Part 1

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Transcriber’s note:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

THE STREET OF PRECIOUS PEARLS

by

NORA WALN

New York The Womans Press 1921

Copyright, 1921, by National Board of Young Womens Christian Associations of the United States of America

To Grace Coppock, who first encouraged me to go into the Far East, I owe deep gratitude.

From the women of China I have learned that World Fellowship is not alone an intellectual concept but a natural law in accordance with which the hearts of all women throb to the same rhythmic beat of the Universe.

To the women of America I dedicate this story of the life of my Chinese friend and teacher: it is as accurate as she with her small store of English words, and I with my limited knowledge of her language could make it.

CONTENTS

I

Wherein Yen Kuei Ping turns off from the Big Horse Street to make purchases on the Street of Precious Pearls 7

II

Wherein there is a wedding and Kuei Ping becomes a member of the family of Chia 19

III

Wherein there is a departure from family custom and Kuei Ping goes with her husband to live in Peking 31

IV

Wherein a son is born and there is great rejoicing 41

V

Wherein shadows throw their length across the tidy courtyard 49

VI

Wherein there is deepening sorrow 55

VII

Wherein the heart of a woman is occupied with one desire 61

VIII

Wherein Kuei Ping prepares for a pilgrimage 65

IX

Wherein there is patience and tenderness and understanding and a return to a little home village 73

X

Wherein twenty-seven slow years are added one upon another 81

XI

Wherein the narrator becomes Kuei Ping’s pupil and is filled with wondering questions and is witness to a dream come true in its threefold parts 91

_Wherein Yen Kuei Ping turns off from the Big Horse Street to make purchases on the Street of Precious Pearls_

Turning off from the Da Mou Lui or the Big Horse Street, the name common to the main street in Chinese towns and villages, there is to be found, if one seeks diligently for it, the Street of Precious Pearls. Always it is a side street. Often it is so narrow that two sedan chairs cannot pass. At those times of the day when the shadows are long there is no golden sunshine reflected from the cobblestones that pave the street. But I have found, for I like to visit the little shops on side streets, that the more precious jewels glow with a warmer brilliancy when the day outside is dark.

It is the street of greatest importance to every Chinese girl. On it will be bought her dowry jewels. Ancient custom rules that the betrothed bride shall convert the wealth she inherits from her father’s household into precious stones. And so it is here on the Street of Precious Pearls that her inheritance is spent, lest by bringing money, as such, into her husband’s household she reflect upon the ability of her new family to support her.

Yen Kuei Ping sat passively quiet as her chair-bearers turned into the street at a low spoken word from her grandmother. She was third in the procession. Madame Yen rode first, directly behind the house servant who walked ahead, breaking a way through the crowded Big Horse Street and into the quieter Street of Precious Pearls, crying, “Lend light, lend light.” Next to Madame Yen came Kuei Ping’s mother, and bringing up the rear was a fourth chair in which was carried a distant relative, by name Chang An, who held a place in the household a trifle higher than that of a trusted servant.

Following the swaying tapestried box-like chairs that marked the presence of her mother and grandmother, Kuei Ping leaned forward in her seat, peering through the horizontal aperture in front of her with brightening eyes. The Street of Precious Pearls was quiet and cool. Moss clung to the bases of buildings and the grasses that had ventured up through the paving stones were worn away only in a central path and in patches in front of entrance ways. Now and then someone came from beneath one of the heavy curtain-like doors that closed a shop, and slipped along the silent street, but the padded shoes of the pedestrian made no noise on the grass-covered stones. Here was a peace and quiet akin to the hush of the Mission Church, Kuei Ping caught herself thinking, and then flushed at what she thought her irreverence in comparing the gorgeous pageantry of the procession as she saw it silhouetted against the dust-dulled gold lacquer of the shops with the aesthetic simplicity of the Chapel.

They had traversed more than half the entire length of the street when Madame Yen’s chair came to a stop before a shop with rich filigree carvings and double entrance doors of heavy velvet with brass frames. At the sound of their approach, two attendants of the door stepped forward and swung it wide, that the chair-bearers might carry the ladies into a tiny inner courtyard before they need dismount, saying as they bowed, “Honorable ladies, enter the humble shop.” Thereupon, the narrower inner curtains of the shop itself were held open and Madame Yen and her relatives, bowing low, returned the formal greeting and passed within.

At the entry of customers, numerous clerks and underlings, so it seemed to Kuei Ping, swarmed forward with greetings and formal offerings of stools upon which to sit and with cups of tea to drink. The head of the shop and his partners flicked their long-stemmed pipes from sleepy lips and rose, as though from deep meditation, struggling a bit with the light that would penetrate into their eyes, even in the darkened room, as they bowed, offering the courtesy of “the miserable place to the pleasure of their honorable guests.”

