The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSun and moonThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Sun and moonAuthor: Vincent H. GowenRelease date: April 3, 2024 [eBook #73324]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927Credits: Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUN AND MOON ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Sun and moonAuthor: Vincent H. GowenRelease date: April 3, 2024 [eBook #73324]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927Credits: Al Haines
Title: Sun and moon
Author: Vincent H. Gowen
Author: Vincent H. Gowen
Release date: April 3, 2024 [eBook #73324]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUN AND MOON ***
Title page
by
VINCENT H. GOWEN
BOSTONLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY1927
Copyright, 1927,BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANYAll rights reservedPublished May, 1927
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PUBLICATIONSARE PUBLISHED BYLITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANYIN ASSOCIATION WITHTHE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To the T'u-Lung Shan Messand in memory of A. S. B. and a groupthat never can be gathered again
SUN AND MOON
The clear sun of July shone through the garden foliage, making circles of light on the grass wherever the inter-woven branches of the locusts allowed its passage. Summer rains had washed the air of all dustiness, swept the flags of the courtyards neat and clean, given new life to the climbing trumpet flowers and a mossy springiness to the path round the overflowing pool, into the waters of which the strong confident sunbeams seemed to plunge deeper than they had ever before dared dive, and to stay, joyfully exploring the green underdepths which matched the opulent color of the garden. For the garden too promised joyful exploring. One had to pass through courtyard after courtyard, through many large-timbered doors swinging on wooden axles and through each hallway of the Chinese house, sprawled out in section upon section, before entering this remote spot where the walls of gray tile shut out the city so completely and gave the impression of such space hidden in what really was quite small compass.
Here, like a hundred other wealthy families in their own unseen gardens, the household were able to enjoy rest from the urgent life of Peking yet never stray beyond the gates of the Tatar city. There was a sheltered pavilion in which to sip hot tea, a zigzag bridge of wood crossing the pool at its narrowest, shady nooks to suit the lazy reflective moods of the angler, best of all—if there were children—a labyrinth of stones, all heaped into grotesque mountains, through which the child, his imagination nimbly excited, could follow the circuitous path, absorbing the landscape of miniature lakes and tiny waterfalls and diminutive pagodas, and descend into the darkness of dripping grottoes as if he were the hero of them all.
Children there were; from behind a round moon gate came the clamor of their voices. But one stopped, astonished at the sight, for they were not the sedate children, the long-gowned boys and gracefully clad girls, one expected in so meditative a garden. They were not the offspring of Ming scrolls, as they should have been, transferred into life itself from the leisurely brush-strokes of old paintings, but strange barbarians, violent in their play, electric in the energy with which they defied the sun and its heat.
The moon gate opened on a place apart, a place of shrubs and formal pathways, but with two large pine trees, gnarled and misshapen as though they had outgrown human efforts to distort their branches, and with bamboo brake on all sides springing up in untidy profusion, yet with the mystery of its deep shadows making the walls seem more distant than they were.
In one of the middle branches of a pine tree sat a girl, swinging her feet mischievously as she dropped cones on the boy who lay at full length on the ground below. Whether he was trying to read or to write or even to sleep was not quite apparent, for, though he lay amid a litter of books and paper, with a stick of ink precariously balanced on the edge of an ink-stone and an unsheathed brush close to his elbow, his one endeavor was to defend himself with as little motion as possible from the bombardment above. This he did chiefly by agile wriggling, seeming to anticipate the course of each projectile by some sixth sense that spared him the trouble of looking up and, when a well-aimed cone struck his neck or his feet, strengthening his defense by racy Chinese abuse.
Yet it was not the sportiveness of the children which was so astonishing as their scantily free clothing and the fact, at once remarkable, that they were not Chinese children at all. The girl was easily fourteen or fifteen, but she swung on her bough with the unabashed grace of a tomboy. Her few garments suggested a creature that had grown up wild and untrammeled, for they were quite out of keeping with the delicate restraint of the garden or with the decorous attire the Chinese prescribe for their women. She wore only a loose gauze vest and a pair of white drawers fastened at her waist by a scarf of red silk. Her slippers had been flung off at the foot of the tree. Except for the heavy braid of hair tossed over her shoulders and the rounded curve of her breasts this strange maid might have been mistaken in her straight coolness for a boy in disarray. But the abiding memory of her, after even a moment's glimpse, was that she was not Chinese; the abiding memory was of arms and legs too white for the Chinese skin, even for the creamy ivory hue of the aristocrat, of a body longer, more fully built, feet more amply turned, of cheeks livelier flushed than the face of the ruddiest Chinese maiden, for the blood was not softened by that darker tinge of the complexion which makes one think of youth's picture painted on old silk. It was a miracle that under so ardent a sun the girl should have kept this spring-like clarity of skin. Unless in the deep color of her hair and her eyes she seemed to make no concession to the tropical warmth of July but to belong to forests where cold streams from the mountains pass amid trees.
Her brother was equally foreign to the baked sandy plains of Peking. He was possibly thirteen, with dark hair and dark eyes like the girl on the branch above him and with the same inviolable fairness of skin. He had reduced the encumbrance of garb to its limits and lay contentedly naked except for cotton trousers which he had rolled half-way up his thighs. So intent was he in countering pine cones with wordy retorts that he let a whole column of ants explore his shoulders unresented till suddenly his patience broke; he leaped to his feet, as swift as any untamed animal, and scrambled up the tree to grapple with his tormentor. The girl was too quick even for him and escaped from limb to limb, taunting him with her bare feet for his impudence in hoping to seize her.
The boy broke into English, most alarming English, violent curses such as foreigners in China use to loose their wrath on servants who luckily cannot understand, mixed with phrases he could have learned only in books—he showed at once that he had not acquired the tongue from playmates of his own age but was speaking it from the need to say something portentously terrible, something which to his youthful consciousness would answer the purposes of blasphemy.
"You filthy devil, Nancy," he shouted, "I will strike you dead! I will cause you to fall!"
Nancy answered him by peals of laughter. She stood poised with tantalizing ease, her hands held up to the branch above her, and swayed back and forth without fear of her brother's threats. She exposed to derision the bookish mould of his words.
"Oh, you naughty boy, Edward, you will cause me to fall, will you?"
Before the boy could move out upon her precarious platform, she had let go her hold, doubled her knees, and shot from bough to bough down the tree like a white cascade or like snow shaken free from overladen branches.
Edward, seeing his enemy had escaped, was satisfied in his turn to pelt her with cones and was vigorously at battle when a third child, even younger, emerged from the bamboo and protested at the noise of their quarreling. This child, a girl, was decidedly different from the others. She had Chinese complexion, Chinese features; she was dressed in the hot-weather négligé which girls of her age could wear in the privacy of the home, long loose trousers, stockings, slippers, an apron, cut so that it covered the front of her body and held in place by strings round her back and her neck. When she came up to Nancy, however, and stood beside the taller girl, there was immediately apparent a resemblance between the two children, a resemblance baffling to decipher, for, even when allowance was made for four years' disparity in age, no one could say it consisted definitely in eyes or mouth or even in the slightly un-Chinese prominence of the nose, yet the resemblance was latently noticeable and was a likeness which included the boy as well. This second girl, then, gave some clue to the history of these strange children; she was certainly their half sister, and it took no great powers of deduction to surmise European parents for them, the same father and a Chinese mother for herself. Exactly this was the case.
