Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “She, a Tung-yang girl, stands barefoot on the bank,

  He, a boatman of Kuei-chi, is in his boat.

  The moon has not set.

  They look at each other—brokenhearted.”

  “But it’s so sad.”

  “Most Chinese poetry about love is sad, for some reason. If someone wishes to be happy, it isn’t recommended that he become a poet.”

  “Perhaps he just shouldn’t become a lover.”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed, a little sadly himself. “Li Po is said to have died through falling out of a boat into his reflection in a lake, while under the influence of wine.”

  “That is sad.”

  “Perhaps not. I think it is quite beautiful, since everyone has to die anyhow, in one way or another. Furthermore, many of us plunge at such evanescent reflections in the water, usually with fatal results. It is a question whether it is more of a folly to plunge at one’s own reflection, or that of another.” She wasn’t following this part of his rambling discourse at all. He closed the Li Po and put it away. “I am not sure how many of these books you would like to see.”

  To Herma’s surprise not all of them were in Chinese. He showed her a fine morocco-bound copy of Marius the Epicurean, a first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a Kamasutra in a French translation, a first edition of Lyrical Ballads (he knew “Kubla Khan” by heart and insisted on reciting it for her), a Leopardi, and a Tasso in a seventeenth-century binding.

  He took down another volume in an old binding and searched for something. Then he read it, or rather recited it with his finger on the passage but looking straight at her, with a slight expression of amusement.

  “You are the reflection of Heav’n in a pond, and he that leaps at you is sunk.”’

  She laughed. “Who said that?”

  “Congreve.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “There are a great many things you don’t know, dear child.”

  “And a great many that I do.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s true. But you must pardon me. These are only dusty old books, and I forget that you are a healthy young person whose dinner has been delayed.”

  “Not at all.”

  “This way, dear child.” He indicated the door to the dining room for her, and allowed her to go ahead.

  The reference to forgetting was a courteous formula. Mr. Ming forgot nothing. His invitation to dinner was a matter of precise timing, and Tea-boy was in the very act of setting the dishes on the table as they entered. They took their places, Herma tucking her legs in under the low table. The dishes were simple but exquisitely prepared. First came scented shellfish cooked in rice wine, then goose with apricots, and pimiento soup with mussels. There was no wine, except for the fine amber nectar the shellfish was cooked in; only tea. The table service was a fragile Yung Lo porcelain of the Ming dynasty, white with an under-glaze pattern of bamboo leaves.

  “What a beautiful teacup.”

  Mr. Ming remarked, “In ancient times it was said that the ideal size for a teacup was that of the breast of a young maiden.” Then he stopped, feeling perhaps that in the light of Herma’s own modest endowments the remark was not tactful. He was embarrassed. How had he got onto this subject anyhow? But Herma, relentless, refused to let him off. “You could try this one,” she suggested, “on one of the singsong girls in Pike Street.”

  “Dear child, please be serious,” he begged her. “I would have given my rarest porcelain not to have made the remark I just made, because it is exactly this subject I wished to talk to you about, but not at all in the tone into which we have fallen in talking about it. As you know, I am a bachelor and I live entirely alone. I have no one to share the beautiful things I have acquired, or with whom to exchange my thoughts. It is all wasted. Youth is wanted here, youth in my own life, and youth in this house. All of it I offer you, my dear. You may be the mistress of it all, if only you would agree to share my life.”

  Herma repressed a smile. “The mistress of all?”

  “I might add that the proposal I am offering is entirely honorable. It is true that according to California law we cannot be married. But a marriage according to Confucian law can easily be arranged, and I can assure you that it is equally serious and far more binding. I will be a good husband to you. And I will demand of you,” he said, embarrassed again, “nothing which you do not freely want to give.”

  Herma hardly knew what to say. She sipped the last of her tea and gazed at the fragile cup in her fingers.

  “Perhaps you think I am only a foolish old man, like the Emperor Hsüan Tsung.”

  “No,” she said after a pause, as though considering, “you are not foolish, you are not old, and you are not at all like the Emperor Hsüan Tsung.”

