Louise Jordan Miln

“ Most of them have a smudged, unfinished look, and they come red-raw and wrinkled into life. But Baby Ivy’s loveliness came with her, and it grew as she grew. Sir Charles Snow sometimes thought that, had she lived in China in the old imperial days, her face might have gained her the yellow chair of an Emperor’s first wife and the throbbing desire of any countryman that ever saw her. The Trojan war was not fought for a woman; but wars have been fought so in Asia, and Snow smiled grimly, more than once, thinking that her Surrey birthplace had perhaps spared Asia bloodshed. ”

“ At the sound of the strange tongue she’d never heard before, the baby’s Chinese face was convulsed with sudden fury, and she tore her tiny hand from the bright yellow timepiece and struck her father in the face with all her angry might.
When Sên King-lo was alone now he was very quiet. Neither book nor work occupied him. He sat almost motionless, with his eyes on the trees or turned with a brooding hungry look towards the East. A man might have sat and seemed so who kept tryst with memories and with a self that had gone far away. ”

“ Whatever his country had gained in freedom and in international grip, he had an appalling feeling that it had lost in beauty and in manners. And once or twice he felt that the soul of China was tarnished, and his taste, if not his reason, veered more and more to Sir Charles’ attitude: “Would that the Manchu were back on the dragon-throne.” It seemed to him that the new Chinese Democracy was overblown and that it was underbred. His countrywomen, that he saw everywhere in the city streets, hurt him almost intolerably. ”

“ Under another name China may not be so comfortable a place to live in, but it is an empire still, disfigured, demented, but neither shattered nor lost—but not less than empire while the soul of the Sages, whom she wombed and who too begat her, breathes through the soul of her people, the poppies and bamboos hang at the edge of the Yellow Sorrow, and the silkworms gorge on the mulberry leaves and empurple the looms. And while those twin empires stand—in so much alike, so much unalike—a something will show in many faces of two races’ women which shows in no others. ”

“ Few tricks of custom, manner or words had crept in to her use during her Washington years, and no traits of personality or thought. But the American vocabulary is too apposite, it catches too neatly and firmly, not to have irresistible appeal to all word-quick ears, and no English girl—princess or housemaid—could listen as often and as long as Ivy Gilbert had to voluble Lucille Smiths and Mary Withrows without adopting a syllable or so of a fresh young vernacular so limpid and forceful that it needs no dictionary and grows a classic. ”

“ Miss Julia would have revelled in it, would have found and greeted the soul in it all and threaded out its meaning, learned its histories, loved its pictures. In a slighter way, Ruby would have done so too, had she come upon it merely in privileged travel, had she not been the English wife of a Chinese man—the English mother of a half-Chinese child.
But Ruby Sên hated it all.
She liked the food; no one could help liking the best food on earth. But she found meal-times abominable, except when Sên King-lo came, which he did whenever he could, to take his rice with her. ”

“ There were men in England and America who ranked Sên King-lo high, as high in ability and skill as in character—and they all were big men and wise, and skilled in their weighing and gaging of manhood. But never before had he been so nearly great as he was now, or so fine in method and difficult achievement. He demanded nothing, pressed nothing, labored nothing; but he heaped her comforts about her, anticipated her needs and created them. And presently his charm reached her again (even through the Chinese motley it wore) and steeped her again in warmth and satisfaction. ”

“ London is something of a jade and unbends to any fun. The “county” is a prude, respectable to a degree. “County” never bends. London’s the more human and undoubtedly has the better time. If “county” has a finer art of living, London has the prettier knack, and the gayer, more amusing.
“Give me the county for my funeral,” Emma told Sir Charles, “but let me live in London every time.” But Lady Snow was frivolous and meant to stay so.
And even Sir Charles, who saw through most things, could not see why the Sêns had moved to Surrey in October, almost on their return from China. ”

“ CHAPTER XVIII Emmeline Hamilton lay on a pile of cushions heaped on the floor, one hand under her head, her knees hunched up in what she thought a Chinese attitude, a cigarette she tried to imagine was opium in her mouth, a purple kimono, embroidered with blue chrysanthemums and red and gold dragons and beetles and smaller bugs, flopped loosely about her. She flattered the garment that it was ultra-Chinese, but it was merely an atrocious libel on the women of Japan. ”

“ Charlie said her giggle was like a Chinese girl’s! Well—what if it was? Probably many Chinese girls were very nice—and were charming. She liked Mr. Sên. The girls here in Washington were silly about him—and odious. But she liked him in a sensible, straightforward way—as a sensible, straightforward, and very interesting acquaintance. It seemed funny for a man to have such small and delicate hands, but when he had swung her up to her saddle she had felt his hand rock-sure and steel-strong under her foot and her weight. How beautiful her lilies were—and how sweet! ”

