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Music Sound and Architecture in Islam Michael Frishkopf
Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which music is made and experienced, especially in contemporary forms of longstanding traditions but also in other landscapes such as popular music and in the design of performance spaces. It shows how music creates and challenges borders, giving significance to geographical and cartographic spaces at local, national, and international levels, and illustrates how music is used to interpret relationships with ecology and environment, spirituality and community, and state and nation.
The volume brings together scholars from Australia, China, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the UK, each of whom explores a specific genre or topic in depth. Each nuanced account finds distinct and at times different aspects to be significant but, in demonstrating the ability of music to mediate the construction of place and by showing how those who create and consume music use it to inhabit the intimate, and to project themselves out into their surroundings, each points to interconnections across the region and beyond with respect to perception, conception, expression, and interpretation.
In Presence Through Sound, ethnomusicology meets anthropology, literature, linguistics, area studies, and – particularly pertinent to East Asia in the twenty-first century – local musicologies. The volume serves a broad academic readership and provides an essential resource for all those interested in East Asia.
Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at SOAS, University of London. He has written or edited 22 books, 170 academic articles, and 195 book/music reviews, and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio.
Catherine Ingram is Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Her forthcoming monograph is on Kam big song, and she recently commenced an ARC Discovery Project on musical resilience.
SOAS Studies in Music
Series Editors:
Rachel Harris, SOAS, University of London, UK
Rowan Pease, SOAS, University of London, UK
Board Members:
Angela Impey (SOAS, University of London)
Noriko Manabe (Temple University)
Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Martin Stokes (Kings College London)
Richard Widdess (SOAS, University of London)
SOAS Studies in Music is today one of the world’s leading series in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically rich studies of music-making in the world’s diverse musical cultures. We publish monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, and historical and analytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, and media and gender studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical, and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows.
The Indian Drum of the King-God and the Pakhāwaj of Nathdwara
Paolo Pacciolla
Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana
The Porcupine and the Gold Stool
Kwasi Ampene
Presence Through Sound
Music and Place in East Asia
Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram
Musicians in Crisis
Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry
Ioannis Tsioulakis
Becoming Irish Traditional Musician
Learning and Embodying Musical Culture
Jessica Cawley
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ music/series/SOASMS
Presence Through Sound
Music and Place in East Asia
Edited by Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram
First published 2020 by Routledge
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on the Significance of Place for
1 The Shifting Strength of Place in Contemporary Big Song Singing from Southwestern China
2 From the Heart of the Lake Booms a Mountain Song: Sense of Place in the Song-Cycles of Coastal China
3 Bringing the Past to Life: Creating and Contesting Place in Kunqu Singing Practices
The Alphabetical Order of Things: The Language of Place and the Place of Language in Tibetan Song
6 Lingering Across the Ocean, Rooted on the Island: Indigenous Music and the Notions of Mountain and Sea as Taiwanese Identifiers
7 The Constructed Soundscapes of Place in Korea, South and North
8 Place as Brand: The Role of Place in the Construction of Contemporary Traditional Music in South Korea HEE-SUN KIM
9 The Sonic Habitus of Silk and Wood: Kugak’s Twenty-First-Century Terrain
10 Not a Habitus for the Have-Nots: The Walker Hill Shows, 1962–2012
11 Gagaku and the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri Festival of Nara: From the Sound of Authority to the Sound of Local Identity
12 Biwa’s Place in Modern Times HUGH
13 Place and Locality in Fuke Style Shakuhachi: The Case of Nezasa-ha Kinpū Ryū
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Map of China, showing Guizhou and Hunan Provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 13
1.2 Singers from Sheeam and Bee (in Chinese, Pilin), sing big songs in the dare low newly built in Bee, February 2009 15
2.1 Map of the lower Yangzi Delta, China 30
3.1 A row of shops, cafes, and a teahouse on Pingjiang Street 45
3.2 A teahouse with kunqu performances on Pingjiang Street 46
4.1 ‘Xulai’ excerpt (bars 23–25), transcribed by Wendy Guan from cipher notation 64
6.1 The carriers of the newly built fishing boat in the launching ritual Manwawai 91
7.1 A contemporary performance of kugak, at the outdoor stage of the National Gugak Centre, September 2014 104
7.2 A high-school student sings in the Man’gyŏngdae Children’s Palace, Pyongyang, using the juche voice and expression 112
9.1 Taebaek Lee and Hyeunbin Lim perform in a hanok, October 2014 139
9.2 The Pungnyu Sarangbang. Photo, image capture of 3D virtual theatre tour, by Sŭngyŏl Na 142
10.1 The entrance to the Walker Hill resort, 1963 149
10.2 The Honey Bees performing on 17 November 1963 155
11.1 The venue of Kasuga wakamiya onmatsuri 164
12.1 The movement of biwa and its antecedent forms within East Asia and Japan from ancient to modern times, then from Japan to other places in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries 178
12.2 A drawing of young Satsuma domain samurai-class men enjoying biwa together (Yamazaki 1886, frontispiece) 182
13.1 Jin Nyodō 196
13.2 Jin Nyodō 197
1.1 Some examples of ‘old Kam’ words in songs in the Sheeam repertoire, and a comparison with their modern equivalents in Kam (Sheeam dialect) and Modern Standard Chinese (MSC)
11.1 The Performing Arts of Otabisho-sai
Contributors
Kiku Day is an external lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, Denmark. Her research mainly focuses on performance-based methods and, in particular, the potential use of the jinashi shakuhachi in contemporary music. She has researched the use of shakuhachi playing as a meditation practice and her interests also include online dissemination of the shakuhachi, the link between shakuhachi and Zen Buddhism, and the growing interest in the shakuhachi outside of Japan. As a shakuhachi performer, she trained in Japan with Okuda Atsuya for 11 years, and has an active career. She is a founding member and chairperson of the European Shakuhachi Society, and served as the chair of the World Shakuhachi Festival 2018 in London.
Hugh de Ferranti has written on the historical biwa traditions, their practice and representation in contemporary Japan (The Last Biwa Singer, 2009), and has also investigated Takemitsu’s modernist compositions for biwa, co-edited a volume on the composer, and written a book on Japanese traditional instruments. Research on minority music cultures and experiences of modernity in urban Japan of the interwar decades led to Music, Modernity and Locality in Prewar Japan: Osaka and Beyond (2013), co-edited with Alison Tokita, and Colonial Modernity and East Asian Musics, a 2012 special issue of the world of music journal co-edited with Yamauchi Fumitaka. Hugh has taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), The University of New England (Armidale), and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Hilary Finchum-Sung is Executive Director of the Association for Asian Studies. She was previously Associate Professor in the Department of Korean Music and Associate Dean of the College of Music at Seoul National University. Her research interests include traditional music education, identity and sound design, music performance space and staging, grassroots preservation, world music marketing, and globalization. She is currently engaged in a research project on women’s roles in grassroots transmission and cultural promotion on Chindo Island and is completing a manuscript on twenty-first-century kugak transitions.
x Contributors
Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at SOAS, University of London, where he was formerly Professor and at times Head of the Department of Music. He has also been Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Sydney and has held visiting professorships at Monash University, Ewha Women’s University, the University of Sydney, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and Texas Tech University. He has written or edited 20 books, 170 academic articles, and 195 book/music reviews, as well as writing for many newspapers and journals.
Catherine Ingram is Lecturer in Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and since 2004 has conducted extensive research on Kam minority music in southwestern China. She is co-author of Environmental Preservation and Cultural Heritage in China (2013) and co-editor of Taking Part in Music: Case Studies in Ethnomusicology (2013). Her monograph on Kam big song is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She has recently commenced a three-year Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project on musical resilience within marginal groups in culturally diverse societies.
Hee-sun Kim is Director of the Division of Music Research at the National Gugak Centre, Seoul, Associate Professor at Kookmin University, Seoul, and Chair of the Music of East Asia Study Group, International Council for Traditional Music. She is the author of Contemporary Kayagŭm Music in Korea: Tradition, Modernity and Identity (2008), and has contributed numerous articles and chapters in journals and books. Her research interests include world music and its cultural translation, Korean music and globalization, interAsian cultural flows, and the modernization processes of traditional music in Korea and Asia.
Lu Liu is a pipa performer, educator, and researcher. She gained her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2019 and teaches the Chinese Music Ensemble at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. She has presented at many conferences and symposiums, and has published a growing number of research articles.
Roald Maliangkay is Associate Professor in Korean studies and Director of the Korea Institute at the Australian National University. Fascinated by the mechanics of cultural policy and the convergence of major cultural phenomena, he analyses cultural industries, performance, and consumption in Korea from the early twentieth century to the present. He is the author of Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea’s Central Folksong Traditions (2017), and co-editor with JungBong Choi of K-pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry (2015).
Anne E. McLaren is Professor at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. Her major research interest is the popular culture of pre-contemporary China, including oral and vernacular traditions, women’s ritual performance, traditional
Contributors xi novels, and drama. She is the author of Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (2008), Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables (1998), co-author of Environmental Preservation and Cultural Heritage in China (2013), and editor of a special issue of Asian Ethnology, ‘Interpreting Sinitic heritage: ethnography and identity in China and Southeast Asia’ (2017).
