Part 4

"It is a nation which for thousands of years has set more store by education than any other nation under the sun," said Uncle Theodore, "I have been reading up about them lately" (that's because of me) "and it is perfectly astonishing, their high ideals. There are clearly marked gradations in society, and the highest rank is open only to highly educated men. First, the scholar; because mind is superior to wealth. Second, the farmer; because the mind cannot act without the body, and the body cannot exist without food and raiment. Third, the mechanic; because next to food and raiment shelter is necessary. Fourth, the tradesman; men to carry on exchange and barter become a necessity. And last of all the soldier; because his business is to destroy, and not to build up society. How does that compare with our country which makes more of the destroyer than of any other citizen? No man in China can rise to any position of responsibility except by education; money in _this_ country will carry a man into the legislature if he cannot write his own name."

"Chinese ethics are grand," added the professor. "Listen to the teaching of Lao Teh. 'I would meet good with good, but I would also meet evil with good, confidence with confidence--distrust with confidence. Virtue is both good and trustful.'"

"There isn't a doubt that they are a wonderful people," returned Uncle Theodore. "When our ancestors were wandering about in sheep-skins and goat-skins--if in any other skins but their own--China had a civilisation. Wrong seems to be not a question of right with us, but of might. We do not attempt to stop people taking chances on the stock exchange; taking such chances is perfectly legal, but taking chances in a lottery is a serious offence. If a Chinaman takes chances in a little game which he understands, the morals of the community are endangered, and the poor Celestial must be hurried off to jail. We civilised people allow betting at a horse-race, and disallow it in other places. It is only the uninfluential people we send to jail for violation of the law."

They talked back and forth in an animated way for some time. I was dying to speak, but did not dare; but I am sure that once in the heat of the argument, Professor Ballington shot a glance across the table at me which spoke volumes. The same smile was in his eyes that was there when I sang for him my _one_ Spanish song. What did he mean? Can he guess? Does he know that I am not Spanish?--that I am the Yellow Pearl?

_May 5th, 1----_

A very important item has appeared in the newspaper to-day--poor Lee Yet has fallen into trouble; rather, other people are trying to get him into trouble, and his wife, the little oval-faced Mrs. Yet, has been subpoenaed to appear as a witness in his behalf.

That dear little sad woman to have to go to court before all those Americans! "She shall _not_ be studied and laughed at as a curiosity. She _shall_ be dressed up like an American woman!" I declared as soon as I read the item.

In pursuance of my idea this afternoon, I a second time donned grandmother's garments--lucky that grandmother and I are the same height--and a second time left the house unnoticed by any one except Yick.

How very much at home I feel in the garments of an elderly gentlewoman! Perhaps I am walking around the world the eighteen-year-old reincarnation of some dear, silken-clad old granny who inhabited this sphere hundreds of years ago.

I quickly found my way down to the home of Mrs. Yet, and rapped at the door.

It was opened by the little woman herself, who looked even sadder than when I first saw her. I addressed her in Chinese and lifting my veil, told her that I had come to make her a visit. She smiled in a pleased way, opened wide the door, and invited me into the house. She had never noticed the discrepancy between my antiquated dress and young face, and was blissfully unconscious that my garments were fifty years (more or less) out of date.

On my entrance something small and pink moved behind a wire screen in the corner of the room, and Mrs. Yet clipclapped across the floor in her Chinese sandals, and picked up a little bundle of Chinese life, saying:

"This my baby. He eighteen month. He sick--get tooth--got one tooth."

We talked about the baby, she sometimes speaking in Chinese, and sometimes in broken English, until we felt acquainted. Then I said:

"Mrs. Yet, I see by the newspaper that you will have to appear in court to give evidence in behalf of your husband. You do not want to go there in Chinese dress to be the subject of curiosity, and newspaper remark?"

The trouble which had left her face while she was talking about the baby, reappeared, and tears gathered in her almond eyes.

It was more than I could stand, and I cried, "Don't! Don't! Mrs. Yet--I have come to make things all right--I, your country-woman--speaking your own language. I am going to give myself the pleasure of dressing you like an American woman."