Timothy Edward Oliver Herrick had been the subject of Peking scandal twelve years before. He had, to the shocked astonishment of his friends, "gone Chinese," which was another proof, to those who hated the drudgery of turning the pages of Giles's heavy dictionary, that too much study of Chinese makes men mad. He had come to China at the early age of twenty—that was thirty years back—and risen quickly from post to post in the Imperial Customs, passing his examinations brilliantly, learning much in all the ports of the Middle Kingdom, charming society out of its stiffness by his wit and tact, penetrating the aloofness of the mandarin, winning distinction in diplomacy and sport, orders, badges, medals, cups, a whole roomful of trophies, and marrying a girl fresh from her schooling in England, the daughter of a consul and undeniably the loveliest, in a decade, of those damsels who return to enjoy a brief season with exiled parents in the East. So for four years they had lived, favored by wealth, honor, love, the ingredients of a fairy tale, till on a sudden Nancy Herrick died,—cholera that year struck down even those in high places,—while her husband retired into a seclusion he never again broke.
In appalled whispers it was mooted through Peking that Timothy Herrick, with his two children, had taken house in an obscure hutung of the Tatar city and that the beautiful Nancy Herrick had been followed not by one Chinese wife only but by several.
Gossip, for once, was true to the facts, probably because society could think of no exaggeration more dreadful than the truth. At the back of twisting lanes, behind bright blue doors studded with brass, Timothy Herrick had created a new world of his own in the spacious security of a Chinese house and there with his wife and his concubines he lived the life of a mandarin. He had discarded Western clothes, Western ways, discarded his British nationality, taken to a moderate use of opium, and now passed his time between an erudite searching of the Buddhist scriptures and the composition of severely classical poems.
Yet this placid consolation for sorrow, this refinement of the patriarchal life which has stood the Chinese race so well for centuries, had one or two irritants. The first, seemingly small yet vexing, was Herrick's chagrin at his failure to grow a queue or, rather, at the futility of a brown queue in a land of black-haired people. He remembered the ridiculous figure of a missionary who had tried this, and knew that while his own florid face, with its heavy eyebrows and moustaches, bobbed up oddly from the collar of his lavender jacket, it would look none the less incongruous if his square forehead were shaved and the back of his head ornamented by a dwindling tail. The Revolution, however hateful its other changes, did at least solve this problem of how to be completely Chinese by making the queue unfashionable.
The second irritant was of another kind and quite another degree; it grew in seriousness with the passage of years and vexed the quiet of his sleep. It was the fate of Nancy and Edward, the two children of his first marriage. For his other children, he did not worry; there were several of them, from Li-an, a girl of eleven, down to an infant son still being bumped in his cradle, but they were all more Chinese than foreign and with the help of generous betrothal gifts could be assimilated by the country of their birth. Nancy and Edward were different. Although they never knowingly had seen, apart from their father, another member of their own race and in twelve years had left their compound only on the rarest occasion and then in a covered mule cart to visit the Western Hills, there was no disguising their foreign blood.
It had seemed easy, when they were babies, to mould them to their environment by education and custom and speech, but there was a stubbornness inherent in their nature which had resisted the Orient and kept the girl and the boy exotic. They had lost claim to any country and grown up disinherited by West and East alike. The father saw this more and more plainly and regretted his selfishness in keeping them when it would have been so easy to send them to his kinsfolk at home. At the time of his first wife's death he could not bear to part with them. They were the only relic of a woman he had loved so well that his whole after life had become a slow descent, because his heart told him the hopelessness of living again on the plane he had reached with her.
He had deliberately turned away from that life because it was ended, cut short, impossible of being renewed. He had chosen in preference a life which would ask no comparison with the past; the tale of his success was being revealed in the relaxing lines of his mouth, the sensual fullness of his chin, a hardening of the eyes. The more serenely burned the memory of his wife,—the years never changing the austerity of her beauty, something perfect like the imperishable beauty of jade,—the more contemptuous did he grow in his thoughts of women, as if to mark her apartness, and give rein to the amorous cruelty of a tyrant. One by one the children had seen the household increase as some new young girl was bought to satisfy the whims of their father, and one by one they had seen these favorites, after serving their time as mistress and mother, relegated to the women's quarters, which were daily becoming more expensive a luxury.
But Herrick remained uncomfortable amid it all. He could not be morally at ease while these two wide-eyed strangers from the West reminded him of his troublesome duty. They were holding him back from that complete immersion in the indolent life he had chosen. He could not swallow the opiate of peace. Their faces seemed to reproach him for neglect; they were uncomfortably knowing. He imagined them talking between themselves in the candid youthful way which appraises too exactly the faults of parents. Theirs had been a curious education because Herrick had made it plain from the first that they were not to be interfered with by the Chinese women of his household.
Trouble had begun after Li-an was born, the stepmother, with a child of her own to advance, having tried to cow these children of an alien mother by petty acts of jealousy, which it was fortunate for Nancy and Edward they had the championship of their old nurse to resist. This nurse had been with them all their lives, and, by fighting tooth and nail each effort to reduce their position, had won for them a freedom from the quarrels and intrigues of the family. As Li-an soon had other rivals to dispute her inheritance, her mother had trouble enough in wielding her sway over the rank of inferior wives and was content to let the foreign girl and boy go their way alone. So they were in the family but not of it, intimately subject to the direction of only one person, the old amah, who humored and spoiled them, telling them always that they were superior beings and secretly undoing their father's attempt to make them Chinese.
Herrick's desire was one the amah hotly resented. She had the peculiar loyalty of an old servant and, remembering Nancy's mother with an affection close to worship, looked with contempt on the women who had followed. They were trash. She was not going to let Herrick's aberrations of passion ruin the hopes of her foster children. With the servile fidelity of a dog she had attached herself to creatures of an alien race, had wrapped her interests in theirs, till her one wish was to see Miss Nancy and Master Edward restored to their own people, where their station, she was sure, would be almost royal. So she fed them with marvelous tales of the West; of its greatness; tales of their own importance. She waited on their moods like a slave and produced in them a bearing of haughty independence which they never quite laid aside, even when they mixed in play with their half brothers and half sisters or took their part chattily in the gossip of the inner courts.
Their formal education, for a long time, had been only in Chinese, the old classical education to which Herrick was partial. They had learned to recite the Four Books and much of the Five Classics and had passed through the obsolete training of Chinese youth, from the redundant exercises laid like a yoke upon children—the Tri-metrical Classic, the Thousand Character Classic—to the pleasanter fields of T'ang poetry, which their teacher explained to them with unusual interest and skill, so that Nancy and Edward often amused themselves patterning upon the hero and heroines of theRed Balconyin contests for writing verse of their own. They wrote well. They spent hours over characters and could fill a scroll with swift symmetrical strokes. They could draw and paint landscapes which they had never seen, landscapes of mountain and valley, temple and trees, delicately colored after the unwavering tradition of the past. This, except for the few novels their teacher approved,The Three Kingdoms,The Dream of the Red Balcony, andTravels in the West, and the many which he did not approve, novels they begged secretly from the women of the household and which related with utmost frankness every physical detail of intercourse between the sexes,—though the talk they had listened to all their lives left them little need to be enlightened further,—this promised to be the whole of their education till their father began, in a hesitating way, to teach them English.
