THE MEETING OF THE MOTHERS
Basil Gregory had written his formally couched note of warning in a
fidget. Nang Ping had no experience of masculine fidgets. She had seen
her countrywomen fidget, but never her countrymen.
And Basil was in a fidget still when he came to her presently, not by
stealth this time, no whistle heralding him, but walking swiftly from
beyond the bridge.
She greeted him placidly, too proud to show the hauteur she felt now;
but Low Soong knew that Nang Ping’s heart was fluttering sickly under
her jade and coral girdle.
Low returned his greeting with a placid face, but her narrow eyes were
yellow with hate, and she turned at once and went to her old place of
watch on the bridge.
“They will come soon?” Nang asked.
“Yes, they are lingering by the big lake, in the outer garden, and
that gave me the chance to speak to you a moment. Oh! my darling.” He
had been near to hating her as he had been coming to her across the
rippling water--hating her because he had wronged her, and now feared
that he might not escape quite all share in her punishment; but now, as
she stood there in all her pretty feminine trappings among her flowers,
he longed to take her into his arms. She had never looked so altogether
desirable to him before--probably because he had made up his mind to
leave her, to snap his life and his years from hers. “Have you missed
me? Why did you leave me so? How are you, dear?”
Nang Ping smiled oddly. She said nothing.
And Low Soong called from the bridge, “Chillee! Chillee!”
Women’s voices, deeper throated than Nang’s and Low’s, European voices,
could be heard coming that way, and Basil said nervously, “Yes,” adding
in English what Low had just said, “They are coming. I shall leave them
when they are going--make some excuse, and I shall go and hide in the
pagoda by the lake----”
“Oh, that pagoda--by the lake!” Nang Ping interjected softly, but her
voice was grim.
“I shall see them pass, and when they have quite gone I will come back.
Wait for me when they are gone. I must speak to you. Remember!” He
moved away from her, and went and stood beside an old stone lantern, as
if examining and admiring it for the first time.
“Low Soong!” Nang Ping said breathlessly, and Low hurried to her from
the bridge and put her arms about her. And they stood so for a moment.
But the voices and the footsteps were close now, and Nang Ping released
herself from Low’s comforting arms, and stood gracious and alone.
This was one of Florence Gregory’s young days--one of her very
youngest. Still in her early forties, she looked a radiant twenty-five
as she stood an instant on the bridge, and then came gayly down it.
And her radiant English beauty--blue eyes, golden hair, cream and rose
face--looked all the more radiant because of the delicate gray of her
gown--a dress of artificial simplicity, Paris-made. It had not cost as
much as Chinese Nang’s fantastic clothes had, but it had cost a great
deal, and it was the more perishable.
Hilda Gregory, walking beside her mother, quite a pretty girl seen by
herself, seemed in the mother’s wake rather than side by side, though
far the more brightly clad, and was a dim afterglow of the matron’s
glory--as Low Soong, for all her gay apparel and own high coloring,
standing a little apart, seemed too of Nang Ping’s. And Florence
Gregory looked as much Basil’s sister as Hilda, who was a few years his
junior.
A Chinese serving woman followed the Gregory ladies. She was palpably
Mrs. Gregory’s maid, and not Hilda’s; why, it is impossible to say,
unless because the mother was unmistakably of the woman-type to which
servants and dogs attach themselves, that claims them, and to which
they belong. Hilda Gregory probably played tennis and golf better than
her mother, and plied a more useful needle; but she buttoned her own
boots as naturally as it came to the mother to lean well back at ease
against down cushions and have her hair brushed by a servant. Ah Wong,
the amah, carried a closed parasol, a costly European thing of lace
and mother-o’-pearl, that would have suited Miss Gregory’s rose crêpe
quite as well as it did Mrs. Gregory’s silver ninon; but the sturdy
Chinese figure, plainly clad in dark blue cotton, was unmistakably in
attendance on the mother.
There were six here now, not counting the Wu servants moving on the
outskirts of the group, silent and busied. But Mrs. Gregory and Wu Nang
Ping held the stage: English womanhood and Chinese something at their
best.
They made a great contrast than which the old beauty-packed garden had
seen nothing prettier: two living, sentient expressions of womanhood,
greatly different, greatly alike.
Each was natural, each was artificial--sweet, elaborate, decorated,
highly bred.
