Mrs. Spring Fragrance
high room open to the stars, with its China bowls full of flowers and
its big colored lanterns, shedding a mellow light.
Sometimes there was music. A Chinese band played three evenings a week
in the gilded restaurant beneath them, and the louder the gongs sounded
and the fiddlers fiddled, the more delighted was Pan. Just below the
restaurant was her father’s bazaar. Occasionally Mun You would stroll
upstairs and inquire of the young couple if there was anything needed to
complete their felicity, and Pan would answer: “Thou only.” Pan was very
proud of her Chinese father. “I would rather have a Chinese for a father
than a white man,” she often told Mark Carson. The last time she had
said that he had asked whom she would prefer for a husband, a white man
or a Chinese. And Pan, for the first time since he had known her, had no
answer for him.
II
It was a cool, quiet evening, after a hot day. A new moon was in the
sky.
“How beautiful above! How unbeautiful below!” exclaimed Mark Carson
involuntarily.
He and Pan had been gazing down from their open retreat into the
lantern-lighted, motley-thronged street beneath them.
“Perhaps it isn’t very beautiful,” replied Pan, “but it is here I live.
It is my home.” Her voice quivered a little.
He leaned towards her suddenly and grasped her hands.
“Pan,” he cried, “you do not belong here. You are white—white.”
“No! no!” protested Pan.
“You are,” he asserted. “You have no right to be here.”
“I was born here,” she answered, “and the Chinese people look upon me as
their own.”
“But they do not understand you,” he went on. “Your real self is alien
to them. What interest have they in the books you read—the thoughts you
think?”
“They have an interest in me,” answered faithful Pan. “Oh, do not speak
in that way any more.”
“But I must,” the young man persisted. “Pan, don’t you see that you have
got to decide what you will be—Chinese or white? You cannot be both.”
“Hush! Hush!” bade Pan. “I do not love you when you talk to me like
that.”
A little Chinese boy brought tea and saffron cakes. He was a picturesque
little fellow with a quaint manner of speech. Mark Carson jested merrily
with him, while Pan holding a tea-bowl between her two small hands
laughed and sipped.
When they were alone again, the silver stream and the crescent moon
became the objects of their study. It was a very beautiful evening.
After a while Mark Carson, his hand on Pan’s shoulder, sang:
“And forever, and forever,
As long as the river flows,
As long as the heart has passions,
As long as life has woes,
The moon and its broken reflection,
And its shadows shall appear,
As the symbol of love in heaven,
And its wavering image here.”
Listening to that irresistible voice singing her heart away, the girl
broke down and wept. She was so young and so happy.
“Look up at me,” bade Mark Carson. “Oh, Pan! Pan! Those tears prove that
you are white.”
Pan lifted her wet face.
“Kiss me, Pan,” said he. It was the first time.
Next morning Mark Carson began work on the special-feature article which
he had been promising his paper for some weeks.
III
“Cursed be his ancestors,” bayed Man You.
He cast a paper at his daughter’s feet and left the room.
Startled by her father’s unwonted passion, Pan picked up the paper, and
in the clear passionless light of the afternoon read that which forever
after was blotted upon her memory.
“Betrayed! Betrayed! Betrayed to be a betrayer!”
It burnt red hot; agony unrelieved by words, unassuaged by tears.
So till evening fell. Then she stumbled up the dark stairs which led to
the high room open to the stars and tried to think it out. Someone had
hurt her. Who was it? She raised her eyes. There shone: “Its Wavering
Image.” It helped her to lucidity. He had done it. Was it unconsciously
dealt—that cruel blow? Ah, well did he know that the sword which pierced
her through others, would carry with it to her own heart, the pain of
all those others. None knew better than he that she, whom he had called
“a white girl, a white woman,” would rather that her own naked body and
soul had been exposed, than that things, sacred and secret to those who
loved her, should be cruelly unveiled and ruthlessly spread before the
ridiculing and uncomprehending foreigner. And knowing all this so well,
so well, he had carelessly sung her heart away, and with her kiss upon
his lips, had smilingly turned and stabbed her. She, who was of the race
that remembers.
IV
Mark Carson, back in the city after an absence of two months, thought of
Pan. He would see her that very evening. Dear little Pan, pretty Pan,
clever Pan, amusing Pan; Pan, who was always so frankly glad to have him
come to her; so eager to hear all that he was doing; so appreciative, so
inspiring, so loving. She would have forgotten that article by now. Why
should a white woman care about such things? Her true self was above it
all. Had he not taught her _that_ during the weeks in which they had
seen so much of one another? True, his last lesson had been a little
harsh, and as yet he knew not how she had taken it; but even if its
roughness had hurt and irritated, there was a healing balm, a wizard’s
oil which none knew so well as he how to apply.
But for all these soothing reflections, there was an undercurrent of
feeling which caused his steps to falter on his way to Pan. He turned
into Portsmouth Square and took a seat on one of the benches facing the
fountain erected in memory of Robert Louis Stevenson. Why had Pan failed
to answer the note he had written telling her of the assignment which
would keep him out of town for a couple of months and giving her his
address? Would Robert Louis Stevenson have known why? Yes—and so did
Mark Carson. But though Robert Louis Stevenson would have boldly
answered himself the question, Mark Carson thrust it aside, arose, and
pressed up the hill.
