It rained all the next day, and King-lo sat with his wife and read to
her and talked with her of England and of Ruben. And they wrote letters
home—letters that would be long in going; for runners must take them to
a distant, but the nearest, treaty-port, before they could make any
positive postal start.
Towards evening Sên Ya Tin sent for her grandson.
Ruby scarcely expected to see her husband for hours; but almost at once,
as she sat crocheting, he came back, eager of pace and of face—and a
soberly dressed man followed him to her side and bowed, crossed his
hands, and stolidly waited, not looking at Mrs. Sên but carefully eyeing
the silk jumper she was making.
Deft-fingered always, Ruby practically had discarded needlework—even
its pretty playtime offshoots—since her marriage, no longer in need of
her own industry to be always well-dressed. She had liked to sew well
enough, partly, no doubt, because she did it so well; but she had hated
the necessity, and she always had taken more pleasure in shopping than
in making or mending.
But in Hongkong King-lo had warned her, “You may be dull some days—just
at first—at the homestead, while it is all strange. Take along
something to do, something you like doing.”
Mrs. Sên had laughed it to scorn, the suggestion that she could be dull,
even for an hour, alone with him in China, with him in the wonderful
place he’d called home as a boy. But he had repeated his words, even
appealing to her, and to please him she had laid in a great store of
ivory needles and silks. And already she was finding the advice she had
laughed at good, for already she had found the life in the women’s
quarters monotonous and deadly. She could quite understand why the
painted and jewel-hung prisoners smoked so incessantly. She herself was
smoking more cigarettes in a day here than she ever had smoked in London
or Washington in a fortnight. One must do something, drug the discomfort
of personal stagnation with some sedative motion, if only of one’s
hands. One couldn’t smoke all the time—at least, she could not, so she
had begun an elaborate jumper that she didn’t need and could not wear in
Ho-nan over a stiffly embroidered Chinese coatee.
She looked up at King-lo with questioning eyes.
“He’s one of the tailors,” Lo told her. “Sên Ya Tin’s best one. She has
sent him to you.”
“To me! What ever for?”
“To make you a habit.”
“A habit—what sort of habit?” Did she need more Chinese clothes, she
thought rebelliously. Did they think she was going to stay here forever?
Lo had promised to take her home. Didn’t they know that? Ruben was in
England! Didn’t they care?
“A riding-habit,” King-lo told her.
“A Chinese riding-habit! I didn’t suppose there were any. Why must I
wear it? When must I wear it?”
“No,” Sên said gently, “there are no Chinese riding-habits. An English
riding-habit.”
“He couldn’t make one,” Mrs. Sên retorted with an unappreciative glance
at the motionless tailor.
“He can make most things,” Sên laughed.
“Has he ever seen an English habit?” his wife demanded. She was not in
the least convinced.
“Surely not,” King-lo owned, “nor any other sort of riding-habit, nor
even any sort of a picture of one, I dare swear. But he’s a genius.”
“He doesn’t look it,” Mrs. Sên remarked crisply.
“Granted,” her husband agreed good-naturedly, “but you know the classic
adage, ‘Things are not always what they seem’—not even Chinese things.
‘Skim milk’—you know the poem. This chap can do as he’s told.”
“But who’s to tell him?”
“You and I.”
Ruby giggled—she had not often done that of late. “You’re crazy, Lo,”
she asserted. “I couldn’t tell him how to make one, and I’m sure you
can’t.”
“Don’t be too sure,” King-lo advised her. “Ah, here come the stuffs for
you to choose.”
Several half-grown Chinese boys had padded in as he spoke, each carrying
a paper-wrapped roll of material—sober-eyed lads with far shaven
foreheads and silk-tasseled queues hanging almost to the hems of their
sober robes, the crest-badge of the Sêns on each blue-clad back.
“Master-artist Worth’s apprentices,” Sên pronounced them.
“Tell them to apprentice off then,” his wife commanded. “They look more
like dummies than apprentices,” she added. “Tell them to go, Lo. I don’t
want a habit—here—what should I do with it? We couldn’t even ride in
Hongkong. Send them away.”
“Just a minute,” Sên King-lo begged. “The grandmother will be
disappointed. She has planned it to give you pleasure. Two of the grooms
are trying out a horse for you now, a splendid, gentle creature that my
cousin Wang’s son often rides. The venerable one has commandeered it for
you. It has never had a woman on its back, or a side-saddle, but it has
a side-saddle now: the saddlers were up all last night, making it by
candle-light. Sên Wo P’ing has seen Englishwomen ride in Shanghai on the
Bubbling Well road, and he was with them all night—it was the
grandmother’s command—directing them as they worked by candle and torch
and lantern light. And they’ll be doing it again tonight. Ka’-ka’ is
careering about now in the storm with a side-saddle on her back, but it
is only a half-finished one. One groom is clutching and dancing at her
bit, hanging there for grim life, the other is side-saddled on her back
and looks like to break his neck—but he won’t do it. They all three are
having the time of their lives, as we used to say in Washington. But
tomorrow or the next day Ka’-ka’ ’ll be as tame as any rabbit. The old
heart is set on it, and so is mine. Won’t you have her kindness,
wifeling?”
