MR. WU

MR. WU

By LOUISE JORDON MILN

(MRS. GEORGE CRICHTON MILN)

Based on the Play “Mr. Wu”
By H. M. VERNON and HAROLD OWEN

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company

Copyright, 1918, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved

First published in the United States of America, 1920

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

MR. WU

CHAPTER I
Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang

A LOOK of terror glinted across the eyes slit in the child’s moon-shaped yellow face, but he stood stock still and silent—respectful and obedient.

The very old man in the chair of carved and inlaid teak wood saw the glint of fear, and he liked it fiercely, although he came of a clan renowned for fearlessness, even in a race that for personal courage has never been matched—unless by the British, the race which of all others it most resembles. Old Wu adored little Wu, and was proud of him with a jealous pride, but he knew that there was nothing craven in the fear that had looked for one uncontrolled instant from his grandson’s narrow eye—nothing craven, but love for himself, love of home, and a reluctance to leave both; a reluctance that he was the last man in China to resent or to misestimate.

Wu the grandfather was eighty. Wu the grandson was ten.

Rich almost beyond the dreams of even Chinese avarice, the mandarin was warmly wrapped in clothes almost coolie-plain; but the youngster, who was but his senior’s chattel, would have pawned for a fortune as he stood, a ridiculous, gorgeous figure of warmth and of affluence, almost half as broad as long, by virtue of padding. His stiffly embroidered robe of yellow silk was worn over three quilted coats, silk too, and well wadded with down of the Manchurian eider duck, and above the yellow silk surcoat he wore a slightly shorter one of rich fur, fur-lined and also wadded. The fur top-coat was buttoned with jewels. The yellow coat was sewn with pearls and with emeralds. Jewels winked on the thick little padded shoes and blazed on his little skull cap.

For himself the mandarin took his ease in unencumbered old clothes, but it pleased his arrogant pride and his love of the gorgeous that his small grandson should be garbed, even in the semi-seclusion of their isolated country estate, as if paying a visit of state to the boy Emperor at Pekin. As little Wu was of royal blood himself, he might indeed by some right of caste so have visited in no servile rôle, for on his mother’s side the lad was of more than royal blood, descended from the two supreme Chinese, descent from whom confers the only hereditary nobility of China. Perhaps the yellows that he often wore hinted at this discreetly. The sartorial boast (if boast it was) was well controlled, for true yellow was the imperial color, sacred to the Emperor, and young Wu’s yellows were always on the amber side, or on the lemon; and even so he might have worn them less in Pekin than he did here in the Sze-chuan stronghold of his house.

The room was very warm, and seemed no cooler for the scented prayer-sticks that were burning profusely in the carved recess where the ancestral tablet hung, and as he talked with and studied the boy, whom he had studied for every hour of the young life, the upright old man with the gaunt, withered, pockmarked face fanned himself incessantly. Little Wu had run in from his play in the bitterly cold garden, all fur-clad as he was. The mandarin had sent for him, and he had not stayed to throw off even one of his thick garments. Old Wu was not accustomed to be kept waiting or the grandchild to delay.

“Well?” the old man demanded, “you have heard. What do you say?”

The quaint little figure kotowed almost to the ground. It was wonderful that a form so swathed and padded could bend so low, wonderful that the jewel-heavy cap kept its place. His little cue swept the polished floor, and his stiff embroideries of gem-sewn kingfisher feathers creaked as he bent. He bent thrice before he answered, his hands meekly crossed, his eyes humbly on the ground: “Most Honorable, thou art a thousand years old, and, O thrice Honorable Sir, ten thousand times wise. Thy despicable worm entreats thy jadelike pardon that he pollutes with his putrid presence thy plum-blossomed eyes. Thou hast spoken. I thank thee for thy gracious words.”

“Art thou glad to go?”

“Thy child is glad, Sir most renowned and venerable, to obey thy wish.”

“Art glad to go?”

The boy swept again to the ground, and, bending up, spread out his pink palms in a gesture of pleased acceptance. “Most glad, O ancient long-beard.”

The grandfather laughed. “Nay, thou liest. Thou art loth to go. And I am loth to have thee go. But it is best, and so I send thee.” He held out his yellow, claw-like hand, and little Wu came and caught it to his forehead, then stood leaning against the other’s knee, and began playing with the long string of scented beads that hung about the man’s neck.

“Well,” the mandarin said again, “say all that is in thy heart. Leave off the words of ceremony. Speak simply. Say what thou wilt.”

“When do I go?” It was characteristically Chinese that such was the question, and not “Must I go?” or even “Why must I go?” The grandfather had said that he was to go: that point was settled. From that will there was no appeal. The boy scarcely knew that there were children who did not obey their parents implicitly and always. That there were countries—in the far off foreign-devils’ land—where filial disobedience was almost the rule, he had never heard and could not have believed. Of course, in the classics, which even now he read easily, there were runaway marriages and undutiful offspring now and then. But the end of all such offenders was beyond horror horrible, and even so little Wu had always regarded them as literary makeweight, artistic shades to throw up the high lights whiter, shadows grotesque and devilish as some of his grandsire’s most precious carvings were, and scarcely as flesh and blood possibilities.

In all their ten years together there had been between these two nothing but love and kindness. No child in China (where children are adored) had ever been more indulged; no child in China (where children are guarded) more strictly disciplined. The older Wu had loved and ruled; the younger Wu had loved and obeyed always. They live life so in China.

“When do I go?” was all the boy said.

“Soon after your marriage moon: the third next moon, as I plan it.”

The child’s face glowed and creamed with relief. He was only ten, and—at least in that part of the Empire—older bridegrooms were the rule. If the dreaded exile were not to begin until after his marriage, years hence, all its intricate ceremonial, all its long-drawn-out preliminaries, and happily to be delayed again and again by the astrologers, why, then here was respite indeed.

“Nay,” the mandarin said, shaking his old head a little sadly, “think not so. Thy marriage will be when the cherry trees in Honan next bloom.”

“Oh!” the boy just breathed his surprise.

“I think it best,” the old man added. “Your wife was born last month. The runners reached me yesterday with the letter of her honorable father.”

Little Wu was interested. He had read of such marriages and he knew that they really took place sometimes. He rather liked the scheme—if only he need not go to England for hideous years of wifeless honeymoon! He had heard none of the details of his exile—only the hateful fact. But his Chinese instinct divined that in all probability young Mrs. Wu would not accompany him. Yes, he rather liked the idea of a wife. He was desperately fond of babies, and often had two or three brought from the retainers’ quarters that he might play with them and feed them perfumed sugar-flowers. He hoped his grandfather would tell him more of his baby-betrothed.

But the grandfather did not, now at all events, nor did he add anything to the less pleasant piece of news, but rose stiffly from his chair, saying, “Strike the gong.”

The boy went quickly to a great disk of beaten and filigreed gold that hung over a big porcelain tub of glowing azaleas, caught up an ivory snake-entwined rod of tortoise-shell, and beat upon the gong. He struck it but once, but at the sound servants came running—half a dozen or more, clad in blue linen, the “Wu” crest worked between the shoulders.

“Rice,” the master said, and held out his hand to the child.

“Lean on me, lean on me hard,” pleaded the boy; “thy venerable bones are tired.”

“They ache to-day,” the octogenarian admitted grimly. “But untie thyself first, my frogling. Thou canst not eat so—we are going to rice, and not into thy beloved snow and ice.”

The child slipped out of his fur, and cast it from him. His quick fingers made light work of buttons, clasps and cords. Garment followed garment to the floor, and as they fell servants ran and knelt and picked them up almost reverently, until the boy drew a long free breath, clad only in a flowing robe of thin crimson tussore: a little upright figure, graceful, and for a Chinese boy very thin. Then the old man laid his hand, not lightly, on the young shoulder; and so they went together to their rice.

CHAPTER II
At Rice

JAMES MUIR was waiting for them in the room where their meal was served. There were but two meals in that household—breakfast and dinner—or rather but two for the mandarin and those who shared his rice; the servants ate three times a day, such few of them as ate in the house at all. But there was a fine mastery of the art of dining, as well as a good deal of clockwork, in the old Chinese’s constitution; and Muir, at liberty to command food when and where he would, found it convenient and entertaining to eat with his pupil and his host.

For three years the young Scot had held, and filled admirably, a chair in the University of Pekin. The post had been well paid, and he had enjoyed it hugely, and the Pekin background of life no less; but old Wu had lured him from it with a salary four times as generous, and with an opportunity to study China and Chinese life from the inside such as probably no Briton had had before, and far more complete and intimate than the no mean opportunity afforded by his professorship in the capital.

Chinese to the core and Chinese to the remotest tip of his longest spiral-twisted and silver-shielded fingernail, Wu Ching Yu, astute and contemplative even beyond his peers, searching the future anxiously saw strange things ahead of this native land of his burning love, and he had boldly mapped out an unique education for his grandson.

