The curio shop was in one of the narrow heterogeneous streets near
the British Museum that run their short length north of Oxford Street
and are stopped abruptly by wise old dingy squares and by wide newer
streets that they have not the vitality to cross.
It looked like a modest enough curio shop but the pundits of
porcelains and ivories and carved lacquer knew that many a fine thing
and none that was spurious might be found at old Kow’s; a quiet,
hard-working, unassuming man who still wore the garb of old China,
still wore a queue, used chop-sticks, smoked a long-stemmed, tasseled
pipe, paid sixty shillings a pound for his tea at wholesale in Hankow,
and believed indeed that “thrift is blessed,” and had no doubt at all
that it was a Chinese duty to make English shillings “breed as fast as
ewes and rams.”
The curio shop was distempered a pale, anæmic buff, but its surface was
smooth and unbroken, and its plate-glass windows were clean. Shantung
silk curtains veiled each window. Right or wrong, Kow Li believed in
the advertisement-value of mystery and apparent indifference. “Chinese
Curios” in large lettering of black and gold over the door was the
only trade announcement Kow’s shop made. But, unlike some other
advertisements, it was accurately true. Kow Li’s wares _were_ Chinese.
He bought none, sold none, that were not. Manufacturers of imitation
“Oriental goods” had ceased long ago to attempt to do business with Mr.
Kow Li. And better-class firms knew that it was time wasted to offer
Kow Li--no matter how cheaply--anything of Indian, Japanese or Persian
make.
There were three places peculiarly dear to Ruben Sên: his mother’s
room, the Reading Room of the great Library he had left a few minutes
ago, and this side street shop with the room above it that he was going
to now.
And dearest of all to Mrs. Sên’s Saxon-faced boy was a fourth
place--that he never had seen. At least to that Mecca of his he had
never been. He dreamed and prayed that he might go to it some day. And
he often saw it as he had seen it just now--its water-ways and temples,
its palaces and pagodas, as he bent fascinated English-blue eyes on a
map at reader’s desk K.17.
Ruben pushed the shop street-door open, and went in. A bell tinkled
musically, and two Chinese quietly busy at ledger and invoices
looked up, slipped down from their high stools, and stood facing him
respectfully. Neither moved towards him, neither spoke. But when they
had bowed, one tried to thrust his hands inside the sleeves of his
English coat--he was the older, and he still had an instinct for the
old manners of his youth in China.
Neither sought to serve Mr. Sên. There was nothing here that Ruben Sên
could buy--for all was his if he would but be pleased to accept it.
The cool of the long shady room was pleasant after the scorch of the
narrow smelly street; its shadow was grateful after the fusty outer
glare.
Except for the high desk at which Kow Li’s clerks had sat at their
work, and their stools, the sizable room was not furnished. The ceiling
was handsomely papered with red, leathery, embossed Canton paper.
The varnished floor was half covered by good Mongol rugs; modern,
not-at-all priceless rugs, not too fine for the wear and tear of casual
rough-shod feet. There was neither lamp nor gas and no electric light
bulbs. Kow Li neither sold nor bought after dusk; and if Mr. Mug and
Mr. Wat, his clerks, had to work after daylight failed them, they
carried ledgers and papers into a room at the back. From floor to
ceiling the shop-room was paneled. Kow Li and his clerks knew the trick
of sliding back every third panel. Kow’s merchandise, wrapped in soft
rice paper and many folds of softest cotton and thin silks, was stored
behind the apparently immovable wall-panels. The room had several doors
but none was visible, though Chinese eyes would have detected the one
that was securely barred by what eyes less used would have thought
bands of ornamental carving. A crimson lily bloomed in a pebble-filled
bowl on the tall writing-desk.
Ruben Sên greeted Wat and Mug. He spoke to them in Mandarin, lingered
a moment to sniff the lily-fragrance before he crossed behind the desk
and pushed back a panel; it opened directly on to a long flight of
thickly carpeted narrow stairs that were broken by three landings; for
Kow’s house was one of the small street’s tall ones--its tallest.
Even uncouth, Bond Street, made-to-order, six-guinea boots could make
no sound through the thick pile of Kow Li’s stair carpets; and Ruben
did not run upstairs. He went up slowly and quietly, as a Chinese does
in the house of a friend he respects; moved slowly too as one who likes
his journey.
Cramped as its space, this stair and hallway, intensely Chinese,
looked, as it was, part of the home of a merchant prince. And there
are stairs as narrow and steep, landings and hallways as niggardly
of width, in many a Chinese shop and dwelling house in Hong Kong.