The eldest among them with his own hand took from an attendant each cup of tea as it was brought and offered it with a low bow to his guest. Kuei Ping, lifting her gaze now and then from the floor, caught a glint of joy of the coming bargain in the corners of the shrewd old dealer’s mouth and in her grandmother’s eyes, even in the midst of courtesy and greeting.

Rich jewels were brought forth, for Kuei Ping’s own grandfather was a well known silk merchant and the coming alliance with an official family was not beyond the knowledge of Wong Lui, dealer in jewels. Madame Yen gave but a sweeping glance to the first display placed before her. Kuei Ping had slipped into the background, but her mother and the relative looked over the jewels and then up at Madame Yen as if to agree that they were not worthy of attention. Wong Lui held various secret conferences with his head clerk, and boys slipped away into dark recesses to bring forth rarer treasures. Madame Yen and her daughter preferred pearls, and from the mysterious caverns of the shop they were brought. Exquisite gems, each wrapped separately, were removed from their covers and glowed in a wondrous heap on the dark velvet cover of the teakwood table.

Kuei Ping liked rich warm color but she liked it best subdued in the luminous pearls. She was a favorite with her grandmother and this preference was no secret to Madame Yen who placed her chair now, as the hour grew on, that Kuei Ping might get the full value of the beauty of the fabulous heap. Carefully, one by one, the preferred gems were separated from those of lesser beauty by the two women. And still at intervals, as though he had just awakened to some almost forgotten knowledge, Wong Lui would cease caressing his drooping moustaches with his slender hands and wave a clerk away to bring even rarer treasure.

But all things come to end in time and these mysterious errands grew farther and farther apart and finally ceased. Wong Lui had placed his best before them. Kuei Ping from under her modestly lowered lashes caught glimpses of bright eyes that glowed from the darkness of the inner rooms, the curious little clerks and underlings who peered through the dividing parchment, eagerly following the tableau in the center of the shop.

Not until the selected heap was before her did Madame Yen speak of price and then only as a question. Kuei Ping had seen her grandmother bargain before and so she scarce drew her attention away from the lustrous heap of jewels even to listen. Wong Lui, too, was seasoned at the game which both dearly loved and so with the skill of chess players they moved slowly, each toward his goal, each carefully measuring the other’s power to yield from his quoted price. At intervals, when the conflict might have grown a trifle sharp, cups of tea were served.

Kuei Ping, resting her eyes upon the pearls so soon to be hers, drank deep draughts of their beauty. Impelled by their drawing power she gathered a handful of them up in her soft pink palm, unmindful of the bargainers but not unnoted by them. The quick eyes of each had counted the number and the face of Madame Yen had softened as she looked upon the girl. Wong Lui had noted that also and put it down in his favor in the game before them.

The girl, holding the jewels thus in her hand that she might feel their nearness, saw them glow into warmer color as she held them, as though her touch breathed life into them. In after years she was to think often of the care with which they had been selected and to pay homage in memory to the experience and knowledge which made possible that rare power of choice, for even Wong Lui, seasoned dealer in jewels, had shown respect for Madame Yen’s judgment.

With a suddenness so abrupt as to make her feel she must have jerked physically, Kuei Ping was back in memory, as she was so often these days, at the little mission school where she had been sent when she could go no farther in lessons with her brothers at home. This too had been an indulgence upon the part of her family, gained by her nearness to her grandmother.

It was graduation day. This was the memory she conned over most often. Kuei Ping had stood first in her class and when the exercises were over she had stolen away into the garden to bid it a last farewell, with the small remembrance reward that had been given to her clasped in her hand. Ever since that day Kuei Ping had worn it next to her heart. She could feel its hard edge now as she sat holding the pearls. In memory the fragrant perfume of the la France roses at the end of the walk drifted out to her again, she recalled the crunching sound Miss Porter’s stiff foreign shoes had made as she came down the path, and the tenseness of the principal’s voice as she had spoken, asking Kuei Ping to come and sit in the arbor and talk with her.

From the first day Kuei Ping entered school she had worshipped the tall golden-haired American girl in the shrine of her heart as an Angel of Freedom. While they sat in the arbor she had held Kuei Ping’s hand in the foreign way. Kuei Ping thrilled to the memory of that touch more than to the glow of the pearls. Miss Porter built for the girl who listened at her side that afternoon, a dream bridge of words that connected the road of Kuei Ping’s life with that strange land called the United States, where men and women had equal opportunity, and from which the Chinese girl with her brilliant mind trained to new ways might return to give service to her own country women. Kuei Ping had held her breath lest she lose a word while Miss Porter talked, quiet at first, carried away by the marvel of the opportunity, then very still because she knew its impossibility. For at the spring holidays Madame Yen had told her granddaughter of the plans for her marriage and had given her the engagement gifts from the Chia household that had been kept these two years now, waiting until she should be finished with school.