She remonstrated politely but I urged so strongly that at last she yielded; and it seemed when she did so as if a great burden had rolled from off her pale little face.

Immediately I went out to one of the great stores and ordered several costumes for her to "fit on"--I wasn't a child any longer. Grandmother's rich old skirt and shawl carried weight a second time (they could not see my face distinctly through the veil), for without hesitation a woman was despatched with the costumes.

This woman expert worked over the little Mrs. Yet, pinching, and pulling, and puckering, after the manner of American dressmakers, until she had her resplendent in a rich maroon-coloured wool costume, which exactly suited her olive skin, and made her almost a beauty.

At last the costume was satisfactorily settled and paid for. Oh, it is nice to have plenty of money to pay for all one wants. Father left me plenty (and although I do not control it until I come of a certain age, I get a liberal monthly instalment). I then went to a milliner's and bought a hat of a shade to harmonise with the costume. It was trimmed with ribbon, and deep, rich, maroon roses, and just looked _too sweet for anything_. "Youthful and stylish," as the milliner said. Why not? Mrs. Yet is young, and she has just as good a right to look stylish as any American woman!

Happy? I should say I am! I never was happier in my life than I am to-night; even if I did steal out in grandmother's old clothes, and am a "sly, subtle Oriental."

_May 10th, 1----_

The Court met to-day, and there has appeared in the evening papers this notice:

"A novelty in the shape of a Chinese woman witness appeared in the Sessions yesterday. Mrs. Lee Yet went into the box in behalf of her husband. Her trim little figure was becomingly attired in a dark-red, tailored costume, and a reddish trimmed hat set off to perfection her rich Oriental complexion and features, beautiful in their national type. She gave her evidence without an interpreter, and did much toward clearing her husband of the accusations falsely laid against him."

Oh, isn't it delightful to think that I have been instrumental in bringing all this to a happy issue! I shall carry this newspaper down to Mrs. Yet's home, and read to her this pleasing paragraph.

_May 11th, 1----_

A "Windfall," as Uncle Theodore calls it, has come to the family; grandmother was quite a "well-to-do" woman before, now she is a _rich_ woman. Some investments in mines that grandfather made years ago have turned out to be of marvellous value, and the result is that my grandmother, my Uncle Theodore, my Aunt Gwendolin have greatly increased in wealth.

Aunt Gwendolin wanted to change the form of our living at once; she would introduce a page and a butler to our household staff. But grandmother said she was accustomed to a quiet life and preferred it. She insists, in spite of my aunt's protests, that a Chinese cook, a house-maid, a laundress, a gardener, and that lovely chauffeur ought to be enough to attend to the wants of four people.

Aunt Gwendolin stormed, and said it was so _common_ to live as we did, that the English always kept a butler; but grandmother was firm. Another example that mothers in America can rule in the house if they wish.

Grandmother seemed a good deal concerned about this sudden acquisition of wealth. "An addition of silver to bell-metal does not add to the sweetness of the tone," she said. "I fear an undue proportion of silver impairs more than bells."

_May 13th, 1----_

"BULLS AND BEARS IN A HARD STRUGGLE OVER WHEAT." Uncle Theodore read the great headline from his evening paper.

"Wild scenes prevailed to-day at the Board of Trade," he continued, "when John Smith began taking in his profits on wheat. It is estimated that he made a profit of over three hundred thousand in less than half an hour. Altogether he has cleared more than five millions on his wheat deal, and that within six months."

"Dear me! Dear me!" cried grandmother, "and people dying for want of bread!"

"Well," returned Uncle Theodore, "Smith is only a highly sensitive product of our so-called civilisation; the civilisation we are rushing and straining to carry to the quiet, unassuming people whom _we_ call heathen. They have no millionaires, made so at the expense of their brothers. When we teach them all the graft, lynching, homicide, enormities of trusts, railroads, new religions, and quack remedies, we shall have them civilised."

