The noise of crackers broke into the first light of the day. Nancy
woke, scarcely understanding where she was or that this was her
bridal day. She had not expected to sleep. Kuei-lien had withdrawn,
leaving her lying open-eyed on her bed. She had watched the tranquil
candles which even now still flickered, low and gutted though they
were. Her heart had been dumb with uneasiness. She could not drive
from her mind the thought that she had something to say to her father
and that now it was too late to say it. Three or four times she had
been on the point of stealing through the quiet house to see him, to
revive for the last time those moments of infinite tenderness when he
had seemed to know, without her telling, every secret of her heart.
But she was afraid, and, before she realized it, had fallen into a
sleep so troubled that it was like being awake. Now came the burst
of firecrackers and the weird sound of the pipes. Kuei-lien came
bustling into the room.
"It is time to be up, Nancy," she called cheerfully, "the bridal
chair has come."
Then with the help of Li-an and the maidservant began the solemn
ritual they had made trial of yesterday, the clothing of the bride.
But none of them could recapture yesterday's deep feeling. In the
chill light the bride emerged, looking tired and sleepy, much too
pale for the richness of her dress. She pretended to eat the
breakfast which was offered her and waited calmly for the proper
moment to cross the courtyard to the hall where the chair had been
set. At last the t'ai-t'ai appeared with her niece, who had come to
fetch the bride. The flutes began once again their unvarying tune.
Men with sashes across the shoulders threw down squares of red carpet
under her feet and picked them up again behind her as she walked
slowly from her room to the great reception hall. Kuei-lien and the
t'ai-t'ai's newly arrived niece supported her, each holding an arm.
The air was blue with the smoke of the crackers.
The hallway seemed dim after the courtyard. The lanterns were
swathed in red silk. The candles on the gleaming altar were choked
with clouds of incense. Nancy was so dazed by the smoke and the
noise that she did not see at first the chair with its trappings of
gold and green and purple and blue heavily embroidered on the scarlet
satin; she raised her eyes for one swift glance at its gorgeous
canopy; became aware of the crowd admiring its splendor, the plumed
ph[oe]nix on the crest, the painted images of children, tasseled
flowers; she saw Edward's woebegone face, the bright skirts of the
women, all mixed together by the trembling confusion of her eyes.
Then the t'ai-t'ai advanced, holding out the long robe writhing with
golden dragons.
"Isn't my father coming?" the girl suddenly asked.
She was anxious that his hands at least should put the veil over her
face.
"He is not well enough to come," answered the t'ai-t'ai.
There was a guilty hesitation in the reply which caused Nancy to look
long and carefully at her stepmother. For a moment she delayed, for
a moment even pondered brushing aside all the futile ceremony in her
mad wish to know what was wrong with her father. Then, as quickly,
she silenced the words on her lips and held out her arms to let her
body be vested with the heavy robe. There was an instant in which
every heart seemed to stand still. Acting for Nancy's absent
parents, the t'ai-t'ai fastened the long veil of red silk across the
face of the bride. It was so thick that the girl could see nothing.
Everyone stared in great quietness at the muffled figure, which
swayed a little when the attendant women helped the bride step by
step into her chair. She sat down, hidden away in darkness by the
curtained windows. The doors were closed in front of her; their two
sides joined together the severed character for happiness. There was
a perceptible click as the lock was slipped into place, a bare
instant before the fresh outburst of crackers, the tumult of horns
and flutes, the loud weeping of the amah, the sound of Edward's
crying, the ear-shattering din as the musicians and lantern-bearers
formed their hectic procession, and the scarlet-girdled coolies
struggled with their huge chair.
Nancy had come close to her threat to stop thinking, but she could
not stop feeling, just as Ronald had predicted. She sat, stiff and
listless, making no effort to lift the veil that cloaked her face.
There would be nothing to see if she did. The windows were too
securely shrouded, the doors too safely fastened. She kept no count
of time, knowing the procession would thread many streets on the way
to her new home, making the bravest show money would allow. Far
ahead came the repeated explosion of crackers, almost incessantly the
trumpets brayed, and the flutes kept up their monotonous lilting
music. The girl could feel the hum of people round her and hear the
noise of traffic in the streets brought to a momentary standstill by
her passing. But she felt no glory, no exultation in this high
moment of her life. Her body was cold with fear and her heart
already sick from loneliness, weary of the ride yet dreading its
finish, dreading her delivery like a well-selected piece of
merchandise into the hands of strangers.