Her family loved her. Kuei Ping had known that from the first moment she opened her eyes and smiled into her mother’s face. They awaited her return home and her fulfillment of their plans for her. There were ties that bound her a part of the whole which made up the unit of her family, bonds that could not be pushed aside with the brusqueness that made possible the spirit of freedom that lit the eyes of the American girl. And yet it was this spirit of freedom and of service in the wider ways of life to which she had built the secret shrine within her heart. It was a hard conflict, but Kuei Ping’s decision was reached before she had lifted her quiet eyes to thank Miss Porter and say that she could not go.

The latter had been a trifle curt. Kuei Ping had wept bitter tears over it since, because she had failed the person she admired most in all the world. The utter futility of attempting to make East and West understand each other had stilled her lips from any sharing of her feeling about her home, or any repetition to her grandmother of the conversation in the garden. The engagement bracelets in the bureau in her mission school room and the silver honor medal beneath her dress were each sacred things that belonged in separate parts of her life.

Madame Yen reached over now to Kuei Ping for the pearls she had taken from the table, that they might be put in the same case with the others. The bargain was closed. Fresh cups of tea were brought forth and refused, Madame Yen and her relatives saying over and over as they were bowed out, “We have squandered your valuable time,” and Wong Lui and his attendants begging them not to waste their breath in courtesy for his humble shop.

Outside, the chair-bearers, trained to patience by long hours, waited.

_Wherein there is a wedding and Kuei Ping becomes a member of the family of Chia_

When Kuei Ping was a child of six, playing at games with the little cousins who dwelt in the Yen compound, or teasing to learn to read with her brothers, soothsayers, upon examination of a document from the house of Chia, had found that her destiny was entwined with that of Chia Fuh Tang, ten years her senior. With care the grey old man, whose judgment Madame Yen trusted, had taken the card upon which were drafted the eight characters indicating the year, the month, the day, and the hour at which Fuh Tang had entered the world and, comparing them with the similar characters of the girl, had returned a favorable report of the auspiciousness of the union. With deliberation and due patience he had compared the combination of their characters with each of the five elements, metal, wood, water, fire and earth, to make sure that in the proposed marriage there was no destroying omen such as the uniting of wood and fire. He next discovered that the two cyclic animals that had presided over the birth of the youthful couple were not at variance with each other. Thereon it was ascertained that the two would abide together in harmony.

Later, the Imperial Calendar being consulted as to the black and yellow days which would govern the lives of the two, a second document was sent from the house of Chia, informing the family of Yen that the fourteenth day of the month had been found to be the day most favorable to the conclusion of an engagement and asking that, if found agreeable to them, a return document, setting the month, be returned. Fate had already decided the month as the second of the Chinese calendar year by causing the girl to be born under the sign of the tiger. The culmination of the alliance had waited but the year to be set by the contracting families as the eighteenth spring of Kuei Ping’s life.

The month, corresponding to April on the western calendar of that year, came with a touch of summer on its breath. Soft rains fell early. From the wind-dried earth sprang a carpet of velvety green. By the middle of the month brown-green orchids had pushed out to the light, azaleas and the wild wisteria were opening buds, the yellow mustard scattered gold over the country-sides, and the southeast wind was languid with the sickening sweet perfume of the purple soi bean.

Kuei Ping, wearing the heavy wedding garments in which she had been dressed, felt near to suffocation in the close room. Yet she shuddered as from a chill when Chang An, having put the finishing touches to the married way of hair-dressing, placed the vanity case before her, urging the girl to teach her own fingers the arrangement.

The old woman felt the shudder and the tense strain of the girl’s body as she fastened the tiny buttons of the collar of Kuei Ping’s dress. Looking down at her she said tenderly, “Be not alarmed, little flower of our hearts. Thou needest have no fear. Look but into the mirror at thy beauteous face before the veil is dropped over it. What man living could pass by the fire of thy deep eyes untouched! Look now, as I hold the veil of pearls before thy eyes, and see that they out-rival the lustre of the gems. Even thy hands are shaped like the petals of the new opened lotus, and thy grace is as exquisite as that of the wind-swayed blossom. Take the incense burner and make thy heart a lake of peace upon which thy beauty may float with the serenity of the flower thou dost resemble.”

Kuei Ping, gazing deep into the mirror as into a wondering dream, reached out her hands for the many-wired burner Chang An brought ere she left the little bride alone. Slowly, one by one, the girl smoothed out the twisted curves until the interlacing grooves were one continuous whole in which the incense burned before the Goddess of Mercy without a break.

