O MY SISTER, I thought that now, since my son is here, forever would I have only joyful words to speak to you. I was triumphant and sure that nothing could come near me to make me sorrowful again. How is it that so long as there are bonds of blood there may be pain come from them?
To-day my heart can hardly bear its own throbbing. No—no—it is not my son! He has had nine months of life now, and he is a very Buddha for fatness. You have not seen him since he desired to stand upon his legs. Ah, it is enough to make a monk laugh! Since he perceived he could walk he is angered if anyone wishes him to sit. Indeed, in my arms there is not strength enough to bend him. His thoughts are full of lovely mischief, and his eyes dance with light. His father says he is spoiled, but I ask you, how can I scold such a one, who melts me with his willfulness and beauty, so that I am filled with tears and laughter? Ah, no—it is never my son!
No, it is that brother of mine. I speak of him who is the only son of my mother, he who has been these three years in America. It is he who pours out the blood from my mother’s heart and from my heart like this.
You remember I told you of him—how in my childhood I loved him ? But I have not seen him now for these many years, and I have heard of him even only a very little because my mother has never forgotten that against her will he left her home; and even when she commanded him to marry his betrothed he would not. His name does not rise easily to her lips.
And now he is disturbing the quiet of her life again. He is not satisfied that he has already disobeyed his mother gravely in the past. Now he must—but see, here is the letter! It came a day ago by the hand of Wang Da Ma, our old nurse, who fed us both at her breast when we were born and who has known every affair of my mother’s family.
When she entered she bowed her head to the floor before my son. Presenting this letter to me she wept and cried out with three deep groans, saying, “Aie—Aie—Aie—”
Then I, knowing that only catastrophe could cause this, felt my life stop in my breast for a second’s space.
“My mother—my mother!” I cried.
I remembered how feebly she had leaned upon her staff when I last saw her. I reproached myself inwardly that I had gone to her but twice since the child’s birth. I had been too absorbed in my own happiness.
“It is not your mother, Daughter of the most Honorable Lady,” she replied, sighing heavily. “The gods have prolonged her life to see this sorrow.”
“Is my father—” I asked, quick terror changing to anxiety.
“That honorable one also drinks not yet of the Yellow Springs,” she replied, bowing.
“Then?” I asked, seeing the letter she had placed on my knee.
She pointed to it.
“Let the young mother of a princely son read the letter,” she suggested. “It is written within.”
Then I bade the servant pour tea for her in the outer room, and giving my son to his attendant I looked at the letter. Its superscription was my name, and the name of the sender, my mother. I was filled with wonder. She had never written a letter to me before.
When I had marveled for a time, I opened the narrow envelope and drew out the thin sheet from within. Upon it I saw the delicate, studied lines of my mother’s writing-brush. I passed hastily over the formal opening sentences, and then my eyes fell upon these words, and they were the kernel of the letter,
“Your brother, who has been in foreign countries these many months, now writes me that he wishes to take in marriage a foreign female.”
Then the formal closing sentences. That was all. But, O My Sister, I could feel my mother’s heart bleeding through the scanty words! I cried aloud,
“O cruel and insane brother—O wicked and cruel son!” until the maidservants hastened in to comfort me and to beg me remember that anger would poison my milk for the child.
Then seeing that I was seized with so great a flood of tears that I could not stem it, they sat down upon the floor and wept loudly with me, in order to drain my rage from me. When I had wept myself to calmness and had wearied of their noise, I bade them be silent and I sent for Wang Da Ma. I said to her,
“Wait yet another hour until my son’s father comes home that I may open the letter before him and know what he would bid me do. I will ask permission to go to my mother. Meanwhile, eat rice and meat for your refreshment.”
She willingly agreed, and I gave orders that an extra bit of pork be placed before her, taking my comfort in consoling her thus for her share in our family calamity.
In my room awaiting my husband’s return I mused alone. I remembered my brother. Try as I might, I could not see him as he is now, grown a man, dressed in American clothes, walking fearlessly about the strange roadways of that far country, speaking, perhaps, to its men and women—nay, certainly this, since one woman he loves. I could only look into my mind and remember him as I knew him best, the little elder brother of my childhood, he with whom I played at the threshold of the gates into the courts.
