ABIRD was singing rapturously in a honagko tree as Nang Ping rose from her knees. She stood awhile at her open casement—it had been flung wide all night—listening to the little feathered flutist, saying good-by to her garden. The pagoda gleamed like rose-stained snow in the rosy sunrise, and the girl smiled wanly, thinking how like a bride’s cake it looked—the high tapering towers, white-sugared and fantastic, that English brides have. She had seen several at a confectioner’s in Hong Kong, and she had seen an English bride cut one with her husband’s sword at a bridal in Pekin. It was far prettier, Nang had thought, than the little cakes, gray and heavy, that Chinese brides have, but not so nice to the taste—flat and dry. The lotus flowers were waking now, slowly opening their painted cups of carmine, white, rose and amethyst; the peacocks were preening to the day, the king-bird of them all flinging out his jewels to the sun, and the shabbily-garbed hens, in the red kissing of the sunrise refulgence, looking to wear breasts of rose. A lark swayed and tuned on the yellow tassel of a laburnum, and a bullfinch see-sawed and throated on the acacia tree. And every gorgeous tulip was a chalice filled with dew.
“Good-by,” the girl said gently, and turned away.
She still wore the rich festive robes of yesterday.She began to take them off, slowly, drawing strings from their knottings, slipping hooks from their silver eyes, pushing jewel-buttons out of their holes, letting the loosened garments fall one by one in a rainbow heap of silk upon the floor (as Wu, when a boy, had shed furs and gems upon a floor in Sze-chuan). Her women would find and fold them presently. But it mattered nothing. Nothing mattered now.
She still was wearing her nail-protectors, two on each hand—necessary adjuncts to the toilet and to the comfort of many Chinese ladies, whose long spiral nails would be a torture if unprotected. But it had been Wu’s pleasure to have Nang Ping taught the piano, and so, of course, she had to wear her nails short. But whenever she was “dressed” she wore the fantastic ornaments, to indicate that Wu’s daughter did not work. She discarded them now, and listlessly let them fall upon the silks heaped at her feet: two were of green jade (one finely carved, one studded with diamonds), one was silver set with rubies, the fourth was gold set with pearls and moonstones.
When all the finery—such finery as Europe never sees, except burlesqued on the stage—had been cast off, she began to re-dress herself, steadily and very carefully.
From the silver ewer she poured water into the silver basin. It needed both her hands and much of her strength to lift the ewer; it was heavy with the precious metal’s weight, and she had never lifted it before. In all her life she had never once dressed or undressed herself. When the attar and the sweet vinegars had creamed in the basin she bathed her face again and again until all the paint was gone. She only wore rouge and thick-crusted white paint on days of function and offestival. On days of homely ease and unceremonied home-keeping her skin was as clean and unprofaned as a baby’s.
It is a canon of Chinese womanhood never quite to undress unnecessarily. Modesty at her toilet, even when performing it alone, is enjoined the Manchu girl as it is the Catholic girl of Europe. And this Manchu niceness has permeated the other Chinese races. And in China a maid would be held not chary, but prodigal indeed, did “she unmask her beauty to the moon.” A land of several peoples sharply distinct in much, China is in much else the land of great racial amalgamation. And it is impossible to trace back to their source many of this wonderful people’s most salient qualities. Tartar has infected Mongol, Mongol inoculated Tartar, Taoist taught Mohammedan, Confucianism and Buddhism have mixed and fused, Teng-Shui tinged all, sometimes tainting and degrading, occasionally idealizing and lifting up to poetry. And modesty of body is simple instinct with Chinese girls of every blend and caste. Nor is it lost—as so many of youth’s sweetnesses always must be everywhere—in the gray slough of old age. Nowhere in China will you encounter the unique exhibitions of antique female nudity that occasionally startle one so extraordinarily in Japan. The old women of China, even the poorest, are always clad, and a Chinese girl slips from the screening of her smock into the screening of her bubbling bath without an instant’s flash of interim.
The early daylight showed Nang Ping very lovely, as she stood there in her one last garment. Chinese women of the mandarin class are often exquisitely lovely, especially those of mingled Manchu and Mongol bloods. Nang’s sorrow was too new to have bleared or blowsedher yet; it had but thrown a gracious, pathetic delicacy about her as a veil. And even the charming coloring of her was not impaired.
There is no greater beauty of coloring than the coloring of such girls—not in England, not in Spain. Nang Ping’s skin was no darker than the liquor of the finest Chinese tea, and not unlike it in hue, not green, not buff, but white, just hinting of each, and in her cheeks the delicate pink of a tea rose told how red the blood at her heart was, and how thin the patrician skin that masked and yet revealed it. The little figure, tall for a Chinese, was tenderly drawn and perfectly proportioned; the young presence, for all its gentleness, was queenly; the firmly modeled head was well set on the straight shoulders. Hair could not be blacker or arched jet brows more beautifully drawn. The girl’s mobile mouth was large, but exquisitely shaped, and her red lips parted and closed over teeth that could not have been whiter, more faultless or more prettily set. There was a dimple in the obstinate chin, and one beneath the tiny mole on her right cheek; and her black, velvet eyes (soft now, and almost purple with unshed tears) were as straight set in the small head as the eyes of any Venus in Vatican or Louvre.
She stood a moment, gazing into space, clad only in her delicate smock, and then slowly she redressed herself in her simplest robes—soft, loose and gray. She had many such gowns, and wore them often. The Chinese are too greatly, too finely artist to let the gorgeousness in which they gloat degenerate by over-use into a commonplace. The blare of their brazen music has its long reliefs of slow, soft minor passages; their gayest gardens have prominent heaps of dull, barren stone, long stretches of cold, gray walls; each sumptuous room has its empty,restful corner. Nang Ping had fifty pictures of great price, and more ivories, each a gem, but all the pictures save one, all the ivories save one, were stowed away always, and just one at a time placed where it might joy her sight; and most often she moved softly about her home habited in plain raiment of neutral tints as gentle as a dove’s.
Her hair took her longest. She had never brushed it before, and the unguent took time to remove. But at last even that was done, the jeweled pins heaped away, the long black strands braided about her head.
And then she sat down on the floor again, her cold, ringless hands clasped at her knees, and waited and listened until her father’s gong should strike.
She knew that she should hear it presently.
Once she started, and caught up from the floor a little scented bead. She held it to her face, and then laid it away in her bosom. It was her father’s, one of a string he often wore, and in her bitter misery she was pathetically a little happier for the proof it gave her that his own hands had carried her here. She would keep it in her bosom always—while she lived.
Twice servants came in with trays of food and drink; blanc-mange, soup, tea and wine. They made deep obeisance to her when they came and when they went. But she did not speak to them, nor they to her.
And no message came until the message of the great gong’s soft boom.