Nang Ping’s face and lips were painted; Mrs. Gregory’s were not.
But her nails were slightly, beneath her gloves, and so were Nang’s
that had never worn a glove. Mrs. Gregory’s eyebrows were lightly
penciled. Nang Ping’s were not. Nang Ping’s hair had taken the longer
to dress, but the dressing of the other’s had cost an hour. The black
hair was stiffened into shape with thick scented gum; the blonde
hair was marcelled into shape by hot tongs. And Mrs. Gregory had the
slightly smaller feet, and far less comfortably shod. For Wu had set
his face against one custom of his country, and braved the anger of
his ancestors. Nang smoked a pipe--Basil Gregory could not insert
his smallest finger-tip into its tiny bowl--Florence Gregory smoked
cigarettes; and they both inhaled sometimes. And each considered the
other of inferior race.
They looked at each other curiously--Mrs. Gregory frankly so. Nang
veiled her keen interest. But her interest was the more. The English
woman was keenly interested in China and in things Chinese. The country
had fascinated her powerfully, its odd people considerably. But she did
not take Chinese womanhood very seriously. Every one of intelligence
knew by now that many Chinese men were clever, almost hideously so,
but equally every one knew that Chinese women were limited--very. Of
course, the terrible old woman who ruled at Pekin was shrewd, unless
her ministers, Li Hung Chang and the rest, did it all for her, which
was probable; and then, too, she wasn’t Chinese really, Tartar not
Mongol. And Mrs. Gregory had no suspicion of what must have interested
her in Nang Ping indeed. She was keener to see the garden, and, if
possible, the house--it was said to be very wonderful--than to exploit
little Miss Wu. But she thought the girl pretty after a grotesque
Chinese fashion, “cute” and not unattractive, and she looked at her
with sincerely friendly eyes.
The young eyes that looked back at her were mingled adoration and
resentment. This was Basil’s mother, and she was like him. This was the
honorable mother who had given him life and nursed him at her breast.
And this was the woman because of whom he was going to forsake her, and
shut her out forever from peace, honor and paradise. Because of this
woman standing smiling at her here he forbade her Europe and joyful
motherhood. And he had shut her forever out of China! Why? Oh! why?
There are three supreme moments in the life of every Chinese girl to
whom the gods are not hideously unkind: the moment when her unknown
bridegroom lifts up her red veil and looks upon her face--perhaps to
love and cherish, perhaps to loathe and punish; the moment when the
midwife says, “Hail, Lady, it is an honorable _son_,” and lays
the funny little red, squirming firstborn on her breast to be adored,
and always to adore her; and the moment when she meets eyes with her
husband’s mother, and they look a little into each other’s souls. And
this last is _the_ supreme moment of her fate. In all the small
ways that make up the most of every woman’s life, her comfort and
happiness will depend upon this mother-in-law even more than upon her
husband--and mothers-in-law live long in China. Women are the pampered
class in China, as they are almost everywhere, and will be until “new”
hermaphrodite “movements” have pulled nature from her throne. And in
the quiet ways, the ways that count, the supremacy of the Chinese
mother is even greater than the autocratic supremacy of the Chinese
father. Occidental readers may believe this or disbelieve it as they
like; superficial travelers, ill-equipped for Asian sojourn, may see or
miss it, but the fact remains. Motherhood has ruled China for thousands
of years. It is not the fair young wife or the favorite daughter who
rules a Chinese, but his mother, old, wrinkled, toothless, bent.
From the thraldom of his father, from the thraldom of his gods, he
_may_ escape; from the thraldom of his mother, never! Nang Ping
knew now that she would never wear the soft red veil. That great moment
had been, and passed, for her when Basil had kissed her first in the
pagoda. The child that even now just fluttered beneath her breast--a
son, she thought, and surely blue-eyed--must die unborn; she knew that
now. He would never purl and pull and purr at her exultant breast. But
this was Basil’s mother, the honorable grandmother to whom she had
given a first grandson! What this moment might have been! Something of
the agony of the disappointment gnawing at her baffled heart crept into
her narrow eyes, and turned her faint and sick, and almost she swayed
an instant standing proud and gracious among her flowers--and the child
leapt.
Basil Gregory stood irresolute, embarrassed, looking from his mother to
Nang Ping, from Nang Ping to his mother.
