IN THE PAGODA AND ON THE BENCH
So long as he may live Basil Gregory will never understand how he
lived through those hours in the pagoda--his last hours in the pagoda
by the lotus lake. So long as he lives he must remember them, and
shudder newly at each remembering--waiting again in torture and alone
to hear the deep-throated damnation of Wu Li Chang’s gong telling him
that--that he was branded forever, soul-scarred. Wu Li Chang had hit
upon something that not even a man could forget.
How he got there he never knew. He remembered being taken to the
mandarin, the terrible interview, the news of Nang Ping’s death, the
demoniac threat of his mother’s ordeal and agony, but nothing of his
return to the pagoda. For a time--he had no way of knowing how long
or how brief--a merciful space of blank had been vouchsafed him. And
the utmost fury need not have grudged him it. For, if the mother in
the house suffered more than a death, the son in the pagoda, when
consciousness crept back, suffered her sufferings multiplied. She was
his mother, and he loved her. Always she had been very good to him. And
he had been so proud of her. Could he ever feel quite that pride again?
Her very sacrifice must smirch her in the eyes of the son for whom
it was made, and whose crime it punished. Even his love for her must
be a little tarnished, a little weaker, after the clang out of that
brazen gong. Wu Li Chang had found a great revenge. His own honor had
never burdened Basil Gregory; but his mother’s honor--ah! Or, for that
matter, even Hilda’s, or his cousin May Gregory’s--for, like so many
such men, Basil Gregory leaned his soul (such as he had) and his pride
upon the women of his blood. To be virtuous vicariously is a positive
talent with some men.
His mother! He writhed. His mother! He tore against the pagoda’s
walls with his hands, all pinioned as they were--for his freed hand
was bound again--until his knuckles bled. If such punishment as Wu
had devised could be shown vividly, anticipatorily, to men about to
stray, the gravest of the social problems must be so somewhat solved,
the most stinging of the burning questions somewhat answered. If sons,
light, selfish, weak, could expect such chastisement as Basil Gregory
was enduring now, a famous commandment would be honored in observance
an hundredfold, dishonored by breach miraculously less. A daughter’s
shame--a sister’s--that scourges most men; a wife’s--oh! well, there
are wives and wives, there are men and men, but a mother’s--ah! That
touches all manhood on its quick. Brand the scarlet initial of adultery
on his mother’s brow in punishment of him, and what son would commit
the fault? Fewer!
From the sun--for there were spaces pierced in the elaborate stonework
of the pagoda’s thick sides, and he could see through some of them--he
thought that he must have escaped nearly an hour of the misery of
consciousness.
Heaven knows the scene enacted in the smaller audience hall was
exquisitely terrible enough; but the man alone in the pagoda pictured
it ten times more terrible, more hideous, more stenched than it was.
Made an artist in fiendishness by his love for his child, Wu was most
fiendish, most exquisite, in his enmaddening deliberateness. He drew
out the woman’s agony until the sinews of her soul seemed to crack and
bleat. The hideous hour seemed an age to her. To Basil, waiting alone
in the pagoda, the hour seemed ages piled on ages.
Alone? But no, he was not alone. This was Nang Ping’s pagoda. She had
given him “free” of it, and shared it with him. She shared it with him
still. A ghost--a girlish Chinese ghost--stood beside him and looked at
him adoringly, accusingly, with death and motherhood in her eyes. “Oh!
Nang Ping! Nang Ping! Forgive, forgive!” he cried, and hid his face on
his pinioned arm. Then he looked up with a cry--wide-eyed, for he had
seen his mother in the room he’d left, the room where the gong was,
and Wu--he saw his mother, and the Chinese moving towards her, and he
turned and cursed the girl-ghost at his side--the poor dishonored ghost
with a tiny nestling in her arms.
Angry at punishment self-entailed, to shift, or seek to shift, the
blame, or some part of it, upon shoulders other than our own, is a
common phase of human frailty. “The woman tempted me.” And so the fault
is really hers. Punish the temptress and let me go. “The woman tempted
me”: it is the oldest and the meanest of the complaints. But sadly
often it is true enough.
A man never had less cause to urge it, in self-extenuation, or even in
explanation, than Basil Gregory had. Nang Ping had never tempted him.
Even in the consummation of their loves, the heyday of her infatuation,
she had never wooed him. In their first acquaintance, contrived in part
by him, brought about in part by a fan of Low Soong’s, lost and found,
Nang Ping had been as shy and unassertive as a violet. She had never
tempted except with her own sweet reserve and the fragrant piquancy of
her picturesque novelty. And that she had not sought him, or, for some
time, allowed him advance, had been her chief charm for him. And on the
day that he had told her that he was returning to Europe, and at once,
leaving her to face their dilemma alone, she had uttered no reproach,
made no outcry--just a quiet expostulation abandoned as soon as made.
“You will not come back,” she had said quietly, and had gone from him
calmly, with dignity.
Never lover had less just cause to reproach mistress than he had to
reproach or blame Nang Ping. But for his mother’s sake, and, too,
perhaps, for his craven own, he did, and cursed the girl who had died
for him, as he raged futilely here in the pagoda, where he had taken,
and she had given, her all.
It is a big thing to be a manly man.
It is a tragedy to be a woman--except when it’s the very best of great
good luck.
* * * * *
Very little of the good luck of life, very little of the joyousness of
womanhood, had ever been Ah Wong’s. All her life she had worked hard
for scant pay and no thanks. All her life she had yearned passionately
for companionship, and been lonely. From a brutal father she had
escaped to a brutal husband. Her children were dead, and had not
promised much while they lived. God knows, Mrs. Gregory had given her
little enough--almost nothing. And yet Mrs. Gregory had given her her
best time--the nearest approach to a “good time” she’d ever known. And
she was pathetically grateful to have had even so much of creature
comfort, such crumbs of kindness, so shabby and lukewarm a sipping
of the wine of life. The Englishwoman did not even know that she had
been kind to the amah. Indeed, Ah Wong had merely warmed her cramped
and frozen being in the careless overflow of a nature that, by happy
accident, was full of sunshine and brimmed with radiance.
Ah Wong was grateful, and Ah Wong was honest. She meant to repay. She
hated debt; almost all Chinese do. She had loyalty. She had grit. She
had Chinese wit. And she had the light wrist of her sex at subterfuge:
it is world-wide.
Ejected from the house, she sat down contentedly in the courtyard and
began to knit--an industry foreign to Chinese eyes. It brought curious
women of the household about her. She had intended that it should. They
brought her liangkao and melon seeds--for hospitality was the rule of
the house--and she ate all the liangkao and cracked all the melon seeds
while the other women chattered to her and to each other.
She said that she was very tired--her lady was a hard taskmistress.
She didn’t like the English. She was very tired, but she’d like to
see something of so beautiful a place, now that she was here, and she
tottered about a little wearily from treasure to treasure, but never
far from the house, from tiny forest trees a few inches high, in pots
the size of thimbles, to an evergreen that was a century old and that
had its widest branches cut into birds in full flight. She cried out in
ecstasy at a great dragon sprawling on the grass, a dragon of geraniums
and foliage plants. And presently she yawned and said that she was very
tired, and sat down heavily on a carved stone bench. After a little
she fell asleep, and the women giggled at her good-naturedly and left
her. The bench was not far from the window that high up looked into the
mandarin’s sitting-room.