The bell rang for tiffin. The servants were very punctilious about
this bell. The custom of ringing it, imported by the amah for the
seemly benefit of her two children, had become a family rite and the
subject of much pride to the women, who boasted to the families round
about that they were always called to meals by this stately summons.
Such was Nancy's and Edward's deference to the custom that they
rushed immediately to their rooms, Li-an only a step behind them, and
had soon appeared, clad in trousers and jacket, to do honor, as their
nurse had taught them, to the formality of the noonday meal.
Herrick of course did not eat with them. The condescension was not
expected. But the size of his family was amply demonstrated by the
women and children who had gathered round the square tables in the
room which was referred to rather proudly as the dining-room,
although dining was only one of its dozen functions. Nancy and
Edward sat at one table with their half sister Li-an and her mother,
the woman who as Herrick's wife held the right of first place in the
household.
Hai t'ai-t'ai, as she was called, was not an old woman; she had been
less than twenty when her father, Herrick's teacher for many years, a
man harassed by a shoal of impecunious relations, saw profit to his
family and the strengthening of a curious attachment in marrying his
daughter to this wealthy Commissioner of Customs. But
responsibilities had aged her appearance till she seemed nearer fifty
than thirty,--responsibilities and much good eating,--so that she was
now a stout matronly person with the wooden masklike face which goes
with dignity. On her shoulders fell the management of the
establishment, the settlement of the many disputes which were bound
to arise where wives and maids and menservants and children of
several breeds were so inextricably mixed.
On the whole, she was equal to her place. She maintained her rule
with considerable strictness, controlled expenditure thriftily enough
to lay aside means of her own, saw that Li-an, if she could not lord
it over Nancy and Edward, could at least lord it over the inferior
brothers and sisters that had followed. She would not have exchanged
the privileges of power for the less substantial marks of favor which
fell to the lot of the younger wives. From only one person could she
claim no obedience; that was the nurse. But Hai t'ai-t'ai, in the
happy old Chinese manner of compromise, tacitly recognized the care
of the two white children as a matter outside her province, accepting
them as though they were ambassadors with treaty rights in her
kingdom.
Between the two other tables the four concubines and their families
were divided. To the casual observer they seemed an amiable,
good-tempered group, knit together into a queer democracy, democracy
based upon a man's more volatile affections, yet there was not a
person among them who did not have her own pretensions and rights, so
that the family, if all secrets could be told, was the most carefully
graded of principalities. Since all of them, like the t'ai-t'ai
herself, had been chosen because they satisfied Herrick's fastidious
notions of beauty, all were young, all were vivacious and handsome.
It was not fading of feature but cares of motherhood that had caused
each in turn to be supplanted, although none of them could claim her
master's love to the exclusion of the others.
As secondary wives, they lacked of course the rank of the t'ai-t'ai;
they also lacked her gentility. But they were not deterred by the
fact of inferior station from grumbling over her control and
imagining ways of replacing her in the management of the family. The
oldest of these concubines felt particularly aggrieved because she
had borne her master two sons and by Chinese custom should have
stepped definitely ahead of a wife who had borne but one miserable
daughter. She felt her injury more deeply as the years passed; the
delights of the table, from which she could not hold herself back,
were visibly altering the daintiness of her figure and she deemed it
only fair, only the natural course, that she should regain through
her sons the influence her body was resigning.
Of the other three, two had been mothers once and had the prospect of
soon being mothers again, while the last was a young slave girl of
seventeen who had been exalted to the rank of mistress by the recent
whim of her master. The two mothers were pretty, ordinary women,
very much wrapped in their children and busier ramming chopsticks
into those sticky mouths than in filling their own. They accepted
the lead of the first concubine, aligning themselves with her
complaints, but they were always properly docile in the presence of
the t'ai-t'ai and, if left alone, would have found business enough in
the care of their children.
But the newest concubine, the reigning favorite in Timothy Herrick's
affections, was an animated contrast to the three who had preceded
her. While they were handsome, she was brilliantly beautiful, an
exquisite figure and face, with creamy skin, glowing eyes, lips which
needed no scarlet paint to accentuate their color, heavy black hair
that shone by an iridescence of its own to which the oil of elder
bark could have added nothing. She was the only one of his wives
with whom Herrick had become definitely infatuated. Such was his
delight in her company that for days she did not appear at meals with
the other women or enter their apartments, but shared the board as
well as the bed of her master. In consequence she was so bitterly
disliked that any of her three predecessors gladly would have thrust
a knife into her breast or marred her body by slow torture.
It was a further cause for quarrel with the t'ai-t'ai that this
wanton creature had been taken particularly under her protection.