Mrs. Gregory turned to him with a happy smile. “Ah! Basil, there you
are.”
“Yes, Mother, I missed you,” he said as lightly as he could, “and found
my way here to make the acquaintance of Miss Wu.”
He gestured courteously toward Nang as he spoke, and Mrs. Gregory moved
to the girl and held out her hand. Nang Ping moved too, a little
towards her guest, and made the elaborate gesture, hands clasped, of
Eastern greeting. Mrs. Gregory still held out her hand, and wondered,
when she gained the girl’s, which was the softer or the better kept,
Nang’s or her own. Basil had wondered it often.
“This visit to your beautiful garden is the greatest treat I’ve had
since I arrived in China, Miss Wu,” she began.
Wu Nang Ping bowed. “I am pleased to receive you in my honorable
father’s absence. He has had much kindness in England. It is his
command that always English friends have most honorable welcome here,
and it gives me happiness. My cousin, Low Soong.”
“How do you do?” Mrs. Gregory said cordially. “And this is my
daughter.” The three girls bowed, the two Chinese with grave formality,
a gesture of the arms more than a bending.
“Such a perfectly beautiful place!” Mrs. Gregory said it sincerely, her
beauty-loving eyes here, there and everywhere gloating.
“This is my own garden, where I walk with my women,” Nang Ping told her.
“It beats our poor little garden, Hilda,” the mother said gayly.
“Into fits.” Just a trifle of the surface vulgarity which, with its
hard coating of adamant varnish, covered and hid Robert Gregory’s soul
side--even from his wife--and wronged him, had caught and scorched,
slightly, the delicacy of Hilda’s breeding. Even Florence Gregory, some
rare times, used a slight word of slang: “As the husband is, the wife
is.”
Low Soong listened to Hilda with polite indifference. Low Soong had
no English. But Nang Ping wondered dully how a garden could have a
fit; she thought an epileptic garden must be very horrid. But she said
smoothly, “Ah! in London you have only walls and roofs, I think.”
“You have been there, Miss Wu, of course?” Mrs. Gregory asked.
“I have never been to any country.”
“Really? But--you must excuse me--but your excellent English.”
“My honorable teacher was English. My honorable father knows it like
you; he has been there--to Oxford.”
“Really! I was born at Oxford. And my son”--she turned to him a little,
meaning to coax him into the talk, and wondering to see him stand so
awkwardly and wordless--he was not often so socially inept, and never
gauche--“my son was there.”
“And my honorable father has taught me to esteem English people because
they are all”--she paused an instant, but she did not glance towards
Basil, and added with a grave, deferential smile--“all honorable men.”
“Well”--Basil’s mother smiled too, a prettily pathetic smile which
was half good manners and half sincere--“I am afraid there are a few
exceptions, sometimes.” She went up to her boy and laid her hand fondly
on his arm. “But”--not speaking to him, but still to Nang--“it is the
duty of all Englishmen to live up to such a high reputation.”
“I must be off, Mother,” the man said hurriedly, releasing himself
gently, “if Miss Wu will excuse me. I thought Father was coming.”
“He has. We left them down by the fish-pond, him and Tom, talking to a
quaint old gardener.”
“Oh! Well, I’m afraid I ought to be off--to the office. I’ll go
straight to the hotel afterwards--dinner usual time?”
“Of course, dear, unless you’d like it earlier or later. Do you know,
Basil, you haven’t dined with us for days?”--Nang Ping knew it. “I’m
getting quite anxious about your health, dear. Bother that fusty
office! You don’t seem a bit yourself.”
Her boy laughed at her and put his hand under her chin. (And Nang Ping
watched them curiously.) “You dear--why--I--I’m as right as rain.”
“Then prove it, my son--a big man’s dinner at eight. Now, if Miss Wu
will excuse you”--for evidently he was uncomfortable here--and why
not, the dear English child? How should he be anything else in this
funny Chinese nook with these Chinese girls? Probably he could not
even see how pretty this smaller one was, for all her narrow eyes and
absurd, grotesque clothes and paint, and it was plain that he could
not find a word to say to either of them, not even to this one who
was playing hostess so nicely, and who understood English and spoke
it surprisingly. His silence towards the plump dumpling of a cousin,
who was showing Hilda about the garden with quaint bobbings and solemn
pantomime, was excusable enough. She didn’t know a word of English,
it seemed; though you never could tell what a Chinese did or didn’t
know, John Bradley said, and Ah Wong said so too. But really, Basil
might have made an effort, and said a little something civil to the
English-knowing hostess; he was not often so shy--he _had_ been at
Oxford, and he was her son. Robert had no _savoir faire_, but, as
a rule, the boy had some.