Then he was a head taller than I, quick to move, excited in speech, eager after laughter. His face was like our mother’s, oval, its lips straight and fine, and the brows clearly marked above the pointed eyes. The older concubines were always jealous because he was more beautiful than their sons. Yet how could he be otherwise? They were but common women, slaves in their youth, their lips full and coarse, and their eyebrows scattered like dog’s hairs. But our mother was a lady of a hundred generations. Her beauty was the beauty of precision and delicacy, full of restraint in line and color. This beauty she had bestowed upon her son.
Not that he cared for it. He brushed aside impatiently the caressing fingers of the women slaves upon his smooth cheeks, when they flattered him to try to please his mother. He was intent upon his own play. But indeed, he was intense even in play and laughter. I seem to see him always with knitted brows above his play. He was filled with resolution over everything, and he would brook no will over his own.
When we played together I dared not cross him, partly because he was a boy, and it would not have been seemly that I, a girl, should set my will against his. But I let him have his way most of all because I loved him greatly and could not see him grieve.
Indeed, no one could bear to see him crossed. The servants and the slaves revered him as the young lord, and even the dignity of our mother was softened in his presence. I do not mean that she ever allowed him actually to disobey her commands, but I think she often restrained herself so that what she commanded of him would be in accord with his wishes. I have heard her bid a slave remove a certain sweet oil cake from the table before he came in, because he loved it and would eat it, and it always made him ill; and lest seeing it he would desire it, and she be compelled to refuse it to him.
Even as a youth his life was thus made smooth before him. It did not occur to me to mark the difference made between him and me. I did not at any time dream of being on an equality with my brother. It was not necessary. I had no such important part to fulfill in the family as he, the first son and the heir of my father.
Always in those days I loved my brother above all others. I walked by his side in the gardens, clinging to his hand. Together we stooped above the shallow pools, searching in the green shadows for the particular goldfish we called our own. Together we collected little stones of varied colors and built fairy courts patterned after our own courts, only infinitely small and intricate in design. When he taught me to move my brush carefully over the outlined characters of my first writing book, guiding my hand with his own placed over it, I considered him the wisest of human beings. Wherever he went in the women’s courts, I followed behind him like a little dog, and if he went beyond the arched gate into the men’s apartments where I could not go, I stood patiently there waiting until he returned.
Then suddenly he was nine years old, and he was taken from the women’s apartments into those of his father and the men, and our life together was broken sharply off.
Oh, those first few days! I could not live through them without long fits of weeping. At night I wept myself to sleep and dreamed of a place where we were always children and never separated. Ah, it was many a day before I ceased to mope about, seeing every room empty without him. My mother at length feared for my health and spoke to me.
“My daughter, this constant longing for your brother is unseemly. Such emotion must be reserved for other relationships. Grief like this is fit only for the death of your husband’s parents. Perceive the proportions of life and restrain yourself, therefore. Apply yourself to your studies and to your embroidery. The time has now come when we must fit you seriously for your marriage.”
Thereafter the idea of my approaching marriage was held always before me. I grew to understand that my life and my brother’s could never go side by side. I did not belong primarily to his family, but to the family of my betrothed. I heeded my mother’s words, therefore, and resolutely applied myself to my duties.
I remember my brother again clearly on that day when he desired to go to Peking to school. He came into our mother’s presence to ask her formal permission, and I was there. Since he had already obtained our father’s consent, his coming to our mother was only a courtesy. Our mother could scarcely forbid what our father allowed. But my brother was always scrupulous in the observance of proper outward custom.
He stood before her clad in a thin gray silk gown, for it was summer. Upon his thumb was a ring of jade. My brother is ever a lover of beautiful things. That day he made me think of a silver reed for grace. He held his head drooping a little before our mother, his eyes cast down. But from where I sat I could see his eyes gleaming between the lids.