Timothy Herrick had not intended such instruction. It marked the first timid thought of surrender, a breach in the logic of their training. But Nancy at ten so disquieted him that he could not rest till he had made some amends for depriving her these many years of the birthright of her native speech. If his plans did fail,—he would not admit that they could,—if she and her brother did resist their absorption into Chinese life, he could give them this means of saving themselves. It was the least he could do, but it meant the possibility of sending them to England, should the need come, where among the uncles and cousins and aunts, to whom he had written not a word in a decade, there were certainly some who could take his children in charge.
He taught them, however, with discretion, always reminding them that English was a foreign tongue. So Nancy and Edward, though they learned to speak with a considerable if bookish fluency, looked upon English very much as an English schoolboy looks upon Latin, as a speech dealing with far-off times and manners. They liked to use it between themselves from the sheer mischievous pleasure of mystifying the other children of the compound; there was the spiteful relish of abusing to their faces people who were not a word the wiser. Then again it was a bond with their father, of whom they grew measurably fonder now that he and they constituted a little aristocracy to which no others had access. Herrick himself soon realized this and liked it less; it was another subtle influence helping to tear him asunder. But when once the habit of daily lessons was formed he could not give up the grave companionship of these two children, who, fight the thought as he would, came closer to his heart than all the tumbling black-haired brats of the compound.
Yet the first thoughts of the girl and the boy were always Chinese. Their background was the Confucian background of their long-nailed teacher, though there were side paths of course into Buddhist and Taoist lore, things they learned from the women or from the nuns who came to collect alms. Of Western history and life, of wars and political changes, they knew scarcely more than the Chihli farmer ploughing his sandy fields or the Mongolian camel-driver leading his tinkling caravan on the night road to Peking. What they heard, except from the few colorless English books they were allowed, was the chatter and gossip of the courts. Newspapers did not come into the women's quarters; these were kept in that sombre room, their father's study, where they dared go only when invited. So they felt themselves better than the Chinese they mingled with, but no kin to the prodigious people of the West.
This was both more and less than Timothy Herrick had planned.
The bell rang for tiffin. The servants were very punctilious about this bell. The custom of ringing it, imported by the amah for the seemly benefit of her two children, had become a family rite and the subject of much pride to the women, who boasted to the families round about that they were always called to meals by this stately summons. Such was Nancy's and Edward's deference to the custom that they rushed immediately to their rooms, Li-an only a step behind them, and had soon appeared, clad in trousers and jacket, to do honor, as their nurse had taught them, to the formality of the noonday meal.
Herrick of course did not eat with them. The condescension was not expected. But the size of his family was amply demonstrated by the women and children who had gathered round the square tables in the room which was referred to rather proudly as the dining-room, although dining was only one of its dozen functions. Nancy and Edward sat at one table with their half sister Li-an and her mother, the woman who as Herrick's wife held the right of first place in the household.
Hai t'ai-t'ai, as she was called, was not an old woman; she had been less than twenty when her father, Herrick's teacher for many years, a man harassed by a shoal of impecunious relations, saw profit to his family and the strengthening of a curious attachment in marrying his daughter to this wealthy Commissioner of Customs. But responsibilities had aged her appearance till she seemed nearer fifty than thirty,—responsibilities and much good eating,—so that she was now a stout matronly person with the wooden masklike face which goes with dignity. On her shoulders fell the management of the establishment, the settlement of the many disputes which were bound to arise where wives and maids and menservants and children of several breeds were so inextricably mixed.
On the whole, she was equal to her place. She maintained her rule with considerable strictness, controlled expenditure thriftily enough to lay aside means of her own, saw that Li-an, if she could not lord it over Nancy and Edward, could at least lord it over the inferior brothers and sisters that had followed. She would not have exchanged the privileges of power for the less substantial marks of favor which fell to the lot of the younger wives. From only one person could she claim no obedience; that was the nurse. But Hai t'ai-t'ai, in the happy old Chinese manner of compromise, tacitly recognized the care of the two white children as a matter outside her province, accepting them as though they were ambassadors with treaty rights in her kingdom.
Between the two other tables the four concubines and their families were divided. To the casual observer they seemed an amiable, good-tempered group, knit together into a queer democracy, democracy based upon a man's more volatile affections, yet there was not a person among them who did not have her own pretensions and rights, so that the family, if all secrets could be told, was the most carefully graded of principalities. Since all of them, like the t'ai-t'ai herself, had been chosen because they satisfied Herrick's fastidious notions of beauty, all were young, all were vivacious and handsome. It was not fading of feature but cares of motherhood that had caused each in turn to be supplanted, although none of them could claim her master's love to the exclusion of the others.
As secondary wives, they lacked of course the rank of the t'ai-t'ai; they also lacked her gentility. But they were not deterred by the fact of inferior station from grumbling over her control and imagining ways of replacing her in the management of the family. The oldest of these concubines felt particularly aggrieved because she had borne her master two sons and by Chinese custom should have stepped definitely ahead of a wife who had borne but one miserable daughter. She felt her injury more deeply as the years passed; the delights of the table, from which she could not hold herself back, were visibly altering the daintiness of her figure and she deemed it only fair, only the natural course, that she should regain through her sons the influence her body was resigning.
Of the other three, two had been mothers once and had the prospect of soon being mothers again, while the last was a young slave girl of seventeen who had been exalted to the rank of mistress by the recent whim of her master. The two mothers were pretty, ordinary women, very much wrapped in their children and busier ramming chopsticks into those sticky mouths than in filling their own. They accepted the lead of the first concubine, aligning themselves with her complaints, but they were always properly docile in the presence of the t'ai-t'ai and, if left alone, would have found business enough in the care of their children.
But the newest concubine, the reigning favorite in Timothy Herrick's affections, was an animated contrast to the three who had preceded her. While they were handsome, she was brilliantly beautiful, an exquisite figure and face, with creamy skin, glowing eyes, lips which needed no scarlet paint to accentuate their color, heavy black hair that shone by an iridescence of its own to which the oil of elder bark could have added nothing. She was the only one of his wives with whom Herrick had become definitely infatuated. Such was his delight in her company that for days she did not appear at meals with the other women or enter their apartments, but shared the board as well as the bed of her master. In consequence she was so bitterly disliked that any of her three predecessors gladly would have thrust a knife into her breast or marred her body by slow torture.
