Sên King-lo

“ 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. ”

“ 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 was glad that Charles and Miss Julia valued Sên so highly, and she gave no more care or thought to what any one else thought or said of her new camaraderie. Not greatly educated, the English girl was beautifully intelligent: that attracted Sên King-lo even more than it at first surprised him. They liked and disliked many of the same things. They shared many prejudices. He was grateful to her for being beautiful, and for a hint of his own race now and then in eyes, gesture and voice. ”

“ Even the babies, and the shrill-tongued babbling women, meditate in China.
“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
Though he was dining alone in his own sitting-room, Sên dressed for dinner as scrupulously as if he’d been an English subaltern alone in a remote dâk bungalow about to dine off half-roasted but wholly grown goat and undergrown plantains, washed down by criminal and luke-warm beer. There was not a little of the English gentleman in Sên King-lo, not a few English characteristics, habits and traits that in no way clashed with Chinese—or that were Chinese as well. ”

“ It was Sên’s doing, not his English wife’s; but it was a selfishness—almost his sole one. He did not wish too many material reminders about him of the homeland he had forsaken. England was his home now, and he did not intend ever again to be homesick for China, and he cut the risks of it as close as he could. But he still read his own classics, when he sat alone in his den, and the love-songs of Li-Po. A man cannot forgo the books that were the mother’s milk of his soul.
And Sên King-lo still brushed many a letter to friends in Chinese—not all of them business letters. ”

“ But each knew that the other knew that they both knew; and they smiled into each other’s eyes now and then—but no plainer allusion passed between them, and Sên King-lo accepted Charles Snow’s loyalty and faith as a matter of course, and quite simply.
The Chinese Minister heard of all that was said. It was he that told Sên; no other man could have dared—unless Snow had cared to or thought it worth while. The Chinese Minister told it in all its ugly grimness—but did not speak of Miss Gilbert—but his old eyes danced and his sides shook with mirth. ”

“ Sên King-lo bowed his head towards his hostess, and answered:
“Something that Confucius said a long time ago, Madame. This: ‘Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’ ”
“True and admirable!” Miss Julia said proudly. Her old eyes flashed. She was thinking of Appomattox—of a cause that she never would yield as permanently lost. And Sên King-lo, a far-off look in his dark, masked eyes, was thinking of Shantung. The East and the West do meet sometimes in the selfsameness of human emotions. ”

“ It was largely from this grandmother that Sên King-lo had inherited the uprightness of character and relentless habit of self-analysis that underlay and dominated all his suavity and sunny good nature. He had inherited also from her no little of his manliness, but he had inherited from Ya Tin few of his tastes. Indeed, she had few, and, unlike most women of her years and power, she had no foibles. ”

“ At the supper table probing, not impertinently or even intentionally, but just as we must probe any stranger with whom we speak for the first time—unless character and personality mean nothing to us, and to Sên King-lo they meant a very great deal—he had found little to hold him; nothing but pleasant girlhood and a touch of bitterness that, while he pitied it, did not attract him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Chinese woman, even one whose profession was frailty, would sooner have strangled or starved herself or have perished by slow suffering inches than have exposed any part of her neck. But Emmeline didn’t know that. Her mawkish but intense and tigerish infatuation for Sên King-lo was no greater than her ignorance of his people and their customs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sên King-lo laughed—his eyes even more than his mouth. Chinese gentlepeople have the most beautiful teeth in the world.
“No, no,” he protested. “That was well-bowled. But you have not caught me out, leg before wicket. I have seen pictures of Chinese girls, Miss Gilbert. And I can read Chinese. Stickpins and girdle ornaments dangle in half the pages of Chinese romances. You did remind me of my home—for the moment. Even the fern you were fanning yourself with added to the impression. You fanned yourself a little as we do—with a Chinese turn of your wrist. I am in your debt.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the impulse of all love is to create, its even greater, more constant, longer, finer impulse is to share. She had loved Sên King-lo well, and she had staked her soul to give him all that was she or hers, to have for her very own all that was he or his. That was why she had insisted upon leaving her child and crossing the world with her husband, crossing the world into China. ”

“ Sên King-lo demanded with a laugh. “Our son is very English.”
“Very, and very handsome!” Dr. Ray answered cordially. But to herself the physician added: “And more interesting than handsome. He is your first-born: a throw-back, of course, to some blonde ancestor of your wife’s. Baby number two may be as Chinese as baby number one is Saxon. What then?”
“What did Miss Julia think of the hula dance?” Sên King-lo asked slyly, as they sat at lunch. ”