Just when her mind had been lulled into a state of throbbing
blankness she realized that the roar of firecrackers had redoubled,
the musicians were blowing themselves into an accelerated frenzy of
noise; the pace of the coolies slackened. The chair was set down;
the long poles were withdrawn. She felt men pick it up at the four
corners, and she clung to the sides as they toiled with their load,
jerking and pitching the unhappy bride across the threshold of her
new home.
It was difficult for Nancy to collect her spirits in the great uproar
of her arrival, but the heavy veil, hiding her face from all
observers, helped the girl at least to look calm when the doors of
the chair were unlocked and she was led stiffly across the room and
seated on the bridal bed beside her husband. She gave herself
entirely into the hands of her attendants. At their direction she
knelt and bowed four times to the tablets of heaven and earth and
then to her still invisible husband.
Now came the great moment, when, having been seated a second time
beside Ming-te, she suffered him to lift the veil from her face. She
felt rather than saw his anxiety, felt rather than saw the curiosity
of the crowd gathered in the door, all breathless to see what the
face of this foreign bride should be. There were reassuring
exclamations of approval, loud whispers of admiration at her beauty,
all bitter praise to the girl whose cheeks needed no paint to
heighten their flushed color. In her bewildered trance Nancy hardly
knew what was done next. She was too shamefaced to steal even a
glance at her youthful husband, but received silently the gilded cups
of wine with which she and Ming-te plighted their troth. She did not
think of touching the food which was set before them or to make even
the pretense of eating, but sat in mute embarrassment, catching just
a glimpse of Ming-te's trembling hands as he helped himself to the
nuptial cakes. The wedding was completed. She knew that she was
irrevocably the wife of this unknown, still unseen stranger. She had
no courage to lift her eyes to his.
Through a long day's ceremonies she bore her part with the same
unbending dignity. But all the time, when she managed to be
outwardly calm enough to worship alien ancestors; to bow down before
the parents of the bridegroom; to stand beside her husband and, at
the command of the master of ceremonies, to do an endless series of
salutations to the many guests who had come; even in the moments when
she was allowed to withdraw with attendants to her room, her real
life went round and round in a whirl of tempestuous thoughts. The
merrymaking, the feasting, the noise and excitement of savory dishes
being served, of wine being drunk, wine being spilt, the loud shouts
of men at their games, touched her so lightly that she did not
observe a sudden change in the festivities, a momentary pause as
though of hearts stricken with fear, words of whispered debate,
before the renewal of the merriment in a defiant spirit which was not
loud enough to drown the buzzing undertone of conversation in which
the word "unlucky," "unlucky," was bandied to and fro. She missed
the first news that her father was dead, and went tranquilly through
the rites assigned to her without knowing her new loneliness.
The news had thrown the feasters into consternation, not because they
had ever met or regretted Herrick, but because his untimely death was
so bad an augury for this marriage. To die in the height of the
merrymaking--they could not forgive him for that. There were those
who deplored the strange match and thought he might have died early
enough to postpone, even to prevent it; others thought he might have
died later. But to die when his death could be neither hindrance nor
help and with no result except to throw gloom upon the feast, that
was unspeakably bad taste. To the dismayed family of the bridegroom
the shock was still harder. They were angry at being balked even for
a few days of the dowry which should by now have been paid, and were
not nearly so sure as their kinswoman, the t'ai-t'ai, that Herrick
had not cheated them by his death.
For the moment, however, they tried to put the best face on things
and when the question arose as to whether the girl should be told,
they decided to leave her ignorant till the morrow. Fate had been
spiteful enough. It would never do to mar the auspices of the bridal
bed by mentioning so unpropitious a word as death. The first hush of
panic gave way to a delirium of mirth. Hosts and guests alike were
determined to forget the grim shadow which had disturbed them, to put
outside the gates of their memory the hideous demon who snatches
souls from the living. More and more hot wine they poured into the
cups. Voices yelled; hands were flung helter-skelter in the fury of
"slippery fist," the wild game of guessing fingers and urging one
another into a state of drunken hilarity. Everyone sought to pledge
the bridegroom till the unfortunate youth scarcely could totter on
his feet and saw lights and faces going round in giddy spirals. The
young men who supported him did stout duty in his defense, discarding
the wine cups little bigger than thimbles and calling for the more
capacious teacups in which to measure staggering potations.
