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.