AT THE FEET OF KWANYIN KO
Nang Ping sat crouched at the feet of Kwanyin Ko, the Goddess of Mercy,
on the floor of her own room. She had been alone all night.
She remembered seeing her father on the bridge. She remembered falling
at Basil’s feet. She remembered nothing more--clearly. She thought she
recalled, as from a dream, being carried from the garden and laid here.
She thought it had been gently done. Whose arms had lifted and borne
her? She thought that she had been laid on her bed; across the room
her sleeping-mats were unrolled, and a light down coverlet was tossed
across the hard little cylinder which was her pillow. Some one had laid
her down to sleep. Who? And some one had brought her food and drink,
for on a tray near the mats there were fresh fruit and a dish of wine.
Had she been awake when she crawled here to lay her sorrow at Kwanyin’s
feet? Or had she thrown off the coverlet and crept across the floor in
her sleep?
A nightlight burned dimly in an opalescent cup, and across the garden
she could hear a cricket call and some big insect buzzing in the dark.
She tried to think, but she was too tired. She turned her face to the
floor and laid so, prone before the painted graven figure which was the
only succor left, the only semblance of woman’s companionship within
her reach. Where was Low Soong? Had Low been caught too in the coil?
If not, surely Low would come to her presently, if she could. What had
they done to Basil? She clenched her hands together in supplication
so frenzied that her nails cut into her palms and her rings tore her
flesh. What would come now? Or, rather, when would it come, and how?
She knew what was to come.
But she could think no more. She could suffer. That faculty was left
her, but she could neither reason nor plan. And why should she? The end
was absolute, and absolute the uselessness of thought.
Towards morning she found the little tinder-box, stuffed her pipe,
and began to smoke. It was innocuous enough a drugging, but gave her
growing nervousness something to do. Three or four whiffs empty those
tiny pipes. To throw out the ash took a moment, to refill the bowl took
another; the drawing on the stem killed a third--over and over again,
and one of the terrible night hours had gone. And still the Chinese
girl lay on her hard wood floor smoking mechanically, as in Europe
a girl so placed might have crocheted, or a woman older but no less
desperate have played patience, or tried to play.
When the first streaks of day came to sharpen the familiar outlines
of the room and of its furnishings, and sharpen her sense of pain and
peril, she threw the tiny silver pipe across the floor. It fell with a
clatter on the arabesque of the hard inlaying.
This Kowloon house of Wu was a veritable treasure-house. Not an
apartment in it (for the servants lived, and cooked even, outside) but
held much that was priceless. And no other room had been plenished with
such lavish tenderness as had this room of his one child.
The old bronze table that pedestalled and throned Kwanyin Ko had not
its match in Europe, neither in palace nor museum, and Kwanyin Ko,
herself looted from a palace six hundred years ago, was worth something
fabulous: no dealer would have sold her for sixty thousand yen.
The lapis-lazuli peacock, so exquisitely carved that its feathers
were fine and delicate as those of the big birds that strutted in the
sunshine on the terrace beyond the lotus pond (and the emerald points
that studded each feather thickly and the threads of gold and silver
that just showed their threads of burnishing here and there were real)
was worth its weight in rubies.
In all the room--and it was large--there was not one thing that of
its own kind was not the best. Wu had skimmed China relentlessly, and
much of its cream was embowled here: Nang Ping’s. And China is wide
and rich. Every inlaid instrument of music that strewed the cushions
and the floor, every classic book, the picture on the wall (there was
only one picture, of course--a landscape by Ma Yuan--heavily framed in
carved and inlaid camphor-wood) was a masterpiece, the culmination of
some imperial art of an imperial people, art begotten of a spiritual
and indomitable race’s genius, and nursed and perfected by centuries of
unfatigued patience. Cedar and sandal-wood and ivory hung and jutted
from walls and painted ceiling in cornice and lambrequins cut into
lace-work, as fine (though thicker) and as beautiful as any ever made
on a Belgian pillow. Three hundred robes, each in its scented bag of
silk, each costlier than the others, were piled on the next room’s
shelves of camphor-wood, and the lacquer chests of drawers and the
carved coffers that stood beyond the sleeping mats were crammed with
jewels. Nang Ping had sapphires that Maria Theresa had worn and a ruby
that had been Josephine’s, a pearl that had blinked on the hand of
England’s Elizabeth. She had, and often wore, a diamond that Hwangti’s
Queen Yenfi had worn four thousand years before. And the girl’s best
gems had been her mother’s.
And in this toyed temple of Chinese maidenhood and her father’s
devotion Nang Ping lay huddled on the floor, “by Love’s simplicity
betrayed, all soiled, low i’ the dust.”
Remember Nang Ping so long as you live, English Basil--while you live
and after!
The day came in, a lovely, laughing day of perfect Chinese summer, and
Kwanyin Ko blinked and grinned in the early radiance.
Nang Ping rose up a little and knelt before the joss, praying, as she
had never prayed before, the old, old prayer of tortured womanhood,
Magdalene’s petition, echoing, moaning in every corner of earth,
girdling the world with a hymn of shame and with terrible entreaty, the
saddest--save one other--of all prayers; never to be answered on earth,
never to be disregarded or coldly heard in heaven.
And in another room, ko’towed before an uglier, sterner joss--the God
of Justice--Wu the mandarin was praying too.
And in the pagoda--for it was there that it had been Wu’s humor to
prison him--Basil Gregory was praying, trying to remember words of
simple, tender supplication that his mother had taught him in England
when he was a little child.