"Then wear it always," said the Doctor, with a pontifical lifting of his
fingers.
Oddly enough, my husband did not care for the native feminine fashion of
trousers and never permitted me to wear them. I considered them very
graceful and comfortable, but gladly adopted the severely plain skirts
with the plaits at the sides.
I had put on China, to wear it always, in my heart and mind, and thought
only of my husband, his work and his people. In the beginning, I should
have been perfectly content to remain cloistered, to meet no one save a
few woman friends, to go nowhere. Life flowed by me so evenly that I was
happy to drift with it, filled with dreams. The noises of hurrying,
half-modernized Shanghai reached me but vaguely, deep within my cool,
quiet house where the floors were spread with white matting and the
walls were hung with symbolic panels. The click of the ponies' feet on
the pavement, the thud of the rickshaw coolies' heels as they drew their
noiseless, rubber-tyred vehicles, the strident scream of the motor
horns, the strange, long cries of the street venders, all came to me
muffled as through many curtains that sheltered me from the world. But
my husband insisted that I should go about with him everywhere that he
felt we should go, that I should help him entertain, that I should meet
and mingle with many people, both foreign and Chinese.
He was always ready to advise me on social matters, a more difficult
undertaking than might be supposed. I have already spoken of the many
gradations in the meeting of East and West. These alone are confusing
enough, and there are further complexities due to the fact that in the
two civilizations the fine points of etiquette are often entirely at
variance. A single example will suffice--the custom of serving a guest,
as soon as seated, with some form of refreshment. In the very
conservative Chinese household, if the visitor even touches the cup of
tea, placed beside him on a small table, he is guilty of a gross breach
of good manners. In the ultra-modern household, he must drink the iced
summer beverage or the piping hot winter drink, to avoid giving offence.
Then there are the variously modified establishments, where he attempts
an exact degree of compromise, whether acknowledging the offering
merely by a gracious bow, or going further by raising it to the lips for
a dainty sip, or being still more liberal and consuming one-half the
proffered amount. That such situations are often baffling, even to Young
China, I have heard it laughingly confessed in many lively discussions.
But, though occasional errors are inevitable, sincere good-will is truly
valued and seldom misunderstood. Chan-King's ability to consider all
points of view at once was very helpful to me.
But he forgot to warn me that in Shanghai social calling is proper at
any hour of the day from nine o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock
at night. I was therefore three days in learning, during a short absence
of his, that early morning and late evening calling was an institution,
and not an accidental occurrence, as I at first supposed. Finally, Ah
Ching gave me a hint. I was in _négligé_, preparing for a morning of
lazy play with Wilfred and hoping there would be no interruptions, when
Ah Ching appeared and announced callers. My face must have expressed
surprise and a shade of annoyance, as it had for three days previously
at these summonses, for Ah Ching hesitated a moment and then vouchsafed
what he plainly considered a valuable piece of information. "In
Shanghai," said Ah Ching, "he all time go to see--all time come to see."
He paused. "_All_ time!" he added firmly and departed. I found this to
be literally true and I therefore formed my habits of dress on the
assumption that callers demanding the utmost formality of behaviour and
appearance might be announced at any moment.
Needless to say, Ah Ching's "he" was pidgin-English for "she," for my
personal visitors were all women. They were of many
nationalities--Chinese of course, and also American, Canadian, English,
Scotch and French. With the Chinese women, especially, I found myself in
perfect harmony. Nowhere, I believe, do sincerity and good-will meet
with a warmer response. They accepted me with a cordiality that was very
real and rendered invaluable assistance in my initiation into the new
life. They took me calling, shopping and marketing until Shanghai ceased
to be a bewildering maze of crowded thoroughfares; they helped me to
understand the complexities of Chinese currency; they explained the
intricate points of fashion in dress and recommended skilful tailors.
From the first we were deeply interested in the meeting and blending of
East and West that went on about us everywhere, in every field of
endeavour. We found unique opportunity for fresh impressions in the
Second Far Eastern Olympics held at Shanghai that spring. In the
presence of many thousand spectators, China, the Philippines and Japan
strove for supremacy in athletic prowess. The affair was managed
entirely by Chinese, and during most of the contests my husband was busy
on the grounds in an official capacity. I sat in the grandstand with
Chinese women friends, some of whom were returned students, and the
rousing cheers, the whole-hearted enthusiasm, brought to us vivid
memories of college days in America. The evenings were filled with
receptions and garden parties in honour of the visitors. Of course our
pleasure in the whole affair was immeasurably heightened by China's
well-earned triumph.
