Dr. Ray came soon after breakfast the next morning, and she stayed all
day.
“Here is your bridesmaid,” she told Ivy gaily, as she took Mrs. Sên in
her arms, then put her away a little to search the younger face with
shrewd, beautiful eyes that hid the anxiety they felt. “I’m having the
time of my life. Nothing but slang will express it. Between Julia
Calhoun and this marvel of a place and the hotel bills, I’m quite off my
head. How are you, my child! But you needn’t tell me; I only asked for
manners. I can see how you are!”
Ivy laughed happily. “How is Miss Julia?” she asked gently.
“More so than ever,” Dr. Ray replied. “How I ever am to get her home
again, I don’t know. I thought I’d never get her away from Honolulu. I
must not say that she went surf-riding, for she didn’t; but I know she
wanted to.”
“Scandal!” Sên King-lo rebuked their guest with a quiet laugh.
“Not a bit of it,” Dr. Ray protested. “The scandal is coming. But she
watched the surf-riding and loved it. She bought a Hawaiian phrase-book
and climbed up Diamond Head road to the peak on a pony. She wore a
_lei_! She went to a moonlight picnic at Weiniea, and she saw a hula
dance.”
Sên King-lo’s face broke into ripples of fun, as only a Chinese face
can, and then the room moaned with his laughter.
“But,” Ivy expostulated, “Dr. Ray! How could you let her do it!”
“Let her! Have you never seen Julia Townsend with the bit between her
teeth? I have. Let her, indeed! I assure you, this is _her_ trip, and
she runs no risk of my forgetting it. She asserts herself.”
“She always did,” Sên said, with a tender smile on his handsome mouth.
“Yes,” his wife agreed, “in her quiet, beautiful way.”
“Oh, Julia is quiet still. But there is a sort of wonderful, hushed
splendor about her. I believe she has grown an inch since we left
Washington.”
“In width?” Mrs. Sên asked smoothly. And they both knew that she meant
not “width” but “breadth.”
The physician shook her head. “But I wish you could see the way she
carries her head, the history of all the Townsends in her face, a
child’s unspoilt joy in her eyes, and the Star-Spangled Banner waving
over her.”
“The Star-Spangled Banner?” Sên reminded.
“It was her fathers’ flag for nearly a hundred years, Mr. Sên. At home
she is a Southern woman first and last. ‘Dixie’ is her anthem, Lincoln
and Grant anathema. But here she is just an American woman, proud of
every state in the Union.”
“Then she _has_ broadened—very much,” Mrs. Sên exclaimed.
“No,” Sên objected. “I fancy it’s merely a matter of breeding; ‘company
manners’ abroad.”
“Precisely,” Dr. Ray agreed, “a sort of traveling cloak that she
considers it good taste to wear. But, by the way, Ivy, I did not ‘let’
Miss Julia attend the hula dance. I was not there and did not even know
anything of her going until several days later. I was away in Molokai.
This is a pleasure jaunt for Julia, but I came for a different purpose.
There are several diseases that I have wished for years to see at short
range in their native lairs. And when I found that Miss Townsend really
was making this trip—the wisest thing she ever had done, I thought at
the time, and now I know that it was—I almost instantly decided to link
my travel up with Julia’s, and that’s how I come to be here now. Oh! Is
that Ruben?” She left the chair that Sên had placed for her where the
shaded breeze came in from the garden and took up the photograph in the
lacquered frame and studied it minutely, with wise, kind eyes that again
told very little of the thoughts behind them. “Very, very charming!” was
her comment as she replaced it.
“He doesn’t favor my side of the house, does he!” Sên King-lo demanded
with a laugh. “Our son is very English.”
“Very, and very handsome!” Dr. Ray answered cordially. But to herself
the physician added: “And more interesting than handsome. He is your
_first-born_: a throw-back, of course, to some blonde ancestor of your
wife’s. Baby number two may be as Chinese as baby number one is Saxon.
What then?”
“What did Miss Julia think of the _hula_ dance?” Sên King-lo asked
slyly, as they sat at lunch.