It was a further cause for quarrel with the t'ai-t'ai that this wanton creature had been taken particularly under her protection. Indeed, she was accused of having brought about Kuei-lien's advancement. Most of the slave girls were coarse drudges, soon polluted by the sluttery of their living quarters. Kuei-lien not only had been bought at the instance of the t'ai-t'ai but made the subject of partial treatment, spared the harder tasks, given better clothes, and defended from the familiarity of the menservants. So there was reason to perceive more design than accident in Herrick's discovery of the girl and his command that she be divested of her humble attire, bathed, dressed in costly silks, and brought like a queen to his chamber.
The relationship of Nancy and Edward to the four mistresses of their father was most informal. They were not shocked by the function of these women because they had never been taught to be shocked. It was an ordinance of nature that a man should have as many wives as he could afford, a sign that all was well with the business investments from which Herrick drew his income. The boy and girl moved quite freely through the house and were on amiably chatty terms with its inhabitants. They played with the children, most of course with Li-an, who had been longer their playmate and was a fair partner in their quarrels and their peacemakings; they fell out now with one group, now with another, but most often with each other, so that no one grieved long over these usual bickerings of children. In the jealousies of the household they had not been involved. The women had treated them with advised caution, preferring not to complicate their intrigues by introducing a new and unstable ingredient. They did not understand the two foreign children, and so treated them with a careful friendliness such as committed themselves neither to enmity nor to love.
But Kuei-lien had disdained these wary tactics. She had set herself quite openly to win Nancy's affection and of course had met no reverse, since the charm which had won the father was easily adaptable to winning the daughter. Nancy even had asked the t'ai-t'ai to put Kuei-lien at the table with them, but this slight upon the others Hai t'ai-t'ai and the amah both agreed was not politic. Still there was nothing to prevent Kuei-lien's spending much time in Nancy's room, which the others never entered of their own accord, where talk, replete with zest and flavor, helped the intimacy to grow.
The championship of the amah had won her charges more seclusion than the others enjoyed. The house, like all Chinese houses, was of many sections, divided by courtyards, and, like the houses of the North, it was substantially built. Occupants and servants and even the dogs moved with no thought of privacy through its rooms and hallways, that is, through all except the portion allotted to Nancy and Edward. Now that the brother and sister had grown too old to live together, they had been given the choicest part of the house and the innermost, where they lived, virtually isolated, between the garden and the last of the courts, with the t'ai-t'ai and their amah for the only immediate neighbors.
They could have asked no place more charming. Their rooms were to left and right of the hallway; which was continued in a straight line through every section of the house so that if all the heavy middle doors had been opened the garden could have been seen from the street as at the end of a long tunnel. Their doors and windows faced the courtyard and this was a very pleasant place. Locust trees towered on either side; from their lowest branches hung cages in which canaries sang and starlings raucously mimicked human speech. Into the pavement two small pools had been built, where goldfish flashed their tails as they swam to and fro round islands of porous rock on which tiny houses and temples and bridges and figures of men and women, in fascinating diversity of posture, had been set to give lifelikeness to the mossy crags. There were flower beds too, multicolored in their profusion of zinnia and canna and marigold, while a vine with diminutive scarlet blossoms climbed the bamboo scaffolding, across which matting was rolled to break the glare of the sun.
Here Nancy and Edward enjoyed very comfortable quiet. Except when servants went through to wash clothes in the pond, they were seldom disturbed; the concubines preferred the liveliness of their own courtyard and rarely went walking in the garden till the afternoon sun had gone down. All day long, after the clothes had been beaten dry on flat stones and the thumping of wooden paddles had ceased, the children heard only the songs of their birds and the agreeably shrill noise of the cicada.
Since her preferment, however, the slave girl Kuei-lien had become a visitor to Nancy's room and at any hour of the day, when the children were not shouting their lessons from the adjacent schoolroom, might lift the screen of Nancy's door and enter. The afternoon was the time she liked best to come, when the shady coolness of Nancy's room was a refuge from the child-infested chambers of her own quarter.
It was a simple room but spacious, divided into two parts by a screen of carved wood in which was an octagonal opening, quaintly shaped, to allow passage from Nancy's bedchamber to what in effect was her parlor. The furniture was not sumptuous; the carpets had been removed at the beginning of summer and the stone floor covered with matting. There were the usual stiff-backed wooden chairs and one or two reclining ones of wicker, narrow tables on which stood gaudy vases, cheap and disagreeably shaped. The walls were decorated with Nancy's own efforts at painting. In the bedchamber were boxes of white pigskin where the girl stored her clothes. The bed itself was a large varnished affair inlaid with different woods. Four posts held up the muslin mosquito curtain. Nancy, never having known steel springs or horsehair mattresses, was quite content with the wicker network over which she had spread a thin cotton pad, leaving the heavier quilts and the mat, which was the coolest to sleep upon in sultry weather, rolled to one side of the bed.
It was here Kuei-lien usually found the girl lying, comfortably divested of the outer garments she donned only for meals and classes, her head raised upon a bamboo pillow and her hand slowly fanning the knees she had drawn up in front of her. Kuei-lien herself would slip off trousers and jacket and lie on the bed beside her or squat cross-legged on a large low stool and share with Nancy the cigarettes which helped their confidences. And Edward, if he were bored or too lazy to sleep, made a third and teased the girls with pleasant sedateness proper to a hot afternoon.
Their talk was sophisticated. Nancy was curious about the forbidden topic of marriage, eager to gain all the knowledge she could from the experience of her father's mistress. To Chinese girls of her age marriage loomed on the horizon, so that it was little wonder she exercised much ingenious fancy in pondering who her husband was to be.
"Oh, you will marry an Englishman," said Kuei-lien.
"But I have never seen an Englishman."
"Your father is an Englishman."
"Pooh, my father is too old!" Such was Nancy's respect for Kuei-lien's superior acquaintance with life that she never thought of the concubine as only two years older than herself, nor that what her words suggested in her own case must also be true in Kuei-lien's. And there was the further difference that a concubine is not a wife; for a man of fifty to take a concubine of seventeen was only reasonable; to take a wife of seventeen would have been extraordinary. Nancy could not have imagined a man living unmarried to the ripe age of fifty.
"My father is too old. What does a young Englishman look like? Have you ever seen one?"
"Of course, I've seen many," replied Kuei-lien, ignoring, if she was aware of it, Nancy's defect of tact. "There are many young Englishmen in Peking. They have yellow hair and red faces and big teeth and big moustaches like your father's—"
"The young ones?"
"Yes, the young ones. I think they are born with moustaches. They wear short coats, and look very hot, and always say 'goddam' to their friends."
The picture was too repulsive.
"I won't marry an Englishman," said Nancy.
"Then what will you marry?" put in Edward.
"I want to marry the Emperor," answered the girl in a sudden burst of fancy.
Because her auditors both laughed, Nancy obstinately defended the absurd notion.
"When the Emperor sends to choose a wife, I shall go to the palace, and then he will command me to be his Empress, and I shall make Edward a governor."
"But he can't do that any more. We have a republic now. And, besides, you are not a Manchu. You are not even Chinese; you are only English."
"That's all the better," said Nancy, "because if the Emperor has an English Empress then all the English will belong to him and he can use their guns to drive out these republican barbarians."