As the months passed, Chan-King's high-hearted enthusiasm, his dauntless
will to carry through great work in the education of Young China,
flagged to some degree, from terrible disillusionment.
This is the problem all returned students have sooner or later to face
and conquer. They come home brimming with hope and filled with
aspirations towards their country's betterment. And gradually they are
forced to acknowledge one enormous fact--that China has been her
glorious, grim old self for too many centuries, her feet are sunk too
deeply in the earth of her ancient traditions, to be uprooted by one
generation of youth--or two or three or a hundred.
Chan-King chafed and worried and worked too hard. Strangely enough, he
grew home-sick for America, though I did not.
"America strides like a young boy, and China creeps like an old woman!"
he said bitterly one day after attending a meeting of the college board,
where his modern ideas of education had suffered a defeat at the hand of
the reactionary body.
"But China is a wise, wise old woman!" I replied gently.
And very often during this time I would uphold the traditions of the
East while Chan-King championed the ways of the Western world.
My husband underwent disappointments, irritations and trials that would
have been unendurable in a less securely poised nature. As it was, he
suffered so in the great things that he had but little patience for the
small ones, and I often found him sudden of temper, with a quick
asperity of tone and finality of judgment that showed me clearly how
great a strain he was under.
But with us there was always love. And Chan-King was very careful to
make me understand, even in the midst of small disappointments and
vexations, that these things were the universal human annoyances that
had nothing to do with regrets or a sense of alienation. I broke into
tears one day when a sharp little scene occurred over nothing at all.
"Oh, Margaret, my dearest!" he said, taking me in his arms, "these
moods mean nothing between us, when we love each other so! Don't take
them seriously! What could destroy our happiness now?" In spite of the
world-wide difference in our race and upbringing, whatever difficulties
of temperamental adaptation we had to meet were merely such as must be
faced by any husband and wife in any land.
Yet Chan-King's personal fascination for me, his never-failing appeal to
my imagination, were definitely founded on the Oriental quality in him.
I found throughout the years, in every phase of our relation, a
constant, irresistible, always recurring thrill in the idea that we were
not of the same race or civilization.
Once when I confessed this fact to him, he said, "Do you love me only
because I am Chinese?"
"No--I think I should have loved you no matter what race you came of.
But how can I know?"
"I like to feel that you love the essential _me_."
"Yes, but the essential _you_ is Chinese."
He thought a moment. "Chinese, yes, but a most respectable member of the
Dutch Reformed Church of America!"
"I won't let that injure you in my eyes!" I assured him, laughing. I was
of the Anglican faith, and we often referred to the strange mixture of
nationalities in our creeds.
My husband, in spite of his firm faith, was not of a deeply religious
mind, and of the two I was much more mystical in my beliefs. Love,
divine and human, had come to mean everything to me, in a literal and
spiritual sense. I believed, obscurely at first, but with increasing
surety and faith as time went on, that human love also was not of time
only, but of eternity as well. And, when I found that Chan-King did not
share this belief, I felt, for the only time in all my marriage, alien
to him, shut out by an impalpable veil from his profoundest inner life,
which I wished passionately to share in everything. The discovery came
hand in hand with our first shadow--only the shadow of a shadow, I might
call it, so vague, at the beginning, that we could not feel more than an
uneasiness.
Chan-King fell ill, though not seriously, and he recovered quickly. But
on the up-curve of returning health he never quite regained the old
plane of physical well-being. Signs--oh, the very smallest of
signs--warned us of a grave, slow breaking down of his system under
phthisis. We could not quite believe it.
His physician advised him to ease the strain of work as much as he
could. We talked together in the early hours of many nights, Chan-King
always insisting that his depression was the result of temporary
fatigue, sure to pass away with a few weeks' repose in the open air of
the hills.
It was during this time that I spoke to him of the everlastingness of
love and my faith in a life farther on. "Where could death take one of
us that the other could not follow?" I asked him, in strange triumph.
His eyes held mine a long minute. His face was very sad. "I am not sure
of that. I have no idea of what we shall be to one another in another
life. I am only sure that we are all things to each other now."
