From then they were thrown together almost constantly—not by others,
but by circumstances and social accidents. And both to her surprise and
to his—more to his than to hers—their acquaintance rapidly grew into
friendship. It was nothing freakish, it was comradeship direct and
unsilly. They met often, and knew that they liked each other, and liked
to be together. They soon knew that they liked each other, but had no
realization of how much. Sên King-lo suspected it first. Their
divergences were a zest. And they had much in common, and that made
between them a bond. Each was lonely—Ivy sometimes, King-lo almost
always. Each was an alien, apart in an alien place. Each was at once
homesick and homeless. Each found refreshment and tonic in the other.
There were English traits and Chinese surprises in Sên, and personality
that attracted her strongly. They had a score of English experiences in
common. They were a boon to the homesick girl. The girl was virginal,
and that attracted greatly the man of a people who cherish and reverence
only one quality—maternity—more intensely than they do virginity. He
knew that her friendliness had in it nothing mawkish. And in the
wholesomeness of their friendship, and the wholesomeness and manliness
of the man, Ivy quite forgot her first cheap desire to pique the girls
who “ran after” him not too nicely. 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. She was grateful to him for being
always deferential, and often amusing, always companionable and
interesting, and for his dependability to know whether Eton or Harrow
had won at Lords, whether Surrey or Middlesex was at the top of the
cricket average, and all about every stroke Oxford and Cambridge had
made from Putney start to Mortlake finish.
The girl found the keener interest, the man stumbled into the stronger
liking. But while she found no fault in him, he found a terrible fault
in her, and it rankled his quickening and strengthening liking sorely;
her indifference to all children, even to her own little cousins. The
opal owes its loveliness and its lure to its flaw. The Chinese soul of
Sên King-lo could see nothing but deformity and disease in the slightest
flaw that even specked a girl’s womanliness. It grieved him that a girl
who, he knew, attracted him more each time they met did not care for
little children. He held it an enormity; it rankled and it bit.
Inside another month, all Washington—the “four hundred”—knew that Mr.
Sên and Miss Gilbert had become—to put it nicely—“great friends.” A
few were disgusted, most were amused, and not a few were jealous:
Reginald Hamilton and a few dozen women.
In all the antipathetical bewildering psychology of East and West there
is nothing more baffling than the lure of European women to Asiatic men.
Know the East longest, search it most tirelessly, grow most in sympathy
with it, and still you can see but darkly and not far into that
inter-racial puzzle and secret of human nature.
The average and the typical men of the Orient are excellent
husbands—polygamous?—granted. But what of their women? The “rights”
the men denied their wives for centuries of centuries those wives would
have resented as insult, spurned as outrage and burden. 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. His wives
rule and coerce him oftener than he does one of them. He locks them up
in some places, and in some castes. They’d berate and punish him if he
did not. The most ruthless ruler Afghanistan ever has had could not
control or direct his favorite wife. She over-sat, she over-ate, and she
over-smoked very badly indeed. Her physicians protested and warned. The
Amir was thoroughly frightened, greatly distressed. He cajoled, he
pleaded, he bribed with the moving bribery of pearls and jeweled tissues
and thick perfumes, and it is reported that at least twice he wept. But
the result was nothing. His wife laughed and pouted and scoffed and
defied and calmly and obstinately lolled, ate sweetmeats, and smoked
herself to obesity and death.
The Chinese man who launders undergarments and table linen or barters
_chop suey_ in Chicago or St. Louis, living in a dearth of Chinese
women, marries an American wife and makes her an admirable and a
generous husband. The Chinese merchant in the Straits Settlements
chooses a wife from any one of a score of non-Chinese races, and they
jog on together most comfortably, and he lets her rule such of their
life and hours as are mutual far more than he, although in intelligence,
education and principles she is his inferior, and he knows it. Chinese
men of education, of some natural taste and refinement, and with ideals
and sterling personal worth sometimes “take in washing” for a
profession, but American women of commensurate qualities do not marry
them. The Eastern man is proud of his woman, admires her and is
satisfied with her and her ways. He guards and he pampers her more often
than not—unless he’s a Japanese—the Parsi, the Sikh, the Chinese, the
Burmese (_he has_ to), the Cingalese, the Hindoo, yes, and the strict
Mohammedan too! And every Eastern man regards the “white” races as
inferior to his own, is convinced that they are, and looks down upon
them. He does not find Westerners companionable, he does not find them
handsome or beautiful. He dislikes their customs, abhors their dress,
and despises their creeds. And he loathes their food. Why, then, the
desire of the Oriental for a European (and the blonder the better)
mistress or wife? It seems inexplicable. But it _is_. The fact remains.
