"Come with me to a drug store and I will supply you with a stock."
And I, decked in my grandmother's cast-off clothes, walked along the
street, and into the "Palace Drug Store" with the elegantly dressed and
caned professor.
He didn't seem the least ashamed of me; indeed, he was so polite that I
forgot for the moment that my dress was anything odd--forgot it until I
saw a young man clerk looking at me in an amused way; then I dropped my
thick veil.
The professor insisted on my taking a certain kind of lozenge to hold in
my mouth while I was in the infected house, and ordered quantities and
quantities of disinfectants carried there, giving me instruction as to
how they should be used.
When we were walking back to the house of Mrs. Yet, the professor
remarked that the Chinese were a people worth studying.
"Have you heard any of their poetry, Miss Pearl?" he questioned. And
before I had time to reply--perhaps he thought he had no right to make
me give an answer to that question, he is a "great philologist"--he
continued: "Could anything be more exquisite than those lines to a plum
blossom?
"'One flower hath in itself the charms of two;
Draw nearer! and she breaks to wonders new;
And you would call her beauty of the rose--
She, too, is folded in a fleece of snows;
And you might call her pale--she doth display
The blush of dawn beneath the eye of day,
The lips of her the wine cup hath caressed,
The form of her that from some vision blest
Starts with the rose of sleep still glowing bright
Through limbs that ranged the dreamlands of the night;
The pencil falters and the song is naught,
Her beauty, like the sun, dispels my thought.'
"A certain collection of Chinese lyrics," he continued, "'A Lute of
Jade,' moved a London journal to observe that, the more we look into
Chinese nature as revealed by this book of songs, the more we are
convinced that our fathers were right in speaking of man's brotherhood.
Here's another to a calycanthus flower:
"'Robed in pale yellow gown, she leans apart,
Guarding her secret trust inviolate;
With mouth that, scarce unclosed, but faintly breathes.
Its fragrance, like a tender grief, remains
Half-told, half-treasured still. See how she drops
From delicate stem; while her close petals keep
Their shy demeanour. Think not that the fear
Of great cold winds can hinder her from bloom,
Who hides the rarest wonders of the spring
To vie with all the flowers of Kiang Nan.'
"This is Wang Seng-Ju's tiny poem," he added, "I presume a great many
people in this greatly enlightened America never ascribe any sentiment
to the Chinaman:
"'High o'er the hill the moon barque steers,
The lantern lights depart,
Dead springs are stirring in my heart,
And there are tears;
But that which makes my grief more deep
Is that you know not that I weep.'"
The moon had appeared in all her full-orbed glory, although it was
early twilight, and the professor looked at me so earnestly while
quoting those words that I actually believe I blushed.
"'There yet is man--
Man, the divinest of all things, whose heart
Hath known the shipwreck of a thousand hopes,
Who bears a hundred wrinkled tragedies
Upon the parchment of his brow.'
"Ou-Yang Hein penned those lines," he added, raising his hat in adieu.
But before we parted I made him promise to write out for me the Chinese
verses he had quoted; and it is his beautifully written lines I have
copied. I am going to learn them off by heart. How I would love to
recite them at one of Aunt Gwendolin's "Drawing-rooms!"
The professor had gone but a few paces when he returned to inquire what
hospital poor Lee Yet was in, saying that he would go around and see
how he was faring.
"This is such a very selfish world," he added, as if half to himself, "I
sometimes fear those poor foreigners that come to our shores get
woefully treated."
That was lovely of him! After all, men are brothers under their skin.
That was what their great man, Christ, taught--that all men are
brothers; he did not except the Chinese, as some Americans want to do.
_June 7th, 1----_
Almost as soon as Mrs. Yet was pronounced well, and was allowed to go
among people again and before Mr. Yet had left the hospital, Baby Yet
fell seriously ill--his teeth.
He grew worse, and worse. Yick told me about it one day in a few
concise Chinese words, which he snatched an opportunity to drop to me
in passing through the dining room. The wily Celestial seems to
understand, without being told, that no one is to know that he and I can
exchange thoughts in our native tongue.
That afternoon I stole out again, and went down to the little Yet home.
It was just as Yick had said, the baby was very ill.
He lay on his little pallet, white and still, almost unconscious, and
his mother stood over him wringing her hands, and shedding bitter tears.
"Oh, my baby! My baby! He die and leave me! My heart break!" she cried
in Chinese when she saw me. "Precious treasure! Precious treasure!" she
continued, bending toward the almost inanimate form on the pallet.
The latter is the almost universal term of endearment in China, and no
American mother ever agonised more bitterly than did that Chinese mother
over that atom of herself lying before her.
I had to do something to comfort her, so I began to tell her about
heaven. _I_, who was not sure that I could get to that blessed place
myself (stealing out on the sly in a grandmother's clothes is not a very
heavenly trick), said that whoever missed it, babies would be there.
"Will Chinese babies be there? They do not want them in America," she
asked rapidly and tremblingly in Chinese.
"Certainly," I replied; and at that moment I seemed to have a vision of
all the babies of this wide world that had died--black babies, brown
babies, yellow babies, red babies (probably the colour of their skin
was only the earth garb); I saw the whole throng, for grandmother had
read to me from the Bible that of such was the kingdom of heaven.
"His tooth not bother him there?" she added.
"No," I returned, "there shall be no more pain there."
"He like it," she continued, almost smiling through her tears.
Then she grew very, very still, and a glow stole over her yellow face
which made it beautiful.