When he was free from his mother, Basil moved to Nang Ping to take
leave of her. She received him with a quiet dignity that seemed
perfectly natural. “Chinese, but quite the grande dame,” the mother
thought.
He uncovered and looked down at Nang. “Good-day, Miss Wu.” She shook
her hands at him in Chinese-salutation way, and straightening up
looked at him with just the edge of a courteous smile--not an eyelash
quivered. He turned and looked towards the other girls, but Low Soong
had turned her back and was bending and gesticulating over a peony bed.
“By the way, Basil,” his mother said as he passed her, but paused to
give her one more smile, “the gardener was telling your father that he
knew you.” She wished him to go, and yet she stayed him.
Basil shot Nang a look--of consternation--taken aback and off his
guard. Mrs. Gregory did not catch it, but both Hilda and Low Soong
did. Nang Ping held herself impassive, but distress flickered for a
moment in her eyes. Then he turned back to his mother, trying to seem
unconcerned.
“Knew me? Why, I--he’s never seen me here in his life.”
“He didn’t say he had, silly,” Hilda Gregory said, strolling towards
them, Low Soong tottering deftly beside her--Low’s feet were bound--“he
said he’d seen you in Hong Kong.”
“Oh!” her brother laughed feebly, “in Hong Kong--that’s quite possible.
Well, now, I really am off. Good-by, Miss Wu.” And Nang Ping bowed to
him once more, in the prescribed ceremonial way, her face perfectly
emotionless, dismissing him suavely, turning from him before he had
quite gone.
“Will you not be seated?” she asked Mrs. Gregory, with a deferential
gesture pointing to the old stone seat.
Hilda and Low Soong still strolled about among the treasures of the
garden.
Ah Sing and perhaps half a dozen other servants moved about on padded,
noiseless feet, preparing Miss Wu’s tea-table with all its picturesque
paraphernalia of elaborate teakwood stools and benches, lacquer
sweetmeat-cabinets, glazed porcelain tea-bowls as thin as gauze and
painted by master craftsmen, trays of candied fruit, and several
delicacies of which Florence Gregory did not know the name and could
not guess the nature.
“So,” she said, surprised to find how comfortable a stone bench could
be, “Mr. Wu was at Oxford. How interesting! I wonder when. I knew a
Chinese gentleman--a student there--when I was quite a girl. We lived
at Oxford, my father and I. I forget his name. I have the saddest
memory, especially for names, and it could not have been your father
whom I knew, for I distinctly remember hearing, the year after I was
married--or some time about then--that my friend was dead, killed in a
climbing accident somewhere on the Alps. He was a fine sportsman.”
“Many Chinese gentlemen are sent to Oxford, I have heard my honorable
father say,” Nang Ping rejoined. “The Japanese go more to Cambridge.”
“Yes--and yet,” Mrs. Gregory said musingly, but more interested in
watching the servants than she was in her talk with this rather wooden
and very painted-faced child of the East, “your name--‘Wu,’ I mean--has
seemed familiar to me from the first, and now I seem to remember that
the man I knew at Oxford had a surname rather like that--or even that.
How odd!”
“There are many Wus in China,” the girl said. “It is a most large clan.
All our clans are very large. We are, you know, so old.”
“Wu.” The English woman said it slowly, as if trying to send, on the
sound of it, her peccant memory back to some forgotten hour.