Nancy's extravagant words had soon been repeated through the household where they excited great merriment. The women giggled at her temerity and nicknamed the girl privately, calling her "Mock-Empress," a name of which Nancy did not become aware till by her haughty mood she provoked it from the lips of Li-an.
"You are nothing but a half-naked barbarian, you mock-empress," exclaimed the half sister in anger. "Do you expect me to knock my head on the ground to you?"
Then the hair flew. Nancy, her wrath swiftly wakened, pounced on the younger girl.
"Yes, you shall knock your head," she cried. With her strong arms she bent Li-an to the earth.
"Knock, knock, knock," she shouted as she thumped the head of her victim against the ground. "Now you will see if I am a mock-empress or not."
Edward intervened and Li-an fled screaming to her mother, in whom the attack awakened all the old jealousy of these children who carried themselves superior to her own daughter. The t'ai-t'ai went to see Herrick about the affair.
"Nancy is growing up and getting silly notions," she told him. "Why don't you send her back to her own people? A girl as big as she is should be engaged. No one here can control her."
Herrick listened in annoyance.
"What do you know about these things?" he asked testily. "Don't I know what is best for my own daughter? You take children's quarrels too seriously. English girls never marry so young. You look after the behavior of your own child and we shan't have these disturbances."
The t'ai-t'ai took the rebuke in silence. But she knew as certainly as though he had spoken the words that her English husband was only trying to conceal his perplexity.
She had touched upon a sore spot. If he had no plan to suggest she must think of one, lest two foreign children, like tiger cubs reared for pets, swallow their playmates of the nursery.
Herrick decreed a retreat to the Western Hills. Seldom though he emerged from his dwelling, the man could not escape the hubbub of a city which slept and prattled out of doors. The barking of mongrel dogs agitated him and made him restless at night. He wished a place where he could think his troublesome problem to an issue, so his fancy turned to the solitude of the hills. He would carry off Kuei-lien like a bride, take Nancy and Edward and the old nurse, and leave the rest of the family to babble away the summer in Peking.
The sister and brother heard the news with undisguised joy. They were more weary of Peking than their father, for they had no change from the enclosed monotony of the compound and were come to a restive age when their limbs craved movement. They wanted to walk and to run and to gaze upon far-away sights with no high walls preventing them.
They awaited with impatience the cool dawn when they could climb into the mule cart and sit in high glee with Kuei-lien squeezed tightly between them. The cart began jolting over the gritty surface of the streets, jarring their bones despite the padding of the floor and the cushions which were fastened to the framework. But this they were too excited to mind. They only regretted the gauze curtain which, by the strict orders of their father, had been flung across the front of their hooded compartment. Their father, however, could not hinder their pushing the curtain from side to side in their eagerness to observe to the fullest the fascinating life of the streets.
Even at this early hour the market and the shops were opening; trains of camels whose thick hair had fallen off in patches were coming down the long street from Hsichih-men; donkeys with bells jingling on their collars bore the weight of fat travelers; Manchu women, so noticeable because of their long gowns and enormous beetle headdress, were stirring abroad; a princeling from the court of the deposed Emperor rode past, followed by retainers; scarlet plumes of horsehair flashed from their conical hats. Nothing escaped the eyes of the children; even the humblest shopkeeper taking down the boards from his windows won their marked interest, and there was observant pleasure in seeing the pavilions on Coal Hill, the turquoise and orange roofs of which seemed to swim in the lucent mists of dawn.
The cart rumbled through a vaulted gate, skirted the precincts of a railway station where the screeching engine provoked an ecstasy of excitement in the hearts of brother and sister; then came slow progress along willow-bordered roads while the sun, growing hotter and hotter, beat down through the blue hood of the vehicle, making Kuei-lien sleepy, tired of her stiff, cramped position, anxious to stretch and to yawn. A stupa of many towers was left to the south; the sombre ruins of the old summer palace were passed and the splendid new palaces of the Empress Dowager, which meet the fragments of Ch'ien Lung's marvelous pleasure domes on the summit of Wan Shou Shan. The children appreciated them all and looked eagerly at the spire-like pagodas of the jade fountain and the dilapidated buildings which were used to house tigers and bears in the far-away time when Tatar princes followed the chase.
Afternoon had come before the cart came at last to the foothills. The children climbed stiffly to the ground. Nancy hoped she might mount a sturdy little donkey for the journey into the mountains, but her father would allow his family to ride only in covered chairs. Not without a pouting of lips did Nancy obey, but soon she lost her disappointment in the charm of scenes she had not laid eyes upon for two long years, not since before the disastrous days of the Revolution. For the first time she was enjoying the dignity of a chair to herself. Hitherto she had been huddled into the same narrow seat with Edward, but now she could look elegantly from side to side through the square windows, and see the plains recede behind the toiling feet of the chair coolies, and Peking, with its towering gates and golden roofs and graceful dagobas, filling the horizon far beyond the palaces of Wan Shou Shan. Suddenly the girl grew inordinately happy. She drank in the ozone of the pines and looked down the steep slopes of the gorge they were traversing till she felt as free as the water that tumbled blithely across the boulders.
At dusk much climbing brought the chairs to the secluded temple Herrick had converted into his summer home. Years ago it had been built on a small flat piece of ground almost overhanging the edge of a ravine. In the old days its red-washed walls might have been conspicuous, but trees had grown round it, a brake of hardy bamboo hidden its entrance till the very bricks themselves seemed to have taken root in their wild terrace. The square beacon tower which crowned the opposite ridge was so desolate and forsaken, so obviously part of a world long passed away, so remote from its time of flaming usefulness, that it served merely to accentuate the loneliness of the place. The men it told of were men who never again would buckle on armor and seize long spears at the news of attack. And the broken gods of the temple whom none worshiped told in their decay the same tragic story.
Nancy hurried with awe through their midst and came gladly to the courtyard she and Edward shared. Oil lamps gleaming through paper windows gave comforting assurance of a supper hot and ready. After all the changes of the day the girl had begun to feel qualms of homesickness for the noisy household in Peking; at sunset she had grown sad, and now she wanted to shut out the magical sound of the wind in the pines and the water pouring down the ravine, for she was a little afraid of the loneliness. She longed for play and laughter and the shrill disputes of concubines and servants. She was sorry Li-an had not come. She would have liked the agreeable relaxation of a quarrel.
The cheer of supper gave way all too soon to the able terrors of bedtime. Nancy lay awake for hours haunted by the absence of all vocal sound; she tried to write in imagination the most difficult chapters of the Four Books: "i p'o, i hun, san tien"—she counted off the strokes and shaded them gracefully in her mind or pulled them short with the neatest of hooklike twists, but all to no avail. The trees would not keep still; the maddening stream would not cease running.
At last, in the panic of one who is seldom sleepless, the girl got up. She was envious of Edward's sound slumbers and went cautiously to his room to awaken him. To her surprise the boy spoke before she had time to call him. He recognized her footsteps.
"I can't sleep," he complained in loud whispers; "let's go outside or do something. It's too quiet here."