The hours hung heavy upon her. Over the door that closed her from the feasting came stray bits of gossip. She heard the click of ivory dominoes as the dowagers gambled at sparrow. The plaintive call of stringed instruments came to her as from a great distance. Now and then, as a minstrel took up the refrain, she caught the words of some old love song, or heard repeated in chant the valor of a departed family hero.

The clamor outside grew greater and then subsided into the murmur of conversation. The one o’clock feast had passed. The shadows of late afternoon sank into darkness. A servant came to light a taper beside her mirror. Chang An returned and put the finishing touches to her toilet. Her mother wrapped the long band of red satin around her head over the new hair arrangement signifying that they bound her to the will of the family to which they sent her. Madame Yen with loving fingers placed the inner veil of red chiffon and then dropped over it the veil of pearls that had come the day before from the bridegroom. The long strip of red silk carpet was laid by servants that she might go to kneel before the family altar and then be placed in the waiting sedan chair without touching her feet to the polluting ground.

The time of departure was near. The rooms and courtyards in which she had lived were strangely unfamiliar with their elaborate decking in honor of the event. Heavily veiled and her eyes lowered, she felt rather than saw the crowded mass of her relatives. The minstrel took up the wail of separation and loss. She heard the tossing of the four cakes which were to bring luck to her family, and the rattle of the sieve placed over her wedding chair to ward off evil spirits as she was sealed into it.

The journey which she must make in darkness began. Ahead of her, almost a mile long, the procession of her attendants went. Sitting strained and still she could hear the clash and clang of brass cymbals, the shifting of burdens from tired shoulders at regular intervals, and now and then, as she strained her eyes, the flare of waving torches. Half way to the end of the tiring journey the noise increased, and she gathered that they had been met by members of the bridegroom’s family. Dull red balls of light swung above the entrance gates. Her chair was borne through the double rows of the procession which had preceded her and set down in a reception room. She heard the murmuring words of good omen uttered as she was helped from her cramped seat and out onto a second strip of red carpet that led to the part of the compound that was to be hers.

Kuei Ping saw Chia Fuh Tang for the first time in one swift stolen glance from behind her veil. He stood with his back to her as she entered the doorway. In that glance she knew that he was taller than her father, that he wore a long mandarin garment with a square of heavy embroidery in the center of the back, over which a black queue hung; she saw the flash of a jewel in the front of his hat as he turned toward her. Then she must lower her eyes to the floor where his dark slippers made a spot of contrast with the bright carpet.

He came forward to meet her. Kuei Ping, hidden beneath the concealing veils, was led forward a few steps by her attendants. Then, as custom dictated, both sat for a few minutes side by side. Kuei Ping, still wrapped in the long veil that reached to the hem of her wedding garments, too weary to stand alone, leaning upon Chang An and another attendant was then led forth to kneel with Fuh Tang before the family altar in worship of heaven and earth and to make low obeisance before the Chia ancestral tablets. Here Chang An lifted the edge of her veil that she might drink with the bridegroom from a goblet of wine ere she was led back into her room to dress for the wedding feast.

Her tired nerves seemed almost to snap at the continued twang of the stringed instruments. Chang An cooled her hot brow with calming hands as she took away the heavy veils and helped to dress her in the lighter dainty pink garments from her trousseau chest. And Kuei Ping, remembering that Madame Yen had told her that Fuh Tang too had attended a foreign school, and the evidences of ill ease he had shown in the ordeal that had passed, wondered whether he knew of the western custom of personal choice, and stilled her own trembling with the realization that he had not seen her as yet.

Fuh Tang saw her first thus, with tenderness and something akin to pity in her eyes, when he came to sit and wait for the serving of the feast. Food was placed before them but custom forbade the bride to eat or sleep for three days. She must sit with downcast eyes, her face immovable while the feasting about her went on, the target of all eyes, the subject of ribald jokes. Long hours passed again in which she had need of all the patience gained with the little incense burner. They left as a memory the odor of heavy perfume that came from hot rooms, the clatter of chopsticks and bowls, the glimmer of many-colored robes and the glitter of jewels of the men guests, strangers and relatives, who came in an almost ceaseless stream during that first twelve hours to gaze upon the beauty of the bride. Their remarks burned as a searing iron across her consciousness.

Two more days the feasting lasted. Women kinsfolk of the family who had not met together for many months, gossiped and drank tea, adding color to the women’s side of the large compound with their rich garments of brocade and satin. Some of them swayed on small bound feet with a “golden lily” glide. They went about examining the chests of wedding gifts, commenting upon the hundred and twenty boxes filled with garments and linens, discussing the charms put here and there to bring good luck.