The Street of Precious Pearls

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.