Two more days passed, and then Sên came.
Ivy met him gaily, bearing herself so naturally, her gaiety so
unexaggerated, that she almost deceived herself and must have deceived
him completely, if it ever had entered his head that she cared for him
at all beyond friendliness—which it never had. He knew the signs of
open and almost-open infatuation; these signs had been hurled at him too
hard and too persistently not to have driven their flagrant message in.
But the signs of a rapprochement that gave no sign and offered or asked
no approach were hidden from his sharp eyes. And the warming inclination
of an essentially modest girl, who also was both proud and self-in-hand,
showed not at all to Sên, who not only was not vain, but even was
modest.
Their camaraderie went on as it had. Ivy was too proud to check it at
all, and after a little, even to her shocked sensitiveness, much of the
gnawing bitterness wore away, and all the pleasure and sweetness stayed.
Her disgust and self-revulsion because she had turned in personal
affection—emotion even—to a man so set from her by race quite slipped
away, and only her shame at loving unloved and unsought remained.
Again she found it hard to remember that Sên was Chinese—less of her
own race than a Spaniard or Russian was. It was _he_, his personality
that appealed to and pleased her, and she did not realize that his race
was a strong and essential part of both, and that in both he was
intensely Chinese. To her he was merely the man, because so much _the_
man.
And when she did think about it—that he was Chinese, she English—it
gradually grew to her a lesser and almost negligible thing. Chinese and
English of gentle birth did not marry. But _was_ it a sound decency or
only a cheap and sorry prejudice that barred the way? Inherited reason
said “decency,” but her heart and her own estimate of Sên, her own
satisfaction and ease in his companionship, leaned to the other answer.
She ceased to feel any shame that she had given her love—for she was
relentlessly frank with herself as to that—to an Asian. But that she
had let herself care for a man who gave her no thought of that sort in
return shamed her cruelly. And she guarded her secret well—now that she
knew it herself. Her ignorance had been her danger-time. It was past.
She guarded it so well that she deceived eyes sharper to the thing she
hid than were the eyes of unsuspecting Sên King-lo. And he had no need
to guard. It is easy enough to hide what does not exist. Even Lady Snow
began to think that her alarm had barked up a phantom tree, and laughed
at herself—and was glad. And Sir Charles laughed up his sleeve at his
fanciful wife, and Miss Julia laughed scornfully up hers at Elenore Ray.
And only Dr. Ray was not deceived—and said nothing. She saw it all—saw
even what neither Ivy nor Sên did. And things went on between Sên
King-lo and the English girl as they had—but they went; they did not
stand quite stock still. Things are not apt to do that between a man and
a maid in springtime. He told her more and more of China than he had,
and she learned how to write her second name in Chinese, and one day—it
was almost May—Sên King-lo filled the blank he had left in the
confession-book. And Ivy locked the book away—not to be written in
again, she intended. But she took it out and looked in it sometimes.
In April the spring was coming. Soft sticky things showed on the
leaf-bare trees, if you looked close enough. The grass was reasserting
itself. Poor people slacked their fires. Fruit from “down South” was
cheaper. Stuffs in the drygoods shops were thinner and paler. The skies
gave a promise of summer. The moon laughed again, and some days at
noontide the Potomac laughed back at the sun. The magnolia on Miss
Julia’s sunniest wall hinted of buds, and then the buds began to swell,
and Lysander and Dinah sorted out turkey-wings and long-handled brooms
of peacocks’ feathers against the coming of flies, and spoke of “them
ornery niggah’s summer cloes,” and dreamed at night of big watermelons
and green peas.
Ivy just glanced at the house on the other side of the street as she and
Sên passed it as they were walking together one late April day. She knew
from the number that he lived over there and, from what Emma had said,
which were his sitting-room windows, but she never had happened to pass
it on foot and in day-time. She had sent notes to him there, but she was
not a girl who would go to look where a man friend lived. She made no
remark about it now, and neither did he.
“I think you are wrong,” he was saying. “As I read it, Ruskin meant——”
Ivy caught his arm and gave a cry.
Two small spotted ponies had dashed madly around the corner from M
Street, not quite missing the sharp curb; ponies she usually drove
herself when the children _would_ go and Watkins could not be spared. A
very small groom with a very white face was seesawing wildly at the
reins, just the one thing to infuriate the already crazily maddened
ponies. Who had trusted Buttons to drive? Where was Charlie? Was Emma
mad? Justine should go for this. Blanche was sobbing and screaming
betimes. Dick seemed in scarcely manlier shape, and just as Sên dashed
towards the ponies and caught their bridles as in a vise, Dick screamed,
and jumped. Buttons gave a superhuman wrench at the reins—one rein
broke—and the low phaeton lurched over. Both the children were pinioned
under its wreck.
