PREPARATION
A bird was singing rapturously in a honagko tree as Nang Ping rose
from her knees. She stood awhile at her open casement--it had been
flung wide all night--listening to the little feathered flutist, saying
good-by to her garden. The pagoda gleamed like rose-stained snow in the
rosy sunrise, and the girl smiled wanly, thinking how like a bride’s
cake it looked--the high tapering towers, white-sugared and fantastic,
that English brides have. She had seen several at a confectioner’s in
Hong Kong, and she had seen an English bride cut one with her husband’s
sword at a bridal in Pekin. It was far prettier, Nang had thought, than
the little cakes, gray and heavy, that Chinese brides have, but not so
nice to the taste--flat and dry. The lotus flowers were waking now,
slowly opening their painted cups of carmine, white, rose and amethyst;
the peacocks were preening to the day, the king-bird of them all
flinging out his jewels to the sun, and the shabbily-garbed hens, in
the red kissing of the sunrise refulgence, looking to wear breasts of
rose. A lark swayed and tuned on the yellow tassel of a laburnum, and a
bullfinch see-sawed and throated on the acacia tree. And every gorgeous
tulip was a chalice filled with dew.
“Good-by,” the girl said gently, and turned away.
She still wore the rich festive robes of yesterday. She began to take
them off, slowly, drawing strings from their knottings, slipping hooks
from their silver eyes, pushing jewel-buttons out of their holes,
letting the loosened garments fall one by one in a rainbow heap of silk
upon the floor (as Wu, when a boy, had shed furs and gems upon a floor
in Sze-chuan). Her women would find and fold them presently. But it
mattered nothing. Nothing mattered now.
She still was wearing her nail-protectors, two on each hand--necessary
adjuncts to the toilet and to the comfort of many Chinese ladies, whose
long spiral nails would be a torture if unprotected. But it had been
Wu’s pleasure to have Nang Ping taught the piano, and so, of course,
she had to wear her nails short. But whenever she was “dressed” she
wore the fantastic ornaments, to indicate that Wu’s daughter did not
work. She discarded them now, and listlessly let them fall upon the
silks heaped at her feet: two were of green jade (one finely carved,
one studded with diamonds), one was silver set with rubies, the fourth
was gold set with pearls and moonstones.
When all the finery--such finery as Europe never sees, except
burlesqued on the stage--had been cast off, she began to re-dress
herself, steadily and very carefully.
From the silver ewer she poured water into the silver basin. It needed
both her hands and much of her strength to lift the ewer; it was heavy
with the precious metal’s weight, and she had never lifted it before.
In all her life she had never once dressed or undressed herself.
When the attar and the sweet vinegars had creamed in the basin she
bathed her face again and again until all the paint was gone. She only
wore rouge and thick-crusted white paint on days of function and of
festival. On days of homely ease and unceremonied home-keeping her skin
was as clean and unprofaned as a baby’s.
It is a canon of Chinese womanhood never quite to undress
unnecessarily. Modesty at her toilet, even when performing it alone, is
enjoined the Manchu girl as it is the Catholic girl of Europe. And this
Manchu niceness has permeated the other Chinese races. And in China
a maid would be held not chary, but prodigal indeed, did “she unmask
her beauty to the moon.” A land of several peoples sharply distinct in
much, China is in much else the land of great racial amalgamation. And
it is impossible to trace back to their source many of this wonderful
people’s most salient qualities. Tartar has infected Mongol, Mongol
inoculated Tartar, Taoist taught Mohammedan, Confucianism and Buddhism
have mixed and fused, Teng-Shui tinged all, sometimes tainting and
degrading, occasionally idealizing and lifting up to poetry. And
modesty of body is simple instinct with Chinese girls of every blend
and caste. Nor is it lost--as so many of youth’s sweetnesses always
must be everywhere--in the gray slough of old age. Nowhere in China
will you encounter the unique exhibitions of antique female nudity that
occasionally startle one so extraordinarily in Japan. The old women
of China, even the poorest, are always clad, and a Chinese girl slips
from the screening of her smock into the screening of her bubbling bath
without an instant’s flash of interim.
The early daylight showed Nang Ping very lovely, as she stood there in
her one last garment. Chinese women of the mandarin class are often
exquisitely lovely, especially those of mingled Manchu and Mongol
bloods. Nang’s sorrow was too new to have bleared or blowsed her yet;
it had but thrown a gracious, pathetic delicacy about her as a veil.
And even the charming coloring of her was not impaired.
There is no greater beauty of coloring than the coloring of such
girls--not in England, not in Spain. Nang Ping’s skin was no darker
than the liquor of the finest Chinese tea, and not unlike it in hue,
not green, not buff, but white, just hinting of each, and in her cheeks
the delicate pink of a tea rose told how red the blood at her heart
was, and how thin the patrician skin that masked and yet revealed it.
The little figure, tall for a Chinese, was tenderly drawn and perfectly
proportioned; the young presence, for all its gentleness, was queenly;
the firmly modeled head was well set on the straight shoulders. Hair
could not be blacker or arched jet brows more beautifully drawn. The
girl’s mobile mouth was large, but exquisitely shaped, and her red lips
parted and closed over teeth that could not have been whiter, more
faultless or more prettily set. There was a dimple in the obstinate
chin, and one beneath the tiny mole on her right cheek; and her black,
velvet eyes (soft now, and almost purple with unshed tears) were as
straight set in the small head as the eyes of any Venus in Vatican or
Louvre.
She stood a moment, gazing into space, clad only in her delicate smock,
and then slowly she redressed herself in her simplest robes--soft,
loose and gray. She had many such gowns, and wore them often. The
Chinese are too greatly, too finely artist to let the gorgeousness
in which they gloat degenerate by over-use into a commonplace. The
blare of their brazen music has its long reliefs of slow, soft minor
passages; their gayest gardens have prominent heaps of dull, barren
stone, long stretches of cold, gray walls; each sumptuous room has its
empty, restful corner. Nang Ping had fifty pictures of great price,
and more ivories, each a gem, but all the pictures save one, all the
ivories save one, were stowed away always, and just one at a time
placed where it might joy her sight; and most often she moved softly
about her home habited in plain raiment of neutral tints as gentle as a
dove’s.
Her hair took her longest. She had never brushed it before, and the
unguent took time to remove. But at last even that was done, the
jeweled pins heaped away, the long black strands braided about her head.
And then she sat down on the floor again, her cold, ringless hands
clasped at her knees, and waited and listened until her father’s gong
should strike.
She knew that she should hear it presently.
Once she started, and caught up from the floor a little scented bead.
She held it to her face, and then laid it away in her bosom. It was
her father’s, one of a string he often wore, and in her bitter misery
she was pathetically a little happier for the proof it gave her that
his own hands had carried her here. She would keep it in her bosom
always--while she lived.
Twice servants came in with trays of food and drink; blanc-mange, soup,
tea and wine. They made deep obeisance to her when they came and when
they went. But she did not speak to them, nor they to her.
And no message came until the message of the great gong’s soft boom.