The supper was long. It might have been called a little heavy, if the
food had not been so very good. It is not of the South to offer a guest
a simple meal. Miss Julia gave her guests more than fried chicken and
quivering ice-cold jellies. She gave them scalloped oysters, she gave
them corn-oysters (an entirely vegetable but very “filling” dish). She
gave them gumbo, and pickles made out of water-melon rinds. She gave
them several salads. The oysters were not the sole shellfish, and the
sweets—Miss Julia called them all “the dessert,” and Uncle Lysander
called them all “puddin’ ”—covered the shining tops of two great
priceless sideboards, and their overflow covered one of the long, narrow
side-tables. They sat a long time at supper. The oysters had given place
to lemon sherbet as Sên King-lo had quoted Confucius, and after the
sherbet he turned and talked for a time to his left-hand neighbor, and
the English girl chatted to the New Orleans man on her right. But after
a course and another, they spoke together again—the merest social
decency, since their hostess had put the girl on his right hand.
“It _sounded_ hard—very nearly impossible to learn,” Ivy said, taking
up their chat just where Miss Julia had torn it.
“Will you try?” Sên asked lightly. “I’d like to teach you—Chinese.”
“I don’t think you would,” the girl retorted. “I’d not like to teach any
one anything. I teach for my living.”
“You!” the Chinese exclaimed—frank and honest admiration in tone and
glance. “How young you are to know enough to follow that great career.
The greatest of all careers, we think.”
“I don’t know anything at all,” Ivy assured him. “I only teach
C-A-T—cat; B-A-T—bat; and wash their faces—my cousins Dick and
Blanche—when they’ll hold their faces still long enough. And when they
don’t their mother scolds me. I hate it all—and so do they. But I have
to—to earn my living.”
Sên King-lo looked more approval than sympathy. Poverty is no social
bar-sinister in China, scarcely a handicap in what, until the Manchus
fell, was the soundest and truest democracy in human history—not a
rabble democracy, but a democracy of dignity, justice, fair play and
spiritual equal chance.
“Yes, I should like teaching you Chinese,” he insisted.
“Why ever, why?” the girl demanded discouragingly.
“To pay a debt,” he replied with a smile. “We Chinese must be free of
debt on our New Year, and that would just about give me time. And you—I
know what you think—you think you’d find my language dull, and that you
never would have any use for it. But you may go to China one day, and
then you’d find it very useful.”
“I go to China? No such luck! Jersey City perhaps, or even Margate,
after we get home again. But I shall never see your country, Mr. Sên—or
Calcutta, or Damascus, or Venice, or Madrid. I shall travel in narrow
gray ways always. It is written.”
Sên shook his head. “We never can tell,” he reminded her.
“I can,” she said briefly.
He laughed at her again. Then—“Well, but, let me get out of debt then.”
“What is the debt?”
“May I tell you? I wonder. You, I fear, Miss Gilbert, will not like it.
It will not seem to you a compliment. But it _is_ one—from me. I’d like
to tell you. Shall I?”
The girl nodded—a little indifferently, a little coldly.
“I thought,” Sên answered gravely, “when I saw you there in the live-oak
trees this afternoon, that you looked something like a Chinese girl.”
Ivy Gilbert stiffened, her eyes grew icy. Sên King-lo had been right.
She did not like it at all.
But Sên King-lo went steadily on. “Forgive me, if you dislike it, resent
it so much. To me—it was a sip of cold water in a parching land, on a
parching day. Perhaps I was wrong. Probably I was—for I never have seen
a Chinese girl.”
Miss Gilbert’s resentment receded before her surprise.
“You never—have seen—a Chinese girl!” she said blankly.
“Not a lady,” he told her. “One sees coolie girls, of
course—everywhere. But I have been from home a great many years now.
When I was a boy Chinese ladies were not seen outside their own
homes—as so many of them are now, I understand. And I had no sisters.
My mother was only a girl when she left us, but I do not remember my
mother. I was very young, a baby, when she went. I know a Chinese lady
here and there: here in Washington, two; several in Europe—but they all
are married ladies—and, too, they often seem to me a little un-Chinese,
because they wear English clothes and eat with a fork—as, for the very
same reasons, I, no doubt, seem not quite Chinese to them.”
Miss Gilbert glanced down involuntarily at his hand—he was lifting food
with his fork, quite accustomedly—and she looked up again, a question
she would not have asked for worlds in her eyes.
“Yes, indeed,” Sên told her, “I can use chop-sticks. I can eat ice-cream
even with chop-sticks—if it is not very feeble—melted. But I like your
forks much better.”
The girl colored slightly in her surprise. She had yet to learn that
many Chinese can read thoughts almost as easily as they can read printed
words.
“I never have known a Chinese woman at all well. Miss Townsend is my
closest woman friend. Odd that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And I never have seen a Chinese girl of our own caste.”
Did he mean his own caste, or his and hers? Again the man had startled
her. It was a rather weird thought that in his opinion (in her opinion
it was an impossibility) she and any Chinese might have caste in
common—caste or any other social bond.
“I knew you were English before I saw you, because I had heard your
voice first. But when I looked to where the voice had sounded, it seemed
to me—just for a moment—that China was not the long way off that it
has been for years. You were wearing some material the color of much of
our rarest jade. Almost all the ladies here were wearing white. It often
looks to Chinese eyes as if every woman in the West went into mourning
as soon as summer comes. That always jars a little. We love summer—the
sun, the flowers, the heat, all that it stands for, and promises. Even
our terrible Yellow Sorrow laughs and is happy when summer comes.”
