But, for all that, Oxford thrilled him, and though he counted every hour that brought him nearer to China, he counted them not a little good in themselves because they passed by the Isis and in the classic droning of Oxford days and ways.
All the sunshine seemed to find him in Oxfordshire, all the shadow at Portland Place.
Small things rasped him at the Legation, and two heavy trials—one a humiliation, the other a grief—found him out there. A few months after his arrival they cut his cue and dressed him in an Eton suit. His rage and shame were terrible. For months he did not forgive it—if he ever quite did. Child as he was, they might not have encompassed it had they not assured him that it was his grandfather’s will. That silenced but did not console him. And he treated his new garments to more than one paroxysm of ugly rage. Chinese calm is as great a national asset as any of the many assets of that wonderful race. Heart disease is almost unknown among the Chinese, and probably they owe their happy immunity from that painful scourge to their own placidity and equable behavior. But when they do “boil over,” as they do at times, the eruption is indescribable—they foam and froth, and until the fit ( for it is that) has spent itself and them they are uncontrollable and beyond all self-control or semblance of it.
Wu did not mind being laughed at in the London streets for his “pig-tail” and his gold-embroidered satins. He was sincerely indifferent to it. When English urchins called after him, “Chin-chin Chinaman, chop, chop, chop,” he did not care a whit. Partly this was good-nature—for he was good-natured as yet—and partly it was vanity: the centuries-old vanity of a descendant of an interminable mandarinate. He understood how immeasurably superior he was to those who presumed to laugh at him—how much better clad, how much better bred—and tolerated them and their peasant mirth very much in the spirit of the old fellow in Æsop’s fable who scorned to resent the kicks his donkey gave him because he “considered the source,” and with, too, the quiet pride of the MacGregor who, when his acquaintance expressed surprise that the great “Mac” had been seated below the salt at some feast, asserted with bland arrogance, “Where MacGregor sits is the head of the table.” But to be shorn of the cue and stripped of the finery at which the canaille jeered maddened him and made him very bitter.
In ten years the Chinese in exile made many acquaintances, but only one friend. Probably he filched some profit, some equipment for his years to come, from each of the acquaintances; but, for all that, he found most of them no small nuisance. A Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot was his infliction in chief. She was a distant connection of the blond attaché’s mother, and had gone to school with a second or third cousin of Sir Halliday Macartney. And she had no doubt that those two facts, by the strength and the charm of their union, made her persona grata at the Chinese Legation. She called there at the oddest times, and dropped in to lunch uninvited; and the Chinese Minister, trained from his birth to make great and chivalrous allowance for the vagaries of women and of lunatics, would not permit his exasperated staff to cold-shoulder, much less to snub, Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot. And so she came to Portland Place frequently and unrebuked. She called the Minister “my dear Mandarin.” She doted on China, and did so hope to go there some glad day. She loved the Chinese, poor dears. And once, when she gave a dinner party, she borrowed the Legation cook; but she only did this once. The Minister would have condoned a second time, but the cook would not. Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot had called him “John,” and asked him if Chinese children loved their mothers, and the kitchen-maid had taken liberties with his cue.
But there were others of his race—more highly born than he—whom this lady also called “John,” among them the Minister’s private secretary, a very proud and solemn man who was a nobleman by inheritance—there are a few in China—and who often longed to boil the friendly Englishwoman alive in oil.
She took Wu to her heart at once; and, what was far worse, she took him for “a nice long day” in Kew Gardens.
That awful day! And she meant so well! At first she merely bored him. Then she infuriated him. It was scarcely fair to ask a Chinese boy to think overmuch of Kew’s prized Wistaria sinensis—there were miles of better on the estate at home. He thought the picture of the House of Confucius hanging in the Museum an impertinence—no red scroll of honor above it, no joss-stick burning in homage beneath it. The Chambers imitation of a pagoda was to him even more unpardonable. What right had this English tea-garden sort of place with a shabby mockery of a sacred thing of China? And the bamboos and the golden-leaf flowers of the hamamelis and the fragrant cream blossoms of the syringa made him newly homesick. What right had the dear home-flowers to grow in Europe, transplanted, dwarfed, caged, exhibited—as he was? And his hostess’s remarks upon opium, as they stood beside the poppy beds, did not tend to soothe him. Wu Li Chang did not know much about opium in those days, but he knew considerably more than Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot did, and he knew that these were not opium poppies, for all the lady or the guide-books said—she had presented him with a guide-book, of course. There was not much poppy culture in his part of Sze-chuan, but he knew that much. Decent brands of opium were made from the white poppy. Some inferior sorts, such as coolies chew, are made from the red-flowered plants, but not such as these.
To his angry young eyes the expatriated lotus plants seemed little better than weeds; and when she expatiated upon the wonders of Kew’s banyan tree (a picture rather of banyan fragments) he scorned to tell her of banyans he knew well at home, trees under any one of which a thousand men could shelter from the rain, and of one his grandfather had seen under which twenty thousand men could hide from storm or sun.
The day at Kew was a ghastly failure. But happily Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot never suspected it, and was sincerely and generously sorry that the boy could never seem to find time to go anywhere with her again.