CHAPTER XIII
Mrs. Gregory
ON one point, and on just one, John and Basil had agreed last night: Mrs. Gregory was to be spared as much as possible. She and Hilda were to remain happily ignorant of what had happened—ignorant of it in its worst form, if that could be compassed.
Basil had carefully omitted telling the clergyman of the proposed visit of the morrow. He would have cancelled it if he could have thought of any way. But he had not a devisive brain. His mother had quite set her heart on the excursion. He felt safe that he could trust to Nang Ping’s pride. Her pride would carry her through, and save and screen him, as such outraged womanly pride has saved and screened such men ever since Eve gave an apple to a man in Eden.
In this episode of Nang Ping (a little nefarious episode of his life; the soul-crux, the supreme tragedy of the girl) Basil Gregory cut the sorriest figure, for he had but toyed with her, he had indulged passion, passion had not mastered him, she was his toy, he her god; he felt tenderness for her, but not love; he had not the great excuse of a great love. His lingering by the sun-drenched lotus pond and in the scented dark of the old pagoda had been mere dalliance, not obsession. And yet the young Englishman was not all bad—far from that. To no one do the wise lines of the Western genius apply more closely:
There is a streak, at least, of angel in most women and in all men. Basil had a rich vein of angel. All that was best in him leapt to his mother. They had been sweethearts from the first. Such love as he had loved as yet was hers. It was a chivalrous love, and passionate. The other primal love, the love of man for his mate, might come to him: probably it would; it comes to most, but it would never equal the love he bore his mother. No other woman would ever be to him half that his mother was, or have from him half that he gave her.
Mothers that are loved so can face most sorrows with some buoyancy. This mother had sorrow, and she fronted it almost blithely.
Between these two, in a very beautiful sense, the spiritual umbilical cord had never been cut, and never would or could be cut.
She appealed to him in a dozen ways. She was gifted with youth. She laughed at the years, and they laughed back at her and caressed her. She looked his own age, scarcely more, and some days, in some moods and in some lights, she looked his junior. And, too, hers was a radiant personality. Her son joyed in her. He was proud of her, and proud to be seen with her. And she gave him love for love. But her love for him needs no explanation, nor merits one; he was her boy and her firstborn.
The night before, after Bradley had cried, “I don’t see my way. You must let me think,” the two men had sat silent for a time, and then the clergyman had re-begun, trying again to thrash it out, breaking nervously the silence he himself had enjoined. And he had referred again to the hideous discomfort of mixed marriages.
The waters of the Tigris do not mingle with the salt water of the sea until they have flowed through it a long, long way from the river-mouth. And so, it seemed to him, many suffering generations must pass before, if ever, any marriage could in truth unite races of East and West, or result in descendants less than sorely unhappy and bitterly resentful.
But marriages that tie the bloods of alien races are not the only mixed marriages. There are mixed marriages of another sort that bring as much, perhaps more, discomfort to the two most directly concerned, although they entail no social inconvenience: marriages of alien individualities. Such his mother’s marriage had proved, and Basil sensed it, and that she winced daily. He had never definitely realized it. He had never thought about it clearly. But he felt it. And this had roused all the angel in him to her defense, and made him very true and knightly to her.
The daughter of a poor Oxford cleric, Florence Grey had married “surprisingly well.” Robert Gregory was rich even then, good-looking, jovial, and to his young and pretty wife indulgent. He was indulgent to her still.
She had married him quite gladly, and for a time been well enough content. But after a year or two the sag had come and the disillusion. What in him had seemed once tonic and individuality came to seem brusque, and even boorish at times. She grew used to silken raiment and spiced meats, used and a little indifferent, though doubtless she would have missed them had she lost them, a tinge contemptuous of them. And often in the whirl of life—in Manchester, in Paris, in Calcutta, and now in gay Hong Kong—she longed a little for the Oxford quiet and Oxford ways, cool, green lanes, a dim old church, a shabby old library, dim too, full of well-worn books, simple usual things—roast mutton, milk pudding, and soft English rain, gray English skies.
But, too, she enjoyed life, and reaped from it with both hands. And her husband had been and was well content. He had married her for love, and he loved her still. But he had had no exultation and no opalescent anticipations. And so, reasonably enough, he had suffered no relapse. Such extremes of feeling, such quiver and ardor as he had ever known, had come to him in office and shipping yard. Business was his cult. And so far he had proved an excellent business man. He was perfectly satisfied with himself; and it never occurred to him that any one else was not. That would be preposterous, and certainly Florence was not preposterous. He was magnificently satisfied with himself, and in a suitably smaller way he was satisfied with his wife.
She had given him no cause to be dissatisfied. And they got on well together. They always had. She wore well. She dressed well. She never tried to understand his business, or to talk to him when he was reading the market reports or the shipping news. She was a handsome creature. People liked her. And she had borne him two children. He would have resented a third; to have had none would have enraged him as much as if he’d been a “Chinaman.”
Yes, Florence had done him very well, and he acknowledged it to himself, and boasted of it to all his cronies. And he had done her well too, by Jove! He was always kind to her. He let her have her own way absolutely when her way did not cross his, and their ways too rarely met (in any soul-sense) to cross often. And he was generous to her. He began that way, and, it is no little to the credit of so busy and business-bound a man, he had always kept it up. They had been married twenty-five years, and he bought flowers for her still. And jewelry he gave her constantly. No woman, unless she was the wife of a rich noble or a millionaire, had more good jewelry.
Mr. Gregory had given his wife some good jewelry for a wedding present. But the handsomest gifts she had received then had been sent her by an acquaintance he had never seen: a Chinese undergrad who had left Oxford the year before—“damned rich Chink,” as Robert Gregory expressed it, when he did not put it even more chastely, “a Rothschild of a nigger.”
The Chinese gift, a bracelet of emeralds and turquoise and jacinths and pearls, still was the most beautiful and the most valuable jewel Basil Gregory’s mother had, and she wore it on every occasion that justified such splendor. And Hilda, watching its green fire and blue softness on their mother’s fine white arm, could but wonder hungrily whether it would become ultimately the possession of herself or of Basil’s wife.
“It is the most beautiful jewel I have ever seen,” John Bradley said when he first saw it.
“Yes, isn’t it?” its owner acquiesced; “but when I have it on, I always feel as if I were wearing a bit of Revelation.”
“More like a bit of the Koran,” the priest had reassured her with an odd smile.
She was greatly puzzled. She had always supposed the Koran was a somewhat indecent book, quite the sort of book a clergyman would not mention to a lady. She resolved to get a cheap copy—she believed there were cheap editions; there were of almost everything now—the next time she sent to Kelly and Walsh’s.
And this resolve was not born of any wish to sample a questionable classic, but of a wish to repair an injustice she was regretful to have done even to a book or a heathen faith. Mrs. Gregory was a thoroughly nice woman.