An inexpressible sense of fear took hold of me. Chan-King seemed at once
terribly alien and removed; I could not speak, for I had the feeling of
calling in a strange language across a great chasm. I said nothing for
fear of distressing him, but he must have sensed my disquietude, for he
took my hands and held them to his face and let his eyes shine upon me.
"Don't look like that," he said. "We have much time yet to think of
eternity." But from the day of this illness the shadow was never once
removed from me.
Now we were lured by the residential charms of the French Concession,
with its broad, tree-lined avenues and fresh, windswept spaces. So we
took a new house in a terrace fronting on Avenue Joffre. We liked our
large rooms, each with its tiled fireplace, its polished floors laid
with Tientsin rugs, its electric lights. There was a grassy lawn with
Chinese orchids and a border of palms and magnolias, and just around the
corner from us was a public garden where, to Wilfred's delight, dozens
of children played each day under the care of their respective _amahs_.
Our staff of servants was now increased to five by the addition of a
rickshaw coolie and a second _amah_.
Chan-King received shortly after this a letter from his father, the
first communication he had had from his family since our marriage. It
contained an invitation to return home for a visit, since his mother
wished very deeply to see him again.
"I can interpret this in only one way, Margaret," he said in a puzzled
tone. "It is an offer of reconciliation. That means that they do not
know you are with me."
"Go and see for yourself what it is," I told him. For I would have
consented, for his sake, to a reconciliation on almost any terms. I had
seen enough of Chinese family life to understand the powerful bonds of
affection and interest that bind the clan together, and I felt in my own
heart the cruelty of breaking those between mother and son and brother
and brother.
"I want to tell them about you," Chan-King answered. "This is my
opportunity."
Before accepting their invitation, Chan-King wrote and told them that
his wife was with him. And their replies to this proved him right in his
first surmise. His family knew he had returned to China and, having
heard nothing further of his marriage, had supposed that it was all
over. This was not exactly a surprising conclusion for them to reach.
More than one foreign woman has refused to accompany her Chinese husband
home. I myself came in contact with an occasional half-household, in
which a Chinese was held in China by his business affairs while his wife
waited for him on the other side of the world. Sometimes, too, she did
not wait, and the marriage ended in the conventional way--that is, in
the divorce court. Chan-King's people imagined that something of the
sort had occurred to him, and were quite ready to wipe out old scores
and resume the ties of relationship.
After having written the initial letter of reconciliation, they held to
their attitude in a thoroughbred way, only amending their welcome a
trifle by requesting him to visit them alone. Very tactfully and gently
they put it like this: his father was growing old and any sudden change
disturbed him; the household had lately been added to by marriage and
births, and he would find everything very much more comfortable if he
should come alone.
He went, firmly resolved to change the mind of his family toward me. And
I, too, was anxious for them to know that a foreign marriage had not
harmed Chan-King. During the six weeks of his absence his letters were
cheerfully non-committal, though he spoke of his happiness in being in
his mother's house again. I thought a great deal about that house, the
intricate lives of the people in it and their many degrees of kinship
and authority. Chan-King had told me enough to give me a fairly clear
picture of them. I had always admired their ability to sustain difficult
relations under the same roof with the utmost good temper and mutual
courtesy.
Yet I was Western enough to feel that Chan-King and I knew each other
better and had been more free to learn each other thoroughly, alone in
our own household, which was growing into quite a Chinese fashion. I
expected my second child and looked forward, with much hope, to the new
life, for I had always been deeply maternal and wanted several children.
But to Chan-King and me our love for each other was the greatly
important thing in life--the reason for all the rest of our existence.
We accepted the fact of birth as naturally as we did the change of
seasons. Children were an essential to our happiness, but not the
dominant essential. We ordered our home for ourselves, as two lovers who
had elected to pass their life together.
Chan-King expressed our views thus: "The Chinese idea is that the family
is the end, the children the means of keeping it up. In the West, the
children are the end, and the home merely the means of keeping them up.
You and I have it perfectly adjusted, I think--the home is for all of
us, and all of us have proper places in it."
Chan-King returned early one morning, and I knew, from my first glimpse
of his face, that his visit had been a fruitful one. I flew to his arms,
and, as he kissed me, I saw that his eyes were serene and contented.
"How is your august mother, my lord?" I asked him with a bow.
"My mother is in good health and wishes to meet her daughter-in-law,"
he answered, and, in spite of the bantering tone, I knew he was in
earnest.