Min Yen Ong is a Teaching Associate in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Her regional expertise includes the musical cultures of China and Hawaiʻi. Her interests encompass music and politics; intangible cultural heritage policy and practice; music preservation and sustainability; tourism; and music, memory and place. She has presented her research in Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, and the Pacific. Min has also worked in various sectors of the music industry in London and Hawaiʻi.
Gerald Roche is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at La Trobe University; he was previously an Australia Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a postdoctoral research fellow at Uppsala University’s Hugo Valentin Centre. His research focuses on the cultural and linguistic diversity of China’s Tibetan regions, and how this diversity is being transformed in the twenty-first century. He lived on the northeast Tibetan Plateau for eight years (2005–2013), working as an applied anthropologist while also undertaking research for his PhD at Griffith University, Brisbane. He recently co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (2018).
Yang-ming Teoh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music of National Taitung University, Taiwan. He obtained his PhD from SOAS, University of London. His research concerns the contemporary music practices of Taiwanese indigenous people, popular music, technology, recording culture, and ownership and control of intellectual property. He is also a performer, composer, and studio engineer.
Naoko Terauchi is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests focus on Japanese traditional performing arts, especially imperial court music, gagaku. She gained her MA from Tokyo National University of the Arts (1987) and DL from Osaka University (1999), and has taught at the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, since 1999. Her recent publications include Japanese Traditional Music: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai 1941 (2008–2016), Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (2011), ‘Be a costume hanger: the aesthetics of imperial bugaku dance of Japan’ (2016), and What the Doctor Overheard: Dr. Leopold Mueller’s Account of Music in Early Meiji Japan (2018).
Acknowledgements
Presence Through Sound develops from a Newton International Fellowship held by Catherine Ingram to work with Keith Howard at SOAS, University of London, during 2013–14. The British Academy and Royal Society, as funders of the Newton International Fellowship Scheme, provided ‘follow-up funding’ that enabled the participation of British-based academics at our first symposium in Sydney in 2016 and Australian-based academics at our second symposium in London in 2017. The first symposium was organized and hosted by the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM) at the University of Sydney, with additional support from the China Studies Centre and the SCM Research Centre for Music Diversity at the University of Sydney, and from the Korean Cultural Centre, the Japan Foundation, and the Tianda Music Fund. The second symposium was organized and hosted by the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London, with additional support from the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, and the SOAS China Institute, and was held in collaboration with Club Inégales, London.
Both symposiums included performances. The first featured performances by both many of those who gave academic papers and a number of distinguished musicians based in the Sydney area, including the wonderful Chai Changning. The second decamped to Club Inégales at Euston, where Peter Wiegold composed three new works – Changgo 1, 2, and 3; these were premiered by his band together with three wonderful Korean musicians, Hyelim Kim on taegŭm flute, Ji-Young Lee on kayagŭm zither, and Jihye Kim on changgo drum and other percussion. It has sadly not been possible to include recordings of these performances with this volume. Nor have we been able to include all presentations, and hope that those we have had to omit will soon appear in other places. We thank those who have contributed figures (including maps and photographs), tables, and notations – including, in addition to chapter authors, Wendy Guan, Hsu Ming-cheng, Wu Jiaping, Jin Rei and Nyodokai, and the National Gugak Centre. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for Routledge, and all of our colleagues who have been involved in the two symposiums and in steering this volume as it has evolved.
Introduction
Reflections on the Significance of Place for East Asian Music
Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
Understandings of Place
To the celebrated humanist geographer, Yi-fu Tuan, music is valuable to both geography and humanity for expressing our experience of place, and for ‘making public our innermost feelings’ (cited in Lack 2015: 8). Tuan considers music as significant for articulating the experience of place, and for allowing geographers to better understand how place is felt – thus making a connection between music and place relevant to the discipline of geography. In contrast, the many studies of music and place from within ethnomusicology and elsewhere in the humanities have tended to consider the significance of the connection through investigating how music gives expression to, or is influenced by, place. They have long demonstrated the significance of place in relation to specific musical cultures (for example, in Levin and Süzükei 2006), and have often explored musical connections to a rooted homeland or to a concept of home filtered through experience in the diaspora (Reyes 1999; Marsh 2013). Although acknowledging the significance of place as a concept, few ethnomusicologists have interrogated place itself in depth. Considering music’s relation to place can often seem straightforward. This may be because, as Cresswell notes, ‘place is a word that seems to speak for itself’ (2015: 1). The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in a late-twentieth-century ‘Afterword’, even notes the lack of specific analytical attention given to the concept within his discipline, writing that, in standard anthropological textbooks and monographs,
Even if a fair amount of attention is given to something called ‘the environment’ or ‘the physical setting’ (rainfall, vegetation, fauna, landforms), ‘place’ as an analytical or descriptive concept, explicitly set out and formally developed, does not appear. Something that is a dimension of everyone’s existence, the intensity of where we are, passes by anonymous and unremarked. It goes without saying.
(Geertz 1996: 259)
Geertz may well be reflecting the situation at the time he was writing. Indeed, in many ethnomusicological analyses, particularly in the years leading up to the
2 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
new millennium, place was commonly interpreted in a relatively straightforward and literal sense as a physical location, and as such it was not extensively interrogated. Such attention to place nevertheless allowed it to have correspondence with the first two of three features of place that political geographer John Agnew (1987) identified within a relatively static formulation: location, locale, and sense of place. However, for many geographers, the various meanings associated with location have long been regarded as also important in defining place. Hence, Tuan notes in his seminal Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:
What begins as undifferentiated space becomes places as we get to know it better and endow it with value … The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.
(Tuan 1977: 6)
Or, as Cresswell (2014: 4) puts it, Tuan’s classic definition of place can be summarized as ‘a portion of space that has accumulated particular meanings at both the level of the individual and the social’.
Over time, understandings of place have become more nuanced. By the 1990s, one of the major analytical trajectories was a consideration of the sensory aspects of the nature of place; the sensory dimension is one of the two major strands of geographic inquiry that Hubbard (2005: 41) identifies within recent work on place. Work in this dimension proved particularly significant for music, and was conveyed and explored vividly through Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s rich collection, Senses of Place (1996) – for which Geertz wrote the afterword. There, Geertz notes that ‘the anthropology of place … can fairly be said to have been launched as a sustained and self-conscious enterprise in these pages (as a diffuse, unthematized concern, a sort of background continuo, it has, of course, been around much longer)’ (1996: 262). Feld’s innovative analysis of music-place sensuousness in Bosavi within this same volume demonstrates just how important the senses are to establishing and understanding music and place connections. And, Feld notes in his conclusion, ‘Places make sense in good part because of how they are made sensual and how they are sensually voiced’ (Feld 1996: 134).
Today, the significance of meaning and feeling associated with place is very widely accepted. However, place itself, in the sense of ‘location’ or ‘locale’, is not always conceptualized as a physical entity; indeed, Heise (2008) critiques the localist emphasis of much environmentalism. A spiritual sense of place may be indicated, or place may be expressed and experienced through musical memory and nostalgia, while virtual dimensions of place may be discussed, such as its function as an internet bridgespace (after Adams and Ghose 2003; Tettey 2009) where home and diaspora, or the local and the global, intersect and interweave. Cresswell (2008: 138), again, notes that the introduction of both fixed and mobile
technologies has led geographers to recast notions of place, and to consider links between mediated and ‘real’ places. We can also note that there is an increasing acknowledgement of the blurriness of boundaries of cultural expression and how these make studies that approach music-place connections on a wider level increasingly important, while also complicating how place is considered to exist or to be relevant. Timothy Rice, in ‘Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and Ethnomusicology’, observes how there is a growing understanding in ethnomusicology that ‘our and our subjects’ experiences are no longer contained within local, isolated cultures, or even within nation-states, but are and have been shaped by regional, area, colonial and global economics, politics, social relations and images’ (2003: 160). Yet despite such complexities, it remains clear that,
Place is how we make the world meaningful and how we experience the world. Place, at a basic level, is space invested with meaning in the context of power. This process of investing space with meaning happens across the globe at all scales, and has done throughout human history.
(Cresswell 2015: 19)
Syncretic Approaches to Place
The various explorations of place and its relationship with musical traditions in East Asia contained within this volume confirm that place has, indeed, invested space with meaning for a long period, but that area-focussed approaches find distinct and at times different aspects relevant to each case study. This would seem to be consistent with the difficulties – and impracticalities – faced by human geographers in precisely defining ‘place’, particularly following the range of recent analytical trends touched upon briefly here. These difficulties have led some geographers to advocate syncretic approaches. In his chapter for the SAGE Handbook of Geography, Cresswell offers what he himself describes as a ‘syncretic theoretical framework for the analysis and interpretation of place’ (2014: 4), and intentionally leaves his thoughts open-ended, encouraging readers to ‘draw a diverse array of possible readings that may inform their own approaches to place’ (2014: 4). Nicole M. Ardoin, in ‘Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Place: Lessons for Environmental Education’, presents a similarly syncretic framework where a multidimensional sense of place is achieved through the interaction of specific elements within a particularly biophysical setting that provides context for all interactions (2006: 114). She represents these interactions through a helpful diagram of three overlapping circles within a single larger circle. The larger circle represents the biophysical setting; the three small circles represent psychological (individual), sociocultural, and political and economic elements; and the centre of the diagram where the three inside circles overlap represents a multidimensional sense of place.