  “It is too much to ask that you should feel affection for me. I ask only your presence, and your acceptance of dominion over my house.”

  “But you see, Mr. Ming,” she explained gently, “I have my career as a singer, and that must come first.”

  “I would make no claims on your time, dear child. You would be free to do as you please. Possibly I can even help you in your career. I have even,” he said, with a slight air of chinoiserie that might have seemed sinister if she hadn’t known him better, “certain influences in the world, of a kind that would perhaps surprise you.”

  “And where would we live?”

  He pointed about to the vast luxurious chambers, with their rich Oriental tapestries, their porcelains, their works of art.

  “But don’t you see, Mr. Ming, in my career I must travel about the world, from place to place.”

  He smiled a little sadly. “Perhaps I could follow you. Or, if that is not possible, you could be my wife whenever you came to San Francisco, even though I should greatly miss you when you were gone.”

  “I am not sure,” she offered as her final riposte, “that it is good for a singer’s voice to be married.”

  Mr. Ming said cautiously, “I have heard that the conjugal act is said to reinforce a man’s vitality, his Yang being recharged by his partner’s Yin. Perhaps it is the same with singers.”

  She smiled at him indulgently, and set her teacup down. “Mr. Ming, you haven’t shown me the rest of your house.”

  The bedroom, like the library, was a good-sized room without windows, somewhere around on the other side of the garden. Mr. Ming lit a lamp. On the walls were paintings on hanging silk scrolls, depicting for the most part fantastic landscapes with flora found only in the world of dream. He told her the names of some of them: Gentlemen Conversing in a Landscape (the gentlemen were hardly visible down in one corner), The Coming of Autumn, A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, and Autumn Landscape, this last by the famous K’un-ts’an of the Ch’ing dynasty, the most eminent brush painter of the classic period, according to Mr. Ming. Most of the subjects were autumnal, she noticed. It was not clear whether this was a reflection of Mr. Ming’s taste, or was characteristic of all Chinese painting.

  For the rest, the room contained a number of tapestries and wall hangings, a luxurious Persian carpet, a single moon-white Ch’ing-pai vase in a kind of shrine (he asked her to guess its Secret Color, but she was unable), and a most peculiar bed. It was a spacious affair with wicker walls and openings hung with curtains, more like a small room than an ordinary bed. Inside it was a stand with toilet articles, a mirror, a frame on which to hang clothes, and a bronze censer for scenting the quilts. A padded silk mattress covered the whole bottom, which was perhaps ten feet square. Herma opened the wickerwork door and looked inside. A tiny lamp was burning on a shelf. Next to it was a book. She started to examine it, but Mr. Ming told her she was looking at it from the back. Chinese books began at the other end from English books.

  “What is it then?”

  He took it from her, coloring slightly. “It is called The Book of the Bridegroom. This is a book in which the young man is instructed how to—care for his bride.”

  “May I not look at it?”r />
  Although he still seemed a little embarrassed about it, he allowed her to take the book from him and examine it. In the thousand and one woodcuts in the text, couples were shown in every imaginable position, and a few that were unimaginable. She leafed on, fascinated. Evidently the Chinese were a nation of acrobats, or perhaps the amorous impulse for some reason developed in them abnormal resiliences. In one woodcut it appeared that the lady had divided her lover in two with a sword before embracing him, but on closer examination she found that the two halves of the gentleman were still joined, although in a roundabout way.

  He took the book from her again. “It is possible to get the wrong impression by looking only at the illustrations. There is also a text, which in many cases is quite poetic.” He leafed through it until he found the passage he wanted. “‘A slow thrust should resemble the movement of a carp caught on the hook; a quick thrust should resemble the flight of birds against the wind.”’

  He smiled at her a little uncertainly.

  “Oh, Mr. Ming,” said Herma. “All that is so unnecessary.”

