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.