Cresswell (2014: 6–9) notes that the notion of gathering and interweaving has a powerful presence within the study of place in human geography whilst also having particular appeal in area studies. His explanation of this understanding of
4 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
place ‘as a gathering of materialities, meanings and practices’ (2014: 6) offers a useful framework for thinking about the connections between music and place outlined by the contributors to the current volume. It is reflected also in Beverley Diamond’s masterful ‘Afterword’ to the influential anthology Performing Gender, Place and Emotion in Music: Global Perspectives, where she likewise notes that ‘the framing of place is necessarily varied in different contexts’ (Diamond 2013: 188), going on to describe the many different ways in which ‘place’ interrelates with gender and emotion in the case studies contained in the volume. As Edward Casey explains,
places gather things in their midst – where ‘things’ connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts … the power belongs to place itself, and it is a power of gathering.
(1996: 24)
The notion of gathering and the resultant dynamism can provide helpful ways of thinking about how place interweaves with the many cultural flows of East Asia, pulling in certain directions at certain times, and emphasizing certain aspects in particular contexts. The notion of weaving also allows us to consider textured aspects of place in a manner that recognizes that its ‘distinctive qualities may be profound’ (Adams, Hoelscher and Till 2001: xiii).
Many of the studies featured in this volume illustrate the value of considering place as being textured, or as a gathering or interweaving of experiences, histories, and other entities, in understanding connections between music and place. For instance, Terauchi’s exploration of gagaku in a Shinto festival in Nara, de Ferranti’s study of biwa, and Ong’s discussion of kunqu in Suzhou, show how memories and historical records of place interweave with the present through the lens of music, pulling together certain elements in different webs of interconnection. Within several chapters that consider issues of repertoire and canonization – including for the pipa (by Liu), for the shakuhachi (by Day), and for North and South Korean musical soundworlds broadly considered (by Howard) – we can observe that place is shaped by and interrelates with music through various interwoven factors including the actions of individuals and communities; identification with region or nation; and movement of music between different social contexts or strata.
In other chapters that follow, textured qualities of place gather more strongly through connections to the natural landscape, language, and associated cultural memory – as, for example, in the studies on Yangzi delta shan’ge (by McLaren) and on music in Tibet (Roche). Much research where place is heavily influenced by ideas of the local environment touches also on the associated field of ecomusicology (see, for example, Allen 2011; Titon 2013; Allen and Dawe 2015; Edwards 2018). Teoh contextualizes the experience of place in a geographical sense as this intersects with ethnicity among Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, while for several other contributors, it is a gathering of elements of place around physical aspects
of the built environment and its historical significance – for instance, performance spaces for Korean kugak (Finchum-Sung) and for performances of musical modernity in early and mid-late twentieth-century South Korea (Kim, Maliangkay).
Place as a Way of Seeing, Hearing, Researching, and Writing
In understanding place as something which has texture, consists of interwoven elements, and is a locus of gathering, we implicitly acknowledge the importance of context and, by extension, the subjectivity inherent in understanding the contextual features of this concept. As Cresswell notes, ‘In other words, place is not simply something to be observed, researched and written about but is itself part of the way we see, research and write’ (Cresswell 2015: 24). In this, understandings of place within human geography have certain parallels with the reflexive turn in anthropology and ethnomusicology since the 1990s. But rather than it being the researcher’s identity or subjective positioning that can impact upon the study, it is their being at a particular locus of elements that form ‘place’ which brings to bear upon how we understand and express ideas about all places.
Some of the following studies involve more explicit handling of this issue than others. One example is Roche’s study of the intersection between music, the multiple languages of Tibet, and place, wherein his perspective is necessarily located outside the mainstream of both Tibetan and mainstream Chinese understandings, and how such an intersection permeates his discussion. Ingram similarly presents a view of place and music connections in Kam minority music from southwestern China that concords more with two dimensions of place that are both located outside the Han Chinese cultural centre: first, that of Kam people themselves, who have for centuries been viewed in China as primarily being geographically distant from China’s sociopolitical centre; and, second, of a researcher looking outwards to understand how place is felt and experienced. Of course, it would be erroneous to suggest that geographical or cultural location beyond the mainstream of each of these cases necessarily produces a more ‘objective’ analysis. However, it could certainly be said that each researcher’s location promotes a particular way of viewing the world and listening to the music of the world. Turning to Cresswell again, ‘Place then is both a (real) thing in the (real) world and a way of thinking about the world that foregrounds the geographical rather than the social, natural or cultural’ (Cresswell 2014: 7).
The Presence of Place
The historian, philosopher, and theorist Ethan Kleinberg offers a useful summation of thinking around the concept of ‘presence’, a notion which we use in the title of this book to indicate the dimensions related to place that are conveyed through sound. Kleinberg points out that ‘there are differing ideas at play as to how the past presses into the present and the scope of the “presence effect”: that is, the non-proximate presence of persons, of moods, of environment’ (Kleinberg 2013: 1). For geographers, too, place is linked to presence in an evocative way;
Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
as Cresswell explains, ‘Places have a material presence … but places have more of a material presence than just their landscape’ (2014: 9). The non-materiality of music allows it to convey a presence that permeates strongly the places through which it is associated, or to convey those places in other ways, providing space for their interrelated aspects to emerge, take shape, and exist with a degree of power that belies music’s intangible nature.
Place and the Music of East Asia
Our topic is clearly broad and, we argue, has been somewhat neglected in the literature. Here, each chapter explores a specific genre or topic rather than presenting an overview, and we group chapters together geographically. In the main, our considerations address longer-standing musical traditions although the contributions by Howard, Roche, and Teoh all include explorations of contemporary popular genres. Given the many and diverse links between music, sound, and place, we can find no reason to impose an overarching theory, hence we traverse wide and divergent spaces, utilizing ethnographic data and narratives. Our heterogeneous approaches illustrate the richness of understandings of place, and offer a corrective against attempts to generalize.
We open with considerations of the People’s Republic of China. Catherine Ingram explores how Kam (in Chinese, Dong) minority big song singing in China’s southwest has long had an important role in presenting and transmitting culture and identity, and consequently exhibits intimate connections to localized conceptions of place. Following the so-called ‘discovery’ of Kam big song singing in the mid-twentieth century, big song began to be used to in discussions of long-challenged evolutionary theories to demonstrate that Chinese music was not all monophonic, and thereby came to be identified with the entire Chinese nation. However, huge social change, the recognition of big song as intangible cultural heritage, and more, has expanded and shifted connections between music and place, both within and beyond Kam communities. Likewise, Anne E. McLaren takes us to song-cycles sung on Lake Tai and along its waterways in the lower Yangzi delta region. These are rich in the sense of natural habitat and, consequently, entextualize place as the site of cultural memory. McLaren shows how narrative song traditions, stemming from songs known as shan’ge (mountain songs) once sung by illiterate populations in rice paddies or while journeying by boat around the lakes and waterways, articulate indelible senses of place and identity that encapsulate how communities construct and interpret the environment in which they live.
Third, Min Yen Ong explores the southeastern kunqu genre, part of China’s widespread and very diverse opera traditions. She explores how sustaining heritage balances and manages competing values in performance and promotion, facilitated through takes on history and aesthetics that underpin productions, tourism events, and learning methodologies. She analyses how Kunqu is associated with Suzhou as a region and a place, and how music provides important, emotive, but
Introduction 7 different narratives for tourists and a local population. She contrasts the creation of place through top-down preservation efforts with the sense of place and collectivity felt among elderly amateur practitioners. Places are shown to be sites of contestation, involving memories to evoke and memories to forget. The pillars of local and national, though, have been joined by institutional training, and this leads to our fourth chapter, in which Lu Liu explores how place has impacted on the development of a single instrument, the pipa lute. While in previous centuries the pipa was taught within different regional schools it is now part of conservatoire training and is performed on urban stages. The cosmopolitan influence of Beijing on the pipa is reflected in educational, social, and historical factors, and Liu explores four key pipa figures – Liu Tianhua, Lin Shicheng, Liu Dehai, and Zhang Qiang – none of whom were born in Beijing, but for all of whom Beijing plays or played a central role in their careers.
