The Feast

So this is the wedding feast! The room is not large, but it is heavily crowded, filled with small tables, filled with many human bodies. About the walls are paintings and banners in sharp colors; above our heads hang innumerable gaudy lanterns of wood and paper. We sit in furs, shivering with the cold. The food passes endlessly, droll combinations in brown gravies—roses, sugar, and lard—duck and bamboo—lotus, chestnuts, and fish-eggs—an "eight-precious pudding." They tempt curiosity; my chop-sticks are busy. The warm rice-wine trickles sparingly.

The groom is invisible somewhere, but the bride martyrs among us. She is clad in scarlet satin, heavily embroidered with gold. On her head is an edifice of scarlet and pearls. For weeks, I know, she has wept in protest. The feast-mother leads her in to us with sacrificial rites. Her eyes are closed, hidden behind her curtain of strung beads; for three days she will not open them. She has never seen the bridegroom.

At the feast she sits like her own effigy. She neither eats nor speaks. Opposite her, across the narrow table, is a wall of curious faces, lookers-on—children and half-grown boys, beggars and what-not—the gleanings of the streets. They are quiet but they watch hungrily. To-night, when the bridegroom draws the scarlet curtains of the bed, they will still be watching hungrily....

Strange, formless memories out of books struggle upward in my consciousness. This is the marriage at Cana.... I am feasting with the Caliph at Bagdad.... I am the wedding guest who beat his breast.... My heart is troubled. What shall be said of blood-brotherhood between man and man?