Three years had passed.
All had gone well with Mr. and Mrs. Sên. There had been tiny rasps, of
course; but they had been very tiny and had gone almost as soon as they
had come. And neither the man nor his wife had had a regret. Sên had
been busy, prosperous and content—keen on his “job,” proud of his wife,
desperately fond of her still. And, if China had called to him now and
then, he had kept it to himself. Ivy had had three years of happiness
and good times, and she had enjoyed every hour of it. Her husband had
proved the best of long-distance companions, and his intimate charm had
even increased with their days. London society, the grave and best, as
well as the gay, had given them both cordial welcome, with never a shrug
or the breath of a slur. Sên King-lo had a very long purse now, and he
took a still boyish delight in having his beautiful wife dip into it.
There was no question now of needed new gloves or homemade blouses and
jumpers for young Mrs. Sên. They met great folk on a parity. Ruben,
their baby, had his father’s sunny temper and strong self-control, and
though he had his mother’s dark gold-brown eyes, straight-set, was
almost a blonde: an Anglo-Saxon baby, deliciously and ridiculously fat,
great pals with his father and very much in love with his mother.
They had a rambling old house, discreetly modernised, delightfully
furnished, a skilfully “old-world” garden about it, Kensington High
Street not much more than a stone’s throw away, and a tiny rose-covered
crib on the river. Their love had held and had grown, and their
congeniality and mutual confidence were entire. Mrs. Sên had left almost
her last annoyance on Fifth Avenue and at Tiffany’s—and only two had
come to her since, both so small that they scarcely are worth
mentioning, even if straws do have a reputed significance.
When the first bewitchery wore off, she discovered that she disliked her
new name—and that it embarrassed her. And, believing her slightest wish
her man’s sacred law, she suggested modifying and (as she thought,
though she didn’t say it) “civilizing” Sên into “Senn.” She even went so
far on that road as to have visiting cards engraved “Mrs. K. L. Senn”
and handed one to King-lo as he sat reading in her room after tea.
“Who is she?” he asked with a smile. “A new acquaintance or an old one
who has found you again?”
His wife made him a very low bow. “Behold her!” she said.
He understood on the instant—and he sensed a chasm ahead, a yawning
rent in their future.
But his face did not change.
He drew his wife down on to his knee, and, with his face on hers, told
her that she might not rename herself “Mrs. K. L. Senn,” nor anything
else. How her wish to do it had cut him, he did not tell her, and she
never suspected it even. She yielded, but she was vexed and
disappointed. But she put the alias-cards in the fire and soon forgot
all about it, disappointment and all. But Sên King-lo’s hurt stayed.
And when she saw her name, as he and thousands of Chinese years had
given it to her, engraved on the cards she ordered the next day, she
decided that Sên had a _chic_ of its own. (The venerable name, the
honorable name of Sên, _chic_!) She grew fond of writing her name and
took special pleasure and pains in making the tent-like accent and
perching it as carefully and daintily over its “e” as she did a new
toque on her beautifully dressed hair. And she found that its very
unusualness made it a social asset—if a cheap one—in avid London; and
revalued it for this. Her handwriting was as individual and almost as
pretty as she was—and many more than her husband thought so—and her
name as she wrote it looked particularly well. She always signed herself
“Ruby Sên.” And Sên King-lo never asked her to write it “Sên Ruby.” But
he wished it.
The other small cloud was a name-cloud, too, and more permanent.
Mrs. Sên did not know what to call her husband. “King-lo” she did not
care for—she thought it had a heathenish sound, and smacked of
Limehouse laundries—though she had the sweet good taste never to tell
Sên so. “King” by itself she particularly disliked. “It would be too
silly to call you ‘King’ all over the place when you’re only a Mister.
And I won’t call you ‘Sên,’ for you are not a peer.” She tried to invent
a name of her own for him but couldn’t find one. Finally she called him
“Lo” thinking it funny and short and belittling at first. But she soon
forgot that she had, and Sên thought its sound from her lips the
sweetest sound he’d ever heard.
And beyond these two Ivy had never felt a shadow since she sailed from
New York City in a jade-colored green dress that she had worn once at a
Rosehill garden party.
