June flowers grew in the grass, a beryl and cinnabar sky crowned and
mantled the world. The trees were heavy and big with leaf, grave and gay
with a score of greens. Bees hummed in the wild roses; an old
apple-tree, late but lusty of blossom, buffeted and bent by a thousand
gales—but its good roots held—lay prone on the ground, its flowers lay
a perfumed white and rose veil heaped on ferns and blue harebells; a
baby squirrel sat bolt up on the prostrate gnarled trunk, industriously
washing his baby face. The summer air had a score of scents and bore on
its fragrant warmth one message. And married birds were teaching their
babies to fly.
The flowers that had bloomed in the wood at the Potomac’s edge were
blooming here. The same butterflies swam above them.
They were wonderful old apple-trees—the prone one here and the prone
one there. But when the apples of this one ripened they’d be insipid and
tasteless, as almost all Chinese apples are, more ornamental than
eatable, but deliciously scented and valued for that; and the fruit of
the other tree had ripened at Ivy’s wedding-day as crisp of flesh and
full of sour-sweet wine as the apples that grow in Albemarle County.
Ruby sat on the ground, as she had been sitting for almost an hour. She
crouched there in misery, so motionless and still that the little
squirrel had not scampered away when he’d come, and scarcely was eyeing
her now, as he completed his toilet and preened and plumed his
feathered, furry tail. He would have whisked off squirrel-quickest at
the farthest sight of a dog; but he had been born fearless of human
creatures, as fearless as he was of the patient, friendly buffaloes on
whose humped backs he often rode, for Chinese are never cruel to such
soft, small, woodland things, and never kill them but at need. Rats, and
even puppy dogs, if of valueless breeds, have quick despatch in China
often; but wild little things of softer, longer fur and swifter speed
are rarely molested and never teased, and so are scarcely wild at all.
But this wee squirrelling would have kept his greater distance and
washed his face in greater seclusion had the woman there on the grass
been less stock-still.
Her brooding eyes were fixed and hard, staring bitterly at the lovely,
laughing landscape before her. It was prison bars to her, all of it, and
the site of her shame.
For it had come to that: Ivy Sên was ashamed, not of King-lo, never
that! but ashamed of her own displacement and not unashamed now of the
birth of her child.
But she was sickening for the sight of Ruben, the song of his
inarticulate baby voice, the feel of his fat, naked, pink and white foot
in her gloating hand, the precious down of his head against her cheek,
the intimacy of his fearless eyes, the baby claim of his imperious
little hand on her bosom. It had been stingingly hard to leave him,
cruelly so too, because the day of her leaving him had been also the day
of his weaning; but the wrench of that parting had been less than the
dull ache of her waxing missing of him. She wanted her baby, and every
hour she wanted him more.
If King-lo did not take her back to Ruben soon. . . .
Six months ago!
How had she stood it?
How much longer could she stand it?
She had been so proudly glad when she first had known that a babe was
soon to lie in her arms, so exultant when it had come!
But now her inmost being shivered and cringed, because she knew that
again a new-born child would lie in her arms. But not here! Not here in
this horrible China! That should not be. It had come to her in China,
this poor little unborn one, but she would not bear it in China: they
must go home, she and it.
She had not told Lo. She could not tell him here. He must not know! No
one must know or think of it here.
Why had she come? Had her cousin Charles no love of her left that he had
not warned her of what life would be to her here?
For all her torture—and it had been just that—at leaving baby Ruben
behind her, she had come with radiant gladness—impatiently eager to
reach the country of her husband and to make it hers, without losing for
an instant her own. Lo had done so much, perfect citizen of the world
that he was! Why should his wife be less splendidly adaptable—more
crassly insular? She had fretted, almost fumed, for the ship to go
faster, reach China sooner, feeling it a laggard, and feeling,
“—so tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes,
And may not wear them.”
And yet she could have danced for joy and anticipation every waking hour
of the way on the boats that had brought them.
If the impulse of all love is to create, its even greater, more
constant, longer, finer impulse is to share. She had loved Sên King-lo
well, and she had staked her soul to give him all that was she or hers,
to have for her very own all that was he or his. _That_ was why she had
insisted upon leaving her child and crossing the world with her husband,
crossing the world into China. She would give and she would take _all_.
And he should set the key and choose and make the frame of their mutual
being: marriage meant that, as her soul and the feminine instinct of her
womanhood sensed and gaged it—and craved it. His people should be her
people, his God her God. It had not been lust for adventure, or
wilfulness, or freak. It had been loyalty, womanliness, and wifehood. A
splendid, sacred trinity!
And they had failed her; she had failed them.
Whose was the fault?
Not Sên King-lo’s. _He_ had not failed her. Her English fairness, her
heritage of centuries, knew it and said it. Never had man failed woman
less, or mate mate. He never had failed her once, not for a breath, not
by the width of a hair.