Ruby Sên rose slowly, the silken jumper falling to the floor.
“She is very, very kind, your grandmother,” she said softly, and King-lo
saw a mist in her eyes. “I shall love to ride here with you. Come, help
me choose,” she bade him as she moved towards the stolid waiting
urchins.
Sên King-lo’s face glowed. He was grateful to Sên Ya Tin, and he was
grateful to Sên Ruby.
And, seeing them engrossed with soft cashmeres and stout tussores, the
master tailor dropped on a surreptitious knee, then squatted squarely on
the floor with his feet tucked in beneath him, and studied the fallen
jumper eagerly.
“What is it, dear?” Sên asked her presently, when he saw a new
perplexity a little wrinkling her forehead.
“Won’t my riding-skirt drive the mare crazy, Lo? You say she has never
carried a lady?”
“Nor has she, but,” Sên chuckled, “you forget—Ka’-ka’ has carried many
skirts—quite as long ones as the one you wear in the Row.”
His wife turned a sudden painful crimson. She _had_ forgotten for a
moment. Was she to ride with her husband riding beside her wearing
petticoats?
Lo saw and understood. But he gave no sign and moved quietly to his
wife’s writing-table, sat down and found a brush and dipped it.
“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Sên asked as she followed him.
“Make your riding-habit,” King-lo told her.
“Lo, you are wonderful!” she exclaimed, as the habit grew quickly on the
pad, a habit perfect in every detail.
She had found a new talent in her Chinese man, and she leaned and
watched him proudly with her hand upon his shoulder.
The tailor slipped up without a sound and came and watched the rapid
brush-work too. And when it was finished, he drew a long tape from his
sleeve and nodded without speaking.
“He says, ‘Can do,’ ” Sên told her, with a laugh.
And it was true, whether the man had said it or not. The new habit
completed would have disgraced neither Rotten Row nor Bond Street.
Sên Ya Tin stood and watched them as they started for their first ride
together in China, an odd, but not unkind, look in her sharp, agate-hard
eyes. She smiled a little, grimly—she who had not smiled since this
Sên’s father had died—smiled when King-lo held his hand under Ruby’s
boot and mounted her so. And Ya Tin stood and watched them till they
were out of sight, lost in the verdure of the far-off hillside; for the
day was very clear, and Sên Ya Tin’s ageing eyes were very sharp.
When Lo had come to tell her that the horses were ready at the house
door, Ruby had started a little and then had flushed; for King-lo’s
riding clothes were as British as her own.
How would Madame Sên like this, Ruby wondered—if Madame chanced to
know.
But, if Sên Ya Tin was surprised, she scorned to show it, and Ruby
wondered if she’d already known and consented, for she knew that no
innovation intruded into the queendom of Sên Ya Tin that did not come
licensed by imperious Ya Tin.
It was the first of many rides, and they were the best and the most
wholesome pleasures of Ruby Sên’s sojourn in the homestead of the father
of her child.
When they galloped side by side through the quivering bamboos on the
hillslopes, along the mossy banks of a rushing river, through avenues of
vermilion roses, under fragrant, wax-flowered lemon-trees that met and
roofed above them, some of the old springtime ecstasy and comradeship
came back to her, and the charm of her man found and wrapped her again.
Her escort was as devoted and as careful of her as he’d been on the
Potomac, his eyes as kind, his laugh as ready. But it was his breeding,
the breeding of his race, the man’s loyalty to the woman who had trusted
him and given her life into his keeping, the personal loyalty of his
manhood and his being that laughed and chatted with her as they rode;
for Sên King-lo was not _with_ the English wife who rode beside him, Sên
King-lo was back in China, his soul meshed in China’s, his heart torn,
every nerve an ache, with the thought that again he must go, go from the
flowers and skies of China, from her rainbowed loveliness and her barren
rocky places and her wild and rushing torrents, from the customs of his
people, the tombs of his ancestors, and the dingy, disregarded temples
of their gods.
And when he drew his bridle, and slacked their pace, and pointed with
his slender amber whip to some special bit or stretch of beauty, and
called her attention to it in a quiet voice that almost trembled and
that throbbed in his throat, Ruby scarcely _saw_, caught no message;
because this was China, and China would forever leave her cold.
It is human blood and story that makes country, not architecture or
flora, neither bleating polar cold nor seething equatorial heat.