Europe was coming into China. It was too late to prevent that now; Wu Ching Yu doubted if it had not always been too late. Well, what would be would be; Confucius had said so. Europe was coming into China, and Wu Li Chang, his grandson, should meet it at an advantage which other Chinese were not wise enough to prepare for themselves. Wu Li Chang should know Europe before Europe came to reap the wealth of Shantung and Peichihli and to fatten on the golden harvest of four thousand years of Chinese thrift, frugality, and sagacity. The boy should have an English education and a facile understanding of English thought and of English ways.

Quietly, remorselessly, the grandfather had studied the individuals of the Aryan races already permeating in official and mercantile trickles into Pekin, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hankow. The Germans commended themselves to him in much. His Chinese thoroughness liked their thoroughness. His concentration liked theirs. But they had other qualities he liked less. The French and the Americans he understood least, and he somewhat under-estimated both. He liked the Russians; but he gauged them to be threatened by the future rather than being themselves seriously threateners of China.

It was the British, he decided deliberately, who most threatened China and promised her most; they, above all others, were to be dreaded as foes, desired as friends. He thought that they had staying powers beyond all other races save his own, honorableness and breeding. He disliked their manners often, but he liked the quality of their given word. He suspected that the English would win in the long run in any contest of peoples to which they set their shoulders and their will: and it was to England that he determined to send his boy, that there the child might learn to hold his Chinese own in China in the years to come, let come to China from the West what would. Cost them both what it might—and would—of heartache, the boy should go, but he should go with such equipment, such armor of savoir faire as was possible or could be made possible. He should learn to speak English, to ride a horse English fashion, and to use a fork before he went. And so James Muir was selected and secured as tutor, mentor and general leader to the little yellow Chinese bear.

Mandarin Wu had met Muir in Pekin, had studied and liked him. And Wu’s great crony, Li Hung Chang, knew the Scot and respected him. The rest was easy; for Wu was masterful, diplomatic, and the length of his purse was almost endless. Muir had lived with the Wus for three years now, and had known from the first what little Wu had only learned an hour ago: that the boy was going to England and Oxford.

Not for a moment had the mandarin neglected the Chinese furnituring and decorating of the boy’s mind. Such a course would have been unthinkable. Already almost the lad might have been presented at the great national examination, and very possibly ennobled as one of the literati, but the mandarin had not thought it necessary. The boy could recite the Li Ki (the old, old Book of Rites that has had more influence than any other secular book ever written, and has done more to make and shape Chinese character and Chinese customs than have all other books put together) and recite it without mistake or hesitation; he could write decorous verse, paint swiftly and accurately the intricate Chinese characters, and he knew his people’s history. He could wrestle and tilt, and once he had beaten his grandfather at chess.

He had worked well with Muir, and Muir with him. They liked each other. And after three years of constant drilling, always followed industriously and often enthusiastically, the young Chinese had a glib smattering of European lore, dates, grammar, facts. Europe itself—real Europe—was a closed book to him, of course. The mandarin understood that. But a few years in the West would mend all that: and then the beloved boy should come home, to serve China and to rule his own destiny.

Between the old Chinese mandarin and the young Scotchman a sincere friendship had grown—and almost inevitably, for they had so much in common, and so much mutual respect. Each was honest, manly, and a gentleman. Each had self-control, generosity, deliberation, taste and a glowing soul. Three years of daily intercourse, and something of intimacy, had destroyed completely such slight remaining prejudice as either had had against the other’s race when they met at Pekin.

Wu the grandfather was never long or far from the side of Wu the grandson. James Muir had taught one Wu almost as much (though not as systematically) as he had taught the other. And they had taught him more than he had taught them: the child unconsciously, the mandarin with conscious glee. All three had been eager to learn, the men more eager than the boy; and the teacher who is at home always has a wide and deep advantage over the teacher who is abroad. Background, environment, each smallest detail and petty reiteration of daily life, aid the teacher who instructs in his own country, but impede and thwart the teacher who instructs aliens in theirs.

Chinese families who live in some state usually eat in the great hall—the k’o-tang, or guest-hall—of their house, as far as they have any usual eating place. But more often than not when in residence here the Wus “dined” (of course, they used for it no such term: it was, as were all their meals, just “rice”) in the chamber in which the two men and the child now sat. This house had more than one great hall, and several rooms larger than this, though it was far from small.

It was a passionate room. It throbbed with color, with perfume, with flowers, with quaint picked music and with a dozen glows and warmths of wealth.

High towards the red and sea-green lacquered roof, carved and scrolled with silver and blue, a balcony of pungent sandal-wood jutted from the wall. The floor of the balcony was solid, and from it hung three splendid but delicate lamps, filled with burning attar. The railing of the balcony was carved with dragons, gods, bamboos and lotus flowers, and within the railing sat three sing-song girls. They were silent and motionless until, at a gesture of the master’s hand, the eunuch, who was their choirmaster and their guardian, spoke a syllable, and then they began a soft chant to the tinkling accompaniment of their instruments. One played an ivory lute, one a lacquered flute, the third cymbals and bells; and the eunuch drew a deeper, more throbbing note from his chin or student’s lute—five feet long, with seven strings of silk, its office to soothe man’s soul and drive all evil from his heart. In the corner farthest from the table squatted, on the mosaic floor, a life-size figure of the belly-god. He wore many very valuable rings, an unctuous smirk, a wreath—about his shoulders—of fresh flowers, and very little else. He was fleshed of priceless majolica, but his figure would have been the despair of the most ingenious corset shop in Paris; his abdomen protruded several feet in front of his knees; his was a masterly embonpoint of glut.

There must have been a hundred big joss-sticks burning in the room—not the poor, slight things sold in Europe, but Chinese incense at its best and most pungent.

The mandarin used chop-sticks. The boy and his tutor ate with silver forks.

The food was delicious, and Muir ate heartily. But the child and the old man ate little. Both were sick at heart. Five of the mandarin’s concubines brought in fruit and sweetmeats. The boy took a glacé persimmon, and smiled at the woman. He knew them all by name (there were a score or more in the “fragrant apartments”), and he liked most of them and often played with them. The mandarin paid no heed to them whatever. Such of their names as he had once known he had quite forgotten. The old celibate lived for China and for his grandson. But he kept his Chinese state in China, and always would. And his women were well clad, well fed, well treated and reasonably happy. And if one of them died she was replaced, and so was one that took the smallpox and was disfigured. But one was rarely scolded, and never was one beaten. Wu Ching Yu rarely remembered their existence. When he did it bored him. But they were part of his retinue, and it no more occurs to an important Chinese to discard his retinue than it does to a portly and decent Scot to discard his kilt in broad daylight on Princes Street. The one discard would be as indecent as the other. Manners make men everywhere, and they have no small share in making manhood, in China as in Edinburgh. They differ in different districts, but, after all, their difference is but of thinskin depth. It is their observance that matters: it is vital.

A great snake waddled in and came across the floor—a fat, over-fed, hideous thing. Muir knew the creature well, and that it was perfectly tame and harmless, but, for all that, he tucked his feet between the rungs of his chair. Little Wu flung sweetmeats and bits of sugared fat pork to the monster, and presently it waddled off again, crawling fatly, and curled up at the feet of the belly-god, and went to sleep with its sleek, slimy, wrinkled head under the lea of the god’s wide paunch.

CHAPTER III
The Marriage Journey

WU LI CHANG enjoyed his wedding very much. He enjoyed all of it (except the enforced parting with his young wife)—the wonderful journey to Peichihli, brightened by anticipation; the more wonderful return journey, not a little dulled by homesickness for his bride and by the near-drawing of his voyage to England; the six weeks’ stay in the palace of the Lis; and most of all—decidedly most of all—his wife.

He would have been ingratitude itself if he had not enjoyed his visit at his father-in-law’s. Never went marriage bells more happily. Never was bridegroom more warmly welcomed or more kindly entertained. The wedding ceremonies interested him intensely; they went without a hitch, and never in China was bridal more gorgeous. The honeymoon was best of all—if only it might have been longer!—and had but one jar. (Most honeymoons—at least in Europe—have more.) The one in Wu Li Chang’s and Wu Lu’s honeymoon was acute and plaintive: it was the day that his wife had the colic and wailed bitterly. Wu Li Chang had colic too—in sympathy, the women said, but James Muir suspected an over-feed of stolen bride-cake, gray and soggy, stuffed with sugared pork fat and roasted almonds. Probably the women were right, for Wu Li Chang was not a gluttonous boy, and he had eaten sugared pork fat with impunity all his life; but, caused no matter by what, the colic was real enough, and Wu Li Chang could have wailed too, had such relief been permissible to a Chinese gentleman.

The cavalcade started at dawn on an auspicious day in early spring, when the nut trees were just blushing into bloom and the heavy buds of the wistaria forests were showing faint hints of violet on their lips. The return journey was made when the short summer of Northern and North Central China was turning towards autumn, and the great wistarias creaked in the wind and flung their purple splendor across the bamboos and the varnish trees, and the green baubles of the lychees were turning pink and russet.

