Wherein
there is a
departure
from family
custom and
Kuei Ping
goes with
her husband
to live
in Peking
MOONLIGHT on which the white magnolia flowers floated as birds about to take wing, filled the courtyard and touched the town with a magic of pale green gold. Kuei Ping could not sleep. She lay wide-eyed, following the pattern that a moonbeam made as it filtered through the parchment window. Unable to resist longer the call of the path of light she slid from her bed to the floor. Cautiously pulling about her the long garment that lay waiting for the morning, she crept through the door of her pavilion into the courtyard. Still holding her slippers in her hand she listened for sounds of others awake. From the rooms of her honorable women relatives came only the rhythmic breathing of deep sleep.
She passed safely out of the women’s division of the compound, stealing through the intricate lacery of courtyards and curious-shaped gateways, stopping to dabble her fingers in the waters of a fountain and then, at a disturbed quack from the pet heron who stood sleeping with one foot drawn up beneath him, she sped carefully away. Her shadow mingled with that of the flowering magnolia trees as she slipped from place to place like a long-caged bird trying its wings in newly gained freedom, stooping now over the fragrant heart of a rose, brushing gently the stiff little potted evergreens that stood in a row at the base of the spirit screen, turning back to feel the velvet of the purple iris, holding up her hands to let the full-blown wisteria petals flutter through them.
From over the walls came a mysterious groping after expression from the strings of some blind wandering musician. It vibrated on the heart of Kuei Ping, calling her beyond the confines of the compound she had entered as a bride two months earlier. Square across the entrance gateway, placed so that evil spirits flying in to bring disaster would be flung back, stood the high, many-colored spirit screen guarding the household, while it slumbered, from disaster. Her hand still touching the familiar potted trees on the inner side of the screen, Kuei Ping crept around it. No sound save that of irregular snoring came from the gatekeeper’s house. Her fingers trembled as they sought for the open link in the chain that held the bar across the outer gate. A wild rose that had clambered up beside the gateway and dared to cross the bits of broken glass that made more impassable the top of the wall gave her courage. Noiselessly she slid the bar and stood without the compound.
How soft the dust felt beneath her feet as they touched it for the first time. Pilgrimages she had made with her honorable mother-in-law to pay respect to the ancestral hall, to worship at the temple of Buddha, and to ask after the health of Madame Yen and her household, but it was not fitting that the new bride should soil her feet upon the common ground. Chair-bearers came within the courtyard to bear her forth upon those journeys.
Leaning back against the wall, Kuei Ping drew a deep breath of air. Now near and now far away the music called. Thither along the road to his former place in the world of other affairs Fuh Tang had returned six days after their marriage. Above her head the wood-rose nodded in the breeze. Men went out and beyond. Women in that far-away land from which Miss Porter came, walked, too, in similar paths of freedom.