Ivy Gilbert had no idea what he meant. She never had heard of the
Yangtse-kiang. She scarcely knew whether China had a river. But Sên
King-lo, though he had had considerable gage of how dense the West’s ken
of the East was, did not suspect her ignorance. Perhaps—because of the
jade-green dress, Sên King-lo was forgetting himself a little. Even a
Chinese man does that—under certain provocation—at twenty-seven.
“White is our ‘black’ you know.”
Yes, she had heard that—though it isn’t quite true; for the hemp
garments of Chinese bereavement are nearer a dun drab than they are to
the white that snow and lilies wear.
“Your gown struck a note of Chinese color, those scarlet peppers”—she
was wearing them still—“struck another: their vividness and their
dangling. Every Chinese woman wears something that dangles.”
“How do you know?” she interrupted him. “How do you know what Chinese
_girls_ wear?”
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.”
The girl made no reply beyond a chill, perfunctory smile. She was
slightly amused, still more slightly interested, and not a little
offended.
She turned and, finding a chance, spoke with the man on her other side.
After that the table talk became more general—as Miss Julia best liked
it.
Much of it was talk well over Ivy Gilbert’s head. She had heard of the
League of Nations and she knew—superficially—what Bolshevism was, but
she never had heard of Lombroso, or of the cave-temples of Ajanta. She
did not know who Akbar and Barbur were. She did not know who “John Doe”
was. Nor what Pragmatism meant. She never had heard of Knut Hamsun. She
listened, not greatly interested, and she contributed nothing. And she
was vexed that the only two men of any special note or maturity there
directed a great deal of their conversation to Mr. Sên King-lo, and that
the part he bore in all that was said seemed not only the least mean and
quite the ablest, most interesting, but also the quickest and easiest.
Certainly his use of English was the supplest there. A _Chinese_ turn of
her wrist indeed! She wondered if the odd, tan-colored creature was able
to _think_ in English? He spoke the language—hers and
Shakespeare’s—almost as if he must think in it. And he must have been
speaking it for a good many years—his r’s were not l’s. There was more
a something Eastern in the timbre of his voice than anything distinctly
a foreigner’s in his accent. He spoke her own tongue more as she did,
more as she’d usually heard it at home—though perhaps not invariably in
Balham—as she always heard it in Washington, or heard it at Harvard or
under the elms of New Haven, when she’d been there last summer for a few
vivid international days.
There was no dancing after supper. There was chit-chat and music—out on
the porch. They sang “Annie Laurie” and “Oft in the Stilly Night” and a
fairly long program dictated by Miss Julia. Then she commanded Mr. Sên
to play—and to sing that little song she’d liked so much the other
night. But he had not brought an instrument—neither a lute nor his
guitar. Ivy Gilbert’s lip curled a little. So, he was a troubadour, too!
He ought to have worn his lute, or a gilded, inlaid harp, to the garden
party, slung over his shoulder on a ribbon. She wondered if he could use
his fists! Those delicate, graceful hands did not look as if they’d be
much good at fisticuffs!
“You are not to come without it again,” Miss Julia told him.
“When I call on Sunday mornings, or meet you at the Wardman Park Inn for
lunch, Madame?”
“You know what and when I mean,” Miss Julia told him severely. “Go and
get a banjo—or something.”
Sên King-lo rose instantly. “ ‘In all my best I shall obey you, Madame,’
” he said with a low and humble bow, and went off towards the “quarters”
beyond the kitchen-garden.
Did Miss Townsend lunch with a Chinese at the Wardman? Ivy wondered. Did
many women do so?
How—how extraordinary! But it was rather sporting of Miss Julia.
Sên came back presently from beyond the tomatoes and the cucumbers,
walking briskly, tuning a banjo as he came.
He sat down on the veranda steps, at Miss Julia’s feet, and began
thrumming an old camp-meeting song. Ivy Gilbert thought the words
preposterous, but the lilt was very pretty—and Miss Julia beat time
softly on the porch railing with her tortoise-shell lorgnette—and Miss
Julia joined in the chorus. Every one did—except Ivy Gilbert. He sang
“My Old Dutch”—Ivy knew that; and he sang a darky love-song. How could
_he_ do that? Then he started Harry Lauder’s London latest. And the
English girl, who never had heard of China’s Yellow Sorrow or of Omi or
of Marco Polo, had heard of Harry Lauder.
Miss Julia hinted deftly at “goodnight” with, “And now the best for the
last. One of your own!”
Sên King-lo made the borrowed banjo wail like a soft wind that grieved
and trembled in the moonlight—and then drifted words into the
accompaniment that the girl fancied he was improvising.
“There is some one of whom I keep a-thinking;
There is some one whom I visit in my dreams,
Though a hundred hills stand sentinel between us,
And the dark rage of a hundred sunless streams.
For the same bright moon is kind to us.
And the same untrammeled wind to us.
Daring a hundred hills,
Whispers the word that thrills.
And the dust of my heart, laid bare,
Shows the lilies that linger there,”
he sang.
And then the good-bys were said. And Miss Julia and Ivy Gilbert were
left alone.
Sên King-lo lingered over Miss Townsend’s hand. Ivy feared he was going
to offer to touch hers. But he did not, he merely bowed, and without
speaking.
The girl was grateful for that.
She stood a moment at her window, looking at the roses in the moonlight,
before she drew her curtain and began to undress. And, as she stood
looking out across the garden, she drew the scarlet peppers from her
bodice and threw them, testily, out into the night.