who had no further time to hesitate and reflect. The ensuing days became almost a round of processions, for Herrick had allowed barely time enough for the festivities which had to be crowded into twenty-four days. The courtyards never seemed clear of the smoke of firecrackers, the neighbors were always being called to their doors by the lilt of wind instruments. First came the wedding cakes, and the satin for the bridal dress, and elaborate gifts, which the t'ai-t'ai took care to return more elaborately.
It had been necessary to transport her brother and the important members of his family to Peking, to take for them a house in the capital, since Herrick had stood out obstinately against sending his daughter to be married in the ancestral home of the bridegroom. The t'ai-t'ai grumbled, of course; she grudged the expense which she said her brother could not afford, she moaned about the insult to her old mother who was much too feeble to make the long journey to Peking to see her grandson married. But Herrick said never to mind the expense; he would see that they were not out of purse because of this accommodation. With so liberal a promise, the t'ai-t'ai decided she could meet his wishes and she took care not only that Herrick should pay for moving Nancy's husband to Peking but that many of the showy presents, which were paraded through the streets on their way to the home of the bride, were actually gifts from Herrick to himself. Her thrift preserved Nancy's dowry intact from all the corroding expense of the wedding.
The autumn festival dawned, but its rejoicings were only an incident, compared with the greater day hurrying upon its heels. Nancy said quiet farewell to the full moon, climbing once again into her comfortable old pine tree to watch its splendor as the moon mounted. She turned a grave face to its light; it was not only a symbol of her sex, of her womanliness, the symbol which she had learned to revere from childhood, but it was bound by deeper ties to the inmost thoughts of her heart, so deeply bound that she almost looked for a miracle to be done in her behalf and this crowning moon of her life never to wane from its completed beauty. But it waned.
The rest was a dull trance in which the days went by, scarcely counted. Night after night the moon decreased; the girl's spirits fell. She kept tryst each evening with its rising until it rose too late to be awaited. Then the darkness frightened her.
In fear she gave herself up to the will of her stepmother and submitted without words to being taught the ceremonies of her wedding, to being set up like a doll for the fitting of the bridal garments. Despite Kuei-lien's laughing advice, she remained remote and aloof, the seething bustle of the household eddying unheeded round her body, which was the only part that her eyes gave them the feeling they could claim. Where her thoughts were no one could tell, no one indeed had the curiosity to search out except Kuei-lien, whose spirit of irony was amused by the puzzle of the silent girl.
The bridal furniture had been got ready. Three days before the wedding it was sent off.
Great show was made of the chairs and tables for the bridal chamber, the chairs with their carved arms and round panels of gray Yunnan marble, but, most sumptuous of all, the bridal bed, hung so heavily with curtains of scarlet satin that the wealth of embroidery led the eyes astray from the pictures inlaid in the woodwork and even from the silver chains which drew the curtains aside. Kuei-lien's tongue was rife with jests about this bed and its heap of satin quilts. Nancy hid her burning cheeks for shame at the concubine's unsparing frankness.
"Pooh, that's nothing to be afraid of," declared Kuei-lien. "You can be mistress there, even if you are the bride. Your husband will be more frightened than you to be shut up with a strange woman, and a foreigner at that, behind those happy curtains. They will fill him full of wine to make him brave. He's only a boy, nothing to shrink from or blush about. Marriage is marriage and a bridal bed is a bridal bed; it is foolish pretending to be so delicate about things that have to be. You are lucky to have rich curtains and plenty of warm quilts and one place where your mother-in-law can't trouble you. You don't have to make your bed your profession like me."
Kuei-lien's bitter moods, her uneasy habit of thinking too deeply, made her singularly outspoken, but Nancy refused to listen further. Her only peace was to be carried on as in a dream. She could not bear to stare at her fate set forth in these visible pictures.
The bedstead, the chairs, the boxes all went their festive way to her new home, where soothsayers ensured the fortunate placing of the bed. Her father's house was draped with red, the walls were hung with scarlet banners on which "joy" was repeated in huge characters of gilt, characters written double to amplify the luck of the occasion. The courtyards were roofed with red bunting and the first chrysanthemums of the season banked high against the walls. Into the nightly feasting Nancy did not intrude, and her father did not appear, did not trust himself to see Nancy. He was ill, feeble, uncomforted by the bustle which echoed even into his silent room.
For the last evening a great feast was prepared and though only the women of the household and their kinsfolk took part, Herrick having no outside guests to invite, they made the most of their one great chance to be merry over an event which promised no good fortune to any of their number. It was the t'ai-t'ai's affair, this wedding, but that was no reason for declining the baked meats of their enemy's bounty. So they were quite cheerful and quite eager to see the girl who had lived with them, so aloof and yet so intimate, clothed at last in her bridal garments.
In her last afternoon the t'ai-t'ai came to Nancy's room to tell her stepdaughter it was time. Everything was prepared. She now needed only to put up her hair and put on her dress for the ceremonial farewell to her own family and then retire to the night's vigil of weeping and vain efforts at sleep, weeping and sleeping both rigidly prescribed by custom, before the bridal chair was heralded by trumpets in the morning. Kuei-lien came in behind the t'ai-t'ai; Li-an and a maid followed her. They had brought the clothes which the bride was now formally to try on to make sure that all was ready for the morrow.