The marriage ceremonial took quite a month, for the mandarins would skimp it of nothing; and a Chinese wedding of any elegance is never brief. The engagement had been unprecedentedly brief—made so by the exigencies of Wu Ching Yu’s plans—and to have laid on the lady the further slight of shabby or hurried nuptials would have been unthinkable, and most possibly would have been punished by three generations of hunchbacked Wus.

Mandarin Wu kept his own soothsayer, of course, and equally of course that psychic had pronounced for the brevity of the engagement, and himself had selected the day of the bridegroom’s departure and the marriage days. His commandments had synchronised exactly with his patron’s desire. The mandarin’s wishes and the necromancer’s pronouncements almost invariably dovetailed to a nicety; and when they did not the mandarin took upon himself the rôle of leading seer, and then changed his fortune-teller. It had only happened once, and was not likely to happen again. Wu Ching Yu was a very fine clairvoyant himself.

The prospective parents-in-law were old and warm friends, Wu Li’s senior by thirty years. The older mandarin had dreamed a dream one night, just a year ago, and in the morning had sent a runner to Pekin with a letter to his friend:

“Thy honorable wife, who has laid at thy feet so many jeweled sons, will bear to thy matchless house a daughter when next the snow lies thick upon the lower hills of Han-yang. Thy contemptible friend sues to thee for that matchless maiden’s incomparable golden hand to be bestowed upon his worm of a grandson and heir”—and several yards more to the same effect, beautifully written on fine red paper.

The offer had been cordially (but with Mongol circumlocution) accepted. The match was desirable in every conceivable way. And when Li Lu was born she was already as good as “wooed and married and a’” to the young Wu, at that moment teaching James Muir a new form of leap-frog.

The cavalcade formed at daybreak, and Wu—both Wus—and the tutor came out of the great house’s only door, mounted their horses, and the journey began. It was a musical start, for each saddle horse wore a collar of bells that the pedestrians might be warned to stand aside.

The palanquins of state and their ornate sedan chairs were carried by liveried coolies that the three gentlemen might travel so when they chose; and those provided for Muir were as splendid as those for the mandarin and little Wu. Teachers are treated so in China always, though not always are they paid as the mandarin paid Muir.

The presents for the bride were packed in bales and baskets—pei tsz—of scented grass, slung by plaited bamboo straps from the shoulders of the carrying coolies. There were three hundred bales in all, their precious contents of silk and crêpe and jade and gems, of spices and porcelains and lacquers, wrapped in invulnerable oiled silk of finest texture and impervious to the sharpest rain. There were silks enough to clothe Li Lu and Li Lu’s daughters forever, and the materials for her bridal robes were as fine as the Emperor’s bride had worn.

There were five hundred bride’s cakes, sodden gray things, quite small in size but heavy with fat pork. There were sixty tiny pipes—all for the bride—of every conceivable pipe material and design. There were a hundred pairs of shoes, to be worn a few years hence when her feet had been bound. There were birds to sing to her—living birds in jeweled cages, and birds made of gold, of coral and of amber. There were ivories and rare pottery and mirrors of burnished steel. There were jades—such as Europe has not yet seen—bronzes beyond price, tea, tortoiseshell and musk, paint for her face, and a bale of hair ornaments. There were a score of slave-girls—ten for her, ten for her mother. In a great bottle-shaped cage of rush a tame tortoise rode at ease. It had been procured from Ceylon at great expense for a maharajah’s children in Southern India, and trained to carry them on its back. It were jeweled anklets now, and was for Li Lu when she should be old enough to straddle it. Wu Li Chang had tried it, and he said that its gait was good. And Muir had named it “Nizam.” But it had its own servants; for the tortoise is one of the four sacred animals in China. A hundred and thirty musicians followed the mandarin’s cooks and bakers—a musician for each instrument of Chinese melody, and for many two; ten more for the flutes, four for the harps, nine for the bells, and a dozen for trumpets, drums and gongs—the women carried in chairs, the men on foot. There was much, much more, and at long last the mandarin’s bannerman brought up the slow rear.

Beside the old noble’s palfrey a servant carried his master’s favorite linnet in its cage.

There was a long wait at the temple, some yards from the house. Wu and his grandchild went in to make obeisance and to worship before the temple tablets of their dead, while Muir sat outside and smoked an honest meerschaum pipe and drank scalding tea.

The road climbed hillward, and soon after they left the temple they passed a magnificent paifang. The mandarin bowed to it reverently, dismounted, and passed it on foot; and so did the child, knowing that it marked the spot where his grandfather’s mother had hanged herself—in her best robes—at her husband’s funeral.

On the summit of the first hill they halted again. The old man and the boy took soup and sweetmeats and tea, and Muir munched fishcakes and savory rice; and the child looked long at the house in which he had been born.

The carved screen, standing a few feet before the door to keep the evil spirits out, was dyed deep with sunlight, and its peaked roof’s green and blue and yellow tiles were darkly iridescent, as were the green and yellow and blue tiles of the old dwelling’s many tent-shaped roofs.

When they moved on, the boy trotted on foot beside his grandfather and twittered to the linnet, and the linnet twittered back; the mandarin smiled down at them, and Muir lit another pipeful.

All this was most irregular—so irregular that only a Wu could have compassed it. The bride should have been coming to her husband, not the bridegroom going to his wife. But Wu and the necromancer had managed it. Wu was an iconoclast—China is full of iconoclasts. Moreover, it was scarcely feasible to bring so young a bride across China in the early spring—treacherous often and uncertain always. And Mrs. Li, who was not well and who hated travel, had insisted upon conducting the details of the wedding herself. That clinched it. Mrs. Li ruled her husband. It is so in China oftener than it is in Europe.

It would be delightful to chronicle every hour of that marriage journey and of the splendid festivity that closed it. But this is the history of an incident in Wu Li Chang’s maturity, and the boyhood that was father to that manhood must be hinted in few, swift syllables.

They traveled as in some highly colored royal progress. Now and again they passed an inn. But they stopped at none. They squatted by the roadside for “rice” whenever they would, and they fared sumptuously every day. There was whisky and mutton for the Scot, and any number of other things that he liked almost as well. When it rained—and in the month it took them to reach Pekin it rained in angry torrents four or five times—they stretched out in their padded palanquins and slept. Each night they rested in comfortable bamboo huts that relays of the mandarin’s servants had erected in advance; and when they had eaten and had wearied of chess, the musicians sat outside and tinkled them to sleep, and often the crickets joined in the throbbing music—and sometimes the pet linnet too.

Because they traveled in such state, the peasants, with which many of the districts through which they passed teemed, never pressed near them. But in the wildest parts there were a hundred evidences of human life and industries. Tiny homesteads jutted from the rocks, perched on the crags, hung beside the waterfalls. Wood-cutters, grass-cutters, charcoal-burners passed them hourly and made obeisant way for the shên-shih or sash-wearers, as the Chinese term their gentry. On every sandstone precipice some great god was carved—Buddha usually—or a devout inscription cut in gigantic letters—gilded, as a rule. Each day they passed some old temple, ruined or spruce and splendid; some days they passed a score; and nearing or leaving each temple was its inevitable stream of pilgrims with yellow incense bags slung across their shoulders—for Buddha shares the imperial yellow in Northern China. Each pilgrim cried out “Teh fu”—acquire bliss—or “Teh lieo fuh”—we have acquired bliss—and to them all the mandarin sent cash and rice or doles of cowry shells, and sometimes bowls of liangkao, the delicious rice-flour blancmange, colder than ice and more sustaining than beef-tea, or plates of bean-curd, the staff of Chinese coolie life.

They passed through groves of tallow trees, winged willow, hoangko, walnut, acacia, poplar, camellia and bamboo; through miles of brilliant fire-weed, arbutus, peanut and golden millet; through jungles of loquat, yellow lily and strawberry.

Everywhere there was running water, jade-green or musk-yellow or frothing white: water clear and unpolluted always, for in Asia it is a crime to befoul or misuse water.

When the short twilight died into the dark, from every temple or hut, by path or on hill, glints of lamp radiance sprang into the night, and lamps glowed along the river banks; from every traveler’s hand a jocund silk or paper lantern danced, and everywhere the kwang yin têng—“lamps of mercy” the Chinese name these will-o’-the-wisps—darted and burned.

The days were golden, and the nights smelt sweet.

And from then Muir had but one quarrel with China: it had made Japan seem to him forever commonplace.

James Muir had never enjoyed himself so intensely before: every moment was a picture and a feast. And often now, sitting alone in London, he closes his book-tired eyes and dreams that he is back once more in China, crossing the Sze-chuan hills with a mandarin he admired and a boy he loved, or sipping hot perfumed wine at the indescribable kaleidoscope that was the marriage of Wu Li Chang and Li Lu, and thinking sometimes, not without a sigh, of all he relinquished when the great boat on which Wu Li Chang went to England took him—the tutor—as he well knew, forever from China.

CHAPTER IV
Wee Mrs. Wu

IT was love at first sight. The bride crowed at the bridegroom, and he forgot his grave new dignity and his ceremonial mandarin robes, and clapped his little yellow hands and danced with delight.

