The departure had been as sudden, as arbitrary, as Herrick's few acts
of decision usually were. The household had not recovered from the
surprise of Nasmith's visit when orders came to pack. In the
mysterious way by which news permeates a Chinese dwelling the subject
of Herrick's conversation with his guest was common property while
the two men were still debating it. Kuei-lien in great glee told
Nancy that her engagement was being arranged. She was to be married
to one of the light-haired men who had rescued her, the one with the
little moustache under his nose. Nancy, who recognized Nasmith from
Kuei-lien's mocking description, blushed a violent red and denied
that any such transaction was in progress.
"Oh, yes it is," declared the concubine, "I know. They are
discussing your presents right now. What a way to do it, with no
middleman! But that's your foreign custom. Soon you'll be squeezing
your waist into corsets and hiding your face with a white veil like a
mourner. Poor Nancy, you won't have a red chair; foreigners never
use them. They'll put you into a motor car and send you to a foreign
worship hall where you'll have to kiss your husband and take his
hand, so"--Nancy jerked free from Kuei-lien's provoking
fingers,--"and then you'll use a knife and a fork and eat goat's meat
till you smell like a Mongolian shepherd."
"I won't, I won't, I won't!" vowed Nancy, stamping her foot.
"Don't tease her," begged the nurse, beaming with smiles at the happy
news; "you know it is not seemly to talk to a maiden about her future
husband."
"Oh, it's quite all right by foreign custom. Your fiancé will come
every day to see you; we shall all hide behind the door while you sit
and talk and make love together."
"Yes, that is the custom," the amah admitted. "She will grow used to
it. She ought to follow the practice of her ancestors."
Nancy, however, had not stayed to listen. She had slammed the doors
of her room in their faces and flung herself across the bed, where in
the semi-darkness she meditated upon a change she never for a moment
doubted had been agreed to. It was while the nurse still
triumphantly declaimed the fitness of Nancy's marrying an Englishman
that Herrick appeared in the courtyard to deliver his curt message
that they were to return to Peking on the morrow. The exultant words
were frozen on the tongue of the amah. She had seen in Herrick's
eyes the defeat of all her hopes.
Nancy and Edward were miserable at coming back to Peking. It was
utterly dispiriting to be fenced by high walls in a garden that had
shrunk: no wide views, no sound of tumbling streams, no walks across
hills teeming with wild flowers--just the beat of paddles as the
clothes were rinsed at the pond and the tedious gossip of women whose
minds were confined like their bodies. The boy and girl relapsed
into their old routine, took up again studies with their teacher,
intermittent lessons with their father, the usual round of writing
and reading, yet all with lassitude of spirit, with hearts aching for
the hills.
Not even the Mid-autumn Festival, which because of the fewness of the
Chinese holidays always had made such a stir in their lives, could
wake the children from this lethargy. Nancy passed idly by the
flowering cassia, the pride of her courtyard, and wholly forgot to
thrust a sprig of the fragrant white blossoms into her hair. More
from habit than from relish she ate her round moon cakes and climbed
into the pine to see the largest moon of the year rise slowly from
the east. She was homesick for her brief hours with Helen and
Elizabeth and wrote them letters in English, long, affectionate
letters which she could not send because she had no knowledge of
where to send them. The exercise did bring some comfort; it seemed
to provide some intercourse with her friends, and would have
entertained them greatly, could the naïve, oddly phrased missives
have found their destination.
Kuei-lien did not visit Nancy as she used to do. The words the
daughter had spoken about her father's enemy were hard to forgive.
She never pressed Nancy for their meaning because she always avoided
unprofitable quarrels, but it became her policy to be cool to the
girl, to snub her as one might snub a pert child. Much of the time
she spent with the t'ai-t'ai, to whom she had related the tale of the
summer. The t'ai-t'ai agreed unreservedly that Nancy and Edward were
a problem; they ought to be sent back to the West. She offered no
proposal, however, as to how they should be sent. The fact was that
she was nursing plans of her own, plans which might not jump with
Kuei-lien's humor.
She had gone to her husband, shortly after his return, and taxed him
on the subject of her own daughter, Li-an. The girl was twelve.
Ought they not to be choosing her a husband?
"Good God!" exclaimed Herrick in English, "have we got to find
another?"
"My heart will have no peace till she is engaged," she said.
"But Li-an is only a babe in arms."
"She is twelve," the mother repeated.
"I hardly know the child. Bring her here. Let me talk to her."
Herrick's attention had in truth been so predominantly centred on
Nancy and Edward that the second daughter came before her father like
a stranger. There had never been the contact of English lessons to
quicken his knowledge of this fast growing girl.
"Yes, she is pretty," he thought to himself, "and, thank heaven,
Chinese."
Herrick examined the scholarship of his daughter, put many questions
which she answered cleverly. Then the whim seized him to ask what he
had asked of Nancy, to see how she would pass the test of bringing
what she valued most. Li-an went at once to her mother and told her
of Herrick's strange request.
"The most precious thing you have?" inquired the t'ai-t'ai. "What a
thing to ask! We must think about it and make sure not to disappoint
him. You might take a copy of Mencius, or the Four Books, or perhaps
your ink-stone and brush. No, they won't do; I have a much better
plan."
She extracted a photograph from her box.
"Take that," she said; "that will please him."
Herrick received the photograph and looked at it curiously. Then he
frowned. The picture was one of himself taken years before, a
portrait which revealed its subject in the stiff pose so dear to
Chinese photographers: there were flower pots bestowed in harsh
symmetry on either side of him, a drop painted to show trees and
balustrades behind, and Herrick, glued to the chair, facing the
camera with exasperated belligerency as though daring the lens to do
its worst--which it did. The man had forgotten such a picture
existed. In a moment of weakness he had given way before the
entreaties of the t'ai-t'ai and consented to its being taken.