We resist the politics of place. However, Chapters 5 and 6 move westwards and eastwards, respectively. First, Gerald Roche looks at links between place, song, and language in Tibet, examining how music is represented in the constructions of popular forms, and how this impacts on the maintenance of social diversity – specifically, linguistic diversity. Tibet is linguistically diverse but culturally integrated, and song has played a crucial role in this integration, to the extent that many speakers of non-Tibetic minority languages across the plateau have traditionally sung in Tibetan, making Tibetan a common sung – rather than spoken – language. Roche shows how pop songs imagine place and space in terms of a national geobody – a bounded, internally homogenous unit – but how this has been refracted as linguistic minorities, rather than singing themselves into a place, sing their own alienation from that geobody, and use song not as a medium of exchange between diverse peoples but as a shibboleth for national belonging and boundary marking. Contrasting Roche, Yang-Ming Teoh discusses how diverse Taiwanese indigenous music has and is used to create a multicultural, localized identity shared across Taiwan. The main essences of the indigenous character, based on place and space and referred to as a culture of mountain and sea (or island and ocean), is harnessed in a continuum running from an open attitude which endorses internationalism, universalism, and globalization, to an appeal to seclusion in which local and traditional values rooted in Austronesian, Formosan, and Taiwanese forms are promoted. Policy and practice, and people’s attitudes, fluctuate from one to the other, and are seen in pop culture’s transcultural engagements, in local and national celebrations, and through efforts to revive and reinvigorate indigenous traditions without resorting to the fossilization inherent in much preservation. Four chapters consider Korea. First, Howard challenges assumptions about ‘Korean music’, reconciling the sense of tradition inherent in kugak – Korean traditional music as it has become the internationally iconic soundworld of South Korea – with the internally representative ‘popular’ songs of North Korea, where socialist realism meets the local monolithic ideology of juche through ideologically sound lyrics. Today, the sonic representation of a country has much to do with a mediatized iconicity fashioned both by temporality and by the politics of
8 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
representation, and Howard argues the two competing soundworlds in the two competing Korean states constitute different resolutions to shared experiences of colonialism, war, and subsequent rebuilding. Second, Hee-sun Kim zooms in on how music within the ‘folk’ category came to mark kugak during the twentieth century. She delineates how connections between place and genre have been understood and constructed differently over time, reflecting the performance, broadcasting, and musicological contexts in which they were framed. Regional identity became embedded in the formation of kugak as a category, but within this the (South) Korean capital, Seoul, played a central role, since that was where Westernized concert stages, broadcasting, recording industries, and tertiary-level education grew. From Seoul, regional genres were projected nationwide, fixing the relationships between music and place.
Third, Hilary Finchum-Sung considers the role of physical space in framing performances of kugak. Occupying an underdog position within the domestic music market but contributing to a core Korean aesthetic, kugak has been deemed to require spaces distinct from those of Western theatres and concert halls. Acoustic spaces have thus become meaningful, and ongoing debates about amplification (or its absence), and about ideal stage materials and design, reveal (and revere) ideas about authenticity. As Finchum-Sung explores acoustic designs for kugak, she notes how the act of performance draws performers and audiences alike into an interpretive space, thereby contributing to a Korean socio-historic sonic experience that reveals ontologies which connect to kugak’s struggle for sustainability in the modern world. From here, fourth, Roald Maliangkay returns us to an earlier space, the Walker Hill Resort, which opened its doors in 1962 and aimed, with government support, to persuade wealthy foreigners to holiday in Korea. The resort, built on a mountainside in Seoul’s eastern suburbs, became known for its risqué live shows that broke with Korea’s conservative morality. Despite existing at a distance from the mainstream of cultural production for Koreans, Walker Hill shows had profound influences on Korean music, launching the careers of many stars and developing choreographed staged versions of traditional repertoires.
Next, we travel across the contested waters of Korea’s East Sea (or, Sea of Japan). Historically, the court music of Japan, gagaku, was transmitted from China (but incorporating repertoires considered Korean and Vietnamese), with Korea acting as both a nurturing ground and as the bridge from continental East Asia to the Japanese archipelago. The links, themselves profoundly influencing notions of place, have long been studied, notably by the ‘Picken school’ – by Laurence Picken (1909–2007) and his students and associates (Howard 2014: 337–60) – and also by many Asian scholars (see, e.g. Zhao 2012). In Chapter 11, Naoko Terauchi offers an analysis of a Shinto festival in Nara, a city listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, and its showcasing of gagaku and other performing arts from ancient and mediaeval times (including dengaku, mikokagura, sarugaku (noh), and seinoo). The festival, Kasuga wakamiya onmatsuri, hosted by the Kasuga-Taisha Shrine, has been held annually since the early
Introduction 9 twelfth century, but struggled to survive social changes brought by the 1868 Meiji Restoration. As its sponsoring temple lost power, volunteer priests and common people were allowed to execute its parts. Its parade, the Owatari-shiki, was rerouted to take in the commercial downtown and the new railway stations, and to satisfy the tourist gaze, but each place continues to inseparably connect to specific performances, while the arrangements of performances convey social – and at times political – meanings.
In Chapter 12, Hugh de Ferranti considers the biwa, a short-necked lute related to the Chinese pipa with a history in Japan of more than 1000 years. Although associations with ancient court culture and blind narrative singers remain important, repertoires commonly heard today derive from musical recitation traditions developed in regions of Kyushu from the eighteenth century onwards. Ties to the former Satsuma domain were important in Tokyo by the 1880s, and continued to be so for old-school players. Although one style, the chikuzenbiwa, was developed at the end of the nineteenth century in northern Kyushu, Kyushu practice had little relevance after it was brought to Tokyo, as is clear in the Kinshinryū, a new Tokyo school that then gained nationwide popularity. When biwa music was first carried abroad, it signified Imperial Japan, the heartland of an empire, home to what ended in calamity in 1945. De Ferranti tracks back and forward, exploring how the 1960s Tokyo avant-garde gave the biwa a new aesthetic presence in instrumental, vocal, and multi-media works, and how some contemporary musicians are innovatively exploring new narrative spaces. Finally, Kiku Day turns to a second iconic Japanese instrument, the shakuhachi, looking at a specific example, the Nezasa-ha kinpūryū. This originated at a Fuke sect temple far from the centre: during the Edo period, as the honkyoku (often translated as ‘original pieces’) were created and became a classical repertoire, up to 77 Fuke sect temples were scattered around Japan. Identifications with place may relate to a temple location, to natural features of a region, or even to the bamboo from which instruments are fashioned, but modern life takes players who represent and transmit a certain style away from a given locality while leaving many lineage holders in rural areas struggling. Again, pieces from a specific locality travel as they are incorporated into the repertoires of mainstream groups in urban settings. Using the idea of collective memory, and the Japanese concept of furusato, Day explores how identification with place is constructed and reconstructed when repertoire is performed far from its origins.
Taken together, our contributors show how place is embedded in songs and in instrumental repertoires, in rituals and festivals, and is part of historical and political legacies. Place is interpreted at specific points in time. Economic activity, urbanization, commodification and commercialization, as well as national and international migration, both remove and reinforce perceptions pertaining to the relationships between music and place. And, while identifications within music with place often reflect issues that have contemporary resonance, they may also be used, implicitly or explicitly, to establish or maintain a musician’s – or an audience’s – place in the world. With this, we return to Cresswell, who states that
Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
it makes no sense to dissolve place entirely into a set of flows and connections (2014: 20). What, he asks, does this leave for geographers (and others) to do? One answer would be a renewed practice of place-writing, and as Cresswell critiques how the tradition of regional geography from the first half of the twentieth century became moribund and parochial in its flat descriptiveness, he asks whether it is possible to start again, offering more than description, resisting the reification of places to roots or routes, to materiality or practice, to presentation or the nonrepresentational, and providing detailed interweavings of theory and empirics in order to better understand the ongoing process of becoming place. This, in respect to East Asian music, is what we attempt to provide here.
Conventions
The romanizations used in this volume are as follows: pinyin for Chinese terms and names, for both Republic of China and People’s Republic of China discussions (with romanizations for the Republic of China based on Mandarin pronunciation); Hepburn for Japanese; McCune-Reischauer for Korean, using the 1988 modifications of the Korean Ministry of Education (including ‘shi’ rather than ‘si’ to reflect pronunciation). An exception applies to personal names: names given in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean in published sources are rendered using the above romanization systems, with family name first and, with the exception of Taiwanese names, without hyphenation; but, we respect preferred spellings of personal names where the publication is in English or another European language, where an author (or musician) is well known beyond East Asia, or where an author has communicated a clear preference. For the chapters featuring less widely spoken languages – Kam and various Tibetan languages – Ingram and Roche briefly comment within their chapters on the romanization systems employed.
Where appropriate, we adjust the grammar of interview quotations in the belief that everyone we converse with has the right for their words to be rendered adequately. Titles of musical works, pieces, or recordings are given in parentheses, with the romanized Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Tibetan preceding an English translation or transliteration where appropriate or needed. English translations of East Asian works are given only where these are provided in the original. A note about the East Asian concept of ‘folk’ and ‘court’: ‘folk’, as the Little Tradition, is in East Asian usage separated from the court, aristocratic/gentry and literati ‘high’ or ‘classical’ Great Tradition (Bauman 1992: xiii–xxi; see also Redfield 1956). This usage, which will be regularly encountered in this volume, reflects its relative prevalence in East Asia. Such usage can perpetuate a definition in which ‘folk music’ is (or was) the product of an orally transmitted tradition that has been selected and utilized by an identifiable community but which is likely to have local or individual variations and be presented by amateur rather than professional musicians. Just as this presents myriad problems, so there are many problems with the term ‘tradition’, a term which continues to have widespread – but regionally
distinct – utility in East Asia, due not least to the region’s long and distinguished historical legacy. ‘Traditional’ may also apply to court and literati musics, but in respect to the frequent correlation between ‘folk’ and ‘traditional’, it is perhaps no accident to recall that the International Folk Music Council changed its name to the International Council for Traditional Music at its first ever meeting in East Asia – in Seoul – in 1981.
1 The Shifting Strength of Place in Contemporary Big Song Singing from Southwestern China
Catherine Ingram
Kam (in Chinese, Dong) minority choral singing has long had an important role within Kam communities in the presentation and transmission of Kam culture and identity, and has consequently had a long-standing and intimate connection to localized Kam conceptions of place. This connection is also expressed through the language and content of Kam big song lyrics, and is explicit in the distinctive use of vocal imitation of regionally specific environmental sounds that characterize the songs in one of the many big song categories.