The bride’s part might have been performed by proxy, and there had been some talk of this, Mrs. Li volunteering for the vicarious rôle. But Wu Li Chang’s lip had quivered mutinously, and so the suggestion had gone no farther.

All was performed punctiliously—or nearly all. One “essential” had been discarded perforce. The baby bride had torn off her red veil and screamed her refusal to wear it. So Wu Li Chang had seen his betrothed’s face some hours before he should. It was a brazen bride, but very bonnie. She wore less paint than an older bride would have worn, for Mrs. Li feared for the new, tender skin. Li Lu was a gleeful bride. The feigned reluctance and the daughterly wailing had to be omitted with the veil. She played with the strings of bright beads that hung over her from the bridal crown, and peeped through them giggling at her bridegroom. She laughed when their wrists were tied together with the crimson cord. Wu Li Chang thought the hot marriage wine less nice than that he usually drank at home; but when a few drops from his cup were poured upon her mouth she sucked her lips eagerly and pursed them up for more.

Even Muir, who had small flair for babies, thought this one very pretty. She was as fat as butter, but not nearly as yellow as Devon butter is when creamed from kine that feed on buttercups and clover there. Her tints were more the color of a pale tea-rose. She had bewitching dimples and the exquisitely lovely eyes which are a Chinese birthright. And her grandfather-in-law thought that she would be surpassingly lovely as a woman; for Mrs. Li, whom he saw now for the first time, was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, and his proud old heart was much content, for he knew well how a wife’s beauty comforts her husband’s years.

She was married on a daïs, of course, but instead of sitting—as she should have done—on a chair of state, she was tied upright in her cradle, the perpendicular bamboo cradle of Chinese babyhood, very much the size and exactly the shape of the huge tins in which farmers send milk to London—to be seen in their hundreds any morning at Victoria or Paddington.

When the last of the hundred rites was over, Li lifted up the mite to carry her to her own room; but she stretched out her arms to little Wu in unmistakable desire, and he sprang to her and gathered her into his arms and carried her himself up to her nursery and her women: the happiest and the proudest bridegroom that ever was—and the mandarins almost chuckled with delight and the Scot felt oddly queer.

After that the boy was free of the women’s quarters (the fragrant apartments) in the inner court. He had many a good game of battledore and of kites in the spacious grounds and in the courtyards with his wife’s brothers—she had six, and they were all very kind to him; but most of his time he spent squatted on the polished cherry-wood floor of her room, nursing the babe. He liked that best of all. She was a placid mite, but she seemed to like his arms, that never tired of her, almost as much as they loved nesting her so—and she slept longest or, waking, smiled sunniest when they encradled her. Even the day the foul fiend colic came and cankered them both, she seemed less tortured in his holding, and it was he who soothed her first.

And so they spent their spotless honeymoon. And much of it they spent alone. Her amah watched them from the balcony where she sat sewing, and Li’s prettiest concubine tottered in now and then on her tiny feet, sent by Mrs. Li to see that all was well. But amah and concubine counted scarcely as more than useful, necessary yamên furniture to the boy, and were no intrusion.

No man of his rank in all China had more or comelier concubines than Li, and none concubines that were finer dressed. Mrs. Li saw to that. She was a strict and punctilious stickler in such things. Her lord had grumbled sometimes at the expensiveness of “so many dolls”—for he was thrifty—and once he had flatly refused another semi-matrimonial plunge. But Mrs. Li had lost her temper then, called him bad things, and smacked him with her fan, and after that he had let her be, and she had enlarged his string of handmaidens as she chose, and he had paid for them; for he loved his wife, and feared her too, and she had borne him six strong sons. But he saw to it that all the concubines served her well. In English (and in the other tongues of Europe) more exquisitely ignorant nonsense has been written about China than about any other subject, and far the silliest and crassest of it all about the facts of Chinese womanhood.

Mrs. Li did not neglect her baby, and she was too good a mother and too proud not to nurse the little girl herself, and she toddled into the nursery as often as the hour-glass was turned thrice, coming in slowly, leaning on an attendant’s arm because her own feet were so very small and useless. As a matter of fact, she could move about quickly enough, and run too (as many of the small-footed women can), so skillfully had her “golden lilies” been bound. But she did it privately only or when she forgot. It was not a fashionable thing to do.

She nursed little Mrs. Wu, but she did not linger in the baby’s room overmuch. The mother of six sons was not inordinately proud of a daughter’s arrival, although the great marriage had gilded it considerably. And she was greatly occupied in playing hostess to her husband’s older guest. It is not etiquette for a Chinese lady to chat with men friends or to flutter about her husband’s home beyond the female apartments, but a great many Chinese ladies do—ladies in most things as canonical sticklers as Mrs. Li. Of course she never went beyond her home gates except in the seclusion of her closed chair. The Emperor himself would as soon have thought of showing his face freely on the Pekin streets.

So the boy and the baby were practically alone much of the time. He sat and crooned to her and rocked her in his arms, and she crooned to him and grew fast into his warm young heart. And each week passed in added delight.

But they passed! Wu the mandarin had much business in Pekin, aside from the paramount marriage business that had brought him so far; he had not been in Pekin for years till now, although his official yamên was still here, and much of his revenue. The yamên was a bleak, empty place that he had never used as “home,” and now given up to compradores and other underlings. He visited it daily after the wedding had been completed, and well scrutinized his deputies’ accounts and doings. It took time. Nothing is hurried in China except the waterfalls. But Lord Wu’s Pekin business was done at last, and he took his elaborate farewells of the Lis, and turned towards home, taking Wu Li Chang reluctant with him.

The boy had asked to take the baby too, even venturing to urge that she belonged to them now. (And to Muir he confided in an unreticent moment that he’d dearly like to include her in the ill-anticipated trip to England.)

The grandfather agreed that she was indeed theirs now. Of course she was. A Chinese wife is the property of her husband’s patriarch. That is alphabetic Chinese fact. But they would lend her to the Lis until her husband returned from Europe. The boy grieved secretly and at heart rebelled, but outwardly he was smiling and calm, made the thrice obeisance of respect and fealty, saying, “Thy honorable will is good, and shall by me, thy worthless slave, be gladly done,” took a stolid (but inwardly convulsive) leave of Mrs. Wu, fast asleep on her crimson cushion, and turned his slow feet heavily toward his homing palanquin.

CHAPTER V
Homing

BUT the homeward journey was even more delightful than the journey coming had been. The mandarin was very good to the boy, even a little kinder than his wont, watching him narrowly with a gentle smile glinting in the narrow old eyes.

The air was pungent with the smells of coming autumn. In the wayside orchards the trees bent with ripening fruit and were heavy with thick harvest of glistening and prickly-sheathed nuts.

There were still strawberries for the gathering, and the raspberries and blackberries were ripe. The wayside was flushed with great waxen pink begonia flowers and fringed by a thousand ferns. The air was sweet and succulent for miles from the blossoms of the orange trees, and on the same trees the great gold globes hung ripe. And the feathery bamboo was everywhere—the fairest thing that grows in Asia.

They passed groups of girls gathering the precious deposit of insect wax off the camellia trees—blue-clad, sunburnt girls, singing as they worked.

Once—for a great lark, and just to see what such common places were really like—Wu Li Chang and Muir had tea at an inn, a three-roofed peaked thing built astride the road. The mandarin did not join them, but stayed to pray at a wayside shrine dedicated to Lingwun—the soul.

One day the three friends (for they were deeply that) saw the great Sie’tu, the Buddhist thanksgiving-to-the-earth service, in a great straggling monastery that twisted about a mountain’s snowcovered crest, and blinked and twinkled like some monster thing of life and electricity, for its dozen tent-shaped, curling roofs were of beaten brass.

The Scot got a deal of human sight-seeing out of that return journeying. But it was its silent pictures and its wide solitudes that the boy, child though he was, liked best. They moved on homewards through a pulsing sea of flowers and fruit and ripening grain, of song and light and warmth and vivid color, but above them towered the everlasting hills, imperial as China herself, white, cold, snow-wrapped.

The soul of China pulsed and flushed at their feet; the soul of China watched them from her far height: China, Titan, mighty, insolent, older than history; China, lovely, laughing, coquetting with her babbling brooks, playing—like the child she is—with her little wild flowers.

There was a tang of autumn in the air, and the cherries were growing very ripe.

Often at night they lit a fire of brush beside their wayside camp, and sitting in its glow the old man talked long and earnestly to the child. To much of their talk Muir listened, smoking his sweet cob in silence. Some of it was intimate even from his trusted hearing. Nothing was said of the voyage to England or of the years to be lived out there. It had been said for the most already, and almost the subject was taboo. But of the home-coming to follow and the long years to be lived at home the old man said much. And most of all he talked to the boy of—women. Again and again he told him, as he often had even from his cradle-days, of the women of their clan. There are several great families in China noted above all else for their women, and the Wu family was the most notable of all.

Most of the ladies Wu had been beautiful. Many of them had been great, wise, gifted, scholarly. Their paifangs speckled the home provinces. One had been espoused by an Emperor and had borne his more illustrious Emperor-son. All had been virtuous. All had been loved and obeyed. To treat their women well was an instinct with the Wus; to be proud of them an inheritance and a tradition.

