CHAPTER XV

THE MEETING OF THE MOTHERS

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 countrymen.

And Basil was in a fidget still when he came to her presently, not by stealth this time, no whistle heralding him, but walking swiftly from beyond the bridge.

She greeted him placidly, too proud to show the hauteur she felt now; but Low Soong knew that Nang Ping’s heart was fluttering sickly under her jade and coral girdle.

Low returned his greeting with a placid face, but her narrow eyes were yellow with hate, and she turned at once and went to her old place of watch on the bridge.

“They will come soon?” Nang asked.

“Yes, they are lingering by the big lake, in the outer garden, and that gave me the chance to speak to you a moment. Oh! my darling.” He had been near to hating her as he had been coming to her across the rippling water--hating her because he had wronged her, and now feared that he might not escape quite all share in her punishment; but now, as she stood there in all her pretty feminine trappings among her flowers, he longed to take her into his arms. She had never looked so altogether desirable to him before--probably because he had made up his mind to leave her, to snap his life and his years from hers. “Have you missed me? Why did you leave me so? How are you, dear?”

Nang Ping smiled oddly. She said nothing.

And Low Soong called from the bridge, “Chillee! Chillee!”

Women’s voices, deeper throated than Nang’s and Low’s, European voices, could be heard coming that way, and Basil said nervously, “Yes,” adding in English what Low had just said, “They are coming. I shall leave them when they are going--make some excuse, and I shall go and hide in the pagoda by the lake----”

“Oh, that pagoda--by the lake!” Nang Ping interjected softly, but her voice was grim.

“I shall see them pass, and when they have quite gone I will come back. Wait for me when they are gone. I must speak to you. Remember!” He moved away from her, and went and stood beside an old stone lantern, as if examining and admiring it for the first time.

“Low Soong!” Nang Ping said breathlessly, and Low hurried to her from the bridge and put her arms about her. And they stood so for a moment.

But the voices and the footsteps were close now, and Nang Ping released herself from Low’s comforting arms, and stood gracious and alone.

This was one of Florence Gregory’s young days--one of her very youngest. Still in her early forties, she looked a radiant twenty-five as she stood an instant on the bridge, and then came gayly down it. And her radiant English beauty--blue eyes, golden hair, cream and rose face--looked all the more radiant because of the delicate gray of her gown--a dress of artificial simplicity, Paris-made. It had not cost as much as Chinese Nang’s fantastic clothes had, but it had cost a great deal, and it was the more perishable.

Hilda Gregory, walking beside her mother, quite a pretty girl seen by herself, seemed in the mother’s wake rather than side by side, though far the more brightly clad, and was a dim afterglow of the matron’s glory--as Low Soong, for all her gay apparel and own high coloring, standing a little apart, seemed too of Nang Ping’s. And Florence Gregory looked as much Basil’s sister as Hilda, who was a few years his junior.

A Chinese serving woman followed the Gregory ladies. She was palpably Mrs. Gregory’s maid, and not Hilda’s; why, it is impossible to say, unless because the mother was unmistakably of the woman-type to which servants and dogs attach themselves, that claims them, and to which they belong. Hilda Gregory probably played tennis and golf better than her mother, and plied a more useful needle; but she buttoned her own boots as naturally as it came to the mother to lean well back at ease against down cushions and have her hair brushed by a servant. Ah Wong, the amah, carried a closed parasol, a costly European thing of lace and mother-o’-pearl, that would have suited Miss Gregory’s rose crêpe quite as well as it did Mrs. Gregory’s silver ninon; but the sturdy Chinese figure, plainly clad in dark blue cotton, was unmistakably in attendance on the mother.

There were six here now, not counting the Wu servants moving on the outskirts of the group, silent and busied. But Mrs. Gregory and Wu Nang Ping held the stage: English womanhood and Chinese something at their best.

They made a great contrast than which the old beauty-packed garden had seen nothing prettier: two living, sentient expressions of womanhood, greatly different, greatly alike.

Each was natural, each was artificial--sweet, elaborate, decorated, highly bred.

Nang Ping’s face and lips were painted; Mrs. Gregory’s were not. But her nails were slightly, beneath her gloves, and so were Nang’s that had never worn a glove. Mrs. Gregory’s eyebrows were lightly penciled. Nang Ping’s were not. Nang Ping’s hair had taken the longer to dress, but the dressing of the other’s had cost an hour. The black hair was stiffened into shape with thick scented gum; the blonde hair was marcelled into shape by hot tongs. And Mrs. Gregory had the slightly smaller feet, and far less comfortably shod. For Wu had set his face against one custom of his country, and braved the anger of his ancestors. Nang smoked a pipe--Basil Gregory could not insert his smallest finger-tip into its tiny bowl--Florence Gregory smoked cigarettes; and they both inhaled sometimes. And each considered the other of inferior race.