“That,” Elenore Ray replied, “I have not been told. She has never
referred to it; but I gathered from Dinah that her mistress spent the
next day in bed, with the blinds down. Uncle Lysander was certain sure
powerful scandalized. He claims to have blushed all over and to have
been nuffin but a jelly.”
“What do Lysander and Dinah think of China?” Sên persisted.
“Lysander is as frightened as if he were alone in a churchyard at
midnight,” Dr. Ray told them cheerfully, “and Dinah giggles more than
ever. I have to give her ‘drops’ every night to calm her—and I make
them bitter. Dinah does not add to the dignity of our party. Now it is
my turn to ask questions.” And she turned the talk into more impersonal
channels.
As she and Ivy sat alone for an hour in the garden after lunch, they
spoke only of Washington. The visitor felt no impulse to question young
Mrs. Sên. Her trained eyes had seen with their first glance in the
drawing-room that all was well with Sên King-lo’s English wife. There
was not a cloud the size of a baby’s palm in Ivy Sên’s horizon—or, if
there were, Ivy had neither seen nor sensed it. Their friend too had
seen, clearly enough, that the affection and confidence between husband
and wife had endured and grown. But she had caught a look once or twice
in Sên’s Chinese eyes that she had not liked. And when Ivy in her turn
left Dr. Ray and King-lo alone for half an hour—not in neglect of a
guest but because the English letters had come and because she knew how
well they two would entertain and satisfy each other—the physician
turned to Sên presently and asked him, as the quality of their mutual
friendship and respect licensed her to, “Tell me, my friend, how has it
worked?”
“Can’t you see?” Sên King-lo questioned for question.
“I see that your wife is perfectly happy. I see that you are beautifully
satisfied in each other and that, if you and she could shut the world
out and keep it shut out, all would be very well indeed with you both.
But that is just what none of us can do—and perhaps have no right to
attempt to do. Most of our troubles come to us from outside, I think. I
believe that the vital germs of every one of them—always—are in
ourselves, either in some quality of ours or in some conduct, but that
it usually is the friction of cross-currents that develops them.
Something troubles you, Mr. Sên. May I know? Can I help? It is the
friend that asks, but it just might be possible for the doctor to
help—to see the way out.”
“May I smoke?” King-lo asked her, and lit his cigarette slowly. Through
its slender smoke he sat and watched the bungalow garden, its bamboos
and tulips and fern-trees, and Hongkong down below the twisting roadway,
with its blur and huddle of Chinese homes and shops and markets, and the
gaunter, though prouder, assertion of Europe’s overlordship, and the
turquoise sea beyond it.
“It has worked perfectly,” he said after a time. “We have had no
regret—neither of us. Ruby, I think, has not had an anxiety. I, when
Ruben was coming, had my bad half-hours. A Chinese baby would have been
a complication, even in London, the kindest, least censorious place on
earth and the most sincerely cosmopolitan. You see a greater and a more
obvious mingling—or, at least, mixture of races in many other places;
Constantinople, Venice, San Francisco, and twenty others. But it is only
in London—only in London of all the world—that there is genuine
welcome for the strangers within the gates. But in London itself there
would have been no place for a Chinese child _of ours_. And also, I
wondered how the sight of a Chinese baby in her arms—at her
breast—would affect Ruby. I have the type of Chinese face—that we
Chinese have now and then—that does not bear country stamped on it too
strongly. I might pass as any one of several races, two or three of them
not Oriental or only remotely so, but it’s not a family trait. Every
other Sên I ever saw and every other Pei-fu—my mother was a Pei-fu
before her marriage—has been unmistakably, strikingly Chinese in
appearance. And Ruby was used to me. She scarcely remembered, except in
a hazy, detached way, that I was not English. But Nature plays many
tricks, but will brook none played on her. The Mongolian is a persistent
type; and such mixed marriages as ours, through some inscrutable law of
Nature, seem almost sure to perpetuate, and even to emphasize, one
racial type and to ignore the other.”
“Yes,” the physician murmured.
“I knew that our child might be born more Chinese than the Chinese—and
I wondered if I might not see my wife shrink, even a little, from the
child our love had given us. I was hideously anxious for her. And I
dared not say one word, give one hint, to prepare her; help her, as that
perhaps might have done, to resist an almost inevitable revulsion—to
destroy it before it existed. But Nature spared us!”