Wu Li Chang just remembered his own mother, and his father’s grief at her death. The father had died before he had laid aside the coarse white hempen garments of grief that he had worn for her. The epidemic of smallpox that had pitted the mandarin’s face for a second time had killed the only son—the father of this one child.

A great-great-aunt of the mandarin had been a noted mathematician. Another ancestress had invented an astronomical instrument still used in the great observatory at Pekin. On the distaff side the old man and the boy could prove descent from both the two great sages—descent in the male line from whom alone gives hereditary and titled nobility in China, except in such rare, Emperor-bestowed instances as that of Prince Kung. Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang were descended through their mothers from Confucius and from Mencius. One foremother of theirs had written a book that still ranked high in Chinese classics, and one had worn the smallest shoes in all the eighteen provinces.

They had cause to be proud of their women, and to boast it intimately from generation to generation.

Li—perhaps in compliment for the tortoise—had given his son-in-law a tame trained bear and a skilled juggler, and Mrs. Li had presented Wu Ching Yu with two of her husband’s choicest concubines. The older mandarin had graciously appointed them attendants upon his granddaughter and to stay with her in Pekin. But the bear and the juggler were traveling with the home-returning Wus; and when the inevitable chess-board and its jeweled chessmen and the flagons of hot spiced wine were laid between Muir and the mandarin, Bruin—Kung Fo Lo was his name—danced and pranced in the firelight for the boy, who clapped his hands and shook with laughter; the heart of a man-child cannot be for ever sad for a baby-girl, known but two months and not able to crawl yet. But Wu Li Chang did not forget Wu Lu. He often wished that she might have come with them. He’d willingly have traded the dancing bear for her, with the juggler thrown in (he had two better jugglers at home); and for permission to forego the journey to Europe he would have given everything he had: his favorite Kweichow pony (a dwarfed survival from the fleet white Arabs that the Turkish horde of Genghis Khan brought into China), his best robes, the little gold pagoda that was his very own, everything except his cue, his ancestral tablets, and his grandfather’s love and approval—yes, everything, even his wife.

CHAPTER VI
Heart Ache

BUT it was summer again before he went. The mandarin was taken ill soon on their home-coming, and all through the cold northern winter only just lived. Death means little to the Chinese, but somehow, for all his relentlessness of purpose, for all his iron of will, the old man could not bring himself to part with the child while his megrim was sharp. With spring he grew better, and when the great tassels of the wistaria were plump and deeply purpled he sent the boy with his tutor to Hong Kong.

They took their parting in a room in which they had passed much of their close and pleasant companionship. James Muir understood that the old man avoided, both for himself and the lad, the strain of the parting, long drawn out, that the cross-country journey must have been. And Muir suspected also that the mandarin did not dare the bodily fatigue of such a journey, no matter how easily and luxuriously taken.

Muir was right. But chiefly, Wu chose to say good-by in their home—the home that had been theirs for generations and for centuries.

Except a few pagodas there is not an old building in China. The picturesque houses, with their pavilions and their triple roofs, flower-pot hung, curling and multicolored, spring up like mushrooms, and decay as soon. Houses last a few generations—perhaps. Great cities crumble, disappear, and every trace of them is obliterated in a brief century or two. The Chinese rebuild, or move on and build elsewhere, but they do not repair. Their style and scheme of architecture never alter. The tent-like roofs (or ship-prow survivals—have it as you will, for no one knows), painted as gayly as the roofs of Moscow, make all China tuliptinted, and looking from a hillside at a Chinese city is often oddly like looking down upon the Kremlin. It is very beautiful, and it looks old. But unlike the Muscovite city, it is all new.

But this house of Wu, where both the old man and his grandson had been born, was far older than a house in China often is. The Wus were a tenacious race, even in much that their countrymen usually let slide; and here, in these same buildings, or in others built on the same site, the Wus had made their stronghold and kept their state since before the great Venetian came to China to learn and to report her and her cause aright.

And it was because of this, far more than because his old bones ached and his breath cut and rasped in his side, that Wu Ching Yu chose to take here what must be a long and might well be a last farewell.

The actual “good-by” was said standing beside the costly coffin which had been the man’s gift from his wife the year their son was born. Wu the grandson had played beside it when still almost a baby. He knew its significance, its great value, and that there was no finer coffin in China. The precious Shi-mu wood, from one solid piece of which it had been carved, was hidden beneath layer after layer of priceless lacquer and Kweichow varnish, both inside and out. And little Wu, who knew each of its elaborate, fantastic details as well as if it had been a favorite picture-book, had never been able to determine which was the more gorgeous—the vermilion of its surface or the gold leaf of the arabesque that decorated it.

The old man laid one thin claw-hand on the casket, the bleached and taloned other on the young shoulder. “I hope that you will be here to stretch and straighten me in it at my ease when my repose comes, and I take my jade-like sleep in this matchless Longevity Wood. If so, or if not, remember always that you are Wu, my grandson, a master of men, the son and the father of good women, and a Chinese. You have always pleased me well. Now go.”

The boy prostrated himself and laid his forehead on the old man’s foot. The old man bent and blessed him. The child rose.

“Go!”

Without a word, without a look, Wu Li Chang went. And James Muir, waiting at the outer door, noticed that not once did the child look back—not when they came round the devil-protection screen, not when they passed the ancestral graves, not when they went beneath his great-grandmother’s memorial arch, not when they crested the hill—nowhere, not at all, not once. He folded his hands together in his long sleeves and went calmly, with his head held high and with a sick smile on his pale face. They were to sail from Hong Kong in a few days, but that was a small thing: this was his passing from China and from childhood.

And as they passed south, bearing east, the boy said little. He neither sulked nor grieved—or, if he grieved, he hid it well. But he wrapped himself in reticence as in a thick cloak.

His eyes went everywhere, but his face was expressionless and his lips motionless.

Villages, cities, gorges, lakes, hills, highways and by-ways, he regarded them all gravely, and made no comment. Even when they crossed the Yangtze-Kiang, he looked but showed no interest. And when at last Muir pointed into the distance, the boy just smiled a cold perfunctory smile, and bent his head slightly in courtesy; nor did he display a warmer interest when the exquisite island lay close before them.

The old rock that used to be the Chinese pirates’ stronghold and tall look-out, but on which England has now built Greater Britain’s loveliest holding—there is no lovelier spot on earth—sparkled in the hot sunlight. The bamboos quivered on the peak, the blue bay danced and laughed. The sampans pushed and crowded in the harbor, the rickshaws rolled and ran along the bund, Europe and Asia jostled each other on the streets and on the boats.

Muir stood on the ship’s white deck holding Wu Li Chang’s hand, and taking a long last look at the city of Victoria and at the old island it threatened to overspread, and in parts did, bulging out into and over the sea. His thoughts were long thoughts too. He had come to Hong Kong little more than a boy, academic honors thick upon him, but life all untasted. Few Europeans had seen China as he had, and almost he sickened to leave her. He was going home. In a month or two he would see his mother, who was very much to him. But China quickened and pulled at his heart. He knew that he would not forget China.

The boat slipped slowly off, backing like a courtier from the queenly place. And the man and the boy stood without a word and watched the unmatched panorama dim to nothingness. The small yellow hand lay cold and passive in the big, warm, white one. Presently Wu drew his palm gently from his friend’s, and turned quietly away and walked to the saloon stairs. Muir turned too, and watched the quaint, gorgeous figure as it went—so pitifully magnificent, so pathetically lonely—but did not follow. He understood that the boy wished to be alone. And he himself was glad to be alone just then.

Two hours later, when the dressing warning went, he found his charge in their cabin. Wu had no wish for dinner. He had been crying—almost for the first time in his life; the Chinese rarely weep—and besides, he was very sick. Muir dressed without speaking much, and when dinner was served mercifully left the boy to himself and his pillows.

Across China an old man in shabby robes left his rice untouched, and bowed long before the ancestral tablets of his race.

And that night in her sleep Wu Li Lu gave a little cry; she had cut a tooth.

CHAPTER VII
A Tortured Boyhood

ON the whole, young Wu enjoyed the voyage. He liked the way the foreign women eyed his clothes; not one of them had garments half so fine. He liked the motion of the boat when once he had mastered it. There were snatches of absorbing sightseeing at Colombo and at Malta. And in those days one had to change boats between Hong Kong and Southampton. He had much to think of when he chose to sit alone. He had Muir to talk with when he liked to talk. And the captain, on whose left hand he sat at table from Hong Kong to Colombo, was friendly without patronage and played a good game of chess.

And by some strength of will and childhood’s splendid resilience he had thrown off (or laid away) his heart-broken apathy with his sea-sickness. He enjoyed the voyage, on the whole.

When they landed at Southampton Wu thought that he had found Bedlam, and wondered, as he had not done before, why his grandfather had condemned him to such hideous exile. Everything he saw revolted him. He thought that nothing could be uglier. He was not even interested. The very novelty had no charm. His little gorge rose. Europe—seen so and so sounding—was a stench in his nostrils and rank offense to his eyes. He held up his heavy embroidered satin skirts and tucked them about him close, as a girl in Sunday-best might pick her way across the malodorous street slime in a low and squalid neighborhood.

