As he walked his horse slowly back to his rooms, Sên King-lo, thinking
the morning over, concluded that he liked the girl he had just ridden
with very much indeed. And he began to suspect that she was more
interesting than he had thought her. They had not said a great deal to
each other this morning—and none of it even remotely profound. He had
had to make all the conversational running at breakfast; and on
horseback, when the pace is swift, as most of their long ride had been,
is not provocative or well calculated for profound or subtle
conversation. But a thought-straw or two from the chaff of her small
talk had pointed, he thought, to a mental equipment less ordinary than
he had suspected. And she had seemed even younger today—looked younger
too, in the searching early light, though less Chinese in her
businesslike English riding gear than she had to him before—and she had
seemed to him intrinsically young each time they had met—as untraveled
twenty-two usually does to traveled twenty-seven. 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. Her reserve had seemed to
him from the first a trait of breeding, in no way a trait of shyness. In
truth, Ivy Gilbert had less claim to the title of “sash-wearer” than he
had—and less than he thought she showed. Her birth was far less
aristocratic than his, not so much because his ancestors had been noble
and distinguished for untarnished centuries when hers were wading
wode-clad or wodeless in the unreclaimed marshlands of Thorney, as
because many a plebeian ancestor had contributed to her being, and not
one to his. So far back that she barely knew it, and thought of it as
the long-off, hazy thing it was, there had been strawberry-leaves in Ivy
Gilbert’s ancestry, but both they and their bar sinister smelt strongly
of fish now—not the salt, fishy tang of scaled giants caught with peril
and prowess, but the staler smell of fish in shrouds of parsley and ice
on tradesmen’s marble slabs.
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. The twenty little flags of British preference
and prejudice she’d fluttered out, scarcely with cause, each time they’d
met, he took for a young and feminine display of a loyalty that was both
sound and sweet. He liked her for it. Her open affection and pride for
her cousin Charles, he liked her for, even more. Chinese loyalty has
been for its thousands of years far more a thing of family and clan than
of country or race—and Young China has had scant time to alter that
yet; and it was not altered in Sên King-lo. Her good-natured and sunny
treatment of him—so disliking him—he was very sure she disliked
him—seemed to him both good-breeding and pluck.
To a point he was right. It had been both—at first. For some quirk or
reason—he, try as he would, could not yet fathom what it was—she had
ridden with him sorely against her inclination, and having done it of
her own untrammeled determination—or freak—she had paid the small
social debt it obligated in sunny, good humored companionship; too
socially honest, too well-bred to default. Sên King-lo liked her for
that. Her honesty appealed to him—true son that he was of a race that
must, to a man, pay _all_ its debts in full at least once a year. Of how
many peoples can that be said? And again, Sên was right, up to a point.
The girl was too well-bred, too socially honest, having gone with him
voluntarily, to treat him sourly or over-stiffly, and not to do so _had_
taken pluck—at first. And he liked her for riding so well, as any man
who was horse-fond must have done.
Yes—he liked her. He liked her, of the women he knew here, next to Miss
Julia Townsend, perhaps. And he certainly liked her very much more than
he did even the least unlikeable of the unmarried girls and matrons who
banded together to “run after” him—a free, if not easy, inter-racial
attention that Sên King-lo valued the tawdry freak thing it was. It both
had amused and had bored him. But it never had flattered him. For the
quality of her liking, her friendship, her kindness, King-lo loved Miss
Julia. But for no one else in Christendom had he ever felt any
affection, until something of that feeling suddenly had sprung in him as
he sat alone in the dining-room with Sir Charles Snow.
This young Chinese was as little given to sudden likings as the
slow-to-decide Englishman was. But there are affinities of manliness and
of tastes that brook no delay, that defy barriers. And the quick and
sure Chinese intuition of the younger man had leapt to Snow’s worth and
congeniality almost on the instant.
Now and then, across the stretch of East and West, there are hands that
touch, and having touched, clasp.