More than one ruler of an “independent” Indian State has married a
European of rougher birth, less education, more inferior mind, uncouther
manners than his own, and imperiled his throne and succession, even his
life in doing it—and knowing that he did.
But in the attraction that Sên King-lo felt in this English girl there
was no abnormality—unless the friendly touch of yellow and white hands
is in itself abnormality. He had been educated in her country and in its
ways. In much he _was_ English. He not only could read, write and speak
her language, but he could think in it—and often did. He had read more
English books than she had, knew more English facts than she did—and
knew far more of the deeds, the years, and the thought that have made
England. And between the typical English and the typical Chinese the
difference is surprisingly small—and is mostly superficial: a matter of
skin-tints and of bone-formation. There _is_ a spiritual difference—we
in England have not learned to repose on Nature, to merge in her as the
Chinese do, and we reverence ancestry and old age less, guard childhood
less loyally, less tenderly. But England grows—as America does—in all
this. And if the race of Shakespeare and Shelley and Newman lives up
less to its ideals, grasps them less and less generally than does the
race of Han, the ideals of the two—at best—are the same.
We—Anglo-Saxons and Celts—have less vision than the Chinese and its
interknit and absorbed races have, but a gleam glows in the sky of the
Occident—it peeps through the blanket of our dark. We are less insular
than we were—some of us at least. The Oriental lectures—than which
nothing in London is more worth having—at the School of Oriental
Studies in Finsbury Circus are sparsely attended, but some of us do go,
and come away grateful. The East always will be East—in spite of
intermittent, ape-like freaks. Probably the crasser West always will be
West. But the two may meet yet, concordant parts of one splendid whole.
The attraction of the Western woman for the Eastern man _in the West_ is
a simpler and a more normal thing than her attraction of him in the
East. Debarred from the womanhood of his own race in London or New York,
because there are no such women there, an Oriental’s leaning towards an
East-and-West marriage or intimacy has something of the humdrum quality
of poor Hobson’s narrowed choice.
Sên King-lo never had seen a Chinese girl!
Ivy Gilbert’s attraction of Sên first and last was a matter of
personality and of person.
Probably its next strength was a matter of caste. She seemed to him
wholly and charmingly patrician. Sên King-lo—as many young Chinese have
done ever since Wang-Ah Shih made an Empire and an Emperor
ridiculous—believed himself to be “republican”; but he was not. He
could not be. He saw in Ivy Gilbert the caste of his mothers—the
ancestral women he worshiped. He saw in Ivy—a slip of English
girlhood—the imperial feminine of a great, puissant, imperial people.
Republic, commonwealth, kingdom, democracy, empire—take your choice.
There are things to be said of them all—they all have their points. You
may not be able to choose an empire, if you’re too long about it—so
they say—well, we shall see, or our children’s children will.
Prophecy’s a thankless, perilous pastime. And even the writing on the
wall blunders sometimes. But this much is true; our old shifting Earth
has but two empires left her now—China’s and England’s. Japan doesn’t
count—yet. It mixes and meddles, but in the ultimate soul bigness _it
does not count_. And China’s a republic you say? China is not—never has
been and never can be, except in the fevered dreaming of a day of
midsummer madness, the demented throes of a short nightmare; there are
intrinsic qualities of peoples as of individual characters which no
label can change. 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. It is not distinction—though it
often includes it; it is not courage—though it never lacks it; it is
not flare or flame; it is not beauty; though never unfeminine it is not
femininity; it is not dignity, though it never is cheap, it never
asserts itself—it has no need to; it is not self-conscious; it is
neither humble nor proud and yet it is both; it is neither virtue nor
individuality; still less is it cant; it is empire—racial empire and
personal empire: a part and a whole. A thing to admire? That’s as you
think. But while the wild white rose perfumes the graves of Li’s
ancestors, and the Augean goats browse by the graves of English boys in
Gallipoli, that something will show in the faces of one type—the best
type—of Chinese and English women. Ts’z-hi had it, and Ivy Gilbert,
whatever medley her ancestry, undeniably had it, and the eyes of a
Chinese man, who had been a sash-wearer for thousands of years, saw it
and gloated. She wore it here in Washington; in the nursery schoolroom,
in the ballroom or at Rosehill, as Ts’z-hi had worn it in the Vermilion
Palace.
That Sên King-lo was attracted by Ivy Gilbert was not odd. That he
attracted her, would be longer to explain, if one could—more intricate
and difficult to trace. But he did. And her liking and friendliness
turned to him in the good old hackneyed way that sunflowers have turned
to the sun ever since Adam made the meanest and truest excuse in human
history.
She tempted him—though he didn’t know it yet.
Youth called to youth. Loneliness answered to loneliness. Sex called to
sex.