“This time,” the physician thought to herself.
“When I saw how lily-fair our babe was——”
“So you quite forgave him for looking so little like your own people? I
wondered, if you had, if you _could_, when I saw his picture just now.”
“I worshiped him for what he had spared his mother,” Sên King-lo said
simply.
“He certainly looks a changeling, even for a child of Ivy’s,” Elenore
Ray said musingly. “Atavism is intensely interesting—and very
baffling.” She added, “What is it that is troubling you, nagging you,
then!—if I may know?”
“You have used the one right word, Dr. Ray, ‘nagging.’ When the
messages—there were two—came that called me to China, I tried to come
alone; but my wife would not let me.”
“No, of course,” the woman said regretfully. “Must you be here long—in
China?”
So she knew, had divined, what his trouble was, understood half of his
dual trouble—for Sên King-lo was carrying two, and they were quite
distinct—knew without any need of being told! But because she had asked
him, and because it was a relief to speak to one he so trusted and
liked, of what he could not have spoken to any one else, unless perhaps
to Charles Snow, Sên King-lo went on.
“As short a time as I can make it,” he replied. “She wanted to bring our
boy with us, of course; but there I would not yield, and our physician
backed me up.”
“Wonderful people, doctors!” the physician remarked, “and beautifully
helpful.”
Sên smiled his agreement. “But I ought not to have brought her,” he
added gravely. “It was a terrible risk, an unpardonable mistake, and I
do not see how I am to save her from finding it out. No one avoided us
in London. No one resented our marriage, or dared to misunderstand it.
She was too fine, too unmistakable—and a little because I was so
seemingly cosmopolitan, and because London is London—at once
indifferent and wholesome. But here it is not so.”
“Has Mrs. Sên been ostracized here?”
“Something like that. The Europeans have been
supercilious—salacious-minded and evil-tongued amongst themselves and
behind our backs, I have little doubt. And my own people have been hard,
unbending. The English sneer, more or less openly, and the Chinese have
tabooed my wife. An Englishman, a married man who also has a Chinese
ménage and children in it, called here one day when I was out, and Ruby
gave him tea; but I happen to know that he has forbidden his wife, an
Englishwoman, to call on mine.”
“But you are going soon,” Dr. Ray said more cheerfully than she felt.
“Get her away. That is the only thing to do. And you are going soon now,
Ruby said.”
“Farther into China. To my own family. That will be worse, I fear.”
“Oh! I hope not. She wouldn’t stay with me, I suppose, while you went
and came back for her? We could take a little trip—to Japan
perhaps—she and I. I will part ways with Julia Townsend, for a time, or
bring her to reason.”
“I’d give a great deal if she would,” Sên replied. “But she will not. It
isn’t even worth trying. Don’t think me ungrateful.”
“I know that you are not that,” Dr. Ray said emphatically.
Mrs. Sên came to them from the drawing-room then, her home letters read,
Emma’s cried over a little—for it had told her of Ruben’s first tooth
and of a pair of tiny new red shoes he preferred to suck rather than
wear—and nothing more of analysis or of confession passed.
It was late when Dr. Ray went back to her hotel down in the city, and
Sên walked beside her with his hand on the edge of her chair.
Even in high daylight (day is never garish in Hongkong) the apish
incongruities and misfitments of Young China ways and clothes cannot rob
Hongkong of its unequaled beauty. The bamboos’ luxuriant, sword-shaped,
fern-like beauty still edges with gray-green lace the twisting footpath
between Victoria City and the blue-topped Peak. Red Chinese roofs still
up-turn here and there among the persimmons and oleanders. Junks and
sampans still huddle in the harbor, and the water still croons blue and
green and limpid about them. At night Young China seems almost a myth,
an unloveliness almost forgotten and quite negligible; the moon and the
stars keep their old state up in an imperial sky; lights still shimmer
like fireflies and flash like friendly arrows of flame from bush and
vine-entangled homesteads and from long pendant lanterns swinging in
coolie hands, and down in the great craft-huddled harbor, lights twinkle
and proclaim in every color that man-made light can show; queer,
passionate Chinese music still throbs now and then through the darkness,
and English pianos tinkle long after London’s bedtime; Chinese voices
rise and fall in velvet guttural across the night-time stillness, and
the laugh of a young English voice pierces it over there behind the
thicket of moon-drenched roses; a nightingale sings in an old
cherry-tree; and night moths wing their filmy flight from the
passion-flowers.