However, the so-called ‘discovery’ of Kam minority choral singing in the early 1950s ushered in a new phase of big song singing in which aspects of place began to impact upon Kam big song singing in many unprecedented ways. This chapter draws on my extensive musical ethnographic fieldwork in rural Kam areas since 2004, including participation in many big song performances with Kam friends and teachers, to outline some of the most significant ways that the connection between big song singing and various ideas of place has developed over the past six decades, and to suggest how changes to the form of this connection are impacting upon the decisions and actions of big song singers today. I explore how and why Kam cultural custodians seek to leverage the significance of both recent and long-standing music-and-place connections in their efforts to promote big song singing within today’s remarkably altered social context, thereby aiming to better understand both the strength of place and the significance of singing in relation to Kam musical culture and Kam society.
In the analysis of big song singing that follows, place features in several different interwoven ways. For example, aspects of the Kam big song repertoire reveal a connection to the physical location of Kam villages through the use of particular lyrical and musical content that reflects elements of and knowledge about the local environment. Place, in its connection with the cultural and historical location of these areas, is also present through the forms of local language used in big song lyrics. Socio-politically, the physical location of the home of Kam big song singers impacts on place for big song singing in other ways as well, in the sense of place being part of the way people see, hear, and understand their world (after Cresswell 2015: 24). Over many centuries, Kam culture and people were viewed from the Chinese centre as existing at the periphery of the Chinese cultural landscape – thus shaping how a sense of place is conceptualized both inside
Big Song Singing from Southwestern China 13 and outside these regions. Recent changes to the perceived positioning of Kam culture within the Chinese cultural landscape have been influential in many of the processes of shifting in the sense of place for Kam big song that are discussed towards the end of this chapter. As I suggest in the conclusion, place is also part of my own position as a non-Chinese researcher writing about Kam culture, and thus has also unavoidably impacted on my analysis and writing about place and Kam big song singing.
Kam People and Culture
Kam people, one of China’s 55 officially recognized minorities (in Chinese, shaoshu minzu), are mainly resident in eastern and southeastern Guizhou, as well as adjoining border regions of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to the south and Hunan Province to the east (Figure 1.1). In 2010, the Kam population was estimated at 2.88 million people (Guowuyuan renkou 2012). The Kam language is a tonal, Tai-Kadai family language with no widely used written form,
Figure 1.1 Map of China, showing Guizhou and Hunan Provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The area shaded grey indicates the precise location of Kam villages, and is where most Kam people reside. The inset diagram shows the approximate distribution of the Kam population in 2010 (based upon data from Guowuyuan renkou (2012)). Map and diagram by Wu Jiaping, used with permission.
and its various dialects are still spoken by many Kam people as a first language. The past few decades have seen a huge Kam youth migration to urban centres, growing school attendance rates, and a marked rise in television viewing, all of which have been major factors contributing to a decline in Kam singing amongst younger generations. Nevertheless, it is clear that a vibrant musical heritage is still maintained within many Kam communities, and contemporary forms of distinctive Kam cultural and spiritual/religious traditions continue to be practised in my main field-site of Sheeam1 and some other rural Kam areas.
Kam Big Song
Big song is the usual English name for a genre of choral songs originating within a very small group of Kam communities that are now home to about 4 per cent of the whole Kam population.2 The songs are also known by the Chinese name dage, which is one of many possible translations of the Kam name for one choral song category (ga lao) and also the source for the genre’s name in its English translation.3 Like most other Kam song genres, big songs are sung in the Kam dialect of the region where the songs are transmitted and performed – for big song, which originates from a small region on the border of Liping, Rongjiang, and Congjiang counties, this is always a variant of the second lect of southern Kam.
Big songs are always sung by groups of at least three singers, allowing for the performance of the two different vocal lines that are a feature of all songs in the genre. The many different categories of big songs are generally distinguished by their distinctive sor (a kind of melodic framework), and also by particular lyrical themes and rhyming structures. Until recently the songs were most often performed in the village dare low (wooden pagoda) during the lunar new year period, originally as a kind of sung exchange between a group of unmarried women and a group of unmarried or recently married men. They have long had an important role within Kam communities for recording and maintaining a wide range of cultural knowledge, and their performance within Kam villages is intimately linked to important place-dependent aspects of Kam society – including local dialect variants, local social structures, localized notions of cultural and social capital, and the surrounding natural environment.
Repertoire Naming, and Cultural and Symbolic Capital
Big song repertoires differ from region to region, and even from village to village. During the traditional big song singing in Kam villages at the lunar new year, when singing groups from two or more different regions meet and take turns to sing big songs (as pictured in Figure 1.2), regionally based musical and linguistic differences between the groups are invariably quite evident, and thus the importance of place – in the sense of ‘location’ – to these repertoires is clear. The importance of place is also clear when songs are shared from one region to another, as the shared big song (or even shared big song category) retains its place of origin in the name it is known by within the new community. Thus, the big song known
as Ban bao juuee (‘Friends say you are proud’), the most well-known ga sheeang4 category big song from the Sheeam region, is known as ga Sheeam (‘Sheeam song’) when it is sung within other regional repertoires (albeit, often sung with a very different melody and rhythm).
Emphasis upon the regional origin of a big song or song category also highlights the connection between big song singing and cultural and symbolic capital – a long-standing feature of big song and several other Kam singing traditions. For example, when I first heard the song Ban bao juuee sung as ga Sheeam in the village of See Wang, more than a day’s walk from Sheeam, I was told stories about how the Sheeam song came to be part of the See Wang repertoire. According to both See Wang and Sheeam singers, more than 25 years ago some Sheeam people went to See Wang after many of the houses and rice stores in Sheeam burnt down during a huge fire. The Sheeam singers were able to teach this big song in exchange for gifts of rice from the See Wang villagers.
Language of Song Lyrics
The language used in the lyrics to all Kam songs, including big song, also has interesting and significant connections to place. Big song lyrics most frequently
Figure 1.2 Singers from Sheeam and Bee (in Chinese, Pilin), sing big songs in the dare low newly built in Bee, February 2009. Photograph by Catherine Ingram.
use words from the local variant of the second lect of Southern Kam, thus reinforcing the highly located nature of the songs. However, three other sources are also occasionally utilized in the same set of lyrics (often to fulfil complex rhyming requirements): the lexicon of a variant of Southern Kam spoken in another big-song-singing region; the local Chinese dialect (Liping hua (‘Liping speech’) or kehua (Hakka; ‘guest speech’), classified by Campbell (2008) as belonging to the Cenjiang dialect group of Southwest Mandarin); and an apparently archaic language referred to by singers as Kam gao (‘old Kam’). The use of words from other Kam dialects and from Chinese is interesting, since it indicates a cultural context in which Kam people have maintained a distinctive local linguistic identity whilst also having interacted with other nearby groups for many generations. Kam singers could not always understand the meanings of these non-local Kam words, leading sometimes to conflicts in interpretation or comments about the great skill of the original creators of the songs.
The use of words described as ‘old Kam’ has not been documented or analysed by linguists or other music researchers; although some singers could identify these words in song lyrics, only sang ga (song experts) and other experienced singers could explain their meaning.5 While my research in Sheeam has revealed that these words have no obvious relationship to their contemporary equivalents within the Sheeam dialect, they do occasionally resemble Chinese words. It is possible that some may be derived from or influenced by Chinese dialect forms previously spoken in the big-song singing area; some examples of this are marked in grey in Table 1.1. Their designation as ‘old Kam’ might therefore be indicative
Table 1.1 Some examples of ‘old Kam’ words in songs in the Sheeam repertoire, and a comparison with their modern equivalents in Kam (Sheeam dialect) and Modern Standard Chinese (MSC)
Word in ‘Old Kam’ in the Sheeam
baet wen
Modern Equivalent in the Sheeam Dialect
mi 米, mifan 米饭 chit men chu men 出门 jing min jianmian 见面
Modern Equivalent in Modern Standard English Gloss Dialect Chinese (MSC) go rice ook ngan go out nu, sop meet, see ngwar nak shuijiao 睡觉 sleep nyair men nan rou 肉 flesh nyin lin lee (…) goong nyin (literally, ‘have (…) nianling 年龄 age many years’)
sam deng dang ook ngan fangzi 房子, jia 家 house soong lee hua 话 words go rice
wa mee
mi 米, mifan 米饭
Note: None of these examples of ‘old Kam’ obviously correspond with their modern Kam equivalents, though features of those shaded in grey seem to have a possible correspondence with MSC.
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"And now she is old and poor, Mary, I should like to be kind to her," broke in Mr. Trent, "especially as Janie—but never mind that! Janie doesn't realise what it is to be without money and friends, so we mustn't blame her if she appears a little hard. Cousin Becky must be very friendless, I fancy, or she wouldn't think of coming to Beaworthy. There are plenty of people who would want her to be their guests if she was rich, but she is doubtless as poor as ourselves. One more at our table surely cannot make much difference—eh, Mary?"
The children regarded their mother with expectant eyes, rather marvelling at the hesitancy they read in her face, for they were not troubled by thoughts of ways and means. A visitor in the house would have all the charm of novelty for them, and their father had told them so many reminiscences of Cousin Becky that they longed to see her.