“My mother,” he said, “if you are willing, I should like to study further at the university in Peking.”
She knew of course that she must consent. He knew that she would have forbidden it if she could. But where another would have dallied with complaining and weeping, she spoke at once quietly and firmly.
“My son, you know it must be as your father says. I am nothing but your mother—I know it. Nevertheless, I will speak, even though I may not now command against your father’s will. I see no use in your leaving home. Your father and your grandfather completed their learning at home. You yourself have had the most skilled scholars in the city to teach you from your childhood. We even procured T’ang, the Learned, from Szechuen to instruct you in poetry. This foreign learning is unnecessary for one in your position. Going to these far cities you imperil your life, which is not fully yours until you have given us a son to carry on the ancestral name. If you could have married first—”
My brother stirred angrily and shut his fan, which he had been holding open in his left hand. Then he opened it quickly again with a snap. He lifted his eyes, and from under their lids protest leaped out. My mother raised her hand.
“Do not speak, my son. I do not command yet. I only warn you. Your life is not your own. Take care of it.”
She bowed her head, and he was dismissed.
I saw him after that but rarely. He came home only twice before my marriage, and we had nothing to say to each other, and we were never alone together. Nearly always he came into the women’s courts merely to give his mother formal greeting or to bid her farewell, and I could not speak to him freely in the presence of an elder.
I saw only that he grew tall and erect in bearing, and his face lost some of its youthful delicacy. He lost, too, the slender, childish, drooping grace of his body that in his early years had given him the look almost of a handsome girl. I heard him tell my mother that in the foreign type of school he had to exercise his body daily, and thus it grew in height and thickness and sinew. His hair he cut off according to the new fashion at the time of the first revolution, and it was smooth and black against his lifted head. I saw that he was beautiful. The women in the courts sighed after him, and the fat Second Lady murmured,
“Ah, he is like his father when first we loved!”
Then my brother went across the seas, and I did not see him again. He became indistinct in my mind and dimmed by all the strangeness surrounding him, so that I have never again seen him clearly.
Sitting in my room, awaiting my husband’s return, with the letter from my mother in my hand, I perceived that my brother was a strange man whom I did not know.
When my husband came home at noon I ran to him weeping, the letter in my outstretched hands. He received me with surprise, saying,
“But what is this? But what is this?”
“Read this—read and see!” I cried, and fell to sobbing afresh to see the look on his face as he read.
“Stupid boy—foolish—foolish!” he muttered, crumpling the letter in his hand. “How could he do this thing? Yes, go at once to your honorable mother. You must comfort her.”
And he bade the servant tell the ricksha man to hasten his meal that I might lose no time. When the man was ready then, I took only the child and his attendant and besought the man to run quickly.
When I had entered the gate of my mother’s house I perceived at once the silence of heaviness over all, as a cloud dims the moon. The slaves went about their business rolling their eyes and whispering, and Wang Da Ma, who had returned with me, had wept as we passed through the streets until her eyelids were thickened with tears.
In the Court of the Drooping Willows, the Second and the Third Ladies sat with their children. When I entered with my son they could scarce give me greeting before they fell to questioning me eagerly.
“Ah, the fair child!” cried the plump Second Lady, laying her pretty fat fingers against my son’s cheek and smelling his little hand in caress. “A little sweetmeat, thou!—Have you heard?” She turned to me with important gravity.
I nodded. I asked,
“Where is my mother?”
“The Honorable First Lady has remained in her chamber these three days,” she replied. “She speaks to no one. There she sits in her chamber. Twice daily she comes forth into the outer room to command the ordering of the household and to give out rice and food. Then she returns again to her chamber. Her lips are set together like the lips of a stone image, and her eyes make us turn away. We dare not speak to her. We do not know her thoughts.
“You will tell us what she says to you?” She coaxed me with nods and smiles, but I shook my head, refusing her curiosity. “At least leave us the little precious to play with,” she added.
She stretched out her arms for my son, but I forbade it.
“I will take him to my mother,” I said. “He will cheer her and turn her mind outward from her distress.”