By evening time no one cared whether Herrick had died yesterday or
to-day or a thousand years ago.
People from the streets had joined the guests in a clamorous entry
into the bridal chamber, long before which time Nancy had been taken
from the quieter feast of the women and prepared for the ordeal to
which every Chinese bride must submit, when she stands the rude
inspection of the crowd. This is always an occasion of ribald
wit,--curiously allowed by the custom of years,--in which strangers
do their best by the indelicacy of their remarks to disconcert and
embarrass the "new woman." But the fact of Nancy's being a foreigner
added spice to the event; it made the girl a natural victim of the
worst pranks the crowd could concoct. And the freedom with which
wine had flowed stirred men to pitiless depths of cruelty in
torturing their prey. They teased the girl with unbridled lust of
word and gesture such as would have revolted any of them in his right
senses. During the three long hours of this orgy the husband of
course remained discreetly absent,--he was in fact too sick to
come,--while Nancy was compelled to stand beside the gaudy bed,
submitting to every whim of her tormentors without a word of defense
or even a sign that she was noticing their obscene spite, and with no
attendant except an amah almost as much a stranger as the rest.
The men crowded round her in a mocking circle. They discussed every
feature of her body with abominable frankness, pulled up her skirts,
pinched her legs, examined the bangles on her arms, chucked her
freely under the chin, tried to force wine between her teeth. The
amah, whose business it was to play the buffoon and draw these
attacks from her mistress by rollicking diversions, was too
mean-spirited a creature to perform her part, and let Nancy suffer
the full force of their lewdness unhindered. There was much laughter
over the drunkenness of the bridegroom; he would be quite unable to
share the bridal bed, the crowd boasted, and the most boisterous of
them played fingers to see who should sleep with this handsome
foreign devil in his place. The thought tickled their wits; they
pulled out clothes from Nancy's boxes, dressed themselves in a
mocking masquerade, threw themselves on the bed, amid howling
applause, to portray an indecent drama of Nancy's modesty and Nancy's
shame. Through it all she stood with half-averted face, eyes and
cheeks ablaze, pretending neither to hear nor to see, knowing too
well that the least sign of anger would draw down the redoubled
hostility of her persecutors.
Yet, despite her outward passivity, the experience was burning deep
marks upon her heart. She began to realize what she had protested
against all her life, that she was in truth a foreigner. The
pleasant manners of her father's household had deceived her too long.
The little differences between herself and her father's wives had
been too slight, too amiably adjusted, to make her know the cleavage
of race that divided her own instincts from the instincts of the
Chinese among whom she had been trained. She had beguiled herself
with books, with romance and poetry, with the language which came by
first impulse to her lips, but now she understood what a lie she had
been living all these wasted years.
Late in the evening, long after Nancy's feelings had been outraged
into a state of numbness, the coarse abuse of the bride brought signs
of reaction. The befuddling effects of the wine were wearing off and
some began to feel compassion for the girl who had borne so
unflinchingly a measure of evil treatment which even they, with many
memories of such bride-baiting, had never seen matched. Sympathies
veered. Those who had held their tongues through the worst
indignities now commenced to find them; their appetite for cruelty
was sated. Yet the irony of the event was that these impulses of
pity should deal the girl her sorest wound.
"Shame!" cried one man, hardier than the rest. "You are a coward to
treat a girl so when her heart must be sorrowing for the death of her
father."
The remark, uttered with such loud scorn, hushed the mob for a
moment. In their sport many had forgotten Nancy's bereavement; some
had never known of it. The fickle crowd responded to an instant's
compunction. There ensued a brief but appalling silence, and when
the sport was resumed it was never with the former heartiness.
Little by little the throng began to dwindle. Guests and onlookers
slipped away till only the more obstinate braves, hilarious intimates
of the family, stayed to stipulate with the groomsmen a feast for the
morrow as the price of their leaving husband and wife to a first
night's undisturbed felicity.
But the outcry of Nancy's one defender, which was a quickly forgotten
incident to the others, made the torture and coarseness of the
evening trivial to the wretched girl learning for the first time that
her father was dead. She turned strangely calm, strangely rational,
as though she never had been so gravely alive, but her one mastering
desire was to talk to someone about her father, to pour out her
words, to make him live on the frantic accents of her tongue.
