Part 11 (1/2)
The children have come home and are clamouring for their supper.
They are growing rougher and noisier each day, and, I fear, are spending far too many hours in the servants' courtyard, where they hear of things not seemly for young ears. Canst thou send me Wong-si for a few months? She might be able to keep some order in my household, although I doubt a person of a nature not divine being able to still the many tongues I have now about me.
We send thee love, and greetings to thy new-born great-grandson.
Kwei-li.
21 My Dear Mother, I have been in the country with my friend Ang Ti-ti. It was the time of pilgrimage to the graves of her family at the temple near Wu-seh. My household gave me many worries, and my husband said it was a time of rest for me, so we took a boat, with only a few servants, as I am tired of chattering women, and spent three long happy days amongst the hills. We sat upon the deck as the boat was slowly drawn along the ca.n.a.l, and watched the valley that autumn now is covering with her colours rare. All the green of the fields is changed. All the gay foliage of the trees upon the hillsides will soon be dead and crumbling.
These withered leaves that once waved gaily in the air are lying now in cl.u.s.tered heaps, or fluttering softly to the ground like dull, brown b.u.t.terflies who are tired with flight. The only touch of colour is on the maple-trees, which still cling with jealous hands to coverings of red and gold. The autumn winds wailed sadly around our cabin windows, and every gust brought desolation to tree and shrub and waving gra.s.s.
Far away the setting sun turned golden trees to flame, and now and then on the sluggish waters of the ca.n.a.l would drift in lonely splendour a s.h.i.+ning leaf that autumn winds had touched and made into a thing of more than beauty.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Mylady28.]
We anch.o.r.ed the first night by a marshy bank girdled with tall yellow reeds and dwarf bamboo, and from our quiet cabin listened to the rainy gusts that swept the valley. Out of the inky clouds the lightning flashed and lighted up each branch and stem and swaying leaf, revealing to our half-blinded eyes the rain-swept valley; then darkness came with her thick mantle and covered all again.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Mylady29.]
We discussed the past, the present, and the future; and then, as always when mothers meet, the talk would turn to children. How we are moved by our children! We are like unto the G.o.ddess of the Pine-tree. She came out from her rugged covering and bore a man-child for her husband's house, and then one day the overlord of all that land sent to cut down the pine-tree, that its great trunk might form the rooftree of his temple. At the first blow of the axe the soul glided back into its hiding-place, and the woman was no more. And when it fell, three hundred men could not move it from its place of falling; but her baby came and, putting out his hand, said, ”Come,”
and it followed him quite quietly, gliding to the very doorway of the temple. So do our children lead us with their hands of love.
On the second day we went to the temple to offer incense at the family shrine of Ang Ti-ti. We Chinese ladies love these pilgrimages to these shrines of our ancestors, and it is we who keep up the family wors.h.i.+p. We believe that it is from the past that we must learn, and ”the past is a pathway which spirits have trodden and made luminous.” It is true, as Lafcadio Hearn has written, ”We should be haunted by the dead men and women of our race, the ancestors that count in the making of our souls and have their silent say in every action, thought and impulse of our life. Are not our ancestors in very truth our souls? Is not every action the work of the dead who dwell within us? Have not our impulses and our tendencies, our capacities and our weaknesses, our heroisms and our fears, been created by those vanished myriads from whom we received that all-mysterious gift of life? Should we think of that thing which is in each of us and which we call 'I' should it be 'I' or 'they'? What is our pride or shame but the pride or shame of the unseen in that which they have made?
And what is our conscience but the inherited sum of countless dead experiences with all things good and evil?”
”In this wors.h.i.+p that we give the dead they are made divine. And the thought of this tender reverence will temper with consolation the melancholy that comes with age to all of us. Never in our China are the dead too quickly forgotten; by simple faith they are still thought to dwell among their beloved, and their place within the home remains holy. When we pa.s.s to the land of shadows we know that loving lips will nightly murmur our names before the family shrine, that our faithful ones will beseech us in their pain and bless us in their joy. We will not be left alone upon the hillsides, but loving hands will place before our tablet the fruits and flowers and dainty food that we were wont to like, and will pour for us the fragrant cups of tea or amber rice-wine.”
”Strange changes are coming upon this land, old customs are vanis.h.i.+ng, old beliefs are weakening, the thoughts of to-day will not be the thoughts of to-morrow; but of all this we will know nothing. We dream that for us as for our mothers the little lamp will burn on through the generations; we see in fancy the yet unborn, the children of our children's children, bowing their tiny heads and making the filial obeisance before the tablets that bear our family name.”
This is our comfort, we who feel that ”this world is not a place of rest, but where we may now take our little ease, until the landlord whom we never see, gives our apartment to another guest.”
As I said to thee, it is the women who are the preservers of the family wors.h.i.+p and who are trying hard to cling to old loved customs.
Perhaps it is because we suffer from lack of facility in adapting ourselves to new conditions. We are as fixed as the star in its...o...b..t.
Not so much the men of China but we women of the inner courtyards seem to our younger generation to stand an immovable mountain in the pathway of their freedom from the old traditions.
In this course we are only following woman nature. An instinct more powerful than reason seems to tell us that we must preserve the thing we know. Change we fear. We see in the new ideas that our daughters bring from school, disturbers only of our life's ideals. Yet the new thoughts are gathering about our retreats, beating at our doorways, creeping in at the closely shuttered windows, even winning our husbands and our children from our arms. The enclosing walls and the jealously guarded doors of our courtyards are impotent. While we stand a foe of this so-called progress, a guardian of what to us seems womanhood and modesty, the world around us is moving, feeling the impulse of a larger life, broadening its outlook and clothing itself in new expression that we hardly understand. We feel that we cannot keep up with this generation; and, seeing ourselves left behind with our dead G.o.ds, we cry out against the change which is coming to our daughters with the advent of this new education and the knowledge of the outside world. But--.
All happy days must end, and we floated slowly back to the busy life again. As we came down the ca.n.a.l in the soft moonlight it recalled those other nights to me upon the mountain-side, and as I saw the lights of the city before us I remembered the old poem of Chang Chili Lo:
”The Lady Moon is my lover, My friends are the Oceans four, The Heavens have roofed me over, And the Dawn is my golden door.
I would liefer follow a condor, Or the sea-gull soaring from ken, Than bury my G.o.dhead yonder, In the dust and whirl of men.”
Thy daughter, Kwei-li.
22 My Dear Mother, I have not written thee for many days. I came back from my happy country trip to find clouds of sorrow wrapping our home in close embrace. We hear Ting-fang is in deep trouble, and we cannot understand it. He is accused of being in league with the Southern forces. Of course we do not believe it, my son is not a traitor; but black forebodings rise from deeps unknown and the cold trail of fear creeps round my heart.
But I cannot brood upon my fears alone; this world seems full of sorrow. Just now I have stopped my letter to see a woman who was brought to the Yamen for trying to kill her baby daughter. She is alone, has no one to help her in her time of desolation, no rice for crying children, and nothing before her except to sell her daughter to the tea-house. She gave her sleep; and who can blame her?