  Herma, who was in an excellent mood, stood him before her exactly as though he were the small mandarin from the doll shop and began unbuttoning his satin-gold tunic. The satin trousers he removed himself, hardly daring to look at her as she took off her own clothes. They were both very neat. They hung their clothes on the frame provided inside the bed, exactly as though they were an old married couple. Then they lay on their sides and discussed each other’s bodies.

  “Do Chinese people blush?”

  He blushed. “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible, because everyone says they are yellow.”

  “That’s not true. The Chinese say that western people are red, but that’s not true either.”

  “Are you sorry that my breasts are not larger?”

  In fact, he seemed to have trouble finding them. He looked about on various parts of her body for a while.

  “No. Chinese women in general have small breasts too. The Chinese regard western women as bovine. As a matter of fact, I have a slight inclination toward boys, and for this reason I find you particularly attractive.” Herma didn’t know whether to take this as a compliment or not. “Of course, I have never put this impulse into practice, and I have never revealed it to anyone but you. But for some reason, I find it easy to tell you everything.”

  “You’re thin too.” She reached out to touch the elegant, slightly translucent bone of his hip.

  “Yes. Our bodies are much alike.”

  In fact, with her long dress removed, and his bulky tunic, it was remarkable how much the two bodies resembled each other. Not only were they exactly the same height, but the proportions were the same: thin shoulders, narrow hips, finely modeled limbs, matching oval faces with delicate, slightly androgynous features. The two bodies coiled together on the silken mattress and interwound like a pair of precious metal serpents, his silver and hers gold.

  “The Book of the Bridegroom is on the shelf,” she heard him saying in a muffled tone, “but I can’t reach it from here.”

  “Mr. Ming, don’t bother.”

  Mr. Ming himself, she reflected, was like porcelain. Even to his member—which was as hard as porcelain and a pale smooth white with just a touch of—what? A faint cast of mauve, she decided. Mauve was his Secret Color—not only of that part of him but of his whole body. She wondered if she too had a Secret Color and if he had noticed it. Perhaps, she thought, it was just the faintest touch of strawberry, under the lemon vanilla. His arms and shoulders, all of him, seemed as hard as porcelain too, and yet in some way soft and resilient—a rare and unctuous body quite different from her own and yet unmistakably human. It clasped hers tightly, in a way resembling none of the woodcuts in The Book of the Bridegroom but in a way unique to the two of them. Mr. Ming was evidently not ready yet for the flight of birds against the wind; he confined himself to gentle motions like a carp on a hook. Yet, somewhat to his surprise, and to the intense pleasure of Herma, the birds took flight anyhow, and soared off with a beating of wings that lasted for some time, and only gradually attenuated.

  If Mr. Ming was not asleep, he was only perhaps too embarrassed to open his eyes. He resembled a Blanc de Chine figurine, pale and moonlike, faintly shadowed with mauve. And that reminded her of something.

  Stealthily, watching him to be sure he didn’t wake up or open his eyes, she crept on her hands and knees to the edge of the bed and lowered herself to the floor. Glancing around once behind her, she crossed the room to the Ch’ing-pai vase in its alcove, with a tiny lamp before it. She studied it for a long time. She tried closing her eyes and slowly opening them again. After she had done this several times, the last time opening her eyes very slowly as though she herself was wakening from sleep, she seemed to make out in the bone-white translucence of the vase a faint greenish shadow, like a reflection from the thinnest possible slice of sea water.

  She crept back to the bed, clambered in, and hung close over Mr. Ming with care not to touch him.

  “I’ve discovered the Secret Color of the Ch’ing-pai vase,” she said. “It’s celadon.”

  Mr. Ming awakened from his dream, if that was what it was. He looked about him with an air of solemnity, at his own naked limbs, and at hers.

  “I am not sure how all this happened. I believe we have both been possessed by demons. However, any wrong will be righted as soon as I have made you my wife. Tomorrow I will discuss the matter with a magistrate I know. He is a member of my own Tong and a very respected person.”

  “When I am finished with you,” she told him, “I’ll take you back to the doll shop.”

  8.