The maddened ponies squealed with fear and rage. They were trembling
violently, but they moved on not an inch more. Sên King-lo was holding
them. He dared not leave their heads, but Ivy, steeling herself to go to
him, saw the agony on his face as he looked at the turned-over trap
under which the children lay. The boy driver sat on the sidewalk crying
weakly.
“Can you pull the whip out from under there—it is under the wheel—and
give him a cut?” Sên asked.
“Perhaps he is hurt,” Ivy murmured shakily.
“I don’t care if he is dead,” Sên snapped. “You and he must lift it off
those babies. Be quick! But first put your hand in my pocket—trouser
pocket—this left one—get my knife—open it. Can you cut the traces? Be
quick!”
She fumbled with the knife, but—though she ripped her light glove and
tore her nail—she could not open the blade. The ponies were plunging
wildly, and they were strong little beasts—only the man holding them
now ever would know how strong.
Sên called sharply to the boy squat on the curb; but Buttons sat still
and continued to blubber.
“Hold it up to my mouth—but look out for their hoofs!” Sên told her.
Ivy obeyed, but as his teeth tugged at the blade—perhaps her hands
trembled a little in spite of her, for a moan of pain came from under
the overturned phaeton—the blade slipped and a trickle of blood went
from Sên’s lip to his stern-set chin.
“Now cut the traces. You must!”
Ivy tried.
“Saw—saw like hell!”
The moments seemed like hours. Sên knew that the sinews of his left arms
were perilously strained—that was nothing, if only their strength
held—and Ivy thought that she was only scratching the strong leather
she tried to cut.
Oddly so at this hour, the street seemed deserted—no other help in
sight or call.
One trace gave a little—then snapped.
“The other!” Sên commanded. “Don’t get too near when you go round. Keep
clear of their legs. Be as quick as you can!”
She thought her strength was failing; she knew her legs shook; but she
made the attempt and reached the other side and feebly attacked the
second trace. Sên’s task was harder now, because of the one severed
trace which, light as the little carriage was, had served in the
entanglement as some slight cheek on the plunging, straining ponies.
A window went up, a colored woman looked out and screamed. A
perambulator jolted round the corner. Small beginnings and not helpful
ones; but the inevitable crowd was coming at last, and just as the knife
slipped from Ivy’s unnerved fingers, a very fat, deliberate policeman
sauntered into sight. But he was worthy his uniform, for he instantly
saw his need and filled it; ran to Sên’s side, blowing his whistle as he
ran, and caught at the near pony’s bit.
“I can hold them,” Sên said. “Get the trap off—carefully—there are
children under it.”
“There would be!” the policeman grumbled. But again he lost no time, and
as men and women, sundry children and dogs, and a cautious sprinkling of
cats thickened the street into a crowd, and more heads showed at
windows, and people on steps, he, unaided, lifted the wreck off, clear
from the little bodies beneath.
There was blood. Dick lay badly still. Blanche was moaning.
Help had come to Sên in abundance now—another policeman, a handsome
young Jew—who didn’t need to be told, but did it; a maiden lady who
wore a green beige veil over a New England bombazine bonnet and
steel-rimmed spectacles on her high-bridged nose; a Jesuit priest and a
Salvation corporal. The men were enough to hold the still struggling
runaways as securely as Sên had done alone; and the ponies already were
growing quieter under the hand and the voice of the old New England
woman, speaking to them companionably, as she fearlessly stroked and
patted them. So Sên King-lo, with questioning torture in his eyes, Saxon
pallor on his tawny face, and sickening pain in his shoulders, left the
newcomers in charge there, and went to Ivy just in time to see her kneel
down and gather Blanche up in her arms. He saw how gently she did it,
saw the look on her face, the tears in her eyes, and that she would not
let them fall, and he saw the welcoming gladness on the welcoming baby
face as Ivy lifted Blanche up and nested the child’s bleeding face
against her girlish breast.
Sên lifted motionless Dick and bent his ear to the boy’s face. Dick was
breathing.
They carried the children up to Sên’s rooms—the constables protesting
and suggesting the ambulance. But they accepted Ivy’s, “I am their
cousin,” Sên King-lo’s more imperative, “’Phone for their father —Sir
Charles Snow—British Embassy;—Massachusetts Avenue, if he’s gone home.
I am taking them to my rooms.” And the policeman who had seen Sên
holding the demented ponies even put his finger up to his helmet.