Nancy told him in low tones to follow. There was a moon outside. The two children looked like ghosts as they moved with slippered feet across the rough marble pavement of the courtyard. The back door was unbolted and slightly ajar so that its creaking was barely audible as they slipped through. They were in a weed-tangled grove of young trees, but the few yards of path were easy to follow. Under the brow of the cliff which set definite limits to the foothold of the temple they saw the tomb of some forgotten abbot, a domelike structure with a ringed pinnacle. It was in deep shadow. They gave an exclamation of dismay and hurried to the side where the path led up a short flight of steps to the top of the wall and ended abruptly in a little rickety platform of wood that gave high views of the ravine.
Nancy's heart was ripe for mystical adventure. The night was cool but she felt no bodily chill through her thin garments. She was inordinately sad, uneasy, desirous of some change, some intrusion to match the hopeless beauty of the night. A waning moon, halfway done with its short flight from mountain to mountain, illuminated the stream far below and gave luminous surface to the rocks with its tranquil light, but left the shadowy parts a pitchy blackness which hid them like a veil. Wistfully Nancy surveyed the scene and looked at the crumbling watchtower on the ridge opposite. Her reading had made her curiously unmodern. Her thoughts dwelt on phantom armies of the past, of princes masterly at falconry losing their way in the wilderness, of old cries and alarms which she could not reconcile herself to believing had long since ceased. She ached to help these poor lost mortals of the past, to be their heroine, their desire. How could she tell such dreams to Edward, dear, stupid, faithful boy that he was?
"What can you see?" asked the brother, surprised at her intent gaze.
"Lots of things," was Nancy's cryptic answer.
"Well, that's more than I can see."
"Ah, but you haven't my eyes."
Another fifteen minutes of this purposeless staring, this obstinate silence, was all that Edward could bear.
"Are you going to stand there looking at nothing all night?" he demanded. "I'm getting sleepy and, besides, it's cold."
"Go in and sleep then," said Nancy.
"I'm—I'm afraid," said the boy, after a moment's pause. "I don't like that tomb. I don't like to go past it."
"Pooh! If that's all, I'll take you past it."
Nancy took his hand and walked bravely down the steps.
"Look, I'm not afraid," she said when they reached the grave, and she suited action to words by kicking the unoffending sepulchre with her slipper.
"Stop!" cried Edward, pulling her back. "Aren't you coming with me?"
"No, of course not."
"You're not?" he echoed in amazement.
Nancy had a delicious feeling of terror in her own foolhardiness.
"I'm not ready to come yet."
Edward stopped for an instant, wondering if he ought not to stay; then he turned and fled while Nancy, who gladly would have followed him, tried to walk unconcernedly, as though her heart were not pounding with fear, back to the platform on the wall.
The moon had slipped out of view, letting the stars, now unrivaled, come down to the very edges of the ravine. The slopes opposite were white and the watchtower suffused by a weary brightness which showed every crack, the irregular lines of every stone, like the wrinkles in the face of an aging man. But the shelf where Nancy stood was steeped in blackness. The girl was cold and miserably afraid, wondering why she had not gone back with Edward, for the tomb avenged her impudence by filling her mind with ghostly fears. Dawn seemed years away. Nancy imagined hostile shapes, things without heads, without limbs, creeping down the cliff behind her.
And at the moment when the tension of her nerves was intolerable she heard a noise, the sound of running feet, a low laugh, a scuffle in the trees. A heavy figure came running up the path, up the steps. The girl was too frightened to jump; instinctively she shrank below the railing of the platform. But the moonlight had betrayed her; she had been all too clearly outlined against the whiteness of the hill beyond. Suddenly she realized that strong arms had seized her, and lifted her from her crouching position, half torn the singlet from her shoulders in forcing her round to meet the savage vehemence of a kiss.
To Nancy this swift shame was unutterable. She had the Chinese loathing of a kiss as a disgusting act suited only to the dalliance of a brothel. She fought like a maddened lioness, scratching, biting, trying to claw the face of her assailant, while the man, checked for a moment, since evidently he had looked for complaisance, replied with cruel fury, ripping her vest open to the waist, choking her till the girl knew she was sinking hopelessly into submission. Just when she had too little strength to know or care what might follow she felt the arms of the man relax. Someone, she did not know who, caught her as she fell limp across the tottering railing.
"Good God!" said a voice in English. "It's Nancy! And I thought it was Kuei-lien."
The voice woke the fainting girl more effectively than a dash of icy water. She stood up abruptly, still bewildered, but understanding that the creature who had attacked her so unreasonably was her father; that he had mistaken her for his mistress. A swift rippling laugh revealed the presence of Kuei-lien herself, very much amused to see the daughter involved in the amorous chase she had been leading the father.
"You will be so boisterous, you clumsy fellow," she said in tart Chinese. "Fancy hugging your own daughter. How absurd!"
But the father was not amused. He turned angrily to Nancy.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded of the girl, who was trying to hold the torn fragments of her singlet over her breast. "What right have you to be spying on us like this?"
Nancy had never been addressed in such harsh tones.
"I was not spying," she stammered.
"You were spying; don't contradict me. You deserve to be beaten for this. Go on—get to your room. You are utterly shameless. And you too—" he said sharply to Kuei-lien, "you damned women are all the same, every one of you."
Nancy got away gladly; she stumbled quickly into her room. The episode had made a rent across her childhood so that she could never again be the careless, innocent creature she was. The kiss was bad enough, an intolerable defilement, but the method of the kiss was so beastly that her mind had been wounded past the help of any quick remedy. Her part had been merely an accident; she could not wash away, however, the uncleanness, the sense of incest in the kiss she had received from her father.
She did not want the day to come now. She had no courage to meet the laughing person of Kuei-lien. The concubine very clearly was not embarrassed by the memory of last night's mishap.
"What a laughable business," she cried, "to be kissed by your own father! And how angry he was!"
"Do you call it laughable?" asked Nancy solemnly.
"Pooh!" said Kuei-lien, "don't take the thing so seriously. It was just play. If you choose to go mooning on a dark terrace you can't blame anybody for making mistakes. It was funny the way you fought—and your own father, too. What romantic sensations you must have had. Did you think the Emperor was kidnapping his beauty? What a violent lover he must have seemed."
Nancy blushed.
"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "It was shameful."
"How innocent you are," said Kuei-lien, still unabashed. "Shameful! It was disappointing, I admit, but not shameful. And such words from you, who have been so curious about marriage. How do you think husbands and wives spend their time? Writing scrolls, like you and Edward? You can be as fine a poet as you please, my dear, and paint charming pictures, and sit in a bamboo shelter with your teacup and your flute and your ink-stone like the heroines you read about, but your husband won't marry you for those things. He'll marry you for your face and your body, for this—and this—and this—" She touched the girl playfully on her cheeks and shoulders and thighs.
"That may be the way barbarians marry," objected Nancy; "that isn't our Chinese way."
"Our Chinese way!" Kuei-lien laughed. "Our Chinese way! What are you? You are not Chinese. Aren't you a barbarian yourself? You are English, and that is the English way."