“ Sên King-lo quoted sadly. Then he said, “I fear least for Ruben, but I fear—terribly—for them both. Ruben is Chinese. He looks English, but he is thoroughly Chinese. If he marries, he should marry a woman of our people, a Chinese girl whose parents live here, just possibly. That will be so more and more, I believe. But I wish earnestly that he may not marry—or Ivy either. You know why. Teach Ruben to worship his mother, to garner his heart upon her, to live for her. It will not be difficult, I am sure, since his instincts are so intensely Chinese.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sên King-lo came and went at the Massachusetts Avenue house and at Rosehill as before, and both Snow and Miss Julia scorned to notice how, or how often, he and Ivy spoke to each other. Dr. Ray held her peace and so did Lady Snow.
But that was more than Washington did. Would it be a match? Men made bets at the clubs, and women “Oh”-ed and “Ah”-ed and “My dear”-ed over tea-cups and cocktails—in Turkish Baths, and even in whispers at church. Had Sên King-lo been caught at last? Was he going to marry Ivy Gilbert? What did the Chinese Minister think about it? ”

“ Ray was much interested to meet Sên King-lo, and to see and consider him in this easy, intimate way. She had known many Chinese—but not before a Chinese gentleman.
Almost greedy still, in her splendid, beautiful ageing, for new experiences, more and still more knowledge, she welcomed this experience and made her most of it.
Dr. Elenore Ray liked Sên King-lo. She liked his simplicity; a woman, she more than liked his deference ”

“ Sên King-lo inclined his head courteously towards the older and host, “but if a man himself is thoroughly sound, I don’t think that it matters very desperately what views he holds. I believe that neither an incorruptible man, nor any views he has, will do himself or any one else much harm. For our weal or our woe, the Manchu has gone—for a time, or for ever—and we, we Chinese, must do the best we can for our country, with things as they are. ”

“ Sên King-lo acted as interpreter, but conversation so spoken cools in the process and grows increasingly difficult. And Sên Ya Tin was by nature and habit unbending and had no knack of assuming an easy congeniality that she never had felt. She had few affections; the few that she had were veritable passions. But between them and icy indifference and vitriolic hate Sên Ya Tin was almost devoid of creature feeling. She was critical and self-indulgent to a degree. ”

“ A Chinese criminal on his way to the indescribable execution ground, will lag a moment to buy a flower, and sniff at it joyously, as he trudges on to his hideous death. Give any Chinese child its choice between a toy and a graceful spray of sweet-scented honeysuckle, invariably it takes the blossoms.
And every Chinese—young or old, rich or poor—knows how to be alone, makes solitude a dignity, and gives it charm, and reaps from it—much.
Sên King-lo did not go out again that day or evening. ”

“ Sên said—“the most beautiful name in the world. We Chinese are said to crave only sons. But as long as I can remember, my heart’s desire has been to have a daughter whose mother would let me give her that name.”
He spoke quite simply, for all his English training, too Chinese to feel any mawkish hesitancy in speaking to a friend, a girl he respected, of life’s best realities. Something that hurt a little, something new and strange, pricked at Ivy Gilbert’s heart.
Sên King-lo’s wife! His Chinese wife! She had never thought of her. ”

“ Reginald liked the suggestion almost as little as Miss Julia had—and by it his personal vanity was stung, which Miss Julia Townsend’s had not been. “That low Chink——”
Emmeline threw out a dramatic hand, scattering ash into the embossed scales of the purple kimono’s handsomest dragon. “Not here!” she hissed. “No one that speaks with less than the deepest respect for Sên King-lo shall dare speak it here. He is Celestial!” and she sank back with an adoring moan on her prickly cushions—a stork’s leg rasped her cheek—but she was too highly or abjectly Chinese to wince. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Sên King-lo knew that Ruby would be Sên Ruby while she lived. He knew.
“It is for Ivy,” King-lo went on, “that I fear most. Mere baby that she is, I know she is English. Yes, I am right. She is as English as Ruben is Chinese, more so perhaps. The mixture of race bloods has modified nothing racial for either of our children—fomented and intensified rather. Ivy is wholly English. I can see it every day. Sometimes when I have been alone, not often but sometimes, I have said something in Chinese—just to hear the Chinese words, just to taste them on my lips. ”