It was late afternoon, and as they were not expected at their London destination until the next morning, Muir put up at the hotel of which Southampton was proudest. Wu was measurably accustomed to English food. The mandarin had seen to it. And on the liner the young Chinese, eating tit-bits and prime cuts from the joints at the captain’s table, had found them good. But this was English food with a difference. James Muir was not a selfish man—far from it—but he exulted, for the time at least, at being at home; and he ordered a truly British dinner in a burst of patriotism (not the less deep because its expression took such homely form), forgetting to consult the boy’s tastes, which he knew perfectly. They began with oxtail soup and finished with three kinds of inferior cheese and a brew of “small” coffee which was very small indeed. Wu thought it would have been an unkindness to the palate of a coolie. And in the big, strange bed he lay awake half the night, grieving for his old grandfather, and trying to make up his homesick little mind which was nastiest, apple tart or salt beef and carrots, and wondering why the gods let a people be who made and ate such salad. His tutor had taken two helpings, and had praised the abominable beef.

The train frightened him. The little (first class, reserved) box into which they were locked, appalled and then offended. Waterloo was purgatory. The hansom he liked. They drove to Portland Place, and Wu went up the steps with dignified eagerness. This he knew, was the Chinese Legation—the London yamên of a distant kinsman. This would be better—almost something of home. They expected him here. But it was not better; it was worse—a purgatory and a drab, dull one. Even James Muir was struck that the hall and the drawing-room had been subjected to unhappy furnishing. And instead of the friendly countryman that Wu had expected to greet him at the threshold, a sleek young English attaché, with oiled yellow hair and a lisp, came forward leisurely, saying, “Oh, it’s you. Hello then! Come on in.” A Chinese servant opened the door to them, but he scarcely seemed real to the disappointed lad, and there was nothing else in the least Chinese to be seen.

Why the Chinese Legation in London should have been furnished from the Tottenham Court Road passes respectful understanding; but it had. It was magnificently furnished. It had been done completely and with no stint by a famous firm. Probably that firm would have done the work less crudely if it had been left to its own well-experienced professional devices. But it by no means had. The youngest attaché—he of the fair, sleek locks—suffered from conscience. He suspected that he might never shine at international diplomacy, but he intended to do what he could to earn his “ripping” emolument. And among other self-imposed activities he had elected to direct the great house furnishers and decorators. The red and yellow, about equally proportioned, of the hall and the reception-rooms were not his own first favorites. A nice Cambridge blue with rose trimmings he’d have liked better for himself. But the Chinese Government was paying him, and he meant to play the game by that Imperial Body of an imperial people; and he played it by some hundreds of yards of red silk plush and bright marigold-yellow satin that he considered utterly Chinese. Wu thought it barbaric, demoniac. The Chinese Minister saw both the intended kindness and the joke, and enjoyed the joke very much indeed, laughing slyly and good-naturedly up his long, dove-colored crêpe sleeve.

The Minister was out, the attaché explained: had had to go—“to the F. O., don’t you know?”—Wu had no idea what “F. O.” meant—“sorry not to be here. Back soon,” and he ushered them up into the long, draped and padded barrack of a drawing-room, and said again, “Hello!” but added in a verbose burst, “I say, sit down.”

It was better when the Minister returned at last from the Foreign Office. And after lunch he took Wu into an inner room more like China, less like Hades. But until he died Wu hated the Chinese Legation at Portland Place. And he stayed there for five years. Then he went to Oxford.

London he never learned to like. There was no reason why he should. But he did learn to like the country places all over the kingdom’s two islands. For he and Muir traveled together at Christmas and at Easter and in the summer.

Muir had a British Museum appointment—it was waiting for him when they landed. But his hours and his duties were easy, and he still drew his larger income from the coffers of the mandarin in Sze-chuan, and he gave much of his time and labor to his old pupil. But for the Scot and a few of the Chinese at No. 49 the exiled boy might have gone mad, so shaken and cramped was he by homesickness. But they were an enormous help and refuge. He worked hard and learned prodigiously, as only a Chinese can learn. And, being Chinese, what he once learned he never in the least forgot.

Oxford he liked from the first. Always his soul ached for China, for her people (his people), her ways and her scenes: the smell of her, the sound of her, the heart and soul of her matching to his: the haze of her peaceful atmosphere, pricked by the music of her lutes, and throbbing with the mystic beat, beat of the tom-tom. He thought there were no flowers in Europe, no repose, no balance, no art, no friendship.

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.

The second trouble that came to him was on a grander scale than the cutting of hair or the enforced wearing of strange, uncomfortable garments. It was tragedy indeed, and almost broke his affectionate, homesick heart. When he had been in England about a year word came that his grandfather was dead.

Wu was desperate. And now he was quite alone. He belonged to no one in all the world. And in all the world no one belonged to him except a baby-girl just learning to walk across a floor of polished cherry-wood, nearly eight thousand miles away in old Pekin.

CHAPTER VIII
Some Balm

THERE was a great deal in the Oxford life that reminded Wu of China: the beauty and the dignity, the repose, the dedication (and of some the devotion too) to the finer things, and not less the riot of the “wines,” the crash and clash of the “rows,” the luxury and the elaborations. It was reminder that he found, and not resemblance. Oxford was intensely English. He liked it none the less for that. Nothing at Portland Place had annoyed him more than the mongrel mix-up of West and East, the fatuous attempt to blend the unblendable. It was neither English goose nor Chinese mongoose, and he loathed it. Oxford was good, downright English dog, and well pedigreed; he liked the bark and the bite of it and the honest look in its eyes.

The crass mistakes so often made by his rich countrymen at such places he avoided, partly by his own good sense and partly by Muir’s counsel and the dead mandarin’s command. He spent of his great income lavishly, but not too lavishly. He kept good horses, but not too good; and he kept no valet. His entertainment was generous, but nothing much out of the common, and never beyond the convenient return of the richer men. He made much pleasant and useful acquaintance, but no friends. He indulged himself a little in the furnishing of his rooms, but they scarcely smacked of China. His jade lamp had cost a great deal, but a young duke had one that had cost more. He had a little bronze and some lacquer, but he had no kakemonos and burned no incense. Quite a number of the other students had kakemonos by the half-dozen, and burned joss-sticks elaborately.

Wu worked prodigiously at Oxford and played industriously. He enjoyed the work. There were some brilliant men at Oxford then, but no mind better than his, and no industriousness to equal his. He took nothing much in honors—that was not in his grandfather’s scheme; but he assimilated an immense amount of alien fact and thought. He learned Englishmen. He read many books and mastered them. But he had been sent to Europe to study men and peoples, and he never forgot it or swerved from it for an hour. None of his fellow undergraduates particularly liked him, but few disliked him, and he interested many. Several of the dons and fellows did like him; with one he might have had intimacy if he had cared to, and from studying Wu two of the wisest reversed a lifelong estimate of China and the Chinese.

He excelled at all he did there. But almost always he was at pains to be surpassed at the last lap; and when now and then he won, he made it his inexorable rule to win by but a hair’s breadth.

Not all his fellow undergraduates treated him with entire courtesy. Some laughed at him openly at times and called him “Chops.” And because these presumably were gentlemen he was not so altogether indifferent to it as he had been to the gibes of the gamins on the London streets. He was young enough to wince at the criticisms of companions he was Chinese enough to despise.

He studied women too when he had the chance, but with all them his relations were impeccably ceremonial and on the surface. His being was in China still, and no English girl stirred his pulse or fogged his subtle shrewdness. James Muir, who watched over him faithful as a mother, had somewhat feared for him when the passing of adolescence into first raw manhood should come pounding at the door of sex. Muir knew that in that experience Englishmen in exile usually found some impulse toward vagary irresistible. But Wu lived on unruffled—alone in Europe, and content with loneliness.

He did not forget Li Lu, but he rarely thought of her now. No doubt she would do well enough when the time came to assert his ownership and desire sons. In the meantime, he was absorbed in carrying out to the minutest particle his grandfather’s behest.

There was a girl at a parsonage where he sometimes visited that he thought less uninteresting than the others he met, less like a horse or a tornado or a pudding, more like a girl. And Florence Grey made him shyly welcome at her tea-table and taught him to play croquet. She played a beautiful game, and in their second match he could have beaten her. He gave her father’s church a new organ, and made her first bazaar an unprecedented success: he half stocked the tables, and then saw that they were swiftly stripped. She knew of many of his “kind contributions,” though not of all his re-purchases—they were indirectly made, and Mrs. Muir in Scotland was not a little aghast at the frills and flummeries her son sent her in three big packing-cases. And the Vicar looked a little askance at the presence of a smirking heathen god, conspicuous, but not for being overdressed, on his daughter’s stall.

After the Oxford years came several years of travel, sometimes with Muir, sometimes not. One summer Wu was the Muirs’ guest in their simple Scottish home.

