MRS. GREGORY
On one point, and on just one, John and Basil had agreed last night:
Mrs. Gregory was to be spared as much as possible. She and Hilda were
to remain happily ignorant of what had happened--ignorant of it in its
worst form, if that could be compassed.
Basil had carefully omitted telling the clergyman of the proposed visit
of the morrow. He would have cancelled it if he could have thought of
any way. But he had not a devisive brain. His mother had quite set her
heart on the excursion. He felt safe that he could trust to Nang Ping’s
pride. Her pride would carry her through, and save and screen him, as
such outraged womanly pride has saved and screened such men ever since
Eve gave an apple to a man in Eden.
In this episode of Nang Ping (a little nefarious episode of his life;
the soul-crux, the supreme tragedy of the girl) Basil Gregory cut
the sorriest figure, for he had but toyed with her, he had indulged
passion, passion had not mastered him, she was his toy, he her god; he
felt tenderness for her, but not love; he had not the great excuse of
a great love. His lingering by the sun-drenched lotus pond and in the
scented dark of the old pagoda had been mere dalliance, not obsession.
And yet the young Englishman was not all bad--far from that. To no one
do the wise lines of the Western genius apply more closely:
“In men, whom men proclaim divine,
I find so much of sin and blot;
In men, whom men condemn as ill,
I find so much of goodness still--
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two where God has not.”
There is a streak, at least, of angel in most women and in all men.
Basil had a rich vein of angel. All that was best in him leapt to his
mother. They had been sweethearts from the first. Such love as he had
loved as yet was hers. It was a chivalrous love, and passionate. The
other primal love, the love of man for his mate, might come to him:
probably it would; it comes to most, but it would never equal the love
he bore his mother. No other woman would ever be to him half that his
mother was, or have from him half that he gave her.
Mothers that are loved so can face most sorrows with some buoyancy.
This mother had sorrow, and she fronted it almost blithely.
Between these two, in a very beautiful sense, the spiritual umbilical
cord had never been cut, and never would or could be cut.
She appealed to him in a dozen ways. She was gifted with youth. She
laughed at the years, and they laughed back at her and caressed her.
She looked his own age, scarcely more, and some days, in some moods and
in some lights, she looked his junior. And, too, hers was a radiant
personality. Her son joyed in her. He was proud of her, and proud to
be seen with her. And she gave him love for love. But her love for him
needs no explanation, nor merits one; he was her boy and her firstborn.
The night before, after Bradley had cried, “I don’t see my way. You
must let me think,” the two men had sat silent for a time, and then
the clergyman had re-begun, trying again to thrash it out, breaking
nervously the silence he himself had enjoined. And he had referred
again to the hideous discomfort of mixed marriages.
The waters of the Tigris do not mingle with the salt water of the
sea until they have flowed through it a long, long way from the
river-mouth. And so, it seemed to him, many suffering generations
must pass before, if ever, any marriage could in truth unite races of
East and West, or result in descendants less than sorely unhappy and
bitterly resentful.
But marriages that tie the bloods of alien races are not the only
mixed marriages. There are mixed marriages of another sort that bring
as much, perhaps more, discomfort to the two most directly concerned,
although they entail no social inconvenience: marriages of alien
individualities. Such his mother’s marriage had proved, and Basil
sensed it, and that she winced daily. He had never definitely realized
it. He had never thought about it clearly. But he felt it. And this had
roused all the angel in him to her defense, and made him very true and
knightly to her.
The daughter of a poor Oxford cleric, Florence Grey had married
“surprisingly well.” Robert Gregory was rich even then, good-looking,
jovial, and to his young and pretty wife indulgent. He was indulgent to
her still.
She had married him quite gladly, and for a time been well enough
content. But after a year or two the sag had come and the disillusion.
What in him had seemed once tonic and individuality came to seem
brusque, and even boorish at times. She grew used to silken raiment
and spiced meats, used and a little indifferent, though doubtless she
would have missed them had she lost them, a tinge contemptuous of them.
And often in the whirl of life--in Manchester, in Paris, in Calcutta,
and now in gay Hong Kong--she longed a little for the Oxford quiet and
Oxford ways, cool, green lanes, a dim old church, a shabby old library,
dim too, full of well-worn books, simple usual things--roast mutton,
milk pudding, and soft English rain, gray English skies.
But, too, she enjoyed life, and reaped from it with both hands. And her
husband had been and was well content. He had married her for love,
and he loved her still. But he had had no exultation and no opalescent
anticipations. And so, reasonably enough, he had suffered no relapse.
Such extremes of feeling, such quiver and ardor as he had ever known,
had come to him in office and shipping yard. Business was his cult.
And so far he had proved an excellent business man. He was perfectly
satisfied with himself; and it never occurred to him that any one else
was not. That would be preposterous, and certainly Florence was not
preposterous. He was magnificently satisfied with himself, and in a
suitably smaller way he was satisfied with his wife.
She had given him no cause to be dissatisfied. And they got on well
together. They always had. She wore well. She dressed well. She never
tried to understand his business, or to talk to him when he was reading
the market reports or the shipping news. She was a handsome creature.
People liked her. And she had borne him two children. He would have
resented a third; to have had none would have enraged him as much as if
he’d been a “Chinaman.”
Yes, Florence had done him very well, and he acknowledged it to
himself, and boasted of it to all his cronies. And he had done her
well too, by Jove! He was always kind to her. He let her have her own
way absolutely when her way did not cross his, and their ways too
rarely met (in any soul-sense) to cross often. And he was generous
to her. He began that way, and, it is no little to the credit of so
busy and business-bound a man, he had always kept it up. They had been
married twenty-five years, and he bought flowers for her still. And
jewelry he gave her constantly. No woman, unless she was the wife of a
rich noble or a millionaire, had more good jewelry.
Mr. Gregory had given his wife some good jewelry for a wedding present.
But the handsomest gifts she had received then had been sent her by an
acquaintance he had never seen: a Chinese undergrad who had left Oxford
the year before--“damned rich Chink,” as Robert Gregory expressed it,
when he did not put it even more chastely, “a Rothschild of a nigger.”
The Chinese gift, a bracelet of emeralds and turquoise and jacinths and
pearls, still was the most beautiful and the most valuable jewel Basil
Gregory’s mother had, and she wore it on every occasion that justified
such splendor. And Hilda, watching its green fire and blue softness on
their mother’s fine white arm, could but wonder hungrily whether it
would become ultimately the possession of herself or of Basil’s wife.
“It is the most beautiful jewel I have ever seen,” John Bradley said
when he first saw it.
“Yes, isn’t it?” its owner acquiesced; “but when I have it on, I always
feel as if I were wearing a bit of Revelation.”
“More like a bit of the Koran,” the priest had reassured her with an
odd smile.
She was greatly puzzled. She had always supposed the Koran was a
somewhat indecent book, quite the sort of book a clergyman would not
mention to a lady. She resolved to get a cheap copy--she believed there
were cheap editions; there were of almost everything now--the next time
she sent to Kelly and Walsh’s.
And this resolve was not born of any wish to sample a questionable
classic, but of a wish to repair an injustice she was regretful to have
done even to a book or a heathen faith. Mrs. Gregory was a thoroughly
nice woman.