NANG’S VIGIL
Sing Kung Yah was away temporarily from her important post as Wu
Nang Ping’s chaperone-guard, spending a few weeks of semi-religious
villeggiatura in a Taoist nunnery with a kinswoman who was its abbess.
So powerful was Wu’s personality and his wealth that he had been able
to command for his widowed kinswoman and for her participation in the
gala things of life, even from the most conventional of his countrymen,
considerable courteous toleration. But it was toleration only, and
never approval. His influence was enormous. Every tong in China would
have torn at the vitals of any one rash enough to exercise against
Sing Kung Yah a social ostracism contrary to his wish. And so the
unprecedented festivity of the kinswoman’s widowhood was tolerated even
by the Chinese whom it both shocked and affronted.
But anything more, or kindlier, than tolerance, even the great Wu was
powerless to win for her--at least from the Chinese. And both he and
she knew this, and it was the one fly in her very nice amber. She
would have been ostracized fiercely if those of their own caste had
dared; but, they not daring, she was tolerated coldly. And feeling it
(approving it even in her thoroughly Chinese heart) she was often glad
to steal away into the quiet, and behind the screen, of the Taoist
nunnery on the cool, far-off hillside.
She had quite a number of English friends in Hong Kong and at Sha-mien.
The English thought her great fun, and she was eagerly sociable. And
English merchants, anxious to conciliate the powerful Wu, encouraged
their womenkind to friendliness with his kinswoman. But she longed
for friends of her own race; and except Nang and Wu she had none. She
longed for cronies, and she had not one, except the Taoist abbess.
Strange that a people so implacable to comforted and comfortable
widowhood should be ruled by a widow! But so it is. And, after all, the
Chinese race has a right to its share of human inconsistency. Tze-Shi
was an Empress, the mother of a son, and had a great personality.
Sing Kung Yah had been born a long way from the imperial yellow, was
childless, and had little personality of her own. And so Nang Ping, in
the sweetest way, had run a little wild, as roses and honeysuckle do,
and so the frequent visits--that were something of a skurrying too--to
the Taoist convent on the hills.
The Wus were not Taoists, strictly. Like most Chinese of their class,
they mingled a loyal observance of the rites of all three of the great
Chinese sects and an anxious acceptance of their tripled superstitions,
with an easy and respectful contempt for them all--certainly for all
except the Confucianism that has made and welded China for twenty-five
centuries, but that every Chinese of half Wu’s intelligence knows is,
in fact, a magnificent irreligion, a philosophy, a patriotism, but no
God-cult.
In her aunt’s absence, as well as her father’s, Nang Ping was
absolutely mistress of herself and of all in her father’s house. When
she left Basil Gregory she had closed the door panel of her own room,
hanging a purple scarf in its outer carving, and no one, not even Low
Soong, dared disregard the imperative silken signal that she would be
alone and unmolested. Even when the gong brayed out the call of evening
rice she made no sign. Wu Low Soong brought a tray of food and laid
it gently on the floor, with a timid supplicatory clatter, beneath
the purple scarf, and, after listening a moment as she knelt with her
hands still on the tray, crept ruefully away. She had shared in the
outer edges of all Nang Ping’s love raptures, shared the dangers of the
forbidden sweetnesses, and it was very hard to be shut out from the
newer excitement of what was evidently a jagged love-rift.
Nang Ping lay very still all night, uncushioned and uncovered on her
polished floor. Her frightened eyes were closed, but she was wide
awake--wider awake than she had ever been before.
She felt Basil linger. She heard him go. She heard each night-sound all
the night long. She heard her household’s every stir, and heard it hush.
In the morning, before any but the night-watchman stirred, she stole
out into the garden and wandered about it aimlessly. But she did not
enter the pagoda.
While it was still very early she went back to her own room, beat on
her own gong, a little burnished steel disk, summoning her women. And
when they hurried to her, surprised and heavy with sleep, she bathed
and put on fresh garments. It was her habit to chatter gayly with her
women while they dressed her, but to-day she scarcely spoke and they
scarcely dared speak. She sat quite motionless in her ivory chair while
Tieng Po dressed her hair. Tieng Po was one of the cleverest tire maids
in China, and wonderfully quick. It rarely took her more than three
hours to do her lady’s hair, and to-day she did it in even a little
less. But she had never done it more elaborately, and all the time her
mistress watched her with cold, critical eyes. For Nang Ping had a
glass, a very lovely one that Wu had bought in Venice. It had been her
mother’s, and reflected more clearly and with less strain on the eyes
than the mirrors that most Chinese women consult.
When Nang was dressed--she was very fine--she sent for Low Soong and
ordered food.
The two girls breakfasted together in silence, and were silent
afterwards as they paced the Peacock Terrace together until the sun was
high and cruel. But Low Soong began to understand, and as each moment
passed understood more and more. The women and the peasants of no other
race chatter so much or so incessantly as the Chinese do; only the
gentlemen and the children are often still. But no other race has so
little need of words. The Chinese is the psychic of all the races. Even
the women have wizard minds. They are all sensitives. And as the girls
paced silently, but arm in arm, Low Soong learned it all.
* * * * *
In the early afternoon Basil contrived to send a note to Miss Wu, and
it reached her safely. Indeed, it ill needed the subterfuge he spent
upon its delivery, for its few formal lines, saying that he would,
as promised, have the honor to wait upon her presently, and have
the pleasure of begging her acquaintance for his mother and sister,
might have been cried aloud from the Kowloon housetops, or published
in the _Pekin Gazette_ and the _Shanghai Mercury_ or the
_Hong Kong Telegraph_. Written words could not have been less
compromising; such a love-letter could not have compromised a nun or
a female fly. And it was the last that he would write her. (It was
almost the first.) Nang’s little lip quivered as she read it, and she
made to tear it into bits; then the little painted lip quivered more
piteously, and she thrust the paper inside her robe. He had had no need
to warn her. She should play her part. He might have trusted her in
that, and in all.
She began to think that Englishmen were timid. And she wondered too if
they might not be dense, some of them, sometimes.