When I had passed through the guest hall into the Court of Peonies and then through the women’s leisure room, I paused before my mother’s apartments. Usually only the red satin curtain hung in this doorway, but now behind the curtain the door was closed. Then I struck lightly upon it with the palm of my hand. There was no answer. I struck again. It was only when I called,
“It is I, my mother! It is I, thy little child!” that I heard her voice coming as from a great distance,
“Come to me, my daughter.”
Then I went in. I saw her sitting beside the black carved table. Incense was smoldering in the bronze urn before the sacred writing on the wall. She sat with bowed head, and between the fingers of one drooping hand she held a book. When she saw me enter she said,
“You have come? I have been trying to read the Book of Changes. But I find nothing to-day in its pages to comfort me.” She shook her head a little vaguely as she spoke, and the book dropped upon the floor. She let it lie there.
The irresolution of the action alarmed me. My mother has ever been self-possessed, sure, restrained. Now I saw that she had been too long alone, I reproached myself that I had loved my son too well and that his father’s tenderness had comforted me too deeply and too long. It had been many days since I came to visit her. How could I rouse her and divert her thoughts? I took my son and placing him on his fat legs, I folded his little hands and made him bow before her. I whispered to him,
“Thy honored Old One—say it, child!”
“Old One!” he lisped, staring at her unsmiling.
I told you that she had not seen him since his third month, and you know, My Sister, how he is altogether beautiful! Who could resist him? Her eyes fell on him and lingered. She roused herself. She went to the gilded cupboard and took out a red lacquered box. She opened it, and within were tiny cakes covered with sesame seed. These she gave to him, filling his hands. When he saw them he laughed aloud, and she indulged him with faint smiles and said,
“Eat, my little lotus-pod! Eat, my little meat-dumpling!”
Seeing her thus momentarily diverted, I picked up the book and poured a bowl of tea from the pot on the table, and presented it to her in both my hands.
She bade me sit, then, and the child played upon the floor, and we watched him. I waited for her to speak, not knowing whether or not she wished to mention the matter of my brother. She did not immediately approach it. She said first,
“Your son is here, my daughter.”
I remembered then the night when I had told her of my grief. Now the joy of the morning had come.
“Yes, my mother,” I replied, smiling.
“You are happy?” she asked, her eyes still on the child.
“My lord is a prince for his grace to me, his humble wife,” I replied.
“The child is conceived and born as from perfection,” she said musingly, her eyes upon him. “In everything I observe he is ten parts and complete. There is no beauty left to desire in him. Ah—” She sighed and stirred restlessly. “Your brother was such a child! I wish that he had died then, that I might have remembered him as beautiful and filial!”
I understood therefore that she wished to speak of my brother. But I waited to perceive the direction of her thoughts more clearly. In a little while she spoke again, raising her eyes to mine,
“You had my letter?”
“My mother’s letter reached me this morning by the hand of the servant,” I replied, bowing.
She sighed again, and rising, she went to the drawer of the writing-table and drew forth yet another letter. I stood and awaited her return. When she gave me the letter I received it with both hands. She said,
“Read it.”
It was from a friend of my brother’s, surnamed Chu, with whom he had gone to America from Peking. At the request of my brother, the letter said, he, Chu Kwoh-ting, was writing to the honored Old Ones to tell them that their son had betrothed himself according to the western custom to the daughter of one of his teachers in the university. He, their son, sent his filial respects to his parents and begged them to break off the early betrothal with the daughter of Li, which had always made him unhappy, even in contemplation. He acknowledged in all things the superior virtue of his parents and their endless kindness to him, their unworthy son. Nevertheless he wished to say clearly that he could not marry the one to whom he had been betrothed according to Chinese custom, because the times had changed; he was a modern man, and he had decided to adopt the modern, independent, free method of marriage.
The letter closed with many formal and filial expressions of respectful affection and obedience. But none the less the determination in my brother’s heart was written plainly forth. He had asked his friend to write for him only because he wished to spare his parents and himself the embarrassment of direct defiance. My heart burned against him as I read the letter. When I had finished it I folded it and handed it back to my mother without speech.