At last the room was quiet. The candles had been changed for those
which should burn through the night. Nancy's mother-in-law appeared
to speak a few formal phrases to the bride and to see that the
attending women were doing their part properly in making her ready
for bed. Then the bridegroom, amid fresh jesting on the part of his
family, was led to the chamber. Nancy did not sit up to look at him,
but waited till the others had withdrawn. She heard them tittering
outside, but she paid no heed to other people, once the heavy doors
had been shut. With slow scrutinizing gaze she stared at the youth
who stood timidly beside the bed. It was the first time she had seen
him.
Ming-te had a face marked both by intelligence and by weakness. He
was handsome, with quick bright eyes, a skin of singular clarity, a
slightness of figure which made him seem younger than the girl he had
married. His distaste for being confined in this embarrassing
loneliness with his bride made him seem the weaker of the two, and
Nancy knew by instinct that he was no match for her strong will. His
family had overplayed their part in rousing his courage with wine; he
was trembling from the effects of sickness, the nausea of unfamiliar
drunkenness, and failed of confidence to meet Nancy's look.
"Is my father dead?" the girl suddenly asked him.
He stammered with surprise at the directness of this question.
"Yes," at last he nerved himself to admit.
"How long have you known it?"
"I--I have known it--I don't know when I knew it."
"And you let them do all these things when you knew my father was
dead?"
The boy opposed a sullen reserve. He felt it was wrong that he
should submit to scolding on the first night of his wedding, but he
was glad for any excuse to talk. He was afraid of this outspoken
foreigner. Nancy divined his thoughts.
"Did you wish to be married?" she asked. "Your parents made you, I
suppose. You had to be here, didn't you? I didn't. I married to
please my father."
There was pride in her voice, pride ill assorted with the humiliation
she had suffered, with the sorrow her heart seemed not large enough
to contain.
"I didn't please him. I killed him. I don't belong to you," she
cried, with a sudden gust of bitterness that showed her shame had not
been forgotten. "I don't belong to you. I married to make my father
happy, and he isn't happy. You are only a schoolboy; you don't
understand these things. I don't see you; I see my father. I don't
even think of you; I think of him. They knew he was dead and yet
they went on with this marriage. They deceived me and tricked me
into coming here when I ought to be at home and weeping. They put up
red candles and sent the red chair for me when they knew he was dead.
They pulled you away from your books, did they, all because they were
afraid they would lose the money my father promised? And so they
forced you to marry a foreigner--how many taels was it?"
Ming-te stood like the schoolboy Nancy declared him to be. His
attitude suggested dread of the ferule poised above his head.
"I am sorry for you," Nancy went on. "No luck will come out of this
marriage." She looked at the huge gilt characters on the scarlet
banners which lined the wall. "Hsi! Hsi! Hsi! Hsi!" she
exclaimed, mocking their message of happiness. "Happiness
everywhere, paper happiness. There is no happiness in your heart or
mine, and you know it. Your own ancestors would cry out against the
blasphemy. I would never have worshiped them to-day if I had known
my father was dead. We have disgraced them. I thought your family
were an honorable family, that they used to be officials, that they
served the Emperor, yet they have shown themselves no better than
small-livered coolies. Happiness!" she muttered again with intense
passion. "What happiness can result from dishonoring the dead?"
Suddenly she forgot the awkward boy at her side. The aching
freshness of her loss made her too miserable to defy him. She choked
down a sob of despair, hiding her face in the gayly embroidered
pillow.
"Oh, my father, my father, my father," she wailed, "why did you leave
me, why did you leave me alone, why couldn't you stay with me! I
want you!"
It was the first time her spirit had given way, the first time she
had broken down through all the prolonged travail which had brought
her so fearfully step by step to this unendurable moment. And as if
to seize the advantage of her defeat, the door opened; her new
parents appeared. They were white with anger at the tales of the
eavesdroppers who had been listening to the events of the bridal
chamber from outside and had heard Nancy upbraiding her irresolute
master.
"You call yourself a man," scoffed the mother, seizing her son, "you
a man, to be bullied by your wife on her bridal night, to let her
devil of a tongue steal your courage? Small joy shall we have from
such a yellow-mouthed milksop as you!"
She bundled him like a disobedient truant into bed, taunting him with
her sarcasm, stinging him into hatred for the girl who had made him
ridiculous, till he did not care whether he stifled her bruised body
with his passion.