"She is awfully nice, isn't she, father?" questioned Roger.
"She used to be very nice, my son, and I don't suppose she has much altered with age. She was never a fussy old maid, and she loved children dearly."
"Oh, mother, do write and ask her to come!" pleaded the little boy coaxingly.
"I certainly will, as you all seem to desire it so much," Mrs. Trent agreed with a smile, "and if she does come we will do our best to make her as comfortable and happy with us as possible. I only hesitated to invite her because I could not quite see how we were to manage; but since Polly is willing to give up her room, and your father thinks Cousin Becky will be satisfied with our humble fare— well, then, I'll write to-night."
Accordingly, as soon as tea was over, Mrs. Trent wrote the letter, and Roger ran out and posted it; and there was a general sense of satisfaction that the right thing had been done. In the course of a few days Cousin Becky's reply was received. It was a brief, grateful note
of thanks and acceptance of the invitation, saying the writer hoped to be with her cousins in Princess Street the following week.
CHAPTER III
AT THE ROOKERY
"Is that you, Edgar, darling? Come to the fire and warm yourself. It's snowing, isn't it?"
"Yes, mother. I hope we shall have a good downfall. If it snows like this all through the night we shall be able to make a snow man in the playground to-morrow. Won't that be jolly?"
It was an afternoon several days subsequent to the one on which Mrs. Marsh had called on her relatives in Princess Street; and the scene was the spacious drawing-room at the Rookery, which, with a big coal fire burning in the grate, and its handsome, well-chosen furniture, was a picture of comfort, not to say luxury. Mrs. Marsh sat near the fireplace, a small table bearing tea-things, a plate of thin bread and butter, and part of a rich cake in a silver cake-basket at her side. She had been entertaining callers, but they had left early on account of the snowstorm which had been threatening. Edgar, who had just returned from school, flung his satchel of lesson-books into a corner of the room, and, advancing to the tea-table, helped himself to a hunk of cake. His mother watched him with an indulgent smile; she was naturally very proud and fond of her son, who was indeed a very nice-looking little lad, with his bright blue eyes, fresh complexion, and curly, brown hair.
"Are your feet wet, dearie?" she inquired anxiously, as she poured him out a cup of tea.
"No," he answered untruthfully, for he knew they were. He sat down and tucked his feet out of sight under the chair. "Give me plenty of cream and sugar, please, mother," he said. "This is a very good cake."
"Yes; but had you not better eat some bread and butter with it? It is very rich."
He paid no heed to her suggestion, however, and there was silence for a few minutes till he cut himself a second slice of cake as large as the first.
"My dear child—" began Mrs. Marsh expostulatingly; but Edgar interrupted her:
"Oh, mother, don't fuss!"
"I merely speak for your good, my darling, I—"
"I do wish you wouldn't keep on calling me 'dearie' and 'darling' and names of that sort; it's so silly, just as though I was a baby, and it makes people laugh, and I hate being laughed at!" The boy spoke petulantly with deepening colour, but his eyes drooped beneath his mother's reproachful glance. "I don't believe Roger's mother would be so foolish," he added, "and Roger says you treat me as though I was a girl."
Mrs. Marsh looked both hurt and angry, but she made no response. Her affection for her son showed itself in words of exaggerated endearment, and he was now of an age to greatly dislike being made to appear ridiculous. It had been at his father's wish that he had been entered as a pupil at the Grammar School; Mrs. Marsh had wanted to have him educated by a tutor at home, but her husband had been too wise to listen to her views on the point of their son's education. Edgar should go to a public school, he had firmly
declared, the boy would soon find his level there; and that he was certainly doing, the process proving rather a humbling one. Master Edgar Marsh was not quite such an important person in his own estimation to-day as he had been at the commencement of the school only a few weeks previously.
"I walked as far as the corner of Princess Street with Roger this afternoon," Edgar informed his mother by-and-by. "I should not like to live where he does, I told him so."
"What did he say?" asked Mrs. Marsh curiously.
"He didn't say anything, but he got very red and looked angry. He very soon gets angry, you know, and I don't think he liked what I said."
"I thought you told me the other day that you didn't care for Roger, and that you never meant to speak to him again," Mrs. Marsh observed with a slight smile.
"Oh," the little boy exclaimed, appearing somewhat confused, "that was because he hit me; but—but it was partly my fault for—never mind about that! Afterwards he said he was sorry, and we've been better friends since. Roger's all right when you come to know him."
"I'm glad to hear that, because he's your cousin, and though, unfortunately for him, his position in life will be very different from yours, I shouldn't like you to quarrel with him. Your Uncle Martin and I were devoted to each other when we were children; indeed, I've always been much attached to my brother, and I've always made it my first duty to be kind to his family."
"It must be very cold travelling to-day," Edgar remarked, glancing out of the window at the falling snow. "Is it a long journey from London to Beaworthy, mother?"
"Yes; do you know anyone who is making it?"
"I was thinking of Cousin Becky." "Cousin Becky? What do you mean? She's not coming here. I never invited her."
"No. But she's coming to stay with Uncle Martin and Aunt Mary. Didn't you know it, mother? Why, I could have told you that days ago!"
"Then, pray, why didn't you?"
"I never thought of it. Roger told me, and of course I thought you knew. She's coming to-night. Roger's going to the station with Uncle Martin to meet her at seven o'clock and she's to have Polly's room."
"And what's to become of Polly?"
"She's going to sleep in the attic."
"The idea! Mary must be crazy to upset her arrangements for an old woman she has never seen in her life, one in whom she can have no possible interest."
"Roger says Cousin Becky is very poor," Edgar observed thoughtfully. "It must be dreadful to be poor, mother, mustn't it?"
"Yes," she acknowledged, surprised at the unusual gravity of her son's face.
"That's why they invited Cousin Becky to Princess Street," Edgar proceeded, "because she's poor and lonely. Roger says now Cousin Becky's brother is dead she hasn't even a home, and no one wants her—you know you didn't, mother."
"But to burden themselves with an old woman," Mrs. Marsh was commencing, when the keen, questioning gaze with which her little boy was regarding her caused her to break off and leave her sentence unfinished.
"It's so odd you didn't want Cousin Becky here," he said. "I can't think why you didn't, because we've lots of spare rooms, and we're
always having visitors. Don't you like Cousin Becky, mother?"
"I have not seen her for many years," was the evasive reply. "Will you have another cup of tea, Edgar? No, I will not allow you to have any more cake; you will make yourself ill."
"Give me just a tiny piece, mother. I'm hungry still."
"Then have some bread and butter."
"No," pouted the spoilt child, "I won't have anything more to eat if I can't have cake."
It ended in his being allowed another slice, and whilst he was eating it, his father, a short, bald, middle-aged man, entered the room, and came up to the fire, rubbing his hands and complaining of the cold.
"We're going to have a heavy fall of snow if I'm not much mistaken," he said. "You'll like that, eh, Edgar? I remember when I was your age there was nothing I liked better than a snowballing match with my school-fellows. Rare fun we used to have."
"Fancy, John, Cousin Becky is coming to Beaworthy after all," Mrs. Marsh informed him. "She's going to stay with Martin. Edgar heard from Roger that she is expected to-night."
"Well, I suppose your brother knows what he is about," Mr. Marsh replied, shrugging his shoulders. "You'll have to ask the old lady to spend a day with you, Janie."
"And ask Aunt Mary, too," said Edgar eagerly; "I like Aunt Mary. But don't have Polly, mother."
"Why not?" inquired Mr. Marsh, looking amused.
"She's such a cheeky little girl," the boy replied, recalling how on one of the rare occasions when he had taken tea with his cousins at their home, Polly had nick-named him "tell-tale" because he had threatened to inform his mother of something which had happened to
displease him. He knew better than to do that now, but he seldom encountered Polly without she addressed him as "tell-tale."
"Edgar, your boots are wet!" cried Mrs. Marsh as, in an unwary moment, the little boy drew his feet out from under the chair. "I can see the water oozing out of the leather. Go and change them at once, or you'll catch a terrible cold. How could you say they were not wet when you must have known differently? You ought to be ashamed to be so untruthful."
Edgar was in no wise disconcerted by this rebuke; but he left the drawing-room and went upstairs to his own room, where he discarded his snow-sodden boots for his slippers, and then stood at the window looking out into the garden, which was separated from the high road by tall elm trees, where the rooks built their nests every spring. The snow was falling very fast now, covering the world with a spotless mantle of white; and Edgar's mind reverted to the visitor whom his cousins expected to welcome to their home that night.
"I suppose mother thought she'd be in the way if she came here," he reflected shrewdly, "but I should say she'll be much more in the way in Uncle Martin's poky little house. It's really very kind of Aunt Mary to have her. Roger says his mother is always kind, and that we all ought to try to be—for Jesus' sake, because He loves every living thing, even animals. I suppose that's true, it's in the Bible about His noticing if a sparrow falls, so it must be, but I never thought much of it till Roger spoke to me about it the day after I'd hit that dog. I didn't mean to hurt it—I only meant to frighten it; I suppose it was cowardly. Well, I won't be unkind to an animal again; and I'm glad I didn't make a fuss about Roger's having struck me, especially as he was sorry afterwards."