Sên King-lo did not like Miss Gilbert—the girl with the Chinese-like
flower names—the less because she was Charles Snow’s cousin, or that
the cousinly bond between them so evidently was strong and close.
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. And
to his Chinese thinking even the slight ailment that kept her little
cousins prisoners in their own rooms would have been sufficient excuse
for the kinswoman, who had an almost maternal office over them, to have
denied herself to him altogether this morning, and have sent him and his
horse away from the door. They might be suffering, the poor little
tender things—and yet she had laughed and galloped, and her color had
deepened joyously, and her brown eyes sparkled care-free and happy. Was
she callous?
All Chinese adore all children. Nothing else in our West so repels them
as that there are among us some that do not.
He hoped he was wrong—she had seemed fond of her horse.
When he had tubbed again, Sên had his lunch-chop and hock alone.
Washington is as “dry” now as an autumn leaf in drought-time, of course;
and was then. But there still are cellars in Washington. In his own
house a man, and his guests, may do as he likes with his own. It seems
unlikely to be so long, but it is measurably so now. And the Chinese
Legation had its cellar—a very good cellar, though rarely broached
except on “guest-nights”; and Sên had its freedom. He would not have
bought hock now, imported since 1914. He did not relish Colonial wines.
But the hock that had been bought and paid for—he feared it had been
paid for—before the War, he drank and enjoyed.
It was no new thing for Sên to eat alone. For so popular and courted a
man, he spent a great deal of time in his own nook—his oak
well-sported. And for so busy a man, he seemed to have, or to make
himself, a great deal of leisure.
To be alone, and to be at leisure rather frequently, was a necessity of
his Chinese being. He spoke three European tongues idiomatically, and
almost without accent. He spoke English so well that when he did, he
thought in English. A very rare and delicate feat that! He could do most
things that Englishmen could do, and some of them he did better than
many Englishmen could. His Western on-growths were genuine and vigorous.
But they all were graftings. No sap of them had permeated backwards into
the trunk or core of his nature. 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. And even the work-driven coolie, who labors
and toils and reeks in his sweat almost from dawn to dawn, snatches a
soul-breather now and then, alone with his pipe, or a growing flower, a
bamboo clump, a rushing river’s bank, a bird on a bough. He must.
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.
When he had lunched—he had called at the florist’s on his way home, and
had written his note to Lady Snow at his club, before he went to New
Hampshire Avenue—he curled up on a divan with a book—poems that
Po-Chii-i had written eleven hundred years ago. He read slowly and
steadily—pausing to dream now and then—reading many verses over and
over—while the pleasant noises of Washington droned unheeded in at his
wide-open window, and he did not lay Po-Chii-i’s old singing aside till
Kow Li brought in his tea: true Chinese tea that can be bought in no
Western shop. But Sên made no ceremony of his tea-drinking, though it
cost him neither cream nor sugar. And he munched a toasted, buttered
muffin and two plump éclairs to the last crumb.
When Kow Li had cleared away the small tea-service, Sên sat, until it
was time to change for dinner, almost without moving in his
easy-chair—and thought. It’s a Chinese habit—the breath of the Chinese
mind. A Chinese must meditate—or die. 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. And there were a number of
Western superficialities that he preferred to their Eastern substitutes.
He not only liked silver forks better than he did ivory chop-sticks, and
glass finger-bowls better than a steaming wet towel, and preferred
mattress, blankets, sheets and soft pillows, to a mat and a hard
cylinder pillow—though in England, and when well dog-tired after a
hunting day, he more than once had sat up all night, in protest against
the feather-bed his hostess had assigned to him—but he had grown so
accustomed to English clothes that he no longer realized how much more
comfortable, and in most ways preferable, were the men’s garments of old
Pekin.
With his after-dinner cigarette, Sên remembered the confession he’d
promised to make—in a book. Where was it? Kow would know, and when Sên
rang, Kow did.