"Christianity has to blush for Christendom," sighed grandmother.

I have been asking grandmother since how bulls and bears could struggle over wheat; and she tells me that the strugglers are not four-footed beasts at all, but _men_. I see how it is, bulls and bears are both cantankerous animals, which, if they come in conflict about anything, are sure to have a fight; and men who have given evidence of like natures have been called after those fierce animals. It must be that way. I have asked grandmother whether that is not the way they came by their names, and she said she supposed it must be.

_May 21st, 1----_

My poor despised people have fallen upon hard lines. Lee Yet met with an accident on the street and had to be taken to the hospital where he must remain for weeks, and the day following Mrs. Yet was stricken down with diphtheria.

I was out in the automobile with grandmother and Aunt Gwendolin and chancing to pass the house of Lee Yet, I saw the awful word "Diphtheria." in black letters on a scarlet ground, tacked to the door.

That night when all his day's work was done I gave Yick a coin and asked him to go down and learn who was stricken with the disease.

He came back with the intelligence that it was poor little Mrs. Yet, and that there was no one waiting on her.

Fortunately the next afternoon Aunt Gwendolin went to "bridge," and again donning grandmother's garments, I slipped out of the house and down to the home of Mrs. Yet.

Meeting the doctor at the door, just as he was coming out, I ordered him to engage a nurse.

He looked at me in surprise, but I paid in advance for a week's service, so he could do nothing but obey me.

Opening the door I went into the front room of the little home and found the Celestial baby fretting away in its cradle just as any other baby would fret if left to itself. I began to call it all sorts of pet names in Chinese, and the little slant-eye cooed and smiled back at me as if he really liked it.

A Chinese neighbour woman came in and told me that the baby was to be kept in the front room, while its mother was quarantined in a room upstairs. She further informed me that she came in twice a day to feed the baby, and the rest of the time he was alone.

"I have it! I have it!" I cried exultingly to my own interior self, "I know now my _aptitude_! I know now what I can do that is impossible to any other; it surely is _impossible_ to any other--in this nation of an hour--to jabber the Chinese I can jabber to this eighteen months' old baby! I shall come here and take care of him, while the trained nurse is taking care of the mother upstairs. I'll come for awhile every day anyway, and will pay the Chinese woman, who cannot leave her laundry-minding in the daytime, to take care of him at night! He's just as much a dear human baby as any purple-and-fine-linen American baby!"

How fortune favoured me that evening! Aunt Gwendolin announced that she was going in the morning on a month's visit to another city.

She was not much more than out the door the following day when I asked grandmother's permission to go where I liked every afternoon of the week.

Dear grandmother remonstrated a little--for fear I might tire myself too much--or might go where it was not wise to go, etc., etc. But I coaxed, and I won the day.

A strange event happened the very first afternoon. Just as I had passed through the lane at the rear of the house, who should be standing there at the back gate but the chauffeur, beside the automobile. He knew me despite my grandmotherly garb (as I had commenced going to the house of Mrs. Yet in grandmother's black shawl, bonnet, and skirt, I thought it better to continue doing so), politely touched his cap, and said if I had far to go it would take him but a few minutes to whirl me there in the automobile.

He is very good looking, and a gentleman. Uncle Theodore says he is a student who is taking this means to earn money further to pursue his medical studies. Sometimes Uncle Theodore familiarly calls him "Sawbones."

Nodding my assent, I entered the car, gave my directions, and soon was down in front of Mrs. Yet's small house.

I lifted the fretting little baby out of his cradle as soon as I entered, washed and dressed him, he kicking and squirming just as I suppose any other baby kicks and squirms. All the fear I had was that he would roll out of my hands, he was such a slippery little eel when his body was wet.

Where did I learn how to wash and dress a baby? I must have known how by instinct, for I never did it, or saw it done before. The Chinese woman who keeps the little Oriental at night told me the articles that went next the skin, and I had no trouble guessing about where to put the others. After one or two attempts I did it as well as a mother of twenty babies.