“I knew they would not blame you, Pan!”
“Yes.”
“And there was no word of you, dear. I was careful about that, not only
for your sake, but for mine.”
Silence.
“It is mere superstition anyway. These things have got to be exposed and
done away with.”
Still silence.
Mark Carson felt strangely chilled. Pan was not herself tonight. She did
not even look herself. He had been accustomed to seeing her in American
dress. Tonight she wore the Chinese costume. But for her clear-cut
features she might have been a Chinese girl. He shivered.
“Pan,” he asked, “why do you wear that dress?”
Within her sleeves Pan’s small hands struggled together; but her face
and voice were calm.
“Because I am a Chinese woman,” she answered.
“You are not,” cried Mark Carson, fiercely. “You cannot say that now,
Pan. You are a white woman—white. Did your kiss not promise me that?”
“A white woman!” echoed Pan her voice rising high and clear to the stars
above them. “I would not be a white woman for all the world. _You_ are a
white man. And _what_ is a promise to a white man!”
* * * * *
When she was lying low, the element of Fire having raged so fiercely
within her that it had almost shriveled up the childish frame, there
came to the house of Man You a little toddler who could scarcely speak.
Climbing upon Pan’s couch, she pressed her head upon the sick girl’s
bosom. The feel of that little head brought tears.
“Lo!” said the mother of the toddler. “Thou wilt bear a child thyself
some day, and all the bitterness of this will pass away.”
And Pan, being a Chinese woman, was comforted.
THE GIFT OF LITTLE ME
The schoolroom was decorated with banners and flags wrought in various
colors. Chinese lanterns swung overhead. A big, green, porcelain frog
with yellow eyes squatted in the centre of the teacher’s desk. Tropical
and native plants: azaleas, hyacinths, palms, and Chinese lilies, filled
the air with their fragrance.
It was the day before the Chinese New Year of 18— and Miss McLeod’s
little scholars, in the decoration of their schoolroom, had expressed
their love of quaint conceits and their appreciation of the beautiful.
They were all in holiday attire. There was Han Wenti in sky-hued raiment
and loose, flowing sleeves, upon each of which was embroidered a yellow
dragon. Han Wenti’s father was the Chief of his clan in America. There
was San Kee, the son of the Americanized merchant, stiff and slim in
American store clothes. Little Choy, on the girls’ side, proudly wore a
checked louisine Mother Hubbard gown, while Fei and Sie looked like
humming-birds in their native costume of bright-colored silks flowered
with gold.
Miss McLeod’s eyes wandered over the heap of gifts piled on three chairs
before her desk, and over the heads of the young givers, to where on a
back seat a little fellow in blue cotton tunic and pantaloons sat
swinging a pair of white-soled shoes in a “don’t care for anybody”
fashion.
Little Me was looked upon almost as a criminal by his schoolfellows. He
was the only scholar in all the school who failed to offer at the shrine
of the Teacher, and the fact that he was the son of a man who dined on
no richer dish than rice and soy gravy did not palliate his offense.
There were other scholars who knew not the taste of mushrooms, bamboo
shoots, and sucking pigs, yet who were unceasing in their offerings of
paper mats, wild flowers, pebbles, strange insects, and other gifts
possessing at least a sentimental value. The truth of the matter,
however, was that Little Me was neither unappreciative nor unloving. He
was simply afflicted with pride. If he could not give in the princely
fashion of Hom Hing and Lee Chu, the sons of the richest merchants in
Chinatown, he would not give at all.
Yet if Miss McLeod, in her Scotch heart, allowed herself a favorite
amongst her scholars, it was Little Me. Many a time had she incurred the
displeasure of the parents of Hom Hing and Lee Chu by rejecting the
oft-times valuable presents of their chubby, complacent-faced sons. She
had seen Little Me’s eyes cloud and his small hands draw up in his
sleeves when the pattering footsteps of the braided darlings of the rich
led them, with their offerings, to her desk.
“Attention, children!” said Miss McLeod; and she made a little speech in
which she thanked her scholars for their tokens of appreciation and
affection, but impressed upon them that she prized as much a wooden
image of his own carving from a boy who had nothing more to offer, as
she did an ivory or jade figure from one whose father could afford to
wear gold buttons; that a lichi from the orphan Amoy was as refreshing
to her as a basket of oranges from the only daughter of the owner of
many fruit ranches. The greatest of all gifts was beyond price. They
must remember the story she had told them at Christmas time of the
giving of a darling and only Son to a loved people. All the money in the
world could not have paid for that dear little boy. He was a free gift.
Little Me stopped swinging his feet in their white-soled shoes. With
solemn eyes and puckered brow he meditated over this speech.
* * * * *
The first day of the new year was kept with much rejoicing. There were
gay times under the lanterns, quaint ceremonies, and fine feasting. The
flutist came out with his flute, the banjo man with his banjo, and the
fiddler with his fiddle. No child but had a piece of gold or silver
given to him or her, and sweetmeats, loose-skinned oranges, and