"How do you know? You are not a wife. You are only my father's mistress. Your experience doesn't prove how a husband treats his wife. You have to do these things; that's what he bought you for."
Nancy's temper had got the better of her tact. Yet Kuei-lien controlled herself to a degree truly extraordinary for a Chinese woman. There was a dangerous flash in her eyes, but the concubine was content to treat the remarks as the petulant outburst of a child.
"Pooh! you are younger than I thought. You don't understand. Some day you will kneel to me for these words."
There was a gravity in this last comment so unlike the usual birdlike frivolity of Kuei-lien's that it left Nancy very much shaken. In her heart she recognized tacitly that the other girl was right. The episode of the night had shown the great gulf interposed between Kuei-lien's experience and her own. It was true: she did not understand. Nancy began to distrust her own defiant protests, the distinctions she had drawn between marriage and the harlotry of concubines, and remembered a hundred hints from the free-speaking women of the Herrick family, things which she had apprehended in the figurative way of a child. She did not have the optimism of Western maidens to help her. Love was not bound up with the myth of the "right man," so that Nancy, although in the first ardent flush of youth, picturing imaginative romance with some chosen stranger from that male world of which her father and her brother were the only representatives she had seen, had no real support against what seemed suddenly revealed as life hopelessly ugly.
In a night Nancy had become a rebel. But rebellion gave her no relief because it offered no hope. There was no bold plan to perform. Nancy never thought of escape to the West because the West meant nothing to her but a strange barbarous country with which she always was angry to hear herself connected. No taunt so roused her as the name of Englishman. The only fallacy she still retained was her trust in the superior refinement of Chinese ways. She saw nothing absurd in saying, "our Chinese ways," yet she and Edward were a race of their own, a race quite unique, who were entitled, not like Eurasians to the defects of two bloods, but to any advantage that might be gained from being Western-born and Chinese-trained.
Even their father was excluded from these privileges. He was an Englishman attempting imperfectly to assimilate the East. Nancy and Edward, without knowing it, made allowances for his case, and, in the midst of being fond of him, were subtly condescending over the little ways in which he failed to adapt his mind and his body, just as they remarked instantly the slight flaws, the little mistakes of accent and grammar, in his remarkable use of Chinese.
When the girl heard the next day that she with her brother had been summoned to an English class, she began to bristle. She went, of course, because she could not throw off in a moment the thought that the will of her father was law; nor could she alienate Edward's sympathy by an attitude she was too embarrassed to explain. But she went, inwardly protesting. Timothy Herrick was not noticeably different in his manner. He did not show, perhaps, quite so much of the whimsical amusement he usually evinced when glancing at his two sober little pupils. Nevertheless he sat unperturbed and Nancy, while envying his calmness, hated it.
His old friends would not have recognized their slim debonair acquaintance of former years in the portly gentleman who was presiding over this classroom. There were more alterations than dress could account for, more alterations than the exchange of tweeds and flannels for flowered silk could explain. The Chinese dress with its gown of pale blue silk and its jacket of cut velvet was the more picturesque, but to those who had known the careless elegance of the past there must be apparent a marked falling off in pride of appearance, hints of slovenliness, in proof of which it was hard, none the less, to cite any convincing detail. Nor could increased age explain why an Englishman known for his alertness, his quick tact, had given way to the heavy pompousness of the mandarin. The rotund belly, the puffy cheeks, the bristling moustache seemed to betray a man whose heart was cowardly, who was trying to disguise by his bluff exterior the real truth, that he had relaxed his standards and amended his life to the pleasures that were easily obtained.
Nancy went through her lessons with an unobliging surliness which Herrick could not but see. He met his daughter's defiance in the same spirit. Herrick had been autocrat so long that it was abnormally hard for him to see mishaps from any side but his own. He was angry and aggrieved at last night's mistake, but more because it had put him to ridicule than because he could conceive the force of the shock to Nancy's pride. It was preposterous to have been fooled thus into kissing his own daughter; Herrick was thoroughly annoyed by his own loss of face; but what right had the girl to sit in judgment over her own father, as she seemed all too palpably to be doing? What right had she even to think of finding fault? His conduct was not hers to criticize. The kiss was only a kiss, nothing to her to brood about; but her temerity in spying upon her father, that struck at the very roots of obedience.
"Nancy, I have a few words to say to you," he said, beckoning Edward to go. The girl rose. Herrick did not like the candor of her clear eyes.
"Has your teacher taught you to stare at your father?" he asked sharply.
Nancy looked down, but not humbly. Herrick surveyed her with a curious detachment. Ought she not to kneel, he wondered—the precedents for Chinese behavior failed him at times. Perhaps it was enough that she should stand. There was no harm, at least, in allowing a few moments of silence to make his ensuing words impressive. So he turned to his water pipe and gurgled a few puffs of blue smoke while the daughter remained in rigid but none the less sullen attention. At last the man ended the silence with well-chosen Chinese phrases.
"I ordered your lessons this morning," he began, "because I wished to see by your behavior whether you were ashamed of the very great offense you have done. For a daughter to spy upon her father—that is unpardonable. You are sixteen; I am fifty. What I do is no concern of yours; what I do you cannot be expected to understand. Your place is in your own room at night; it is a scandal for you to be anywhere else. Yet I find you following me around, causing me shame by your immodest curiosity; and not only that, but all this morning you have sat here stiff-necked, stubborn, seeming to reproach me, as though I were answerable to you for my conduct. What excuse can you offer for your shameless behavior?"
"I was not spying," replied Nancy.
"You were not spying? Then what were you doing there at two o'clock in the morning?"
"I could not sleep. I was looking at the moonlight."
To allow such an excuse would have undermined Herrick's just cause for anger. He could not hear of it.
"Who taught you to lie?" he sneered. "I have no patience with such nonsense. Your business is to answer me, not to argue with me."
Greatly restraining herself, Nancy said nothing.
"Of course you were spying," Herrick continued, "and you haven't had the grace to be sorry. Now, by way of making amends, I want you to kowtow three times to me."
"It is right that a daughter should kowtow to her father," said Nancy simply, "but I am not sorry."
"Then you may stand here till you are sorry."
He had asked the impossible. After two hours of silence, during which the girl stood like a rigid statue, Herrick realized that there was a sturdiness in his daughter's nature which he might break but assuredly could not bend. He began to admire the endurance of the child while he grew more and more oppressed by the discomfort of his own position.
"Well, that will be enough," he said, trying to gloss the fact of his defeat, "I think you have learned your lesson and have been punished sufficiently. You needn't stay any longer: you may go."
To his amazement, Nancy knelt down and bowed her head to the ground three times.
"I am sorry I could not obey my father," she said.
"What is the child!" wondered Herrick, when she had gone. "Just when I think she is hopelessly English, she outvies the spirit of the Analects themselves. Is she English or is she Chinese?"
The answer was of such importance that Herrick neglected Kuei-lien in his effort to find it. Herrick's wrath had gathered for a great outburst; and then Nancy, by kneeling, by her sign of reverence for his position if not for the man, had dissipated all the heaped-up vapors of anger. They had passed like summer lightning. The man grew sunny again.