As they turned one of the steep, narrow pathway’s sudden curves, they
almost collided with a singing quintet of young Chinese—two girls and
three men, swinging along all arm in arm and quite spanning the narrow
yellow path. They were singing an English music-hall song stridently,
the men dressed in European clothes that _were_ European—Bayswater or
Battersea—the two young women in “English” raiment that was _not_
English. One girl swayed a little as she walked, because her golden
lilies, disfigured now in sensible English boots, had not “unbound”
successfully. They drew aside to let Dr. Ray’s chair pass, backing
against the bamboos at the road’s edge, still linking arms, still
singing, but much more softly, just keeping it up: “My mother-in-law
ain’t no jellyfish.” And they looked, as they were, perfectly
respectable and self-respecting.
When the descending chair had passed on, they swung back athwart the
path and went on again in step and singing again in louder tones: “My
mother-in-law ain’t no lamb, and she ain’t no Venus neither”—crashing
it out to the Chinese night, where the moon above showered the yellow
path and the gray-green bamboos with a rain of opals, and the
nightingale broke off its fragrant song in the old cherry-tree.
Elenore Ray smiled, kindly, a little sadly, as she saw Sên King-lo’s
hand clench on the frame of her chair.
“You are disappointed,” she told him gently.
“In Young China?” he replied frankly. “In some of its surface
tricks—candidly yes. Yes, Dr. Ray, I carry two anxieties now.”
“So I thought.”
“But,” he added stoutly, “every new movement has its scum, and scum
always rises to the top.”
“Always,” she agreed. “But fulfilled dreams are sorry things often. I
sometimes have wondered what George Washington would think of the
Chicago Board of Trade when it’s busy, and of the stock-yards.”
“But the cause for which he lived and fought and worked was supremely
right,” Sên reminded her.
“We Americans like to think so,” the woman told him; “but right gets
terribly twisted in human hands again and again. And the longer I live,
the deeper I probe, the more convinced I grow that ‘causes’ count for
strangely little, individual lives for almost everything—everything
that really matters.”
“And you believe,” Sên King-lo questioned slowly—thinking as he spoke
of a Chinese Emperor of whom Dr. Ray never had heard—“that in his
record of personal character, Washington left his nation a greater
heritage than he did in the victory of the War of Independence and in
all the great national foundation he and Hamilton built after Yorktown?”
“Just that,” was the quiet reply. “In mental equipment and achievement,
I incline to believe that Alexander Hamilton was the greatest genius in
history, and certainly the greatest of our country. But George
Washington was the greater man—because he was the more entirely
_good_.”
“Do you hold,” Sên asked with a slight smile, “that all who are good are
great?”
“I do—the _greatest_.”
The five harmless revelers were near them again, for the hillside road
had swung round on itself, and the singers were not far away and
directly overhead; and the Leicester Square doggerel belched stridently
down: “My mother-in-law she’s got a walk like a crab and a tongue like a
toad.”
“This is not China!” Sên King-lo said, in sudden unleashed passion.
“Tell me something—” the woman laid a motherly hand on his hand that
lay on her chair, and her eyes that were very kind also were twinkling.
“Do you hate and despise the Manchus as much as you did?”
“No,” the Chinese man said quickly, “I do not. I am older. And I see
what I see.” He smiled back at her as he spoke, but his eyes and his
voice were sad.
The chair coolies came to a quiet halt, as they often do at some point
of special beauty.
Elenore Ray gazed about her with a sigh of great content.
“I wish you could have seen Hongkong as it was but a few years ago,” Sên
King-lo said, as they moved on again.
“This is supremely beautiful,” Dr. Ray insisted. “But,” she added
musingly, “I begin to suspect that the missionary and the gunboat have a
great deal to answer for.”
“The Chinese who have taken a wrong turning—if they have—will have a
great deal more to answer for,” Sên King-lo said bitterly.