It was cold in his bedroom, so in a short while the little boy went downstairs. In the hall he encountered Titters, his mother's favourite Persian cat; but when—mindful of his resolution to be kind to animals in future—he essayed to stroke her, she tried to escape from him, and arched her back and raised her fur in anything but a friendly fashion. Truth to tell, he had been in the habit of teasing her, and she
consequently mistrusted his intentions. However, he caught her, picked her up, and was carrying her into the drawing-room in his arms when she suddenly gave him a vicious scratch on the cheek, whereupon he dropped her with a cry of mingled anger and pain.
"See what Titters has done to me, mother!" he exclaimed as he entered the drawing-room.
"What a nasty scratch!" Mrs. Marsh said. "But you should not have teased the poor creature, Edgar."
"I was not teasing her, mother."
"Now, my dear, I know better than that. How can you tell me such a naughty story? I do wish you would learn to speak the truth. You are always teasing Titters—I suppose that's only natural as you're a boy —so you need not pretend you were not doing so just now."
Edgar did not argue the point, but he regarded his mother with an injured air which only made her laugh. He was annoyed that she did not believe him, forgetful that not long before he had told her an untruth about his boots, and that not without cause had he gained the reputation of a perverter of the truth.
CHAPTER IV
COUSIN BECKY'S ARRIVAL AT BEAWORTHY
"Isn't it nearly time for you to start, father?" asked Polly, turning from the window out of which, with her face pressed close to the glass, she had been watching the falling snow, and glancing at Mr. Trent, who, during the half-hour which had elapsed since the family had arisen from the tea-table, had been quietly reading the newspaper.
"Very nearly, my dear," he answered, raising his eyes to the clock on the mantelpiece, and then fixing them on his newspaper again.
"I believe the clock's rather slow, father, and it will take you quite quarter of an hour walking to the station. It's half-past six."
"And Cousin Becky's train is not due to arrive till ten minutes past seven, so there's plenty of time. Where is Roger?"
"Gone to put on his boots, father. Don't you think you had better put on yours?"
Mr. Trent laughed as he laid aside his newspaper. "I see you will not be satisfied till I am gone," he remarked. "Fetch my boots, there's a good girl."
Ten minutes later Mr. Trent and Roger were putting on their overcoats in the hall, preparatory to braving the snowstorm. The latter was quite as anxious to start for the station as Polly was to send him off. In fact, both children were much excited about their expected guest.
"You won't be able to wear this much longer," Polly observed, as she assisted her brother into his overcoat, which had become most uncomfortably tight for him. She buttoned it across his chest with some difficulty, adding, "You look like a trussed fowl."
"He has grown so much this winter," said Mrs. Trent, overhearing Polly's unflattering remark on her brother's appearance as she came downstairs. "I wish he could have a new overcoat, but—" She paused with a faint sigh, and Roger said quickly:
"Oh, this one will last me a long time yet, and I don't in the least mind how I look. It's a good warm old coat."
"That's right, Roger, never run down an old friend, especially one that's served you well," said Mr. Trent, at which they all laughed; for, poor though they were and obliged to practise many economies, they were a lighthearted family and happy amongst themselves.
"Surely you are very early in starting for the station," said Mrs. Trent. "There is half an hour before the train is due."
"Yes; but Polly is anxious to get us off," her husband returned, with a smiling glance at his little daughter, "and there's sure to be a good fire in the waiting-room at the station if we have long to wait. I shall not be surprised if the train is late to-night, the snowstorm will probably delay it a little."
"It's snowing very fast," announced Roger, as he opened the door and stepped into the street, followed by his father. "I believe it's inches deep already."
"We must keep up a good fire in the sitting-room, for Cousin Becky is sure to arrive very cold," said Mrs. Trent as she closed the front door "I wish there was a fireplace in your bedroom, Polly, but the oil-stove has made it feel very warm and comfortable."
The little girl ran upstairs to the room she had vacated for Cousin Becky. A heating stove with a crimson glass shade stood on the floor, and threw a rosy glow around. The apartment was small and plainly furnished, but it looked very cosy, and Polly thought their expected visitor would be very hard to please if she was not satisfied with such a nice little room. She said something of the kind when she joined her mother downstairs a few minutes later, and Mrs. Trent smiled, but made no response. She was as curious as her children to see Cousin Becky, and not a little anxious as well. How the hands of the clock seemed to drag as Polly watched them! Seven o'clock struck, and nearly another hour paced before a cab drew up before
the house. Then mother and daughter hastened into the hall, and the former flung open wide the door, a welcoming smile on her face.
"Here she is, Mary!" cried Mr. Trent, as he sprang out of the cab and assisted a little lady to alight. He led her immediately into the house, whilst Roger followed labouring under a bundle of wraps and a rug. "Here she is," he repeated, "almost frozen with cold, I believe. Becky, this is my wife, and this is my little maid, Polly. Go into the sittingroom, out of the draught, whilst I see to the luggage."
Not a word had the stranger spoken yet but she had taken Mrs. Trent's outstretched hand and warmly returned the kiss which the latter had given her; then she had kissed Polly, too, and now she allowed herself to be led into the sitting-room and established in the big, leather-covered easy chair by the fire.
"How good you all are to me!" she exclaimed at length with a quick breath, which sounded very like a sob, as she took off her thick veil, revealing a countenance which, though plain, was redeemed from insignificance by a pair of bright, observant dark eyes—wonderfully soft eyes they were at the present moment, for they smiled through a mist of tears. "Why, you might have known me all your lives by the warmth of your greetings.'"
"I have heard a great deal of you from my husband," Mrs. Trent told her. "You do not seem a stranger at all."
"I am pleased to hear that. What a glorious fire! A good fire is always such a welcome, I think. And what a cosy room!" And the bright, dark eyes wandered around the apartment with its worn Brussels carpet and well-used furniture, with appreciation in their gaze.
"I believe you will find the house comfortable, though small, and—I'm afraid—rather shabby," Mrs. Trent replied.
"It is a home," Cousin Becky declared with a pleased nod. "I've been in many large, handsomely-furnished houses that have never been
that. Well," she said, turning her glance upon Polly, who had been watching her intently, "do you think you will like me, my dear?"
"Yes," Polly responded with a smile, by no means abashed at this direct question. "I am sure I shall. But you are not a bit like what I expected."
"Indeed! What did you expect?"
"I thought you would look much older," the little girl candidly admitted.
"I'm nearly seventy, my dear, and that's a good age. But I don't feel old, and I cannot have changed a great deal of late years—except that my hair has grown white—for your father recognised me the minute he saw me on the platform."
At that moment Mr. Trent appeared upon the scene, followed by Roger. They had been helping to take their visitor's luggage upstairs; and Mrs. Trent now suggested that Cousin Becky should go to her room and remove her travelling things, by which time she would be glad of some tea.
"What do you think of her, Polly?" asked Roger, as soon as their mother and Cousin Becky had gone upstairs together.
"I think she looks very nice and kind," was the prompt reply; "but what a little thing she is, Roger! Father, you never told us that."
In truth, Miss Trent was a very little lady, with a slight figure which was wonderfully upright and agile for one her age. When she returned to the sitting-room, Roger pulled the easy chair nearer the fire for her, and Polly placed a cushion behind her shoulders, and she looked at them both with a very tender light shining in her dark eyes.
"Thank you, my dears," she said with the smile which made her plain face look almost beautiful. "I will take the easy chair to-night as I am
weary after my journey, but usually I am not so indulgent to myself. Roger, you are very like what your father used to be at your age."
"And do you think I am like Aunt Janie?" asked Polly, veiled anxiety in her tone.
"Slightly, perhaps; but you are more like your mother," was the decided reply.
"Oh, I am glad to hear you say that!" Polly cried delightedly. "I would rather not be like Aunt Janie at all; though everyone says she is very handsome," she added meditatively.
"Polly does not much care for Aunt Janie," Roger explained; "but she's very nice in her way. And Uncle John's very nice, too, but we don't see much of him. Oh, here's Louisa with tea—"
"Which I am sure Cousin Becky must be greatly in need of," Mrs. Trent interposed, not sorry of this opportunity of changing the conversation, "so hush your chatter, children, for a while, and let her take her meal in peace."
"I love listening to their chatter," Cousin Becky said. She did full justice to the chop which had been cooked for her and enjoyed her tea; and afterwards they all sat round the fire, and the children listened whilst their elders conversed about people and places they only knew by name. Then by-and-by Cousin Becky spoke of her brother's death, and her own forlorn condition.
"I cannot tell you how glad I was to receive your letter, my dear," she said to Mrs. Trent. "I considered it was especially kind of you to invite me to visit you as you had never seen me in your life."
"Father wanted you to come, and so did Polly and I," Roger informed her frankly, "but mother was afraid—" He paused in sudden confusion.
"Afraid you might not be satisfied with our mode of living, Becky," Mr Trent said with a smile, whilst his wife shook her head at him reproachfully.
"The idea!" cried Cousin Becky with a laugh.
"I told her you had had to rough it in your day," Mr. Trent proceeded, "and that you were not a fussy old maid. You see we're living in a small way, and we've had reverses of fortune, as no doubt you have heard, but I don't think we're a discontented family, and we make the best of things—eh, my dear?" he questioned, turning to his wife.
"Yes," she answered, "or, at any rate, we try to do so. Children, I think it is time for you to say good-night; it is long past your usual bed-time."