Not for months had he shown such friendliness for his children. He took them walking, busied them collecting flowers, led them up the heights of the opposite ravine to see the desolate beacon tower. Nancy did not talk much on these excursions. Her spirit was not yet at ease; the rebellious impulses, however, sought outlet in the unusual exercise. They spent themselves, for the present, on the hills which taxed her legs and revealed to her eyes so many novelties of sight. Edward, on the other hand, prattled continuously, amusing his father by his voluble excitement over every strange blossom and his certainty that every cave contained a leopard or a tiger.
"Ah, there's English in you, my lad," said the father wistfully, "you ought to be playing cricket."
"What is cricket?" asked the boy, instantly curious.
"I'll show you," said Herrick, beaming from indulgent memories of his own youth. After searching out a clear place, he constructed implements as primitive as they were ingenious, a pitch of mountain turf cleared of boulders, pine twigs for stumps, and cones for bails so insecurely perched that the afternoon breeze put up the best of the bowling. Edward combined the conflicting duties of bats-man and wicket-keeper while his father hurled large cones down the pitch and Nancy, stationed in the slips, invariably fumbled the rare ball Edward lifted in her direction.
So absorbed were the players in their very rudimentary game that an unexpected cry of "Well hit, sir," burst upon them like a thunderbolt. Edward's desired tiger could not have startled them more thoroughly.
Nancy turned to run, but she saw her brother gazing with wide eyes and open mouth till her own fear could not keep her from seeking with half-averted face the object of his astonishment. She saw two men walking toward her father. They were not Chinese; that she knew instantly, for they wore strange white helmets and shirts open at the throat and short khaki trousers and thick foreign boots. They carried knapsacks and strange black boxes such as Nancy, in her inexperience, did not recognize as cameras. Each of them swung a stout cane. Could they be bandits, Nancy wondered, her heart beating in alarm; they looked extremely fierce. Then she realized by a flash of insight that she was seeing the spectacle she had looked forward to—the spectacle of foreigners from the mythical lands of the West.
"Wait a minute," called out one of the two men, removing his hat courteously and exposing a shock of blond hair, "wanchee take picture, allee same photograph."
He had not realized that the three people he was approaching were not Chinese. Excited by observing what unmistakably was a wicket, crude though it might be, he thought he had stumbled upon some prototype of his own national game being played by the aborigines of the mountains.
"Perhaps it's been played since the days of Yao and Shun," he told his companion; "nothing ever changes in China. Some dear old lady may find a new proof that we're all descended from the Ten Lost Tribes. I certainly mustn't miss this picture. Think how well it would look in 'Leaves from an Archaeologist's Notebook' or, at the worst, 'A Nomad W.G. Scores a Boundary.'"
"Well, he's not a nomad nor a W.G. and I'm not sure he's even playing cricket," said the other; "but don't let small scruples interfere with your picture."
"I won't," said the first, who was considering how he might approach the game unobserved till Edward, catching a cone in mid-flight and thwacking it back into the ravine, provoked his shout of "Well hit, sir." Nothing was left except to walk forward openly in the hope that the three strangely assorted players might prove amenable to his wish. So he shouted emphatically in the direction of Herrick's portly figure, trying to check visible symptoms of retreat. "Just a minute, wanchee take picture, wanchee take picture, one minute can do."
"Oh, do you?" inquired Herrick with the dryest of accents. "And to whom am I indebted for your acquaintance?"
The man stopped abruptly, while Herrick used the chance to muster off his children. Without further words he went coldly by, as though he were passing two strangers in the crowds of Regent Street, and the two children, excited by this encounter, were too much afraid of their father to give the men another glance.
"Well, what do you make of that?" asked the astonished intruder of his companion.
"You were right in one point, at least," said the latter, "it was cricket. But I don't think the knowledge is going to help any dear old lady's theory of the Lost Tribes. That was certainly a stony British stare."
"And a stony British retort. What on earth do you suppose he was doing here masquerading in Chinese clothes? And the girl and boy too? They must have been English; they weren't Chinese. An uncommonly handsome girl at that. If I hadn't been paralyzed by the old gentleman's answer, I should have taken a picture to prove we weren't dreaming. They might at least have stopped, and not run away in this barbarous fashion."
"Yes, but what an uncommon pair of fools we must have seemed, shouting pidgin English at them! No wonder they were crusty."
Nancy and Edward knew the time was not opportune for questioning their father. But when they were home again and safe in their own quarter, their tongues seethed with comments on this meeting. Kuei-lien and the old amah joined in the discussion and were able to supply more details about the men, who were members of a party, it seemed, that was occupying a large bungalow in one of the valleys some distance beyond. It was a settlement, in fact, to which foreigners came in the summer. There were women too, said the nurse, and girls dressed in foreign clothes; "just like your mother," she continued, "but oh no, not so beautiful, and not such splendid clothes."
She went into rapt ecstasies on the subject of Nancy's mother, how she looked when the Admiral came, and what she said, and the way she wore her jewels, till Nancy, who had listened to these discursions many times and knew that the garrulous record always veered round to distasteful details of her own infancy, how she had given her bottle to the dog or used the Consul's top-hat for a lavatory, cut the nurse short by asking how she could get a glimpse of these Western girls.
The amah looked suspiciously at Kuei-lien, whom she did not trust.
"No, I'm afraid your father would not like it."
"Oh, I don't think he would mind, if you didn't boast about it," interposed Kuei-lien.
"You ask him," said the nurse, scenting danger for her children in the affable assurances of the concubine.
Kuei-lien and Nancy had not been cordial since the affair of the kiss. Kuei-lien had the long memory of her race, a memory quite prepared to avenge insults on the third and fourth generation if no earlier chance came, and she had not forgotten Nancy's slighting words. The score, in fact, had been increased by the new kindliness between Herrick and his children; this kindliness seemed to grow at the cost of her own hold upon the father. Since her ascendancy began this had been the first falling away of Herrick's affection.
The concubine, knowing too well the hazards of an old man's fickleness, did not propose risking her mastery merely to indulge the claims of two children. With all her bent for headstrong passion she was a cool creature, resourceful, intelligent, able not only to captivate the heart of her elderly husband by daring use of beauty, but to calculate to a nicety the effects she meant to achieve. She wished place, position, power, desirable ends toward which Herrick's infatuation could assist. She knew the force of the proverb that there is no fool like an old one and played cleverly on its truth, that, when the time should come, when Herrick had gone and her friend the t'ai-t'ai, then the despised fifth wife should be enjoying the harvest she had sowed.
But the place of Nancy and Edward in the household economy had puzzled her. They stood in the way of her success, for, like all Westerners, they followed a disturbing logic of their own and did not yield to the good old precedents of the Orient. She had not sat back with arms folded, however, like the t'ai-t'ai, resigning the problem to fate. Fate was indiscriminate as lightning in the way it struck, a very clumsy agent for nice ends. Kuei-lien believed in the art of directing fate, and now, after her study of Nancy and Edward, she had come to one certainty—that they must be returned to the West whence they had come.