"Who put you up to bringing this atrocity?" he demanded. He tore the
picture asunder and threw the pieces on the floor.
"Tell your mother," he said, "that it is rather early to be teaching
her daughter to lie."
The t'ai-t'ai appeared, full of explanations, full of apologies. The
child had been puzzled by her father's command, and was unhappy
because she had nothing precious enough to take to her father.
"So I asked her whom she honored most. 'My father,' Li-an answered,
'of course I honor my father more than anybody.' I showed her the
photograph merely to test her and instantly she begged me to let her
have it. When I saw the happiness come over her face and how she
valued it I suggested that this was the gift to bring to her father.
I am sorry it displeased you, but there was no time to frame it
suitably."
The excuse was so much more flagrant than the offense itself that the
man could not keep back a burst of laughter.
"Not even from your lips can two lies cancel each other, my good
lady," he remarked dryly in English. The t'ai-t'ai was a standard by
which he could mark his growing absorption into Chinese life and
realize how much deeper he still needed to sink himself before the
waters covered his soul.
"I'm afraid your daughter is much too clever," he said, openly
accepting Li-an's ill-advised act as a joke. "Fancy a child of
twelve practising such artful wiles on her old father."
The mother's face beamed in relief.
"But we mustn't be in too great a hurry in choosing her a husband.
We must make certain of a suitable man. Meantime I want your help in
something far more pressing. You realize of course that Nancy is
four years older than Li-an. We must make some arrangement for her;
we can't delay it any longer. I thought for a time of marrying her
to an Englishman, but now that I have been thinking about the matter
I know that Nancy, though she is English-born, can never be at home
in the West. She is Chinese by nature and training and speech, and
Chinese she ought to remain; so now I am determined to find a Chinese
husband for Nancy, and I want you to be matchmaker. Please don't
annoy me by a statement of objections and difficulties; I know these
as well as you. But there are a few points to keep in mind: first, I
must see the man you suggest. I am not going to be put off with any
dunderheads; I want the best. If I can't get the best there will be
no engagement. Furthermore, the man must be of good family; he must
be well educated, a man of scholarly tastes--and he must know no
English, no English at all. I won't have a son-in-law sucking his
breath and grinning at his own smartness as he gibbers 'Yes-s' and
'Alright.' Do you understand?"
The woman nodded.
"You may think I am asking the impossible in expecting such a
paragon. Well, you know the proverb that what we value cheaply we
sell cheaply. We don't need to apologize for Nancy and I will not
have you setting about this task as though we were asking favors.
Yet of course there will be a prejudice against the girl because of
her foreign birth. That perhaps will frighten the conservative
families, the very families we ought to look to for decent, obedient,
scholarly boys. I am ready to make one concession to overcome the
handicap of Nancy's having been born English; if I am satisfied with
the man you choose, I will give Nancy a portion of ten thousand taels
at her marriage; if I am very well satisfied, I might stretch the sum
to fifteen thousand."
After this last offer, which outweighed all Herrick's other
provisions, the t'ai-t'ai accepted her commission as matchmaker. She
was admirably fitted for the post, since she came of good family
herself, an excellent but impecunious family with many ramifications,
many branches, all prolific of sons and daughters, all equally
genteel, all equally poor. Within the confines of her own family the
t'ai-t'ai knew she could find many candidates for Nancy's hand. She
did not propose to look further.
Her father had been Herrick's teacher of Chinese. He was a gentleman
of the old school, a scholar of distinction, benignant in his ways, a
fountainhead of Chinese lore. The family had been broken by the
disgrace of the patron, whom an arbitrary whim of the Empress Dowager
had banished from court. Without exception every man of the family
had been thrown out of official employment. Years of vain waiting
for reinstatement had followed: they could not dig; to beg they were
ashamed. Swiftly their fortune melted away till Herrick's future
father-in-law broke with tradition by undertaking to instruct
foreigners in the obscurities of the Mandarin tongue.
For a long time he was the only man of his extensive family who
deigned to work. The others continued from day to day, living always
on the edge of solvency, getting food and clothing by some mysterious
means of which Chinese families are rarely so impoverished as to lose
the secret; they had been rather contemptuous over the one member who
stooped to teach foreign devils for a living, but they did not
scruple to share in the profits of his abasement; they were outraged
by his marrying a daughter to a foreign devil, but always borrowed a
liberal part of the money the t'ai-t'ai brought home as her gift to
the exchequer. They waited and taught their sons and grandsons to
wait for the turn of affairs which might restore them to office,
restore them to the emoluments of magistracies and deputy
inspectorships. Waiting had become the family profession and was
practised with all the assiduity of the Oriental who has known better
times and feels sure that in some lucky cycle of the future, in the
wheel which shifts dynasties and oligarchies and republics and chaos,
fate again will provide better times to her patient servants. The
t'ai-t'ai, surveying the case, decided that fifteen thousand taels
would be an extremely useful addition to the family fortunes, the
very harbinger of better times. There was more profit to be made out
of Nancy than out of her own daughter Li-an, for Nancy, being no kin,
could be married to a member of her prolific family, whereas Li-an's
dowry would be swallowed by some other voracious clan. It would be
foolish to let fifteen thousand taels slip out of her hands to the
advantage of someone else. With so many nephews and cousins sitting
idle at home, one surely could be sacrificed in the interests of the
family, even to contract something so undesirable as a mixed marriage.
The t'ai-t'ai put the reins of the household into the hands of the
nurse--she was always careful not to give power to a concubine--and
after she had stipulated this and stipulated that, lest the old amah
wax rich in her absence, she climbed into a mule cart and started
lumbering along the dusty ruts of the road home.