SOME BALM
There was a great deal in the Oxford life that reminded Wu of China:
the beauty and the dignity, the repose, the dedication (and of some
the devotion too) to the finer things, and not less the riot of
the “wines,” the crash and clash of the “rows,” the luxury and the
elaborations. It was reminder that he found, and not resemblance.
Oxford was intensely English. He liked it none the less for that.
Nothing at Portland Place had annoyed him more than the mongrel mix-up
of West and East, the fatuous attempt to blend the unblendable. It was
neither English goose nor Chinese mongoose, and he loathed it. Oxford
was good, downright English dog, and well pedigreed; he liked the bark
and the bite of it and the honest look in its eyes.
The crass mistakes so often made by his rich countrymen at such places
he avoided, partly by his own good sense and partly by Muir’s counsel
and the dead mandarin’s command. He spent of his great income lavishly,
but not too lavishly. He kept good horses, but not too good; and he
kept no valet. His entertainment was generous, but nothing much out
of the common, and never beyond the convenient return of the richer
men. He made much pleasant and useful acquaintance, but no friends.
He indulged himself a little in the furnishing of his rooms, but they
scarcely smacked of China. His jade lamp had cost a great deal, but a
young duke had one that had cost more. He had a little bronze and some
lacquer, but he had no kakemonos and burned no incense. Quite a number
of the other students had kakemonos by the half-dozen, and burned
joss-sticks elaborately.
Wu worked prodigiously at Oxford and played industriously. He enjoyed
the work. There were some brilliant men at Oxford then, but no mind
better than his, and no industriousness to equal his. He took nothing
much in honors--that was not in his grandfather’s scheme; but he
assimilated an immense amount of alien fact and thought. He learned
Englishmen. He read many books and mastered them. But he had been sent
to Europe to study men and peoples, and he never forgot it or swerved
from it for an hour. None of his fellow undergraduates particularly
liked him, but few disliked him, and he interested many. Several of
the dons and fellows did like him; with one he might have had intimacy
if he had cared to, and from studying Wu two of the wisest reversed a
lifelong estimate of China and the Chinese.
He excelled at all he did there. But almost always he was at pains to
be surpassed at the last lap; and when now and then he won, he made it
his inexorable rule to win by but a hair’s breadth.
Not all his fellow undergraduates treated him with entire courtesy.
Some laughed at him openly at times and called him “Chops.” And because
these presumably were gentlemen he was not so altogether indifferent
to it as he had been to the gibes of the gamins on the London streets.
He was young enough to wince at the criticisms of companions he was
Chinese enough to despise.
He studied women too when he had the chance, but with all them his
relations were impeccably ceremonial and on the surface. His being
was in China still, and no English girl stirred his pulse or fogged
his subtle shrewdness. James Muir, who watched over him faithful as a
mother, had somewhat feared for him when the passing of adolescence
into first raw manhood should come pounding at the door of sex. Muir
knew that in that experience Englishmen in exile usually found some
impulse toward vagary irresistible. But Wu lived on unruffled--alone in
Europe, and content with loneliness.
He did not forget Li Lu, but he rarely thought of her now. No doubt she
would do well enough when the time came to assert his ownership and
desire sons. In the meantime, he was absorbed in carrying out to the
minutest particle his grandfather’s behest.
There was a girl at a parsonage where he sometimes visited that he
thought less uninteresting than the others he met, less like a horse
or a tornado or a pudding, more like a girl. And Florence Grey made
him shyly welcome at her tea-table and taught him to play croquet.
She played a beautiful game, and in their second match he could have
beaten her. He gave her father’s church a new organ, and made her
first bazaar an unprecedented success: he half stocked the tables,
and then saw that they were swiftly stripped. She knew of many of his
“kind contributions,” though not of all his re-purchases--they were
indirectly made, and Mrs. Muir in Scotland was not a little aghast at
the frills and flummeries her son sent her in three big packing-cases.
And the Vicar looked a little askance at the presence of a smirking
heathen god, conspicuous, but not for being overdressed, on his
daughter’s stall.
After the Oxford years came several years of travel, sometimes with
Muir, sometimes not. One summer Wu was the Muirs’ guest in their simple
Scottish home.
