NANG PING
The years passed, and Wu took no other wife. Time enough, he reasoned;
and while he devoted himself, body and soul and seething, subtle
intellect, to the big tasks he had set himself and had had set him
by the old mandarin long ago, the bachelor habit grew upon him and
encrusted him with its self-sufficient and not unselfish little
customs, as it does so many men of Europe. Perhaps in this and in some
other things Europe had marked and tinged him more than he knew.
Except for his wifelessness, he kept all such establishment as a
Chinese gentleman should; there were flower-girls in his retinue and
much in his life of which Ellen Muir would have disapproved violently.
He had felt no disappointment at the sex of his firstborn. Perhaps
his grief (it was very great) at Wu Lu’s death made him indifferent
to the great sex-blemish in the child. Or possibly his descent from
Queen Yenfi and from a score of ladies little less able or less
famed gave him an unconscious estimate of the woman-sex strangely
un-Chinese--unless China be misreported.
Mrs. Li had petitioned for the custody of the babe, but Wu had refused
sternly. “She is a Wu. She stays with Wu.” But he conceded a point--a
minor point. A younger sister of Mrs. Li was widowed at about the time
of Wu Lu’s death, widowed while still a bride and childless. She begged
to come and be foster-mother and servant to the motherless babe; and Wu
had consented to her coming, for a time at least, partly because he
had known and liked her husband, partly in pity for her widowhood--the
most uncomfortable condition in Chinese life, and abjectly deplorable
when the indignity of childlessness is added--partly because he had no
kinswoman of his own to fill a post which he instinctively hesitated to
confer on any hireling. Sing Kung Yah came; Wu found her amiable and
tractable, and, he thought, fairly efficient. Of her fondness for the
child or the child’s fondness for her there could be no doubt, and her
place in their household soon came to be one of established permanency.
From the first Wu exacted for her treatment from his retainers such
as Eastern widows rarely enjoy, and gradually he gave her some real
authority, as well as much show of it, in addition to the lavish
courtesy he paid and enforced for her. Sing Kung Yah was pathetically
grateful. She never heard of Ellen Muir, and little thought that she
owed her unprecedented ease of widowhood to the dignity and firm
despotism with which an Aryan woman had worn her weeds in Fife.
When Nang Ping was three her father brought her to Kowloon, and when
she was thirteen established her as mistress of the tiny and very
charming estate he had bought and perfected there, just beyond the
English holding, and where he made his home when his business lay, as
it did more often than not, in Hong Kong.
He knew now that he should take no wife. He had no wish to, and he
saw no necessity. For he could adopt a son--presently. There was time
enough. A wife was neither here nor there, but certainly a son was
indispensable. He could not die without a son. Without a son he could
not be properly buried, or mourned and worshiped.
Upon the great wealth his grandfather had left him he piled wealth
far greater. But far beyond the riches he amassed he amassed power
and influence. The ramifications of his influence were endless and
tortuous. Tze-Shi felt Wu’s influence as she decreed policies, signed
edicts and enacted laws of tremendous reach, weaving and fraying out
the destiny of China, and there was not a coolie in Hong Kong but felt
and obeyed it. No one in China--unless it was Tze-Shi herself--wielded
more power than Wu.
He held the Chinese in Shanghai, in Penang and in Rangoon, in Bentick
Street and in Yokohoma, in the hollow of his hand.
Wu wore a mandarin’s button now. And he had presented himself at one of
the great national examinations in the first year of his fatherhood. To
be enrolled among the literati served him and his purposes, as it did
to wear the coveted peacock feather. But he did not overvalue either of
the showy distinctions, or often wear them conspicuously. Chinese to
the core, superficially he was no little cosmopolitan. All that he had
found good in English life and in English ways he adopted frankly, but
always for a Chinese purpose, with a Chinese heart. At home he usually
wore the dress and ate the food of his country, but not always. Out
of his home, at least in the treaty ports, he was usually dressed as
Englishmen dress, but not always.
Nang Ping had more apparent freedom than other Chinese girls of fair
birth have; and some of it was real. She had English governesses from
time to time. She spoke English almost as purely as her father did, but
with less vocabulary and far less command of idiom, and French quite as
well as he; she played Grieg and Chopin better than Hilda Gregory--the
rich steamship magnate’s only daughter, and not a contemptible
pianist--so the German music master who taught them both had told the
Governor’s wife.
The Gregorys had been in Hong Kong for a year--the mother, the son and
daughter, as well as Mr. Gregory himself. But the two girls had never
met. Hilda Gregory went everywhere, but Nang Ping did not often leave
Kowloon.