  Fred had a quick breakfast in the coffee shop, then he left the hotel at nine and set off briskly down Market Street. It was a busy day and the city was already buzzing with activity. The climate slightly intoxicated him. There was a vitality to the city, an electric snap in the air, lacking in the sun-baked and indolent South. The shop windows glittered with expensive merchandise, much of it imported. Spanking new green and white cable cars rattled busily up and down Market, from the Ferry Building to Twin Peaks. There were almost as many motorcars as carriages in the streets. A large Locomobile discharged a lady in furs, with a wolfhound on a leash, in front of the Palace Hotel. Fred stopped to watch. She was young and pretty, with a long and pale aristocratic face. The furs swathed her to the chin, although it was not very cold. The harp string in his blood went twang, as it always did at the sight of a pretty girl. She handed the leash to the doorman and drifted imperturbably through the glass doors into the hotel.

  He came to himself and noticed the clock on the Chronicle Building just across the street: nine-fifteen. It was only a short distance to the Hyde Street cable car at the corner of Powell. The crewmen, assisted by the passengers, were just pushing the car around on its turntable to head it back up toward Nob Hill.

  Fred got on, next to a girl in a middy blouse and a pleated skirt who seemed to be an art student. She was carrying long rolls of paper, a folded easel, and a portfolio with splashes of paint on it. Her heavy brown hair was piled in a coil on her head, which called attention to her perfectly white and smooth neck. She turned and gave Fred a bold glance. He was wearing his checked jacket, beige trousers, and yellow shoes, and he had managed to press out most of the dents in his derby caused by its being packed in a suitcase. She seemed to be examining this headgear with interest.

  Fred felt the color coming into his face. Ziiiing! It happened again: an electric shock that made his nerves stand on end. It was a sheerly mechanical reflex, he thought. It probably had something to do with the climate. San Francisco was a stimulating city in all respects, and full of opportunities. The motorman pulled back on his long lever and the car started with a jerk.

  As the car swayed, the elbow of the art student nudged gently against his side. Union Square went by, then the car started up Nob Hill. The Stanford Mansion went by on the right, then the Fairmont H
otel. At the top of the hill the car made a jerky turn to the left, went down a couple of blocks, and then turned right again.

  The art student got off at Broadway and went briskly down the hill toward North Beach. Fred watched her retreating form with regret. Like everybody else in this busy city, she had something to do. The car went steeply down Hyde Street now. In the distance there were clouds over the Golden Gate, but here in the city a thin sun warmed Fred’s knees. The car came down onto a flat stretch and rattled along toward the terminal only a block or so away. The Ghirardelli chocolate factory loomed up on the left. The motorman jerked back on his brake and deftly slid the car into the turntable that would turn it around, always provided a few volunteers were found to help push.

  Here Fred got off and walked a block to the E car, following the directions given him by the hotel clerk. The streetcar, a large green affair with gleaming windows, came along presently. It took him along Bay Street, angled to the right on Cervantes for a while, and then continued along the waterfront for a mile or so until it came to a stop in a pasture with the Bay on one side and the Presidio up on the hill to the left. This was the end of the line; from here Fred had to walk.

  The pointed yellow shoes weren’t really suited for walking. Still, it wasn’t very far. A half a mile or so across the meadow he could see a barnlike building with a curved roof, and near it a pair of insectlike shapes standing in the grass. At this sight his heart began to pound a little in his chest. Forcing himself not to hurry, he went on down a narrow beaten path toward the hangar and the two machines standing in front of it.

  The brand-new corrugated-iron hangar looked as though it had been rather hastily flung together. On the front of it was a homemade sign saying “Curtiss Flying Service.” There was no one in sight. Fred turned to look at the two flying machines parked in the grass. One was a Voisin monoplane in rather poor condition; the wire was rusty, and the short mast that held up the struts looked rather shaky. The other machine was a Farman. It was similar to the Wright Flyer, with a canard elevator and a combination of wheels and skids for landing. The engine was an Antoinette—heavy and, as Fred had heard, prone to throw its connecting rods through the cylinder wall. He turned and went back toward the hangar.