Mr. Wu Based on the Play "Mr. Wu" by H. M. Vernon and Harold Owen

The very old man in the chair of carved and inlaid teak wood saw the glint of fear, and he liked it fiercely, although he came of a clan renowned for fearlessness, even in a rac...

James Muir was waiting for them in the room where their meal was served. There were but two meals in that household--breakfast and dinner--or rather but two for the mandarin and...

Wu Li Chang enjoyed his wedding very much. He enjoyed all of it (except the enforced parting with his young wife)--the wonderful journey to Peichihli, brightened by anticipation...

It was love at first sight. The bride crowed at the bridegroom, and he forgot his grave new dignity and his ceremonial mandarin robes, and clapped his little yellow hands and da...

But the homeward journey was even more delightful than the journey coming had been. The mandarin was very good to the boy, even a little kinder than his wont, watching him narro...

But it was summer again before he went. The mandarin was taken ill soon on their home-coming, and all through the cold northern winter only just lived. Death means little to the...

On the whole, young Wu enjoyed the voyage. He liked the way the foreign women eyed his clothes; not one of them had garments half so fine. He liked the motion of the boat when o...

There was a great deal in the Oxford life that reminded Wu of China: the beauty and the dignity, the repose, the dedication (and of some the devotion too) to the finer things, a...

Wu did not see his wife in Pekin. He stayed with Li several days, and long and earnest was their talk, many and deep their interchanged kot’ows, and the cups of boiling tea and...

The years passed, and Wu took no other wife. Time enough, he reasoned; and while he devoted himself, body and soul and seething, subtle intellect, to the big tasks he had set hi...

Kowloon was drenched with sunlight, and the lotus garden was drenched with music. A minstrel paused a moment to drink in the beauty of the great lilies, white, yellow, pink, amb...

Do you know Hong Kong? If not, you are poor with poverty indeed. Except in China earth has no lovelier spot, and heaven itself needs none. The interior of the island is almost b...

On one point, and on just one, John and Basil had agreed last night: Mrs. Gregory was to be spared as much as possible. She and Hilda were to remain happily ignorant of what had...

Sing Kung Yah was away temporarily from her important post as Wu Nang Ping’s chaperone-guard, spending a few weeks of semi-religious villeggiatura in a Taoist nunnery with a kin...

Basil Gregory had written his formally couched note of warning in a fidget. Nang Ping had no experience of masculine fidgets. She had seen her countrywomen fidget, but never her...

“Oh!” her brother laughed feebly, “in Hong Kong--that’s quite possible. Well, now, I really am off. Good-by, Miss Wu.” And Nang Ping bowed to him once more, in the prescribed ce...

Mrs. Gregory bore her part in the pretty little function with creditable imitation of Chinese propriety. She had been coached by a woman at Government House. She blessed her own...

And then the breakdown came, and she sank down, weeping and distracted, on the long stone seat. Her father in Kowloon! Her father who was almost omniscient! How long had he been...

She remembered seeing her father on the bridge. She remembered falling at Basil’s feet. She remembered nothing more--clearly. She thought she recalled, as from a dream, being ca...

A bird was singing rapturously in a honagko tree as Nang Ping rose from her knees. She stood awhile at her open casement--it had been flung wide all night--listening to the litt...

When he had lifted her, he had not glanced at the Englishman, nor had he even looked in the direction of prison or prisoner since. The servants had their orders. Those orders wo...

Lord Melbourne once said that “nobody has ever done a very foolish thing except for some great principle.” Well, it would be difficult to find the great principle underlying mos...

That afternoon Florence Gregory, coming in with Hilda and Ah Wong from a weary, distracted searching--searching here, there, everywhere--found in her sitting-room such a basket...

That same night, at midnight, Tom Carruthers and Hilda Gregory sat hand in hand on a verandah that looked down the Peak on to the city and the water beyond. The midnight sky was...

Holman sat glowering at a telegram he was reading for the third or fourth time, but looked up impatiently as a Chinese clerk came in and stood waiting to speak.

At eleven a coolie was caught smuggling paraffin, disguised as a chest of tea, on to the _Fee Chow_. Not a word could be got out of him as to what or who had instigated him; nei...

The three sat brooding in silence for several minutes, until one of the native clerks came in and held the door open respectfully. That meant that the chief was coming, and Murr...

At the door Holman, as devoted a servant in his masculine and British way as Ah Wong was in her way, turned back almost peremptorily, and coming close to Robert Gregory said sha...

Gregory, nearly exasperated by the other’s coolness, made a threatening gesture. And then came the sudden blazing out of ferocious rage that smolders always under the quietest O...

“Quite right,” Wu Li Chang said cordially. “This is--or was--your son’s property. My servants found it in my garden, after your son had left there. I intended to give myself ple...

Again, as Wu Li Chang passed through the office yards, the coolies almost groveled at his feet, and this time he threw a curt but not unpleasant word to one or two of them.

It was four when Wu Li Chang reached Kowloon and his own home. Barely two hours in which to arrange the details, the scenic background, of the last act of the tragedy--the exqui...

“Not necessarily, my young seducer,” the Chinese said softly. “Your father I do not regard as a man at all formidable. I had a most interesting interview with him--to-day. And I...

There was terrible silence between them. Great puffs of sweet smell came in at the window where the headheavy wistaria hung and the lemon verbena crowded at its gnarled roots, a...

“The lady has arrived,” Ah Sing said with an obeisance, and speaking, of course, as he always did to his master, in Chinese; “she is coming through the honorable garden.”

The woman’s uneasiness was growing rapidly. “I don’t think I ought to have come,” she said, looking about her nervously. “But now,” with an effort to speak ordinarily and to ass...

So long as he may live Basil Gregory will never understand how he lived through those hours in the pagoda--his last hours in the pagoda by the lotus lake. So long as he lives he...

The tray of tea was laid on the table. The lamp-man moved about the room, and a dozen dim lights broke out, like disks of radiant alabaster, so dim, so beautiful, and so unexpec...

Distracted, not knowing what she did, or why, like some wild thing trapped and helpless, Florence Gregory looked about the room, searching it with eyes almost too fright-blinded...

As she passed from the house into the garden, moving crazily on--not knowing why, how or where--the frenzied mother met her son coming blindly toward the door, his arms still tr...

And in the K’o-tang--the smaller audience hall--where he had died, Wu Li Chang lay as he had fallen. For none had dared to disturb him for a long time, unless he summoned them....

It would be difficult to say which dreaded it the more, or which suffered more during it: probably the mother--both; for she was guiltless and made of the finer clay.

The Gregorys sailed from Hong Kong the next week, and half the Colony saw them off. One means, of course, half the Europeans: the Chinese don’t count--in China. But John Bradley...

And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding--prettier than any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses she wore, and very like them: pink and whi...

It was a quiet ceremony, quietly performed. There was but little music; no fife, no drum, no clang. The old organist played softly. (Neither he nor Mrs. Gregory gave a thought t...