Luck-flowers grew in luck-bowls and tubs on lacquered window ledges,
carved newel posts and on each thickly rugged landing, for Kow Li had
no courtyard or garden (which is where luck-flowers should grow) in
his Bloomsbury home. He had made him a tiny Chinese courtyard of every
landing, with a pot of luck-flowers in tub or bowl, and elfin-small
hoary dwarf-trees and a bullfinch or linnet in a gilded bamboo cage.
And Sir Charles Snow, when he had first been here and seen, had
instantly understood; and Snow had thought it pathetic--a signal of
homesickness made by an exiled Ho-nanese caged in a Bloomsbury side
street.
An old Chinese rose with a cry of welcome as Ruben Sên opened the door
of the room that filled the topmost floor and laid his horn-rimmed
spectacles down on the book he had sat reading, before he presumed to
greet his dead master’s son.
Kow Li was richly but soberly clad in dark blue brocade. His coat was
buttoned with delicate peach-blow corals exquisitely carved. His cap
of the same blue brocade boasted a fine emerald. His girdle boasted a
jeweled pouch from which dangled a green pearl that was real and half
the size of a plover’s egg. His short, thin white beard was carefully
kept. His hair--what was left of it--was “a sable-silver,” his queue
began in the sable-silver of his scanty hair, was suddenly a brilliant
black, and ended in braided strands of ruby-red silk. He wore one ring,
a thin band of silver that his peasant mother had worn. His stockings
were very white with beautifully embroidered heels, his blue-brocade
padded shoes had red embroidered soles. His petticoat was edged with
black embroidered bats. Bats give wealth, luck at cards and keep age
virile. Kow’s delicate yellow hands were riddled with age, but the
sloe-black eyes from which he had in common politeness removed his
spectacles were as clear and as bright as a boy’s.
The room was the room of a Chinese palace--Kow Li the Ho-nan peasant
kept it so for his master’s son. For Kow Li the rich curio merchant
had been the body-servant of Sên King-lo the father of Ruben; and held
himself so still--a faithful servant of the antique world.
The old Chinese, and the fair-faced, fair-haired boy who was half
Chinese did not shake hands. They kept to Chinese ways--old Chinese
ways--always when together here; the old man who had been a Chinese
gentleman’s servant, and had followed him around the world in exile,
and the Cambridge undergraduate who looked a typical English boy and
whose voice was unmistakably English.
They gave each other the gesture of Chinese salutations--Ruben as
gravely as Kow Li. Kow Li bowed very low, Ruben bent him as far and as
gravely as Kow Li had.
That was too much for the old man’s fealty. He had no right to speak
until his young master had spoken first, and bade him speak. But Kow
Li was a stickler for strict etiquette and his outraged sense of fit
social behavior broke through his immediate sense of servitude in
protesting words.
“It is unlawful, O most glorious one, that the noble Sên, the high head
of the illustrious House-of-Sên, should incline his precious person
before his leprous worm of a slave.”
“Chuck that, Kow,” Ruben answered in English--more to tease Kow Li than
because he best liked to use his mother’s tongue. “You know--or you
ought to--that my youth with all my Sênship thrown in, ko’tows in the
dust before your august age.”
Ruben shook an affectionately impudent forefinger at Kow, and perched
himself easily on the cherished writing-table, stacking his hat, his
gloves and his silver-handled Malacca cane on the open pages of the
rare and valuable book that Kow Li had been reading, tweaked open a
table drawer, took from it a silver box and lit a cigarette. Kow Li
did not smoke cigarettes but he kept the best that money and an expert
knowledge of tobaccos could buy--for Ruben. Ruben Sên’s cigarettes and
cigars were famous in Cambridge; Kow Li gave them all to him.
Kow’s bright old eyes twinkled affectionately but he answered gravely,
his yellow palms turned up in an entreaty for pardon for contradiction,
“That high rule has an exception, sir; a young noble does not obeise
himself to his servant. Life would be intolerable else, no matter how
old the servant-one is.”
“Well--you’re old, aren’t you, Kow?”
“This unworthy person was born yesterday,” the man answered gravely,
still speaking Chinese. He had spoken nothing else. “You, his noble and
estimable master, are venerable, a century old.”
“Come off it, Kow Li,” the boy chuckled, swinging a disrespectful leg
back and forth against the costly table. “Draw it milder, old dear.”
Kow Li folded his hands in his sleeves meekly as a servant should when
his master speaks--but he sighed; Kow Li did not like English slang on
the lips of a Sên; he sighed a little, but even his sigh was indulgent,
and his bright old eyes were full of affection and pride. Kow Li
dreamed great dreams for Sên Ruben the son of Sên King-lo--celestial
dreams laid in the land of Han.
The Trinity Hall undergraduate looked about for some mischief to do. He
was bubbling with health and young animal spirits--so glad to be here,
so keen to tease his dear old Kow Li. He pounced on the big horn-rimmed
spectacles, and put them on. They did not fit; Ruben’s face was thinner
than Kow Li’s, the bridge of his nose more boldly molded.
