CHAPTER XI
In the Lotus Garden
KOWLOON was drenched with sunlight, and the lotus garden was drenched with music. A minstrel paused a moment to drink in the beauty of the great lilies, white, yellow, pink, amber and mauve, one that had cost a fortune, clear pale blue, one that had cost more, a delicate jade green.
The strolling singer retuned his lute and moved across the garden, singing as he went.
It was the typical garden of a rich Chinese home—so repeatedly caricatured on the “willow-tree-pattern” crockery of cheap European commerce—caricatured but also somewhat accurately portrayed. But the gardens on the plates for sale in half the pawnshops in outer London (the aristocracy of the pawnbrokers will not look at them any more), in every household furnisher’s in Marylebone and Camberwell, in Battersea and Shoreditch, and on the business streets of every British town and village, are of one uniform Chinese blue—the blue the sampsan women wear when their clothes are new—and background of white, Chinese white, appropriately enough. This living garden in Kowloon was of every vivid hue on nature’s prodigal palette, and its background was of blue hills and purple haze and blue, white and limpid golden sky.
A twisted camel’s back bridge of carved stonework, like coarse lace in its pierced tracery, dragons squatting and guarding its corners, and flowers hung from it everywhere in baskets of bamboo, of crystal, of painted porcelain and of lacquer, spanned one corner of the lake, above which a crooked flight of steps at each bridge-end lifted it high. Dwarf trees in glazed pots, some on the ground, rarer specimens on carved stands of teak wood and of ebony, stood here and there. And in the artificial water, half river, half lake, which the miniature bridge crossed, the priceless lotus grew and glowed. Most of the great lily cups were pink, others were deeply red.
Some distance from the house there was a pagoda open to the garden, its plaid floor strewn with cushions, a book or two, a woman’s scarf, and from every outer point and eave hung a pot or a basket in which flowers of every brilliant hue grew and bloomed.
A sinuous gravel path turned from the dwelling-house to the outer wall, twisting and turning ingeniously all over the garden, passing close to the cypress bush at the foot of the steps that led to the bridge, skirting the baby grove of dwarf orange and lemon trees, and encircling the gnarled old cherry tree.
Whatever we may think of China, the sun thinks well, and shines so gloriously nowhere else. It made the flowers in Nang Ping’s garden glow with a vivid brilliance that was part their own, part his; it touched the summits of the hills seen in the distance with a light blue haze which deepened to purple at their base. Against that dark purple background the sumptuous little garden foreground glowed with a riot of color, and quivered with pulsing, scent-breathing flowers.
A servant squatted on his yellow heels, picking up dead leaves and broken flowers heads, gathering them into his tidy basket. Another gardener was sweeping the gravel path as carefully as if it had been the velvet carpet than which it was no less soft.