After her first sternly concealed qualm or two, the friend’s mother
took an immense liking to the young Chinese, and her he liked at once,
perhaps better than he had ever liked any one but his grandfather and
her son. And it was in no way an attraction of opposites. Worth and
courage recognized worth and courage, and felt at home with them. Ellen
Muir and young Wu were both indomitable, naturally upright, proud,
clannish. They had twenty qualities and several prejudices in common.
They talked together gravely for hours. He helped her often as she
moved keenly about her housework, and Muir rocked with silent laughter
at the sight, knowing that those delicate yellow hands had never
performed anything menial before, and in all human probability never
would again.
Wu watched his hostess with lynx eyes, and the more he watched the more
be respected and admired. Late at night, in the hour he invariably
spent alone, and had done so from his first coming to England--the hour
in which he read and wrote and spoke and thought in Chinese, when in
spirit, and bodily too, he made obeisance to his ancestors’ tablets
across the world--he wrote down carefully much that she had said and
that he had learned from her. Among his many sons the gods might send a
daughter, and if they did she too should learn of Ellen Muir.
Wu knew, of course, that many of the English ladies he had seen at
theaters and had met at aristocratic dinner-tables were respectable,
above reproach. But he had never yet escaped a shudder of contempt when
he had seen one “dressed” for evening. He had seen the coolie women,
in the cocoon sheds on his grandfather’s silkworm farms, scantily
clad in one brief garment, that by their own chilliness they might be
warned if the room grew too cold for the delicate spinners, and that
they might easily shelter the hatching worms beneath their breasts,
but that semi-nudity was a necessity and had a use, and rarely was
the privacy of the shed invaded; but women undressed (as he termed
it) collectively, voluntarily, and interspersed among men, he thought
abominable. Ellen Muir did not dine in décolletage.
The eminent scholar--for as such the scholar world now recognized Wu’s
once tutor--she commanded, and even at times reprimanded, sharply,
exacting and receiving the docile obedience of a tractable child.
And that appealed to Wu as inevitably as did the high-necked stuff
gowns. Mother ruled sons so in China. And in China sons showed their
mothers just such meek obedience. The keeper of many of the most
valuable treasures at the British Museum spilled marmalade on her best
tablecloth one day, and she scolded him roundly, and Wu saw nothing
funny in it, and would not, had he known that the son had bought the
cloth and kept up the home.
The little house stood on one of the loveliest of Scotland’s hillsides.
A brown burn rushed by the door. Great birds wheeled and whirred above
the eaves. This woman almost worshiped the beauty of her homeland, and
it touched her to see how much their strange guest saw and felt it. He
saw even more of it than she did--though, fortunately for their mutual
liking, she could not suspect that--and he felt it very much indeed. It
reminded him of the country beside the Yangtze in the neighborhood of
the Falls of Chung Shui.
One long vacation Wu and Muir climbed the Alps and the London papers
reported Wu killed. But it was another Chinese, an undergraduate at
Cambridge whose name was Ku, who had misstepped and slid down into the
engulfing ice. But the mistake reached Oxford, and several there were
sorry to hear it. And Florence Grey, who had been married the week
before, heard it on her honeymoon, and felt a little saddened for a few
moments. He had always seemed a nice boy, and he was so far from home.
Once he lived for three months in Tours, alone with the people and the
language.
After Oxford he traveled carefully, as he had done everything so far,
sometimes alone, sometimes with Muir, searching Europe for every
experience that might serve his grandfather’s desire and plan.
When Wu was twenty-four he went home. James Muir had half expected to
be asked to go also, but Wu did not suggest it.
His European phase was over, and he wished to be alone with his own
people in his own land.
Bland and courteous to all, yet he spoke little on the long voyage, but
sat looking out across the waters towards China. And he did not trouble
to leave the boat either at Malta or at Colombo.
But he was not dreaming as he sat brooding, looking out to sea. He was
planning, for himself and for his race.
There were international clouds ahead. Wu saw them.
A week in Hong Kong--he had much to do there--and then he pushed across
the mainland that was still China, where feet of Europe rarely trod,
and journeyed to his home.
When he had paid his long respects to the graves and the tablets, he
set his house in order, and the estate. But indeed all had been well
kept in his absence. It seemed as if the old mandarin’s spirit still
brooded there and his adamant will still ruled.
To visit all he owned took Wu some months, though he went swiftly, by
boat, by horse, and in chairs with which the coolies ran, for there
were several wide estates and a score of smaller holdings.
All seen at last and ordered to his mind, he took the old winding road
to Pekin and knocked at Li’s yamén gate.