The Street of Precious Pearls. Nora Waln

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

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