Ruben studied a scroll of minute characters that he pulled
unceremoniously from under a folded fan, which he opened and fanned
himself with elaborately, elegantly, as he read.
“Can’t read a word!” He tossed the spectacles down on his hat. “What do
you wear the things for? You can see as well as I can and better too,
you old fraud? All right to impress Mug and Wat with downstairs; but
why ruin your blessed old eyes with them up here?”
“As my honorable master justly remarks, it becomes this person who
employs them to wear scholarship-spectacles before his shopmen-clerks.
But I need them, sir, when I read fine grass-characters. The
God-of-sight still is gracious to me, and permits my eyes to do their
work without a crutch, but when a page is fine and dim of ink these
help them, Master.”
Ruben continued to smoke, and to fan himself as he did so. He looked
about the room, gravely now; a room a little less dear than his
mother’s own room, but incomparably more beautiful. Ruben Sên, who
never had been out of Europe, had two homes; one, and first, at his
mother’s knee, the other this, where the rumble of buses in Oxford
Street came in from the opened fretworked lattice of the Chinese room.
Ruben Sên never forgot his mother; he loved her as English mothers
rarely are loved. But here he often forgot that London or Cambridge,
England or Europe existed. The half-Chinese boy was in China here;
which was what Kow Li, whose ancestors had served Sên masters for a
thousand years, had planned and furnished and garnished it for. It was
the chiefest object of Kow Li’s life, the supreme urge of his toil,
that Sên Ruben should be in China.
There was no other room like this in Europe. There were rooms in
Mayfair that aped China apishly; but this one room in London--this
Bloomsbury room--was China. It was propaganda, too, subtle and
masterly, contrived by a servant’s burning loyalty; a loyalty not to be
understood by men of Western breed; a loyalty as silent and selfless as
it was unalterable and unassailable.
Ruben’s blue eyes came back at last to the patient yellow face.
“Top hole! The oftener I am here, the more I like it. It’s great, Kow;
our room! I believe it’s the best room on earth!”
Many a mandarin has received his yellow jacket, his button of coral,
his double-eyed peacock feather, with less emotion than Kow Li felt at
the boy’s words--and with not a tithe of the gratitude.
But Kow Li merely smiled deprecatingly, and bowed as he said: “This--my
lord, is a poor room indeed in comparison with those in my lord’s
palace-home in the sacred province of Ho-nan.”
“I wonder if I shall ever see that Ho-nan home of mine?” the boy said
wistfully.
“The gods are kind,” the old Chinese replied significantly. “And I
burn much delicate incense to their propitiation.” He left it there.
The time was not quite ripe to say to Sên Ruben all that an old-one’s
heart and head planned; and, too, Kow Li intended the youth should fall
in with an old servant’s scheme believing it his own.
“I wonder!” Ruben sighed.
“May the unworthy servant presume to ask his illustrious lord a
question?”
“Fire ahead! Want to know which gee is going to lick the favorite on
Thursday? Don’t I wish I knew!”
Kow Li’s deprecating outheld palms were denial. “Nay, great-one, I have
no wish to make the horse-bet. That is riding a tiger indeed! But,
oddly, the question I importune my lord to condescend to answer does
concern itself with the horse animal. Could you use another mount, sir?
It is a very beautiful horse animal. I have not seen a better.”
“And you know as much about horses as you do about porcelains and
paintings, don’t you, Kow?”
The old Chinese bent almost to the floor. “Next to his own, my lord
your father trusted my judgment of horse animals, illustrious-one,” the
man said meekly, but his voice creamed with pride.
“He trusted you in all things, I think,” Ruben said gravely, speaking
again in Chinese.
Kow Li bowed again very low; but he made no other reply. Sên King-lo
had neither trusted Kow’s judgment, nor invited Kow’s advice,
concerning marriage with a girl of the West.
“He rode well, you say!”
“My lord!” The two whispered words were a pæon of praise. They
acclaimed Sên King-lo the greatest rider who ever had ridden; a
_slight_ exaggeration, that to Kow Li was none.
“Tell me about it, Kow.” And Ruben Sên sat very quiet while old Kow
Li told him, as he had again and again, of the horsemanship of Sên
King-lo. Ruben Sên never tired of hearing about the father whom he did
not remember; and never Kow Li tired of telling of the master he would
never forget. Kow Li knew no happiness so great as speaking of Sên
King-lo to Sên King-lo’s son whom he lived to serve.
Mrs. Sên knew, and Sir Charles Snow knew, how eager Ruben always was to
hear of his father, and they never wearied of gratifying him. But it
was only old Kow Li who understood how persistently Ruben Sên’s soul
called to his father’s.