After her first sternly concealed qualm or two, the friend’s mother took an immense liking to the young Chinese, and her he liked at once, perhaps better than he had ever liked any one but his grandfather and her son. And it was in no way an attraction of opposites. Worth and courage recognized worth and courage, and felt at home with them. Ellen Muir and young Wu were both indomitable, naturally upright, proud, clannish. They had twenty qualities and several prejudices in common.

They talked together gravely for hours. He helped her often as she moved keenly about her housework, and Muir rocked with silent laughter at the sight, knowing that those delicate yellow hands had never performed anything menial before, and in all human probability never would again.

Wu watched his hostess with lynx eyes, and the more he watched the more be respected and admired. Late at night, in the hour he invariably spent alone, and had done so from his first coming to England—the hour in which he read and wrote and spoke and thought in Chinese, when in spirit, and bodily too, he made obeisance to his ancestors’ tablets across the world—he wrote down carefully much that she had said and that he had learned from her. Among his many sons the gods might send a daughter, and if they did she too should learn of Ellen Muir.

Wu knew, of course, that many of the English ladies he had seen at theaters and had met at aristocratic dinner-tables were respectable, above reproach. But he had never yet escaped a shudder of contempt when he had seen one “dressed” for evening. He had seen the coolie women, in the cocoon sheds on his grandfather’s silkworm farms, scantily clad in one brief garment, that by their own chilliness they might be warned if the room grew too cold for the delicate spinners, and that they might easily shelter the hatching worms beneath their breasts, but that semi-nudity was a necessity and had a use, and rarely was the privacy of the shed invaded; but women undressed (as he termed it) collectively, voluntarily, and interspersed among men, he thought abominable. Ellen Muir did not dine in décolletage.

The eminent scholar—for as such the scholar world now recognized Wu’s once tutor—she commanded, and even at times reprimanded, sharply, exacting and receiving the docile obedience of a tractable child. And that appealed to Wu as inevitably as did the high-necked stuff gowns. Mother ruled sons so in China. And in China sons showed their mothers just such meek obedience. The keeper of many of the most valuable treasures at the British Museum spilled marmalade on her best tablecloth one day, and she scolded him roundly, and Wu saw nothing funny in it, and would not, had he known that the son had bought the cloth and kept up the home.

The little house stood on one of the loveliest of Scotland’s hillsides. A brown burn rushed by the door. Great birds wheeled and whirred above the eaves. This woman almost worshiped the beauty of her homeland, and it touched her to see how much their strange guest saw and felt it. He saw even more of it than she did—though, fortunately for their mutual liking, she could not suspect that—and he felt it very much indeed. It reminded him of the country beside the Yangtze in the neighborhood of the Falls of Chung Shui.

One long vacation Wu and Muir climbed the Alps and the London papers reported Wu killed. But it was another Chinese, an undergraduate at Cambridge whose name was Ku, who had misstepped and slid down into the engulfing ice. But the mistake reached Oxford, and several there were sorry to hear it. And Florence Grey, who had been married the week before, heard it on her honeymoon, and felt a little saddened for a few moments. He had always seemed a nice boy, and he was so far from home.

Once he lived for three months in Tours, alone with the people and the language.

After Oxford he traveled carefully, as he had done everything so far, sometimes alone, sometimes with Muir, searching Europe for every experience that might serve his grandfather’s desire and plan.

When Wu was twenty-four he went home. James Muir had half expected to be asked to go also, but Wu did not suggest it.

His European phase was over, and he wished to be alone with his own people in his own land.

Bland and courteous to all, yet he spoke little on the long voyage, but sat looking out across the waters towards China. And he did not trouble to leave the boat either at Malta or at Colombo.

But he was not dreaming as he sat brooding, looking out to sea. He was planning, for himself and for his race.

There were international clouds ahead. Wu saw them.

A week in Hong Kong—he had much to do there—and then he pushed across the mainland that was still China, where feet of Europe rarely trod, and journeyed to his home.

When he had paid his long respects to the graves and the tablets, he set his house in order, and the estate. But indeed all had been well kept in his absence. It seemed as if the old mandarin’s spirit still brooded there and his adamant will still ruled.

To visit all he owned took Wu some months, though he went swiftly, by boat, by horse, and in chairs with which the coolies ran, for there were several wide estates and a score of smaller holdings.

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.

He determined to rule and to serve with and through the established tongs, and himself to establish others, because he saw clearly that so he could serve best, and with the surest, tightest grip.

While he waited for the girl to come with noise and cavalcade, he stayed at home and in the neighborhood of home; but every day odd messengers came and went, quiet, unobtrusive men. Often Wu was closeted for hours with some shabby-looking coolie, footsore and travel-torn. Wu was seeking and making affiliation with tong after tong. He was sowing seed all over vast China.

But he found time, or took it, to oversee every item of the bridal preparation. So lavish had been his orders on his first home-coming, and so well had they been obeyed, that further preparation might have been dispensed with—only a Chinese mind could have detected blemish or contrived improvement or addition. Wu’s mind was very Chinese. Thirteen years in banishment had not discolored it in the least. Everything that Lu would touch, every place that she would see, was in some way or detail given additional beauty or comfort. In her garden he lavished a wealth of care. The very flowers seemed to respond to his urging, as things much more inanimate than flowers do respond to such a master will as that of Wu. Wu Lu’s garden foamed and glowed with bud, perfume and flower, until even in China there could scarcely have been another spot so roseate or so full of rapture.

There was a pagoda of course, a bridge, a lotus lake, a sun-dial and a forest of tiny dwarf trees.

The pagoda had eleven storeys. Each storey’s projecting roof had eight corners, and from each corner Wu had hung a bell of precious blue porcelain, silver lined, silver clappered. The slightest breeze that came must set one or more of the delicate things a-ringing, and by a costly and ingenious device each motion of a bell threw down on the garden not only music, but sweet, aromatic smell—a different odor, as a different note, from each bell.

That was the last thing Wu could find to do.

And then they gave him his wife. They brought her to him through the gloaming one balmy autumn eve, sitting hidden in her flowery chair, carried through the paifang which he had regilded and newly crimsoned in her honor and in that of his never-to-be-forgotten great-grandmother.

She came in greatest state, and much of the glittering ceremonial they had enacted fourteen years ago they re-enacted now; and all that necessarily had been omitted before because of her tender days, and of the marriage having been (irregularly) celebrated at her home in lieu of his, was scrupulously performed now.

At the house door he bent and lifted her from her chair, which the bearers had put down on the ground. She shrank back on her cushions into the farthest corner when he drew the curtains aside, and when he reached to touch her she panted delicately like some frightened pigeon. He could not see her, even when he held her in his arms, for she was shrouded from crown to toe in her voluminous veil of crimson gauze. There had been no difficulty about her wearing it this time. She knew all the niceties of her important rôle, of which she had been so outrageously ignorant before, and performed them to a Chinese perfection. He saw only a red-wrapped bundle—it felt soft and tender to his gentle grip—with an under-gleam of jewels and gold, and the iridescent glitter of the strings of many-colored beads hanging from her crown thickly over her face. And no one else saw even that much, for when the chair had been laid at his feet the bearers and all her retinue and his had turned away and stood backs to the chair.

He carried her in, holding her over a dish of smoking charcoal at the threshold, that all ill-luck might be for ever fumed away from her.

In the great hall he sat her high up upon her chair of state and took his seat on his. For more than an hour they sat so, and neither spoke. But when the wild goose which the medicine-man flung from a lacquered cage circled about her head and not about his own, indicating that she would rule, not he, Wu laughed aloud, and under her red veil the girl looked down at her half-inch embroidered shoe and smiled well pleased.

They drank from one cup. The crimson cord was tied about her wrist and his, fastening them together now for weal or woe.

At length he rose and led her to the tablets of his ancestors—hers too now, for Li was no longer her father—and there they bent together and paid homage again and again.

Then came the marriage feast.

And through all the incense burned, the tom-toms bleated brazenly, a hundred instruments gave out their unchorded melodies, and the slave-girls shrilled Chinese love-songs in their sweet falsetto voices and a marriage hymn that is four thousand years old.

And all this time he had not seen her face, and she but dimly his.

But at last they were left alone. One by one the horde of people who had witnessed and served them made repeated obeisance and withdrew.

They were alone.

Gently, carefully, slowly he led her into an inner room, and there he lifted the red veil and looked at her face. After a long moment she raised her pretty almond eyes and looked in his—two gorgeous, bedizened figures, standing very still, with a cloud of red silk gauze heaped at their feet.

Wu made a sudden sound that was almost a sob, and held out his arms.

“My flower,” he said.

All night long the perfume of the flowers, the sweet, shrill voices of the sing-song girls, and the soundings of the guitar and the flutes stole softly in through the chamber casements; all night long they heard the throb, throb of the drums and of old barbaric love-songs; and all night long each felt the beating of the other’s heart.