Indeed, she was accused of having brought about Kuei-lien's
advancement. Most of the slave girls were coarse drudges, soon
polluted by the sluttery of their living quarters. Kuei-lien not
only had been bought at the instance of the t'ai-t'ai but made the
subject of partial treatment, spared the harder tasks, given better
clothes, and defended from the familiarity of the menservants. So
there was reason to perceive more design than accident in Herrick's
discovery of the girl and his command that she be divested of her
humble attire, bathed, dressed in costly silks, and brought like a
queen to his chamber.
The relationship of Nancy and Edward to the four mistresses of their
father was most informal. They were not shocked by the function of
these women because they had never been taught to be shocked. It was
an ordinance of nature that a man should have as many wives as he
could afford, a sign that all was well with the business investments
from which Herrick drew his income. The boy and girl moved quite
freely through the house and were on amiably chatty terms with its
inhabitants. They played with the children, most of course with
Li-an, who had been longer their playmate and was a fair partner in
their quarrels and their peacemakings; they fell out now with one
group, now with another, but most often with each other, so that no
one grieved long over these usual bickerings of children. In the
jealousies of the household they had not been involved. The women
had treated them with advised caution, preferring not to complicate
their intrigues by introducing a new and unstable ingredient. They
did not understand the two foreign children, and so treated them with
a careful friendliness such as committed themselves neither to enmity
nor to love.
But Kuei-lien had disdained these wary tactics. She had set herself
quite openly to win Nancy's affection and of course had met no
reverse, since the charm which had won the father was easily
adaptable to winning the daughter. Nancy even had asked the
t'ai-t'ai to put Kuei-lien at the table with them, but this slight
upon the others Hai t'ai-t'ai and the amah both agreed was not
politic. Still there was nothing to prevent Kuei-lien's spending
much time in Nancy's room, which the others never entered of their
own accord, where talk, replete with zest and flavor, helped the
intimacy to grow.
The championship of the amah had won her charges more seclusion than
the others enjoyed. The house, like all Chinese houses, was of many
sections, divided by courtyards, and, like the houses of the North,
it was substantially built. Occupants and servants and even the dogs
moved with no thought of privacy through its rooms and hallways, that
is, through all except the portion allotted to Nancy and Edward. Now
that the brother and sister had grown too old to live together, they
had been given the choicest part of the house and the innermost,
where they lived, virtually isolated, between the garden and the last
of the courts, with the t'ai-t'ai and their amah for the only
immediate neighbors.
They could have asked no place more charming. Their rooms were to
left and right of the hallway; which was continued in a straight line
through every section of the house so that if all the heavy middle
doors had been opened the garden could have been seen from the street
as at the end of a long tunnel. Their doors and windows faced the
courtyard and this was a very pleasant place. Locust trees towered
on either side; from their lowest branches hung cages in which
canaries sang and starlings raucously mimicked human speech. Into
the pavement two small pools had been built, where goldfish flashed
their tails as they swam to and fro round islands of porous rock on
which tiny houses and temples and bridges and figures of men and
women, in fascinating diversity of posture, had been set to give
lifelikeness to the mossy crags. There were flower beds too,
multicolored in their profusion of zinnia and canna and marigold,
while a vine with diminutive scarlet blossoms climbed the bamboo
scaffolding, across which matting was rolled to break the glare of
the sun.
Here Nancy and Edward enjoyed very comfortable quiet. Except when
servants went through to wash clothes in the pond, they were seldom
disturbed; the concubines preferred the liveliness of their own
courtyard and rarely went walking in the garden till the afternoon
sun had gone down. All day long, after the clothes had been beaten
dry on flat stones and the thumping of wooden paddles had ceased, the
children heard only the songs of their birds and the agreeably shrill
noise of the cicada.
Since her preferment, however, the slave girl Kuei-lien had become a
visitor to Nancy's room and at any hour of the day, when the children
were not shouting their lessons from the adjacent schoolroom, might
lift the screen of Nancy's door and enter. The afternoon was the
time she liked best to come, when the shady coolness of Nancy's room
was a refuge from the child-infested chambers of her own quarter.
It was a simple room but spacious, divided into two parts by a screen
of carved wood in which was an octagonal opening, quaintly shaped, to
allow passage from Nancy's bedchamber to what in effect was her
parlor. The furniture was not sumptuous; the carpets had been
removed at the beginning of summer and the stone floor covered with
matting. There were the usual stiff-backed wooden chairs and one or
two reclining ones of wicker, narrow tables on which stood gaudy
vases, cheap and disagreeably shaped. The walls were decorated with
Nancy's own efforts at painting. In the bedchamber were boxes of
white pigskin where the girl stored her clothes. The bed itself was
a large varnished affair inlaid with different woods. Four posts
held up the muslin mosquito curtain. Nancy, never having known steel
springs or horsehair mattresses, was quite content with the wicker
network over which she had spread a thin cotton pad, leaving the
heavier quilts and the mat, which was the coolest to sleep upon in
sultry weather, rolled to one side of the bed.