“ One hand nursed lilies-of-the-valley, and so did her cheek—one hand lay on the open confession-book, her filbert nails lying pink on a page of Chinese characters.
Ivy Gilbert was a very pretty girl—more than pretty—face and body had considerable loveliness, but her hands were her paramount beauty, as hands always are, in every race, in the woman whose loveliness is Nature’s deliberate achievement, and not just happily accidental.
Did lilies-of-the-valley grow too in China—the flowers she loved most? And their perfume was always an intoxicant to her. Did they grow in China? ”

“ If the Chinese who never have left the land of their birth, the centuried home of their race, love China as no other country is loved, the Chinese who have left her, lost her a little in exile, as exiles must, and have found her again, washing their homesick eyes in her beauty and joy, laving their souls in her soul, must love China even more. Comparison is the acid test. China stands it.
And so Sên King-lo loved China now. ”

“ Rumor began to scratch and tear at Sên King-lo, and it did not leave Ivy Gilbert quite unscotched—though, for a time, it left her unsmirched.
It was winter now, and November winds rattled leafless branches at Arlington and on the hillside woods above old Fort Totten’s star-shaped embankments and cherished parapets. The Potomac crawled gray and sullen between ice-scummed shores. If gossip and scandal are rampant in the capital’s summer-time, in winter they flourish like upas trees and leap to maturity and detail like the Indian conjurer’s mango tree. ”

“ In all of them some Chinese sap flowed and tinged. Sên King-lo was thoroughly Chinese—as essentially Chinese as if he never had left the Ho-nan home of his birth. It is in solitude, communing with self, communing more with Nature, that every Chinese takes his spiritual ease, has his spiritual growth, leads his intensest, truest life. It is then that he lives—even more than when he sits with his hand on his mother’s girdle, or his children’s hands on his skirt. Except the most toil-stunted of the working-class, every Chinese must be alone sometimes, or perish. ”

“ One thing, at least, Sên disliked in his new girl-acquaintance: the little she seemed to care for her small cousins. He had not seen her with them—or seen them at all—and he hoped her indifference to them was merely a verbal barrage to screen and defend from a stranger, a sentiment too exquisite to be shown to a passing acquaintance, above all not to one whom she disliked. He hoped that—for the sake of his new ride-born liking of her—but he rather doubted it. He thought her pluck was more than her artifice; her indifference had rung true enough. ”

“ She had not a trace of Europe on her; but almost from the first Sên King-lo suspected that she had almost no trait of China in her, that—except for that outer sheath of Chinese beauty—she was all a Western.
Luckily for both the babies, Ruben was delighted with his sister and vastly proud of her—though he called her, as soon as he could talk, “funny Ivy!”
But in one thing Emma Snow was wrong. Baby Ivy was very lovely, in her vivid, flower-like Eastern way: a lovely, laughing, pomegranate child. She was lovely from the first. New-born babies are not often beautiful, unless to mother eyes. ”

“ His people should be her people, his God her God. It had not been lust for adventure, or wilfulness, or freak. It had been loyalty, womanliness, and wifehood. A splendid, sacred trinity!
And they had failed her; she had failed them.
Whose was the fault?
Not Sên King-lo’s. He had not failed her. Her English fairness, her heritage of centuries, knew it and said it. Never had man failed woman less, or mate mate. He never had failed her once, not for a breath, not by the width of a hair. ”

“ Shut off from his own people, debarred from the women of his race, it was inevitable that his manhood should turn to some one of the women among whom he lived. And Sir Charles appreciated what Ivy’s appeal and lure had been—appreciated it all. Desdemona, on the stage, usually is golden-haired and tea-rose faced. A finer art would show her Venetian dark. Sir Charles heard the Chinese note in Ivy’s laugh and knew that the colors she oftenest wore and the dangling things she instinctively thrust in dress and hair had a Chinese touch—and how that must be in Sên King-lo’s eyes. ”

“ Sir Charles was musing.
“Are you a Christian?” he asked suddenly.
“No,” the Chinese told him, “though I was confirmed at Public School—they made it part of the ‘course,’ as they did cricket and footer—and I took it all as part of the ‘English’ I was there to learn.” He added, but with absolute courtesy, “Are you?”
“I believe in God,” Snow said stoutly.
“So do I.”
“But not in our God, not in hers!”
“I think I do,” Sên King-lo assented. “I believe that there is only one God—many gods, but only one God. Does it matter what we call him? I think not. Or matter how we reach him? ”