Every day I am being conveyed down to my duties in the automobile. The chauffeur seemed to divine that I would go out every afternoon (perhaps because Aunt Gwendolin was away) without my telling him, and is always waiting at the little rear gate in the back street to obey my commands.

What a delightful time we are having! "When the cat's away the mice can play!"

Dear grandmother has never seen me either leave or return to the house, but necessarily Yick and Betty are both into the secret.

"'For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,' commend me to the Chinese."

_May 22d, 1----_

A most impressive occurrence has transpired, as Mrs. Paton would say. Just as I was coming out of Mrs. Yet's house this afternoon who should be passing but Professor Ballington!

I had not yet dropped my black chiffon veil, and glancing down from his great height of six feet, he looked me full in the face.

At the same instant he saw the word, "Diphtheria," in the great black letters on a scarlet ground, and stopping he exclaimed:

"Why, Miss Pearl! This is a surprise! Do you know where you are--what risk you are running? Diphtheria is contagious--_very_!"

"I know," I replied, "but some one has to mind a little Chinese baby in there. Its father is in the hospital, and its mother is shut in a room upstairs with diphtheria, and there is no one to stay all afternoon with the baby if I do not. He's a Chinese baby, and of no account in America," I added. (I came within one of telling him that I was the only one who could call him pet names in the language he could understand; wouldn't Aunt Gwendolin have taken a fit?) "I just _had_ to come," I pleaded, seeing his look of disapproval. "Each man and woman is born with an aptitude to do something impossible to any other, an aptitude that the world has no match for, Mrs. Paton says; and I have just found out that my aptitude, impossible to any other, is to mind this Chinese baby; no one else can _match_ me in this!"

He looked less severe, almost kind, and half as if he could scarcely keep from laughing. Then he said, "Have you disinfectants? They are very necessary."

I shook my head, and he said:

"Come with me to a drug store and I will supply you with a stock."

And I, decked in my grandmother's cast-off clothes, walked along the street, and into the "Palace Drug Store" with the elegantly dressed and caned professor.

He didn't seem the least ashamed of me; indeed, he was so polite that I forgot for the moment that my dress was anything odd--forgot it until I saw a young man clerk looking at me in an amused way; then I dropped my thick veil.

The professor insisted on my taking a certain kind of lozenge to hold in my mouth while I was in the infected house, and ordered quantities and quantities of disinfectants carried there, giving me instruction as to how they should be used.

When we were walking back to the house of Mrs. Yet, the professor remarked that the Chinese were a people worth studying.

"Have you heard any of their poetry, Miss Pearl?" he questioned. And before I had time to reply--perhaps he thought he had no right to make me give an answer to that question, he is a "great philologist"--he continued: "Could anything be more exquisite than those lines to a plum blossom?

"'One flower hath in itself the charms of two; Draw nearer! and she breaks to wonders new; And you would call her beauty of the rose-- She, too, is folded in a fleece of snows; And you might call her pale--she doth display The blush of dawn beneath the eye of day, The lips of her the wine cup hath caressed, The form of her that from some vision blest Starts with the rose of sleep still glowing bright Through limbs that ranged the dreamlands of the night; The pencil falters and the song is naught, Her beauty, like the sun, dispels my thought.'

"A certain collection of Chinese lyrics," he continued, "'A Lute of Jade,' moved a London journal to observe that, the more we look into Chinese nature as revealed by this book of songs, the more we are convinced that our fathers were right in speaking of man's brotherhood. Here's another to a calycanthus flower:

"'Robed in pale yellow gown, she leans apart, Guarding her secret trust inviolate; With mouth that, scarce unclosed, but faintly breathes. Its fragrance, like a tender grief, remains Half-told, half-treasured still. See how she drops From delicate stem; while her close petals keep Their shy demeanour. Think not that the fear Of great cold winds can hinder her from bloom, Who hides the rarest wonders of the spring To vie with all the flowers of Kiang Nan.'