It was here Kuei-lien usually found the girl lying, comfortably
divested of the outer garments she donned only for meals and classes,
her head raised upon a bamboo pillow and her hand slowly fanning the
knees she had drawn up in front of her. Kuei-lien herself would slip
off trousers and jacket and lie on the bed beside her or squat
cross-legged on a large low stool and share with Nancy the cigarettes
which helped their confidences. And Edward, if he were bored or too
lazy to sleep, made a third and teased the girls with pleasant
sedateness proper to a hot afternoon.
Their talk was sophisticated. Nancy was curious about the forbidden
topic of marriage, eager to gain all the knowledge she could from the
experience of her father's mistress. To Chinese girls of her age
marriage loomed on the horizon, so that it was little wonder she
exercised much ingenious fancy in pondering who her husband was to be.
"Oh, you will marry an Englishman," said Kuei-lien.
"But I have never seen an Englishman."
"Your father is an Englishman."
"Pooh, my father is too old!" Such was Nancy's respect for
Kuei-lien's superior acquaintance with life that she never thought of
the concubine as only two years older than herself, nor that what her
words suggested in her own case must also be true in Kuei-lien's.
And there was the further difference that a concubine is not a wife;
for a man of fifty to take a concubine of seventeen was only
reasonable; to take a wife of seventeen would have been
extraordinary. Nancy could not have imagined a man living unmarried
to the ripe age of fifty.
"My father is too old. What does a young Englishman look like? Have
you ever seen one?"
"Of course, I've seen many," replied Kuei-lien, ignoring, if she was
aware of it, Nancy's defect of tact. "There are many young
Englishmen in Peking. They have yellow hair and red faces and big
teeth and big moustaches like your father's--"
"The young ones?"
"Yes, the young ones. I think they are born with moustaches. They
wear short coats, and look very hot, and always say 'goddam' to their
friends."
The picture was too repulsive.
"I won't marry an Englishman," said Nancy.
"Then what will you marry?" put in Edward.
"I want to marry the Emperor," answered the girl in a sudden burst of
fancy.
Because her auditors both laughed, Nancy obstinately defended the
absurd notion.
"When the Emperor sends to choose a wife, I shall go to the palace,
and then he will command me to be his Empress, and I shall make
Edward a governor."
"But he can't do that any more. We have a republic now. And,
besides, you are not a Manchu. You are not even Chinese; you are
only English."
"That's all the better," said Nancy, "because if the Emperor has an
English Empress then all the English will belong to him and he can
use their guns to drive out these republican barbarians."
Nancy's extravagant words had soon been repeated through the
household where they excited great merriment. The women giggled at
her temerity and nicknamed the girl privately, calling her
"Mock-Empress," a name of which Nancy did not become aware till by
her haughty mood she provoked it from the lips of Li-an.
"You are nothing but a half-naked barbarian, you mock-empress,"
exclaimed the half sister in anger. "Do you expect me to knock my
head on the ground to you?"
Then the hair flew. Nancy, her wrath swiftly wakened, pounced on the
younger girl.
"Yes, you shall knock your head," she cried. With her strong arms
she bent Li-an to the earth.
"Knock, knock, knock," she shouted as she thumped the head of her
victim against the ground. "Now you will see if I am a mock-empress
or not."
Edward intervened and Li-an fled screaming to her mother, in whom the
attack awakened all the old jealousy of these children who carried
themselves superior to her own daughter. The t'ai-t'ai went to see
Herrick about the affair.
"Nancy is growing up and getting silly notions," she told him. "Why
don't you send her back to her own people? A girl as big as she is
should be engaged. No one here can control her."
Herrick listened in annoyance.
"What do you know about these things?" he asked testily. "Don't I
know what is best for my own daughter? You take children's quarrels
too seriously. English girls never marry so young. You look after
the behavior of your own child and we shan't have these disturbances."
The t'ai-t'ai took the rebuke in silence. But she knew as certainly
as though he had spoken the words that her English husband was only
trying to conceal his perplexity.
She had touched upon a sore spot. If he had no plan to suggest she
must think of one, lest two foreign children, like tiger cubs reared
for pets, swallow their playmates of the nursery.