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.