"I wonder who put those lovely snowdrops in the vase on the dressing-table in my room," said Cousin Becky, as the young people rose obediently to retire for the night.
"Roger did," replied Polly, "he bought them on purpose for you. Do you like them?"
"Indeed I do. Thank you, Roger, so much; it was a most kindly thought which prompted you to get them for me."
The little boy blushed with pleasure, for it was nice to know the flowers were appreciated, and he had been wondering if Cousin Becky had noticed them. After the children had said good-night and left the room, they stood a few minutes in the hall, discussing their visitor in whispers.
"She's awfully jolly," Roger said decidedly, "and she seemed very pleased that I was at the station to meet her with father."
"I like her," Polly answered. "It must be very bad to be alone in the world if you're poor," she continued thoughtfully. "Did you see the
tears in her eyes when she talked of her brother and said she had no home now?"
"Yes," assented Roger; "but she didn't say anything about being poor."
"No, but we know she is, from what Aunt Janie said. If she had been rich she'd have been invited to stay at the Rookery." Polly was a sharp little girl, and often surprised her elders by the clearness of her mental sight. "I'm glad she's come here instead," she added heartily, "for we should not see much of her if she was Aunt Janie's visitor."
"I expect not," agreed Roger. "Edgar says he doesn't like Princess Street, and I suppose Aunt Janie doesn't either. I don't mind, do you?"
Polly declared she did not, but her heart was hot with indignation; for she realised, more clearly than did her brother, that Aunt Janie despised their home.
CHAPTER V
AFTER THE SNOWSTORM
"Oh, I say, Roger, do wait for me a moment! What a tremendous hurry you're in! I want to speak to you."
Roger Trent paused to allow the speaker—Edgar Marsh—to come up to him. It was nearly five o'clock on the afternoon subsequent to
the night of Cousin Becky's arrival at Beaworthy, and the cousins were later than usual in returning from school, as they had lingered in the playground—a large yard surrounded by high walls at the back of the Grammar School building, which was situated in one of the principal streets of the town—to enjoy a good game of snowballing. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, but the morning had dawned clear and fine; there had been only a very slight thaw, and now the air was keen and betokened frost.
"I'm in rather a hurry, because we have tea at five o'clock and mother will wonder what's become of me if I'm not home by then," Roger explained, as his cousin joined him and they walked on side by side.
"What a splendid game we've had, haven't we? I believe it's going to freeze, and if it does the streets will be as slippery as glass tomorrow."
"So much the better, then we shall be able to make some slides. I don't mind the cold, do you? But why don't you do up your coat."
"Because it's so uncomfortable if I do; it's too tight for me, I've grown out of it."
"You ought to have a new one; it's awfully shabby."
Roger laughed at the critical way in which Edgar was surveying him, but his colour deepened as he said:
"I shan't have a new one till another winter, that's certain, and perhaps not then; it will all depend—"
"Depend upon what?" asked Edgar inquisitively.
"Upon whether father can afford to buy me one or not," was the frank response.
Edgar was silent for a few moments. Accustomed to possess everything that money could buy, it seemed very dreadful to him that
his cousin should not be well clothed. He reflected that Roger and he were much the same height and size, and determined to ask his mother for permission to present him with one of his own overcoats.
"It must be horrid to be poor like that," he remarked; "but, never mind, Roger, I'll see you have another overcoat soon." This was said with a slightly patronising air, though it was kindly meant.
"What do you mean?" Roger demanded quickly.
"I'll give you one of mine."
"I won't have it. I don't want it. I'd rather wear my old one." Roger's tone was distinctly ungrateful, and he appeared vexed. "You'd better mind your own business, Edgar, and let me mind mine."
Edgar looked considerably taken aback. He saw he had annoyed his companion, but he had not the faintest idea how he had done so. However, he was wise enough to let the matter drop.
"Did Cousin Becky come last night?" he inquired. "Mother'll be sure to ask me when I get home."
"She arrived by the ten minutes past seven train," Roger replied. "Father and I met her at the station—the train was more than half an hour late—and we drove home in a cab. I enjoyed it."
"Enjoyed what?"
"The drive."
"Oh!" Edgar exclaimed rather contemptuously. "Tell me what Cousin Becky's like."
"She's very small, and her hair is quite white, and she has very dark eyes. Polly and I think we shall like her."
"Will she stay long?"
"I don't know. Mother asked her for a few weeks."
The boys had reached the corner of Princess Street now, and were about to separate when Edgar impulsively caught up a handful of snow and flung it in his companion's face. Roger had not expected this, but he laughed and promptly returned the compliment, and soon they were engaged in a smart game of snowballing, in which a couple of errand boys who happened to be passing, joined. By-andby Roger unfortunately slipped and fell full length on the sloppy ground; but he picked himself up, unhurt, though very wet and dirty, and returned to the battle. The game would have lasted much longer than it did, had not a policeman come round the corner upon the combatants and promptly dispersed them.
Of course, Roger was late for tea, for, upon reaching home, he found it was absolutely necessary to change his clothes. It was little wonder that Louisa grumbled when he marched into the kitchen, after having put on a dry suit, bearing his wet garments, which he begged her to dry and clean for him in time for him to wear next day. "Of all the thoughtless boys I ever knew, I do believe you are the worst, Master Roger," she said emphatically as she stuffed paper into his dripping boots to prevent their shrinking. "You'll soon have no clothes to wear, and what will you do then?" As the little boy offered no solution to this problem, she continued in the same scolding tone, "I don't know what the mistress will say when she sees your secondbest suit in this terrible state. Well, leave the things here, I'll try to get them dry and do my best with them, for it's certain you can't go to school to-morrow looking such a sight as that!" And a smile broke upon her countenance as her eyes travelled over his figure. He had been obliged to don a much-worn suit, darned at the knees and elbows, and too small for him every way.
"It's very kind of you, Louisa," he said gratefully, "I'll do you a good turn some day."
"Will you, Master Roger? Well, I believe you would if you could, so I'll take the will for the deed. Boys will be boys, I suppose, and I daresay your clothes are not really much damaged after all."
After that Roger left the kitchen and went into the sitting-room. He apologised to his mother for being late, and drank his luke-warm tea and ate several slices of thick bread and butter with relish. Cousin Becky occupied the seat at his mother's right hand, and Polly sat opposite. Mr. Trent was not present, for he did not, as a rule, leave the office till six o'clock.
"I have not been outside the door all day," Polly remarked in a slightly desponding tone, after she had listened to her brother's account of the fun he and his schoolmates had enjoyed in the playground that afternoon, "and I do love walking in snow."
"You know you have a slight cold, my dear," Mrs. Trent said, "and I did not want you to run the risk of making it worse."
"Besides, my boots leak," Polly muttered under her breath, "so I could not have gone out anyway."
Mrs. Trent glanced quickly at Cousin Becky, but apparently she had not heard the little girl's complaint, for she was giving her attention to Roger, who was answering a question she had put to him about his school. A look of relief crossed Mrs. Trent's face, seeing which Polly grew suddenly ashamed of her discontentment, and would have given anything to have been able to recall the words which she realised must have grieved her mother to hear; she well knew she would not have had leaky boots if such a state of things could have been remedied.
After tea the children sat at one end of the table preparing their lessons for the following day. Up to the present Polly had been educated by her mother, but it was hoped she would be able to be sent to school later on—to which day she was looking forward with much pleasure, for she had but a dull time of it at home, poor little girl, and she was far more inclined than her brother to chafe against the circumstances of her life. On one occasion she had overheard it remarked to her mother that it was a shame Mr. Marsh did not give his brother-in-law a larger salary for his services, and she had secretly felt a deep sense of resentment against her uncle ever
since. Then, too, she disliked her aunt, because that lady did not own sufficient tact to confer her favours in a different manner; and she despised Edgar because his mother petted and spoilt him. So, it must be confessed that poor Polly had but little affection for those relations outside her own household. But the little girl forgot her grievances when, later on, and lessons finished, she and her brother drew their chairs near the fire and Cousin Becky entered into conversation with them, encouraging them to talk of themselves. Before the evening was over the visitor had gained a clear insight into the character of her young cousins, and had learnt a great deal about the family at the Rookery.
Seeing the children were entertaining her guest, Mrs. Trent by-andby left the room in search of Louisa, whom she found in the kitchen carefully drying Roger's second-best suit of clothes before the fire.
"I'm drying the things slowly so that they shan't shrink," Louisa explained. "Isn't master come yet, ma'am?" she inquired as she glanced at her mistress' face.
"No, and I cannot imagine what's keeping him; he generally comes straight home from the office. I cannot help being nervous, for I know something unusual must have happened to have detained him. It is past eight o'clock. Supposing he should have met with an accident? I expect the streets are like glass to-night."
"I wouldn't go to meet trouble if I were you, ma'am," advised Louisa. She had been in Mrs. Trent's service for several years, and had insisted on accompanying the family to Princess Street, having declared nothing should induce her to leave the mistress to whom she was deeply attached. "You're too anxious, ma'am, that comes of having had so many troubles, I expect; but if anything had happened to the master you would have been the first to have been informed of it. There! Surely that's his step in the hall."
It was, and Mrs. Trent's face brightened immediately. She hastened into the hall, where she found her husband divesting himself of his overcoat.