They looked at each other curiously--Mrs. Gregory frankly so. Nang veiled her keen interest. But her interest was the more. The English woman was keenly interested in China and in things Chinese. The country had fascinated her powerfully, its odd people considerably. But she did not take Chinese womanhood very seriously. Every one of intelligence knew by now that many Chinese men were clever, almost hideously so, but equally every one knew that Chinese women were limited--very. Of course, the terrible old woman who ruled at Pekin was shrewd, unless her ministers, Li Hung Chang and the rest, did it all for her, which was probable; and then, too, she wasn’t Chinese really, Tartar not Mongol. And Mrs. Gregory had no suspicion of what must have interested her in Nang Ping indeed. She was keener to see the garden, and, if possible, the house--it was said to be very wonderful--than to exploit little Miss Wu. But she thought the girl pretty after a grotesque Chinese fashion, “cute” and not unattractive, and she looked at her with sincerely friendly eyes.

The young eyes that looked back at her were mingled adoration and resentment. This was Basil’s mother, and she was like him. This was the honorable mother who had given him life and nursed him at her breast. And this was the woman because of whom he was going to forsake her, and shut her out forever from peace, honor and paradise. Because of this woman standing smiling at her here he forbade her Europe and joyful motherhood. And he had shut her forever out of China! Why? Oh! why?

There are three supreme moments in the life of every Chinese girl to whom the gods are not hideously unkind: the moment when her unknown bridegroom lifts up her red veil and looks upon her face--perhaps to love and cherish, perhaps to loathe and punish; the moment when the midwife says, “Hail, Lady, it is an honorable _son_,” and lays the funny little red, squirming firstborn on her breast to be adored, and always to adore her; and the moment when she meets eyes with her husband’s mother, and they look a little into each other’s souls. And this last is _the_ supreme moment of her fate. In all the small ways that make up the most of every woman’s life, her comfort and happiness will depend upon this mother-in-law even more than upon her husband--and mothers-in-law live long in China. Women are the pampered class in China, as they are almost everywhere, and will be until “new” hermaphrodite “movements” have pulled nature from her throne. And in the quiet ways, the ways that count, the supremacy of the Chinese mother is even greater than the autocratic supremacy of the Chinese father. Occidental readers may believe this or disbelieve it as they like; superficial travelers, ill-equipped for Asian sojourn, may see or miss it, but the fact remains. Motherhood has ruled China for thousands of years. It is not the fair young wife or the favorite daughter who rules a Chinese, but his mother, old, wrinkled, toothless, bent. From the thraldom of his father, from the thraldom of his gods, he _may_ escape; from the thraldom of his mother, never! Nang Ping knew now that she would never wear the soft red veil. That great moment had been, and passed, for her when Basil had kissed her first in the pagoda. The child that even now just fluttered beneath her breast--a son, she thought, and surely blue-eyed--must die unborn; she knew that now. He would never purl and pull and purr at her exultant breast. But this was Basil’s mother, the honorable grandmother to whom she had given a first grandson! What this moment might have been! Something of the agony of the disappointment gnawing at her baffled heart crept into her narrow eyes, and turned her faint and sick, and almost she swayed an instant standing proud and gracious among her flowers--and the child leapt.

Basil Gregory stood irresolute, embarrassed, looking from his mother to Nang Ping, from Nang Ping to his mother.

Mrs. Gregory turned to him with a happy smile. “Ah! Basil, there you are.”

“Yes, Mother, I missed you,” he said as lightly as he could, “and found my way here to make the acquaintance of Miss Wu.”

He gestured courteously toward Nang as he spoke, and Mrs. Gregory moved to the girl and held out her hand. Nang Ping moved too, a little towards her guest, and made the elaborate gesture, hands clasped, of Eastern greeting. Mrs. Gregory still held out her hand, and wondered, when she gained the girl’s, which was the softer or the better kept, Nang’s or her own. Basil had wondered it often.

“This visit to your beautiful garden is the greatest treat I’ve had since I arrived in China, Miss Wu,” she began.

Wu Nang Ping bowed. “I am pleased to receive you in my honorable father’s absence. He has had much kindness in England. It is his command that always English friends have most honorable welcome here, and it gives me happiness. My cousin, Low Soong.”