Sên made himself very comfortable in his biggest arm-chair, and
leisurely studied the book. In a way, it proved better worth the trouble
than confession-books often do. Ivy had passed it about with
discrimination. A number of distinguished men, and one or two such
women, had written in it; notables whose acquaintance she had owed, no
doubt, to Sir Charles. As he read and studied, Sên grew really
interested. His “mea culpa” was going into uncommonly good-fellowship.
There was not a nobody there! Unless Miss Gilbert herself was “no one.”
Certainly Julia Calhoun Townsend was not even remotely a nobody. And
almost every other name signatured there was known and reputed beyond
both the width and the length of the Potomac.
He smiled reverently at Miss Julia’s spidery tellings—and read them
twice for their perfume of a sweet and aromatic personality. Ivy’s own
“confession” was naïve and girlish—written several years ago on the
birthday the book had been given her. But it surprised even more than it
interested him. It interested him even more than he knew. His browsing
of it outlasted an entire cigarette; and Sên smoked slowly. Yes, the
girl was interesting, and very much more intelligent than he had
supposed. He wondered if many English girls of sixteen—the book told
him that she’d been sixteen when she received it six years ago—were so
intelligent and so out of the ruts. He looked at the date her
“confession” gave, and he made a mental note of it. Then he thought
better of that, and penciled a note on his cuff. But what surprised him
most—and it amused him—was that several of her answers were identical
with those he’d write in a few moments—if he wrote quite truly. So
Grieg was her favorite composer as well as his own. There were several
pastimes that he cared for even more than he did riding. But Velasquez
and Turner were his favorite painters—of Western ones. Miss Gilbert
could not be expected to have heard of Ma Yuen—much less to have seen
even one of his silks. And he too preferred Thackeray to Dickens.
Lemon-yellow was the color that too pleased him most. The harp was also
his favorite instrument. Spain was not the country he most wished to
see—for he had seen Spain, had spent almost a year there. What she most
disliked was vulgarity and disloyalty. That was true of him. He thought
best of the living reigning monarch of whom she did. Really—the thing
was a little ridiculous. She liked prose better than she did
poetry—well, that was one escape. And there were other safety-valves.
He rose with a light laugh, and carried the telltale volume to his
writing-table—a table of hybrid impedimenta; for Sên King-lo usually
brushed the letters he wrote to China; and he had no intention of
forgetting to write his own language in the old Chinese way in which Tu
Fu and Li T’ai Po and his own father had written it.
He found his vacant pages; a pair that followed a pair, and dipped his
brush in the ink. And when he also had written in English and the last
page was dry, he closed the book, and strolled to the still-open window.
He’d send Kow Li with the book tomorrow. He had kept it long enough.
“What a woman wants, she wants quickly. Only men have the strength to
wait.” Which of the philosophers had said that? Odd, he’d forgotten—but
he had. Kow should carry the book back tomorrow, and ask for news of
Lady Snow’s hurt, and of her children’s colds. He wished he had not sent
those tea-roses today. Lilies-of-the-valley were her favorite flowers—a
flower she never had seen was his. He’d like to send her valley lilies
with her book. But you couldn’t send tea-roses one day and
lilies-of-the-valley the next. Bother those roses!
He wondered if Miss Gilbert would ride with him again. He hoped so. But
the next time, if there was one, should be fully as much her doing as
his. That was only fair to her. Sên King-lo had neither wish nor
willingness to push any woman’s inclination—not even Miss Julia’s,
whose proved warm friendship gave him some license—least of all that of
a girl who had no great liking for him or his company. But he wondered
if she would pave the way for him to ask if they might go again. He
hoped so. And a very slight and delicate pavement would do.
He strolled back from the window, and sat up till nearly daylight
puzzling over a game of chess he was playing with a friend in Siangtan.
But first he copied the date on his cuff into a notebook.
Kow Li did not go to Massachusetts Avenue the next day.
More ciphered cables come to Washington than those that are sent from
Downing Street and Whitehall or Threadneedle and Lombard Streets. A
disquieting cable came from Pekin to Sên King-lo as he breakfasted, and
he forgot all about Miss Gilbert’s confession-book.