“He is seized with a madness,” said my mother. “I have sent him the electric letter to command his instant return.”
Then I knew how great was her agitation. For my mother is altogether of the old China. When in the streets of our ancient and beautiful city tall poles were reared which carried wires as the branches of a tree may carry spiders’ webs, she had cried out against the desecration.
“Our ancients used the brush and the ink block, and what have we, their unworthy descendants, to say of greater importance than their august words, that we need such speed?” she said in indignation.
And when she heard that words could travel even under the sea itself, she said,
“And what is there that we wish to communicate to these barbarians? Did not the gods in their wisdom pour out the sea between us in order to separate us from them? It is impious to unite what the gods in their wisdom have put apart.”
But now such need for haste had come even to her!
“I had thought,” she said sadly, “that I should never use these foreign inventions. Nor should I, had my son remained in his own country. But when one deals with the barbarians, one must harness the very devil to one’s mill!”
I spoke then to soothe her.
“My mother, do not grieve overmuch. My brother is obedient. He will listen and turn from this folly of running after a foreign woman.”
But she shook her head. She leaned her brow upon her hands. A sudden anxiety fell upon me to see it. She was looking really ill! She had never been full-fleshed, but now she was wasted away, and her hand, supporting her head, trembled. I leaned forward to observe her with more care, when she began to speak slowly.
“I have learned long ago,” she said, her voice coming faintly and with great weariness, “that when a woman has crawled into a man’s heart, his eyes are fastened inward upon her so that he is blind for a space to anything else.” She paused to rest, and then went on, her words coming at last like sighs. “Your father—is he not accounted an honorable man? Yet have I long resigned myself to this thing; when a woman’s beauty seizes him and catches his desire, he is mad for a time and understands nothing reasonable. And he has known a score of singing girls, beside these idle mouths he brings home as concubines—three of them we have had, and the only reason we have not another is because his lust failed for the Peking girl before the negotiations were finished. How then can the son show greater wisdom than the father?
“Men!” She roused herself suddenly. She curled her lips until her mouth seemed a thing alive of its own scorn. “Their inner thoughts are always coiled like snakes about the living body of some woman!”
I sat in horror at her words. Never had she spoken before of my father and the concubines. I saw suddenly into the inner halls of her heart. The bitterness and suffering there were bowels of fire within her. I had no words wherewith to comfort her—I, the beloved of my husband. I tried to imagine his taking a Second Lady. I could not. I could only remember the hours of our love, and my involuntary eyes fell upon our son, playing still with the little sesame cakes. What had I to say of comfort to my mother?
Yet I longed to speak.
“It may be that the foreign woman—” I began timidly.
But she struck her long pipe upon the floor. She had just taken it from the table and had begun to fill it with hasty, trembling fingers.
“Let us have no talk about that one,” she said sharply. “I have spoken. Now it is for my son to obey. He shall return and marry the daughter of Li, his betrothed, and of her shall his first seed come. Thus can his duty be fulfilled to the Ancient Ones. Then he may take whom he likes for a small wife! Shall I expect the son to be more perfect than the father?—But be silent now and leave me. I am very tired. I must rest awhile upon my bed.”
I could say no more. I saw indeed that she was very pale, and that her body drooped like a withered reed. I took up my son, therefore, and withdrew from her presence.
When I had returned to my home I told my husband with tears that I had not been able to soften the sorrow of my mother. He comforted me with his hand upon my hand, and bade me wait with patience the coming of my brother. When he talked gently with me thus, I took hope for the future. But the next morning when he was gone to his work I fell into doubt again. I cannot forget my mother!
Out of the sadness of her life these many years she has had this great hope of the future—the hope of all good women; she has thought of her son’s son to stay her old age, to fulfill her duty to the family. How is it that my brother has placed his careless desire before his mother’s life? I shall reproach my brother. I will tell him all that my mother said. I will remind him that he is my mother’s only son. Then I will say,
“How can you place upon our mother’s knees the child of a foreigner?”