Nancy rose without comment and was as quiet as a puppet in their hands, raising her arms or turning her head at their bidding. A square of red carpet was laid on the floor for her to stand upon. Slowly and with great deliberation Kuei-lien and her helpers proceeded to their work, the dignity of the season making them linger over each detail. The girl was divested of her own garments, bathed and scented, and the cotton of her former undergarments replaced by linen on which symbols of good luck had been embroidered in cross-stitch. The t'ai-t'ai exclaimed upon the pity of Nancy's unbound feet and deplored the new custom of large feet, which would ruin China, she vowed, but Kuei-lien defended new fashions at the expense of old, while the girl who was the subject of their debate gave no signs of listening, but allowed her body to be assessed without reply. Sometimes she watched the fingers that were busy with her; for the most part she kept her fixed gaze upon the carpet. A panel of cloth was tied with strings round her waist and hung by a silver chain from her neck. Stockings of scarlet silk were pulled up to her knees. She stepped unresistingly into the undermost pair of long pantaloons and let the tunic that matched them be slipped softly down her arms. Then, at the precise minute the soothsayers had set, began the unbraiding of her thick hair, the sign that she was to be a maiden no more; slowly it was soaked with resin, pulled across her head till it matched the smoothness of enamel, and gathered in a lustrous clump at the back, a clump into which Kuei-lien thrust blade-like pins of soft gold. The fringe of down round her forehead would not be pulled out till she came to her new home.
The concubine and her helpers stood back to admire the change they had made. Then over the face of the bride they dusted clouds of powder, and brushed it half away again before they softened the spectral white with an artfully applied surface of rouge. Nancy seemed to cease breathing while they reddened her lips; she closed her eyes while they penciled the graceful arch of the brows. Her face had become like the mask of a tragic figure, something removed from life, yet deeply instilled with the most pitiful passions of life, austere and delicate, sombre and youthful, possessed of a beauty which a day could destroy, yet which promised in its singularly immobile pose to live forever, an unforgettable memory. Nancy had lost her personality; she had become a symbol. The age-old traditions of the bridal took her out of common places and common scenes, they invested her with sadness and fear, made her too holy to be touched, too lovely to be worshiped, set upon her face the pathetic seal of flowers at their blossoming.
Even the scoffing spirit of Kuei-lien was awed by her handiwork. With a caressing touch the concubine proceeded to her task, helping Nancy into the voluminous scarlet folds of her skirt, fastening the gold buttons of her scarlet tunic, slipping bangles over her wrists and setting gently on her glossy hair the headdress of pearls. There now remained only the veil of red silk to be placed over her face before she entered the chair. For the rest, Nancy was the bride complete, and Kuei-lien, in an unwonted mood of reverence, could not resist bowing before the brilliant vision.
Dusk had come. Hours had gone by. Nancy came forth, assisted by Kuei-lien, to take farewell of the family among whom she had lived so long and so happily. The all-provident t'ai-t'ai had made ready an altar with a bright new tablet to Nancy's unrecorded ancestors. In the first grayness of twilight the red candles glowed in their pewter sticks, the incense went up in faint spirals, the courtyard was redolent of burning sandalwood. The women stood round, hushed by a spirit of awe close to tears, when the bride bowed gravely in front of the glittering tablet, separating herself by this simple act from the host of spirits whose name she had borne. With the same trance-like dignity Nancy bowed to the t'ai-t'ai. Then she let herself be led to her father, who was too ill, too sad to receive her worship before the eyes of the feasters. The door was opened and she was allowed to go in alone. She stood motionless before her father.
Timothy Herrick stared as though his mind scarcely could believe what his eyes saw. He seemed struggling to realize that this vision of scarlet and gold was his daughter, come at last to say good-bye. For the first time in the long tedium of the day's events, Nancy lifted up her eyes. She paid her whole debt of loyalty with that one look and then, behind the tragic splendor of her dress, behind the loveliness of brocades that outshone the blood-red lustre of flames, her spirit seemed to withdraw, as though she had said good-bye. Nancy became only a memory in the sight of her father.
The man trembled with a great moan of despair, scarlet and gold blinded his eyes; suddenly, with a cry that rasped in his throat, Herrick threw himself forward, buried his head in his arms, and so lay still amid the vain litter of his desk.
Nancy waited for him to speak, quite forgetting it was her time to kneel and bow. Finally, when the silence seemed hopeless, when the clock had ticked away many empty minutes, and still with no sign from her father, she realized that someone was leading her away again, that Kuei-lien was leading her back to her own room. She had left the presence of her father without the kindness of one last word. There had been so much to say, so much she wanted to tell him; yet her heart had been sapped of emotion till the girl was not even sorry for this wordless parting.
Only one thing could have wakened her spirit, and this she did not know. She had been too tired to see that not she, but her father, had been the first to go out from his home.