"This is Wang Seng-Ju's tiny poem," he added, "I presume a great many people in this greatly enlightened America never ascribe any sentiment to the Chinaman:

"'High o'er the hill the moon barque steers, The lantern lights depart, Dead springs are stirring in my heart, And there are tears; But that which makes my grief more deep Is that you know not that I weep.'"

The moon had appeared in all her full-orbed glory, although it was early twilight, and the professor looked at me so earnestly while quoting those words that I actually believe I blushed.

"'There yet is man-- Man, the divinest of all things, whose heart Hath known the shipwreck of a thousand hopes, Who bears a hundred wrinkled tragedies Upon the parchment of his brow.'

"Ou-Yang Hein penned those lines," he added, raising his hat in adieu. But before we parted I made him promise to write out for me the Chinese verses he had quoted; and it is his beautifully written lines I have copied. I am going to learn them off by heart. How I would love to recite them at one of Aunt Gwendolin's "Drawing-rooms!"

The professor had gone but a few paces when he returned to inquire what hospital poor Lee Yet was in, saying that he would go around and see how he was faring.

"This is such a very selfish world," he added, as if half to himself, "I sometimes fear those poor foreigners that come to our shores get woefully treated."

That was lovely of him! After all, men are brothers under their skin. That was what their great man, Christ, taught--that all men are brothers; he did not except the Chinese, as some Americans want to do.

_June 7th, 1----_

Almost as soon as Mrs. Yet was pronounced well, and was allowed to go among people again and before Mr. Yet had left the hospital, Baby Yet fell seriously ill--his teeth.

He grew worse, and worse. Yick told me about it one day in a few concise Chinese words, which he snatched an opportunity to drop to me in passing through the dining room. The wily Celestial seems to understand, without being told, that no one is to know that he and I can exchange thoughts in our native tongue.

That afternoon I stole out again, and went down to the little Yet home. It was just as Yick had said, the baby was very ill.

He lay on his little pallet, white and still, almost unconscious, and his mother stood over him wringing her hands, and shedding bitter tears.

"Oh, my baby! My baby! He die and leave me! My heart break!" she cried in Chinese when she saw me. "Precious treasure! Precious treasure!" she continued, bending toward the almost inanimate form on the pallet.

The latter is the almost universal term of endearment in China, and no American mother ever agonised more bitterly than did that Chinese mother over that atom of herself lying before her.

I had to do something to comfort her, so I began to tell her about heaven. _I_, who was not sure that I could get to that blessed place myself (stealing out on the sly in a grandmother's clothes is not a very heavenly trick), said that whoever missed it, babies would be there.

"Will Chinese babies be there? They do not want them in America," she asked rapidly and tremblingly in Chinese.

"Certainly," I replied; and at that moment I seemed to have a vision of all the babies of this wide world that had died--black babies, brown babies, yellow babies, red babies (probably the colour of their skin was only the earth garb); I saw the whole throng, for grandmother had read to me from the Bible that of such was the kingdom of heaven.

"His tooth not bother him there?" she added.

"No," I returned, "there shall be no more pain there."

"He like it," she continued, almost smiling through her tears.

Then she grew very, very still, and a glow stole over her yellow face which made it beautiful.

I stepped nearer, put my arm around her, and kissed her on the cheek.

She looked at me in a startled way, then drawing a tiny handkerchief from her bosom, she carefully wiped the spot on her cheek where my lips had touched. The practice of kissing is unknown in China.

On the way home, when but a few yards from the house of Mrs. Yet, I met Professor Ballington again, and told him the story about the sick baby.

He asked me to go back with him, and take him in to see it, which I did. He looked scrutinisingly at the little hard pallet on which the baby lay; and what did that dear man do but go out to one of the great stores not far away, and buy the prettiest little cot, and the softest and best mattress that could be found in the market, and order them sent home without delay to that little yellow baby.

Was it the soft mattress that did it? I do not know; but almost immediately the baby seemed to rest easier, and by degrees came back to life and strength.

Oh, this would be a glorious country to live in!--if the people were all like Professor Ballington.

_June 10th, 1----_