“Oh! it is a most general name. It means Military. I do not know
why, for,” she added almost hastily, “we have had no soldiers in our
family--everything almost but that. All Chinese names mean something,
but of most of them--they are so old--the meaning is lost in the mists
of far, far back, uncounted years before history was written or kept
in record. And perhaps I ought to have remembered that one Wu was a
soldier once. Wu Sankwei defended Ningyuan against T’ientsung when
the Manchus first overran China. But that was, oh! so many years ago,
and since then none of my honorable ancestors have been soldiers--or
at least very few,” she added, with a sudden blush beneath her paint,
too honest to conceal from Basil’s mother, who was also her guest, her
military forbears, descent from whom she felt to be a bitter disgrace,
though she knew, as every educated Chinese must, that in all China’s
long history there are few greater names than that of Wu Sankwei, the
defender of Ningyuan. “‘Li’ is the name in China the most common and
perhaps the most proud. It is our ‘Smith’ name. And we are very proud
of it, because many of its men have been great and noble, and because
their honorable wives have borne them many children. Scarcely the
census-takers can count the Lis. My honorable mother was a Li before
my honorable father married her to be Mrs. Wu. They were cousins, but
more than a century away--‘twenty times removed,’ as you would call it
in your English. The honorable Li Hung Chang’s our distant kinsman, my
honorable kinsman on both sides. My own honorable father has ‘Li’ blood
on the side of distaff; his honorable name is Wu Li Chang. We are
Chinese, we of our house, but now in some of our blood we are Manchu
too.”
Mrs. Gregory smiled up at the girl. “Will you not sit here too?” And
Nang Ping bowed and curled up on the other end of the big seat.
Ah Wong opened her mistress’s parasol and brought it, and Mrs. Gregory
took it with a grateful “Ah!” “We have enjoyed ourselves so much in
your wonderful country, Miss Wu,” she went on; “we are quite sorry
our time here is drawing to a close. You know--but I forgot, you know
nothing of us, of course--well, we are going soon, going home.”
“All of you go?” Nang Ping knew that they all were to go, but she could
not resist the self-inflicted pain of hearing it again.
“Yes, all four of us--we are just the four--and I think my son will be
glad to get home again, after a year in the East.”
“I doubt that not,” the girl replied, in an odd, quiet voice. “But,”
she added, reaching up one ring-heavy hand to pull down a flower, only
to pitch it aside when she had smelt it once--the Chinese rarely do
that--“but he said he liked the East.”
“Oh! yes, indeed he does. We all do. Who could help it? But, after
all, it is not quite the same thing as home, you know, especially to a
man; and, besides, Basil has many friends whom he longs to see again.
And”--adding this good-naturedly, anxious to interest the girl and
smiling significantly--“we don’t want an old bachelor in our family,
you know; we have but the one son.”
“‘Bachelor’--that is one English word I do not know.”
“Well, what I mean is that Basil must return home before all the
eligible young ladies of his acquaintance forget him.”
“That means”--the girl’s voice hurt her throat--“he is going home to
marry?”
“Well,” his mother admitted, “there is a young lady at home, I believe,
who will be very glad to see him again, so I hope it will eventually
come to that.”
Nang Ping laughed. And Mrs. Gregory thought, “How very oddly the
Chinese laugh! It’s anything but gay.”
“And he will never come back?”--the strange creature said it with a
smile.
“Oh, yes!” Hilda said, joining them, “some day, perhaps, when he has
settled down, to take charge of this branch.”
“I’m afraid Basil is the sort of son who never settles down,” his
mother said lightly. Nang Ping thought it most strange, and not nice,
that the mother should say it at all, but she quite believed--now--that
it was true. She rose, and clapped her hands for Ah Sing.
“If you will honor me by taking tea,” she said, and led the way to the
highly decorated table where the ornate meal was elaborately laid, the
blue-clad servants standing about it in a circle, as still as stones.
At their young mistress’s approach they bowed almost to the ground--so
low that their cues swept the grass, and one caught and tangled in
a verbena bed. Mrs. Gregory suppressed a smile, but Hilda could not
suppress a low giggle. But she tried to, and that much is to her credit.
“How jolly!” she cried, as they sat down to an accompaniment of many
bows from the cousins. “How perfectly jolly!”
“Delightful!” agreed her mother. And Nang Ping, in spite of the
choking misery in her throat and smarting in her breast, was pleased
at their pleasure. She thought it sincere, and both Low Soong and Ah
Wong, watching lynx-eyed and imperturbable, knew that it was. Low Soong
was but an obliging mannequin this afternoon, Ah Wong but a lay figure,
expressionless and almost motionless, but neither had missed a word, a
look, or a meaning from the first, although Ah Wong had little English
and Low Soong had none.