Nor had her heart failed him. She did not love him less than she had.
His quality appealed to her not less but more as they passed hand in
hand through the long glade of days. Her husband’s quality was her
highest and firmest pride. He never had grated on her once nor affronted
her taste, and she knew how rarely even the happiest wives could say
that. His charm, that perfume and weapon of personality that cannot be
defined or expressed, held her almost increasingly; it gripped her
securely and close. And she knew that, be the years however long, let
them bring whatever they might, stretch wherever they might, she should
love her man to the end.
She knew how generous he had been to her—how he had warded off from her
every ill thing, great or petty, that he could. He had been tender of
her every failure, her miserable little shames, her worthless shrinkings
and had covered and condoned them—had covered them gently as a hen its
chicks under its wing. And what it must have cost him to see her shrink
and “turn”! Would a Chinese woman have failed an English husband as she
had failed her Chinese husband? She believed not. Was China’s then the
better part? China that she disliked and was ashamed of! She had made no
sacrifice in marrying Sên King-lo, but she knew now that he had made a
sacrifice in taking her to wife, and could but have known that he did.
For he had known both his country and hers, his people and hers, had
known both well, and she had known only her own. He had known all the
spiritual barrier, the fundamental prohibition. He must have realized
her disqualifications! And when pay-day had come, how gaily he had paid
the price, how ungrudgingly! Paid for both. For she knew that his tally
had been tenfold hers. If it had vexed her to be here, to suffer the
repugnance of odd and uncongenial ways, what must it not have been to
him?—and _she_—his _wife_—knew that the texture and nerves of his
soul were as fine and sensitive as those of his strong sensitive hands.
(She had seen him balance by its stem a long peacock feather on the tip
of his finger until it ceased to seesaw or move at all, and she had seen
him lift Reginald Hamilton, bulky and heavily clothed, up off his saddle
and swing him lightly down to the ground.) What must it not have been to
Sên King-lo to see her scarce-smothered dislike of his home and kindred,
of all that meant _all_ to him; what must it not have cost him to bring
her here, knowing, as he must have known, how poor a thing, unfitted and
unpolished, she would seem to Sên Ya Tin, to all his kinsmen, to the
women of the domain, to the very coolies?
She had meant so well and so bravely, and she had done so ill and so
cowardly!
She had been happy in Hongkong. And Hongkong’s scorn and innuendo had
reached her. (In that one thing she had been cleverer than he.) And she
had not cared. She had been unaffectedly indifferent to it all, because
Sên King-lo was “MacGregor,” and she sat on his right hand.
But here, where it had mattered most, here where she had garnered up her
dream of infinite and exquisite sharing with him, here where he had been
at her woman’s mercy, his English wife’s mercy, her happiness had
sickened, her comradeship and pluck had crumpled.
The little furry thing had finished his toilet, and he scampered away.
The woman never moved.
Oh—to see Ruben! Oh—to be in England! Her husband’s people were not
_her_ people, his home was _not_ her home!
Ruben’s baby voice called her. England called her. The shabbiest,
grimiest taxi in the Strand was more to her than all the pagodas and
lacquers and peonies in China!
She hated peonies now. She always should. She hated all of _this_. The
bamboos that bent over there in the breeze mocked her. She had been
pilloried here in Ho-nan. To live and be with thickly painted,
chattering women who tittered all the time; who never had the dignity of
a sorrow, or the blessing of a care; who had no responsibility—hadn’t
even the grit or tang of jealousy—but tottered about, because their
feet were deformed; who were vain of their hideous deformity; and who
gorged on sickly sweetmeats and scandal! She couldn’t understand a word
they spoke or whispered, but she knew Mayfair and Washington too well
and too shrewdly not to know the sound of scandal when she heard it! To
eat with a posse of giggling chattering women, young and old, or to eat
alone, half her meals, while a dancing bear reared above her shoulder
and growled for tit-bits! To see cats chained and tethered like
house-dogs and hear them wailing how they liked it! Sên Ya Tin was
addicted to cats, and on one moonlight night the screech and yowl of
twenty tethered and outraged cats had well-nigh crazed Ruby Sên. Lo had
not been there to slake her nervous fury, for he had been in an
all-night attendance on Sên Ya Tin in the _ko’-tang_ or hawking in the
moonlight with his kinsmen.
China! Oh—to go! Oh—never to have come! She _would_ escape the place.
They could not keep her—they should not! But could she ever escape the
memory?
Would she love her child—her second baby? She did not love it now.
Could she ever love it—would she when she heard its cry—a child
begotten in this China! She loved Ruben, second to his father; she loved
Ruben, her fair-haired, Saxon-seeming baby son. She was dearly proud of
Ruben. A young queen-mother might envy her Ruben. But this unborn child
of hers—would she live to hate the flesh and blood that were bud of her
own? Might she live to be ashamed of her own baby? What if China marked
it!