If Sên King-lo had such a desire, he was scarcely aware of it. And a
Chinese usually knows perfectly what all his own wishes are. There is
very little that floats; most is securely fixed in Chinese mentality and
character.
He had liked her at Miss Julia’s supper table, and on the porch after
supper, better than she had liked him, but she had interested him less
than he had interested her. In the garden, under the live-oaks she had
arrested his attention intensely. 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 the garden she had charmed him and simply and solely
because, as he had told her, she for a moment had looked to him less
un-Chinese, or, to coin a fitter word, less dis-Chinese than any not
Oriental woman had before, or than he’d have credited that any could.
She, the tilt of her head, her coloring, a look in her eyes, the
movement of her fine, blue-veined wrist, the jade-green of her
straight-cut gown, the scarlet peppers dangling charm-like at her
breast, the fan-used fern-frond, had made a sudden picture of home to
him. And Sên King-lo was homesick—sometimes very homesick. And if she
had looked to him a little Chinese-like, and he had been grateful to her
for that, what he’d by chance heard her say had quickened his admiration
as no mere beauty of person could have done—and Sên King-lo worshiped
beauty. In that he was true to type. Chinese religions are somewhat a
farce, a convention and not a force, but the Chinese strictly speaking
religionless, are intensely and vitally religious, and they worship but
two gods: ancestors and beauty. The technical gods of China are among
its servants—hewers of wood, drawers of water—engaged often by the
year or the day, treated and paid accordingly, punished when
recalcitrant or slothful, dismissed without a character if too
unsatisfactory. All of which the gods take lying down, and far more like
unto lambs than Chinese servants do, who often make the welkin ring with
their wailing and cursing.
When Ivy Gilbert had inveighed against kissing and being kissed she had
spoken straight to the soul (and the taste) of China, and the Chinese
soul of Sên King-lo had sprung to her in response. Sên King-lo was no
yellow-tinted “plaster saint.” But our Western habit of kissing,
meaninglessly and otherwise, revolted him as much today as it had when
his astonishment and disgust first had observed it. And he had avoided
it—always. Girls, and here and there a wife, here in America, across
the Atlantic, in several capitals—well, Sên King-lo knew that he might
have kissed, if he would. A girl who stayed away from a presumably
pleasant gaiety rather than receive a young hostess’ friendly kiss had
intrigued him. And that charm and approval held when he had found less
than he’d hoped in the girl at supper, and still held. But if she had
interested him less than he her, she had not altogether failed to
interest him, and he had liked her.
He had sent his violets (they’d cost a fraction of what Miss Julia’s
carnations had) with far less thought of further acquaintance than of
gratitude for the picture she’d made—she and her gown and peppers and
fan of fern. For that and for one other reason. Because of the picture
she’d made, and because her name was “Ivy.” He’d heard her called
so—and it had made an oddly strong appeal to him—a Chinese appeal.
He had bought and sent the little offering of fragrant flowers not from
any light or sudden impulse—Sên King-lo very rarely acted on
impulse—but in quiet acknowledgment of a debt; and because her name was
Ivy! Not very usual reasons for the sending of flowers—but then Sên
King-lo was Chinese.
In one thing Lucille had gossiped truly enough. Sên King-lo never had
sent flowers to a girl before. And he had done it this time without
either intention or any flicker of warmth. Just possibly the call of her
youth to his had sent its young, quick message through more than he
realized. Twenty-seven is not omniscient—not even twenty-seven of the
quicker sense and Chinese born. He had known no “girls” of his own race.
The many he’d known of the American and, but more slightly, half a dozen
European races, had sent no message along the nerve wires of his
personality, partly because they had both looked and seemed to him so
utterly foreign, and because they had not seemed to him altogether
girl-like. Miss Gilbert had had a hint of familiar look to him; she had
said a Chinese-like thing—the first thing he’d heard her say—and if
afterwards, she had not whipped his mind into foam and excitement, he
had thought her maidenly.
He had thought and sensed her maidenly. He was twenty-seven. And he was
a man.
And perhaps for this—certainly for something else—his face warmed when
the English girl’s note of thanks—the merest, meaningless line—came to
him on Monday.
Before he read it he saw how much he liked this girl’s writing. No other
people take handwriting so seriously as the Chinese do—put so much into
it, read so much from it. This was round, clear writing, individual and
decided; nothing Spencerian about it—as refreshing as a cup of cold
well-water on a very hot day—in a country where almost all handwritings
were disconcertingly, monotonously alike. It was an attractive
handwriting, and he thought it looked like its writer. It pleased him.
But it was something else that brought a soft flush to his face, a new
look in his eyes.
She had signed it in full:
“Sincerely,
“Ivy Ruby Gilbert.”
“Ivy _Ruby_! How strange!” he said under his breath. And he stood for a
time at the window looking out at the opposite house, and not seeing it.
Seeing a homestead in China where the hollyhocks and persimmons that
crowded about it were almost as gay as the roof of his birthplace, where
the flamingoes filched coolness from the tiny streamlet where the trout
were pinkest and sweetest—perhaps because of the tang of the citron and
lemon trees that hung over it, and the musk and mint and verbena that
clothed its banks, and the violets his mother had loved best of all
flowers grew in their delicate millions—his girl-mother whom he had
never seen, his mother, at whose grave his father had worshiped until
he’d gone to her “on high,” his mother who had died that his life might
come: a service of motherhood that gives a saintship of its own in
China, where mothers not so set apart are loved by sons as mothers are
nowhere else—a service that lays on a Chinese son a double duty and
joy—and, too, sorrow—of worship and remembrance. His mother had been
fifteen at his birth and her death. And her “milk-name,” the name her
husband always had called her, and called her in his sleep till he went
to her, was “Ruby.”