All seen at last and ordered to his mind, he took the old winding road to Pekin and knocked at Li’s yamén gate.
CHAPTER IX
Wu Li Lu
WU did not see his wife in Pekin. He stayed with Li several days, and long and earnest was their talk, many and deep their interchanged kot’ows, and the cups of boiling tea and tiny bowls of hot spiced wine they drank together innumerable. Mrs. Wu was well, they assured him, and utterly inconsolable at her approaching departure from her parents. She wept and wailed continuously, and would not be comforted. Wu bowed and smiled. For this was as it should be. No Chinese maiden would do otherwise, and his bride’s high estate predicated an utmost excess of grief. And once he caught through a wide courtyard the noisy storm of her grief. Evidently she had been well brought up, and Wu was highly satisfied.
He took profoundly respectful farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Li and hurried home.
And while he waited for the coming of his bride, some days thinking of it a good deal, some days thinking of it not at all, he had twofold and strenuous occupation. He divided his time between preparation for the reception and the housing of his wife, and laying the foundations of his own relations with the innumerable “tongs” or secret societies that in China play so powerful and so indescribable a part in all things of great pith and moment, and more particularly in everything touching international affairs and the treatment of aliens in China.
Sociology and political economy had been no small part of Wu’s studies in Europe; there he had observed and gleaned much on those lines that he planned to graft upon the sociological and political methods of his own people.
While studying Europe he had kept in passionate touch with China. He knew that the mighty current of her being ran underground. He was permeated by things European now, for the time at least, but was in no way enmeshed by them. He did not make the mistake that some highly intelligent Chinese have made after years of European study and travel—the mistake of underestimating the quality, the power, and the permanence of the “tongs,” of which so comparatively little is heard, so much felt, in every part of China.
He knew that who ruled China in deed must rule through the secret societies of that tong-ridden and yet tong-buttressed land; he knew that who would influence and serve China greatly must work through the tongs, or work but half effectually.
He intended to rule in China, to be one of the supreme powers behind and beneath her throne; for he was loyal to the Imperial Manchu, in his heart held no traffic with republicanism or rebellion, and meant to hold none with his hands. He intended to rule because dominance was his nature and his delight, and equally because he believed it to be his duty—his duty to China and to the house of Wu. Even more than he intended to rule he intended to serve. He was his country’s servant. He had dedicated his life to China, and sworn her his fealty on almost every day of his exile.