“How do you do?” Mrs. Gregory said cordially. “And this is my daughter.” The three girls bowed, the two Chinese with grave formality, a gesture of the arms more than a bending.

“Such a perfectly beautiful place!” Mrs. Gregory said it sincerely, her beauty-loving eyes here, there and everywhere gloating.

“This is my own garden, where I walk with my women,” Nang Ping told her.

“It beats our poor little garden, Hilda,” the mother said gayly.

“Into fits.” Just a trifle of the surface vulgarity which, with its hard coating of adamant varnish, covered and hid Robert Gregory’s soul side--even from his wife--and wronged him, had caught and scorched, slightly, the delicacy of Hilda’s breeding. Even Florence Gregory, some rare times, used a slight word of slang: “As the husband is, the wife is.”

Low Soong listened to Hilda with polite indifference. Low Soong had no English. But Nang Ping wondered dully how a garden could have a fit; she thought an epileptic garden must be very horrid. But she said smoothly, “Ah! in London you have only walls and roofs, I think.”

“You have been there, Miss Wu, of course?” Mrs. Gregory asked.

“I have never been to any country.”

“Really? But--you must excuse me--but your excellent English.”

“My honorable teacher was English. My honorable father knows it like you; he has been there--to Oxford.”

“Really! I was born at Oxford. And my son”--she turned to him a little, meaning to coax him into the talk, and wondering to see him stand so awkwardly and wordless--he was not often so socially inept, and never gauche--“my son was there.”

“And my honorable father has taught me to esteem English people because they are all”--she paused an instant, but she did not glance towards Basil, and added with a grave, deferential smile--“all honorable men.”

“Well”--Basil’s mother smiled too, a prettily pathetic smile which was half good manners and half sincere--“I am afraid there are a few exceptions, sometimes.” She went up to her boy and laid her hand fondly on his arm. “But”--not speaking to him, but still to Nang--“it is the duty of all Englishmen to live up to such a high reputation.”

“I must be off, Mother,” the man said hurriedly, releasing himself gently, “if Miss Wu will excuse me. I thought Father was coming.”

“He has. We left them down by the fish-pond, him and Tom, talking to a quaint old gardener.”

“Oh! Well, I’m afraid I ought to be off--to the office. I’ll go straight to the hotel afterwards--dinner usual time?”

“Of course, dear, unless you’d like it earlier or later. Do you know, Basil, you haven’t dined with us for days?”--Nang Ping knew it. “I’m getting quite anxious about your health, dear. Bother that fusty office! You don’t seem a bit yourself.”

Her boy laughed at her and put his hand under her chin. (And Nang Ping watched them curiously.) “You dear--why--I--I’m as right as rain.”

“Then prove it, my son--a big man’s dinner at eight. Now, if Miss Wu will excuse you”--for evidently he was uncomfortable here--and why not, the dear English child? How should he be anything else in this funny Chinese nook with these Chinese girls? Probably he could not even see how pretty this smaller one was, for all her narrow eyes and absurd, grotesque clothes and paint, and it was plain that he could not find a word to say to either of them, not even to this one who was playing hostess so nicely, and who understood English and spoke it surprisingly. His silence towards the plump dumpling of a cousin, who was showing Hilda about the garden with quaint bobbings and solemn pantomime, was excusable enough. She didn’t know a word of English, it seemed; though you never could tell what a Chinese did or didn’t know, John Bradley said, and Ah Wong said so too. But really, Basil might have made an effort, and said a little something civil to the English-knowing hostess; he was not often so shy--he _had_ been at Oxford, and he was her son. Robert had no _savoir faire_, but, as a rule, the boy had some.

When he was free from his mother, Basil moved to Nang Ping to take leave of her. She received him with a quiet dignity that seemed perfectly natural. “Chinese, but quite the grande dame,” the mother thought.

He uncovered and looked down at Nang. “Good-day, Miss Wu.” She shook her hands at him in Chinese-salutation way, and straightening up looked at him with just the edge of a courteous smile--not an eyelash quivered. He turned and looked towards the other girls, but Low Soong had turned her back and was bending and gesticulating over a peony bed.

“By the way, Basil,” his mother said as he passed her, but paused to give her one more smile, “the gardener was telling your father that he knew you.” She wished him to go, and yet she stayed him.

Basil shot Nang a look--of consternation--taken aback and off his guard. Mrs. Gregory did not catch it, but both Hilda and Low Soong