Mrs. Sên, in her prettiest rest gown, lounged happily in her favorite
chair, her hand on Ruben’s hair.
They were not talking now and had not been for some time. They had had
a long, happy, restful day together--Ivy was on the river with the
Blakes--and they had thrashed out a good many things together. They
often did that, and always frankly and without embarrassment.
But two things of vital importance had not been mentioned between
them, though both were thinking of them constantly these last weeks
of Ruben’s last term at Cambridge, and had been thinking of them
especially all day to-day: Ivy’s future and Ruben’s own.
Most mothers and sons who are lovers and congenial, canvass together
the boy’s probable future and his choices of future, almost from the
lad’s earliest school-days. Oddly enough this mother and son never once
had. That they had not Ruben had come to feel a barrier between them
lately. He did not mean to let any barrier stand between him and his
mother. And he thought the time had come to crash through it.
Not that he believed he’d really have to crash with much force. It
would crumble at a touch, for surely it was but a thing of film, an
accidental, careless reticence, nothing that was meant.
Ruben Sên loved his mother’s room as much as Ivy disliked it. His
liking of it was fourfold: it was a charming room, and Ruben was
susceptible to all such things; it was his mother’s room which made
it sacred to him and perfumed it; always they were almost sure to be
left alone there, and most of his mother’s pictures of his father were
in this room. That last was not the least of Ruben’s liking of his
mother’s own sitting-room.
The oil portrait that they sat facing never had been hung at Burlington
House, but it could not have been rejected there, even if a less
distinguished painter’s name had signatured it. How fine it was merely
as a picture neither Ruby nor Ruben knew, but Sên King-lo, her husband,
lived on that canvas and for that Ruby Sên loved it. She had never kept
even a snap-shot of King-lo that was not “just like” him. Mrs. Sên
would tolerate no half-likeness of him of whom she needed none. She
always could see King-lo without looking at photograph or canvas; and
she wished their children to learn their father’s outer seeming as it
had been in his lifetime.
Ruben was looking up at Sên’s portrait, studying it gravely, as he very
often did.
“I wish I were more like him!” the boy said at last. “Don’t you,
Mother?”
“Yes,” the woman answered quickly. But in her heart she knew that
she might have felt it a handicap to Ruben if he had had even the
unemphasized Chinese look of his father. And she knew that she must
have resented any living replica of Sên King-lo. There had been only
one Sên King-lo. She felt, as Charles Snow did, that she would not look
upon his like again. Nor did she wish to; not even in other flesh that
but hinted his, and that in doing so, just possibly might have diverted
or blurred even a little her living memory of her husband.
“Was Father no darker than that?” Ruben asked without turning to her,
his eager young eyes still clinging to the slightly smiling pictured
face of his father.
“No,” the mother told him. “The likeness could not be better in any
particular, I think. Cousin Charles thinks so too; and so does old Kow
Li, for all his contempt for Western artists. I have tried to find a
fault in it and I never have found one. I used to make him stand beside
it just as he is standing there; and I could not find even the tiniest
improvement to suggest. It is a wonderful picture, Ruben.”
“You have no picture of Father in Chinese clothes, have you? Not even a
photograph?”
“Oh--no.” The quick reply came a shade unsteadily. And Mrs. Sên dreaded
what Ruben might ask her next.
“I wish you had,” Ruben said. “We ought to have. It’s an indignity to
his memory, and to us, that we haven’t.”
Mrs. Sên was thankful that her boy’s face was still turned from
hers--he still gazing at his father’s picture.
“Why haven’t we, Mother?” Ruben asked it affectionately. But Ruby
Sên felt the question ruthless. And it stung her conscience. She had
thought little of it at the time--in China. She was obsessed by her
own homesickness for Europe. But she had wondered since if King-lo had
known how she had disliked seeing him in Chinese garments.
“Your father never wore anything but English dress here or in America,
Ruben, and when we were in China together he did not either, only in
Ho-nan. Most Chinese have adopted Western clothes, even in China, now,
I think; and, you know, they all wear it here--all but funny old Kow--”
the half laugh she broke off with was a little tremulous, a trifle
forced.
“I’d give anything for a good picture of my father in his Chinese
dress,” Ruben replied. “I say, Mater, I wonder how I’d look Chinese
dressed!”
Mrs. Sên laughed again, softly. “Rather funny, son, I fancy. You are
so very English to look at! Ever so much more English looking than I
am!” She did not add how little she would like to see Ruben in Chinese
clothes or how the suggestion had startled her. But she knew.
“Yes--worse luck! Did you wear Chinese things too, in Ho-nan, Mother?
