When King-lo left his wife at the fragrant apartment’s outer entrance,
he had gone to the outer gate again and waited there until Sên Ya Tin
should summon him.
She sent for him soon.
She sat immovable on the great carved and inlaid chair on the
red-covered daïs at the far end of the great _k’o-tang_, as Sên King-lo
came through the opened panel and k’o-towed thrice to the floor. A slave
in the outer room closed the panel again, and they two were alone in the
great carved room.
Sên Ya Tin was not old as Western women count years now. But she looked
very old, for life and her own flaming spirit had scorched and burnt
her. Her face was as brown and crinkled as an autumn leaf that the
lightest touch will flay into dust. Her black eyes—time had not dimmed
_them_—glittered diamond-cold and hard, under her snow-white eyebrows
which tweezers had shaped and torn into almost the sharp shape of the
accent that crowned the proud name of Sên—narrow, almost thread-like
eyebrows that were so silken that they glistened on the brown parchment
of her wrinkled forehead like sun sparkled snow streaking a rough brown
rock. Her hair was as white and as glistening as they, fantastically
dressed, and bristling with costly stickpins. Her tiny brown hands—more
claw-like than human with no look of age’s exquisite softness about
them—were arrogantly wide-spread on her robe, every finger and one
thumb covered from joint to knuckle with blazing gems, seven of the
eight fingers tipped with heavy jeweled nail-protectors more than finger
long.
It was a very tiny figure that sat bold upright in the huge chair. Her
blunted scraps of feet just peeped arrogantly beneath the fur hem of her
turquoise-tinted trousers, just resting on a cushioned teak-wood stool
that was higher than most such footstools, or else the tiny woman’s tiny
feet could not have reached it. Stripped of her heavy robes Ruby Sên
might have lifted and carried her. But her embroidered robe of yellow
brocade must have weighed as much as she. It was not the sacred imperial
yellow, of course; but it _was_ yellow, which it had no business to be.
There is no sacred color in China now, alas, and perhaps not too much
else that is sacred in the old imperial way. Alas, and alas! But that
was not why Sên Ya Tin sat with jeweled yards of satin brocade about
her. The lady Sên took little notice and no “stock” of Young China. She
held with old ways, waited serenely for them to return, and kept them
here as she always had. This was a learned woman. She could both read
and write. The blind scribe that squatted by his low bamboo table in the
fragrant courtyards and wrote for the wives of her sons, when those
letterless ladies wished to write to the homes that had been theirs
before marriage or purchase, never did personal service for Sên Ya Tin.
She knew, too, her country’s history. She knew that, though individual
insanity had been unknown until European intrusion had bred it there,
China had suffered civic and national insanity before, and more than
once—before the birth, nine centuries ago, of Wang Ah-shih, the poet
father of Chinese socialism, and after that erratic Prime-Minister of
the easy-going Emperor Shen Tsung had gone on high. But always the
convulsion had been short. Socialism and peasant-franchise had strutted
but a day. Then China had shaken the distemper off and returned to her
state. Sên Ya Tin looked for China to do it again. The new Republic
troubled Madame Sên as little as it concerned her, but she always had
hugged a personal vein of wickedness of her personal own. And because
she had no right to wear even a tinge of yellow, she often did, and
often had since widowhood had made her supreme in the house of the Sêns.
No one outside her gates would know, for no one within her gates would
presume or dare to report.
A vase of almost inestimable value, a porcelain saucer of melon seeds,
with a tiny-bowled, long-stemmed silver pipe, a tinder and a
gold-lacquer box of fine tobacco and a tiny queenly fan lying near it,
stood on a small, octagonal, carved teak-wood table beside her; a small,
tight bouquet of mint and sage and musk lay on her lap; a tiny tame
monkey, tethered by a silver chain, perched on the top of the tall,
throne-like chair; and about her neck Sên Ya Tin wore, as she always
did, the long mandarin chain of cornelian beads of her dead
husband’s—as the widow of a British officer often wears his regimental
badge.
She sat with her face square to the panel that had slid open for King-lo
and slid close again behind him, and her unmoved face was a wrinkled,
lifeless mask.
Three times Sên King-lo k’o-towed to the floor, then stood with downcast
eyes and hands meek within his wide sleeves and waited for her to
command.
She let him wait, neither pleasure nor love nor welcome in her adamant
eyes.
The water-clock dripped a long minute away.
Sên King-lo did not lift his eyes. Sên Ya Tin did not move hers. She
watched him stiffly through unwavering narrow lids—and so did the
mouse-sized monkey, too.
“Approach!” she said in a cold, relentless voice.
Sên King-lo neared her by three slow steps; his padded Chinese shoes
made no sound as he moved; his hands were still hid in his sleeves; his
eyes were still on the floor. And then he k’o-towed again, and again
three times, then stood and waited as before.
Again she let him wait—but not so long.
“Nearer!”
Three steps more he went, three more obeisances he made, and as he stood
again erect he lifted his eyes to the face of his father’s mother. And
Sên Ya Tin sent her eyes to his, steady old eyes, harder than age, that
looked but told nothing, gave no hint or sign.
It was nearly twenty years since his eyes and hers had met; for she had
been ill with smallpox when he had been in China last, and she had
forbidden him—as her will and self-control had forbidden the smallpox
to disfigure her. And boy and pox had obeyed.
She looked at him long, coldly. And he waited for her to signal or
speak; to beckon or dismiss.
His eyes were the eyes of her father. A silver nail-protector studded
with diamonds clattered a little against a pearl-studded one of gold.
His mouth was the mouth of her favorite and first-born son. The
cornelian beads moved a little on her bosom.
Slowly, very slowly Sên Ya Tin rose from her seat, came from the daïs,
spurning the high footstool from her way, tottered across the glass-like
mahogany floor on her tiny, tuber-like, satin-shod feet. Still Sên
King-lo did not move. Her face broke up a little. His eyes leapt to her
then. A cry that was only a whisper of sound breathed from her lips that
scarcely moved. Sên King-lo took a step—another—two more, and she hid
her working face on his coat. Her grandson’s arms were about her. They
held her close, his head bent low to hers. Her hands fondled his
sleeves. She was quivering now. He heard her heart beat under all its
harness of silk and satin, embroidery and jewels, and she heard his. She
was sobbing now.
Yam-Sin, the monkey, pounced on the porcelain saucer and gorged himself
on melon seeds that snapped briskly between his strong, tiny teeth, his
silver chain clank-clanking against the high chair’s inlaid wood; the
tiny pipe of an august lady clattered to the floor; and the fine, silken
tobacco streamed after it, raining down from an upset lacquer box.