“ Ivy cried, ashamed to her core that any girl could be so brazen—for such she considered the other’s avowal of feeling for a man with whom, as Ivy knew, her acquaintance was very slight. It did not shock her at all that Miss Hamilton had come to care for a Chinese—for she, Ivy herself, had ceased to think of Sên King-lo as of a race apart and debarred and even unconsciously thought of him as of one far less alien to her than most of the men she met here. ”

“ The waterfalls that surged and flung, the tiny brooks that tinkled over the pebbles and romped with the baby trout that played in their happy iridescent bosoms, were real, real water, real beauty, real message, only because they were Chinese—Chinese cascade, Chinese brook, Chinese water. There were no others. All places beyond China were one dun, lifeless No Man’s Land between Earth and Heaven, between Time and Eternity, as bleak, fruitless, unbellied as a far gray stretch of flat polar ice, as barren and lifeless and hopeless as the Turanian desert at night. ”

“ No one could better Uncle Lysander at mixing juleps—he wore white cotton gloves when he pulled the mint from the kitchen brook-side—and few could equal Julia Townsend, of the Townsends of Virginia, at the concocting of cup.
Towards sunset, all the burnished hour’s splendor of colors glowing and melting over the blue and silver Potomac, a tinkle of banjos came from behind the tomatoes and asparagus beds. Miss Julia never permitted her blacks to obtrude jarringly their gift of ripple and rhythm, but always banjos in the distance played her garden party guests out of her gates. ”

“ Ivy’s ancestry was as weird a patchwork as was ever a New England quilt. Sên King-lo’s was one almost royal blue. And it had no bar sinister. There are few bar sinisters in China. Perhaps the Chinese manage man’s wide-flung proclivities more wisely than we do. It could be argued. Certainly they punish little children for prenatal happenings less than we do. They suffer them all to come welcomed and desired into life, suffer them all to wear with untainted right their father’s name—and, not less a boon and a gladness, to love their mothers and be loved by their mothers unashamed. ”

“ It is not facile to enfranchise a race, a caste or a sex that will have none of it. Even in Earth’s “freest” country you may coax, or lead or prod a woman to the polling-booth, but you can’t make her vote. Not yet. And in this new day of our greatest enlightenments when enfranchisement is peeping seductively over the shoulders of Oriental women, it is those women who hang back and hesitate, not their husbands and masters who hold them back or coerce them. The Oriental husband is not a tyrant. ”

“ The bamboos’ luxuriant, sword-shaped, fern-like beauty still edges with gray-green lace the twisting footpath between Victoria City and the blue-topped Peak. Red Chinese roofs still up-turn here and there among the persimmons and oleanders. Junks and sampans still huddle in the harbor, and the water still croons blue and green and limpid about them. At night Young China seems almost a myth, an unloveliness almost forgotten and quite negligible; the moon and the stars keep their old state up in an imperial sky ”

“ There were carnations in it, great dusky, imperial, wine-deep carnations, ruby red ones, flaming scarlet, blush pink and lemon, and a handful just the color of tomatoes. Julia Townsend gathered them up in her hands with a murmur of delight—as many of them as her hands could hold, and hung her pleased face over their sumptuous fragrance.
“I never give a friend’s gift away—or any part of it,” she said, “or you should have half of these. They belong to youth,” she added a little sadly—but quite bravely. “But you shall smell them.” ”

“ Would a Chinese woman have failed an English husband as she had failed her Chinese husband? She believed not. Was China’s then the better part? China that she disliked and was ashamed of! She had made no sacrifice in marrying Sên King-lo, but she knew now that he had made a sacrifice in taking her to wife, and could but have known that he did. ”

“ Youth appealed to Sên King-lo. Being Chinese, deeply and typically so, he sincerely reverenced age, felt for it unaffected affection; but it did not lure him—and he was in no way un-Chinese in this. Her youth appealed to his. Next to beauty, what lured him most, as they most lure all of his race, were loyalty, breeding and pluck—probably the first and the last because they tune and key with the loyalty that is deep-grained in most Chinese, and with the pluck that is innate in them all. ”

“ She echoed his pleasure, but could not share his absorption; she alien here, in the white Virginia woods, with snow and thin gleams of ice where ice and snow come but rarely, the white passion of December rapturously calling Earth its bride. Sên King-lo felt at home; for the hour, no longer afar from China. Not once in many years does winter show so in England. In his Chinese home Sên had seen winter so a thousand times. ”

“ They had had many a golden jaunt together—a month in Venice, wonderful weeks in Spain, again and again a week in Paris—these married lovers and best of friends, before Ruben had come to call a halt to their journeying and make their London life more of a permanency than it had been. They had learned North Wales together and watched Windermere. No reasonable wife could have seriously asked more of marriage and husband than Sên King-lo had given her. ”