The baby could not write its name yet—some five-months-old babies
cannot—and no question had arisen as yet as to whether that important
signature would be “Ruben Sên” or “Sên Ruben.” Sên King-lo had named
their firstborn, rather insisting on “Ruben” in place of the “Ruby” he
had wished. But he realized that even a Chinese man—very probably a
future great President—could not appropriately go through life and
international preëminence under the winsome name of Ruby. But the father
liked the sound of “Ruben” better than the mother did.
Ruby—the young mother—enjoyed her social popularity keenly, and
neither she nor Sên suspected that it had grown even more from the
estimate in which several eminent people held him than from the
undeniable charm of her personality and easy adaptability. She loved her
home, especially the rose-covered crib with only room for two. She
enjoyed her husband’s “vogue” and his cordial welcome in high places.
But most of all she loved her husband and child—and King-lo the dearer
of the two.
No one looked at them with unpleasant surprise. London has an easy grace
of the darker strangers within her imperial gates. And Mrs. Sên soon
realized that in Mayfair there was more distinction than disgrace in
being the English wife of Sên King-lo. And, whatever they thought or
felt about it there, they were very kind to Mrs. Sên at Portland Place
where the five-colors flag flew. She made his Chinese friends welcome
and was sweetly cordial to them, and most of them liked her. The Chinese
in London grow in numbers, and there are many of a birth and class that
do not affiliate with Limehouse. But their home and home-life were
English. Kwan Yin-ko hung beside their bed, and an old Chinese miniature
of an older “Ruby” was locked away in Sên King-lo’s own “den.” But there
was nothing else Chinese in the house. Few smart houses in Hampstead,
Mayfair, Chelsea or Kensington but had more Chinese curios than the
Sêns’ had. It was both kind and wise of Mr. Sên, many sage folk said.
But they misjudged him there. It _was_ Sên’s doing, not his English
wife’s; but it was a selfishness—almost his sole one. He did not wish
too many material reminders about him of the homeland he had forsaken.
England was his home now, and he did not intend ever again to be
homesick for China, and he cut the risks of it as close as he could. But
he still read his own classics, when he sat alone in his den, and the
love-songs of Li-Po. A man cannot forgo the books that were the mother’s
milk of his soul.
And Sên King-lo still brushed many a letter to friends in Chinese—not
all of them business letters. And he still sometimes played a game of
chess with an opponent in Shansi, and he often heard the Yellow Sorrow
surge and creak—in his dreams as he slept.
But most of his nights were untroubled and dreamless, and whatever his
sleep, he woke each day to a deeper and more tender love of the girl who
lay beside him.
King-lo always woke the earlier. For centuries his people had waked at
dawn, and the old race-habit stayed.
When King-lo woke he scarcely stirred lest he disturb her. Sometimes he
drew a book from his bedside table and kept himself quiet with the
volume’s pages till she moved and he turned to greet her waking. But
oftener Sên King-lo lifted his chin on an elbow-supported hand and
watched and worshiped the girlish loveliness of the delicate face asleep
on its pillow. He thought of the girl on whose face he had laid his face
as they stood by an old fallen apple-tree, the girl he had taken to wife
one early morning in a crumbling, dreary church, on an old-fashioned
street—a church that had not been any god-place of his churchless
people—in the crown-city of an alien people, the Queen City of the
Potomac. Though he’d loved the girl well, and had dared to risk for her
the convictions of his being and the future of all his years, in
defiance of the instincts of centuries and the laws of his fathers, she
had not been loved as he loved his wife resting beside him, sleeping
safe and secure in his love and in the keeping of his manhood. Day after
day Sên King-lo’s soul kept a sacred tryst with the woman who slept
happily there while the sun came back from China, going its way to
China, rose over New York City, throwing splashes of gold over
skyscrapers, Central Park, boat-busy river, “Flat Iron” and ocean.
They had had many a golden jaunt together—a month in Venice, wonderful
weeks in Spain, again and again a week in Paris—these married lovers
and best of friends, before Ruben had come to call a halt to their
journeying and make their London life more of a permanency than it had
been. They had learned North Wales together and watched Windermere. No
reasonable wife could have seriously asked more of marriage and husband
than Sên King-lo had given her. And riant Mrs. Sên was a very reasonable
and entirely contented woman.