After that Wu Li Lu forgot that she had had a father and a mother, brothers, girl-friends and a home in Pekin. And Wu let all the days slip by, forgetting business of his own, affairs of China, life-plans, life-schemes, almost forgetting his grandfather; scarcely remembering, his wife’s soft hand in his, to make obeisance before the old, old tablet in front of which their children would bow and worship them in far-off years to come, when he and Wu Lu should be dead.

For a year they lived in paradise, the pretty paradise that comes but once and does not come to all.

Mrs. Wu was as sweet, as delicate, as the graceful pet names he called her. She had no great strength of character, and little distinction of mind. How long it would have taken the infatuated man to learn this is impossible to guess. Whether, when learned, it would have diminished her fascination in the least is as difficult to determine, but, on the whole, probably not, Wu being Wu in China China.

When their first year closed in she bore him a daughter, and in bearing died.

CHAPTER X
Nang Ping

THE years passed, and Wu took no other wife. Time enough, he reasoned; and while he devoted himself, body and soul and seething, subtle intellect, to the big tasks he had set himself and had had set him by the old mandarin long ago, the bachelor habit grew upon him and encrusted him with its self-sufficient and not unselfish little customs, as it does so many men of Europe. Perhaps in this and in some other things Europe had marked and tinged him more than he knew.

Except for his wifelessness, he kept all such establishment as a Chinese gentleman should; there were flower-girls in his retinue and much in his life of which Ellen Muir would have disapproved violently.

He had felt no disappointment at the sex of his firstborn. Perhaps his grief (it was very great) at Wu Lu’s death made him indifferent to the great sex-blemish in the child. Or possibly his descent from Queen Yenfi and from a score of ladies little less able or less famed gave him an unconscious estimate of the woman-sex strangely un-Chinese—unless China be misreported.

Mrs. Li had petitioned for the custody of the babe, but Wu had refused sternly. “She is a Wu. She stays with Wu.” But he conceded a point—a minor point. A younger sister of Mrs. Li was widowed at about the time of Wu Lu’s death, widowed while still a bride and childless. She begged to come and be foster-mother and servant to the motherless babe; and Wu had consented to her coming, for a time at least, partly because he had known and liked her husband, partly in pity for her widowhood—the most uncomfortable condition in Chinese life, and abjectly deplorable when the indignity of childlessness is added—partly because he had no kinswoman of his own to fill a post which he instinctively hesitated to confer on any hireling. Sing Kung Yah came; Wu found her amiable and tractable, and, he thought, fairly efficient. Of her fondness for the child or the child’s fondness for her there could be no doubt, and her place in their household soon came to be one of established permanency. From the first Wu exacted for her treatment from his retainers such as Eastern widows rarely enjoy, and gradually he gave her some real authority, as well as much show of it, in addition to the lavish courtesy he paid and enforced for her. Sing Kung Yah was pathetically grateful. She never heard of Ellen Muir, and little thought that she owed her unprecedented ease of widowhood to the dignity and firm despotism with which an Aryan woman had worn her weeds in Fife.

When Nang Ping was three her father brought her to Kowloon, and when she was thirteen established her as mistress of the tiny and very charming estate he had bought and perfected there, just beyond the English holding, and where he made his home when his business lay, as it did more often than not, in Hong Kong.

He knew now that he should take no wife. He had no wish to, and he saw no necessity. For he could adopt a son—presently. There was time enough. A wife was neither here nor there, but certainly a son was indispensable. He could not die without a son. Without a son he could not be properly buried, or mourned and worshiped.

Upon the great wealth his grandfather had left him he piled wealth far greater. But far beyond the riches he amassed he amassed power and influence. The ramifications of his influence were endless and tortuous. Tze-Shi felt Wu’s influence as she decreed policies, signed edicts and enacted laws of tremendous reach, weaving and fraying out the destiny of China, and there was not a coolie in Hong Kong but felt and obeyed it. No one in China—unless it was Tze-Shi herself—wielded more power than Wu.

He held the Chinese in Shanghai, in Penang and in Rangoon, in Bentick Street and in Yokohoma, in the hollow of his hand.

Wu wore a mandarin’s button now. And he had presented himself at one of the great national examinations in the first year of his fatherhood. To be enrolled among the literati served him and his purposes, as it did to wear the coveted peacock feather. But he did not overvalue either of the showy distinctions, or often wear them conspicuously. Chinese to the core, superficially he was no little cosmopolitan. All that he had found good in English life and in English ways he adopted frankly, but always for a Chinese purpose, with a Chinese heart. At home he usually wore the dress and ate the food of his country, but not always. Out of his home, at least in the treaty ports, he was usually dressed as Englishmen dress, but not always.

Nang Ping had more apparent freedom than other Chinese girls of fair birth have; and some of it was real. She had English governesses from time to time. She spoke English almost as purely as her father did, but with less vocabulary and far less command of idiom, and French quite as well as he; she played Grieg and Chopin better than Hilda Gregory—the rich steamship magnate’s only daughter, and not a contemptible pianist—so the German music master who taught them both had told the Governor’s wife.

The Gregorys had been in Hong Kong for a year—the mother, the son and daughter, as well as Mr. Gregory himself. But the two girls had never met. Hilda Gregory went everywhere, but Nang Ping did not often leave Kowloon.

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.

Four girls tripped down the bridge, chattering and laughing as they came, and the gardeners took up basket and broom and moved away.

Hearing the singer (he had left the garden now), the girls rushed with one accord, and climbed and clambered up until they could peer at him over the wall. One poised like a fat balloon-shaped butterfly on the high edge of a great flower-pot, two jostled together tip-toe on a majolica bench, and one (the smallest footed of the lot) climbed squirrel-nimble up a tulip tree. They pelted him with flowers, tearing blossoms ruthlessly from shrub and vase and vine and tree, and each commanded him shrilly to sing to her her favorite song.

“Chong-chong er-ti” (professional singer), “sing on,” one cried; “Yao won chong” (let us play with him), another; and the girl in the tree tore the jasmine from her hair and tossed it into his hands.

He leaned against the wall and sang:

“Over green fields and meadows Tiny Rill ran

(The little precocious coquette!);

She was pretty, she knew, and thus early began

Gayly flirting with all that she met.

Her favors on both sides she’d gracefully shower;

One moment she’d kiss the sweet lips of a flower,

The next lave the root of a tree;”

and as he sang, Nang Ping, with Low Soong, her cousin, in her wake, came slowly from the house, and stood listening too, one finger on her lips, her eyes far on the fading hills.

They did not see their mistress—they were her play-girls, in attendance on rich Wu’s child—until the man had done and gone. But when they did they rushed to her, laughing and pelting her with speech. “Nang Ping! Nang Ping! Come, play with us! Come, play!” But she beat them off, saying, “Go away. I do not want you now. Go away.”

But they clustered the closer and girdled her with their arms, but again she shook them off, repeating impatiently, “Pa choopa, pa choopa;” and realizing that she meant it, they went, tumbling against each other as they ran laughing and singing, and turning as they went, and hurling flowers at her, and crying, “Pu yao choopa,” that they did not wish to go away.

When they had gone the cousins went to the pagoda, looked in it, and then about it, carefully. Then they beat the garden as some careful watchman might some treasure-place of price.

It was growing dusk.

The girls went together to the lotus basin, and stood a long time looking down into its darkling glass. But neither spoke. The brilliant lilies were softer-colored now, turning to pink and blue-greys, and the red few almost to ruddy black.

A long, low whistle pierced through the gloaming from beyond the wall.

Nang Ping’s tiny hand clutched excitedly at her sash. “Soetzo”—“go and watch over the bridge,” she told her cousin quickly. But Low Soong had already gone.

The blackbird whistle came again, nearer, but very soft.

Nang Ping answered it with a high falsetto crooning, and in a moment more a man cautiously parted the bamboos that grew clumped beyond the wall, vaulted it, and stood within the garden. Nang Ping ran to him with a little gurgling cry, and he caught her in his arms.

No Chinese lover this, in Oriental gala dress, with glancing amber eyes and coarse threads of strong red silk prolonging his long braid of straight hair, but a Saxon, wide gray-eyed, a distinct wave in his fair short hair, trim and British in his well-cut suit of white duck, with the crimson cummerbund wound about his waist.

He looked down with laughing tenderness at the picturesque little creature in his clasp, half-affectionate, half-amused, and she looked up at him with all a woman’s soul—soul aflame—and all a nation’s passion in her eyes, adoring and perfect trustfulness.

“Oh! my celestial little angel,” he murmured at her flushing cheek.

The girl nestled closely and sighed with content, and he held her, and played with the dangling jewel in her fantastic hair.

“You have been so cruel long, Basil,” the girl told him gently, but moving not at all.

Basil Gregory laughed lightly. “So? I could not come before. You’re an impatient puss.”

Nang Ping shook her sheeny head, and the red flower in her wonderfully dressed hair shook and quivered, and all the jade stick-pins and the hanging emeralds and turquoise jangled against the tassel of small pearls that she wore pendant from her comb. “No. I am never impatient. But the sun-dial tells not lies. You came not soon, and I did miss you hard.”

“Well, I’ve brought you news. Guess.”

“Thy honorable mother——”