How did you look in them? Did you look Chinese? How I wish I could have
seen you.”
“I think I looked rather nice, dear.” Mrs. Sên’s little tinkled laugh
was natural this time. “I didn’t look a mite Chinese though. But they
were very comfortable; and they were very beautiful. I grew fond of my
Chinese clothes. I felt almost sorry when I left them off.” She was
glad to be able to add that.
“It’s a pity Ivy and I can’t change skins and faces, isn’t it, Mother?
I can’t help envying her her Chinese look; and I think she envies me my
Saxon appearance pretty badly.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Sên replied with a sigh, “I know she does.” The sigh was
not all for Ivy, or for Ivy’s discontent. Ruben had startled her.
Only once--and very briefly--in China, when she unexpectedly had seen
King-lo in Chinese clothes, had it seemed to her at all unnatural that
she was the wife of a Chinese husband. But she had been glad when Ruben
had proved a very English baby; and even now she had no wish to have a
Chinese son; knew that she would have not been proud of it.
All but less than a year of her married life had been spent here in
Europe. She had in no way grown Chinese. To many beside herself Sên
King-lo had seemed almost English. Only Sir Charles Snow had known how
little English, or any sort of Western, Sên ever had been.
A great deal that is English Sên King-lo had made his own, liked and
worn it easily, as he had English speech and clothes. And English and
Chinese have a great deal in common--the two upper classes a very great
deal. But Ruby Sên came of a race less adaptive than Sên’s. He had come
to her, not she to him.
American women who marry and live in England often grow almost English;
sometimes so nearly English that neither their own countrymen nor
English strangers discover that they are not. Even English women, far
less adaptive, sometimes become surprisingly French or Slavic through
such marriage and permanent sojourn. But it is not in any Western
woman to become an Eastern--not even the versatile American woman. It
would be rash and unobservant to assert, though, that it may not befall
her some day--or she accomplish it.
Ruben’s next question startled Mrs. Sên even more and she had to meet
his eyes when he asked it; for he turned at her knee, where he still
sat on the floor, and faced her, looking up at her earnestly.
“You wouldn’t like to live in China, would you, Mother?”
“I don’t think you would, dear.”
“It is my country,” he reminded her. But he did not repeat the question
she had evaded.
“I feel sometimes that I ought to be there. China needs her sons now.”
“They need not all be in China to serve her,” Mrs. Sên said quickly.
“Your father left China to do her service, and he never slacked in
doing it, not even when we lived in Surrey. Kow Li loves China, I am
sure. He is a very rich man now, Cousin Charles says. He says that Kow
is worth fully a million.”
Ruben grinned at that.
“Your father’s old servant a millionaire! And I suspect that Kow sends
most of his profits to China; but I don’t think he ever means to go
back there. And more and more Chinese come here to stay each year now.
You have some Chinese friends at Cambridge, haven’t you, dear?”
“Indeed, I have--and out of it. I make every Chinese friend I can,
Mother. I have so wanted to bring some of them home.”
“Why haven’t you? Do.”
“Ivy wouldn’t like it.”
“That is no reason for depriving you of such a pleasure. Bring them,
your friends, home by all means. I shall love to make them welcome.”
“Ivy wouldn’t. Ivy can be trying; we both know--”
“This is your father’s house, Ruben. While I am its mistress no
countryman of his will receive any discourtesy in it.”
“Ivy can convey a good deal of insult from under the edge of an eyelid.
I don’t think we’ll try it, Mother.”
Mrs. Sên nodded wearily. She knew only too well. She knew that better
than Ruben did.
“We will find a way,” she told him. “I never have wished to keep you
from knowing your father’s countrymen.”
“And mine!” her boy reminded her again. “I know that, dearest.” Then,
“We won’t do anything to worry Ivy just now,” he added. “She is having
such a ripping time since she was presented. I don’t think Ivy will be
allowed to remain _Ivy Sên_ very long; she’s too lovely.”
“Oh! Ruben! How I puzzle over that! So much depends upon it for
Ivy--more than for most girls even. If that goes wrong with Ivy, it
will go very wrong indeed. And I can help her so little, if at all.”
That was all they said to each other of Ivy then. It was difficult. It
was easier to long to help Ivy Sên than to plan how to do it.
“There’s a chap at Trinity,” Ruben said after a little, “that has a
great case full of ripping pictures of China--photographs he took there
before he came over. They have made me homesick for my fatherland. Do
you know, Mater, I have been a little homesick for China ever since I
was a small boy, I think. I think that I ought to see my own country
some day,” Ruben persisted gently.
“And you would like to--go there?” Ruby Sên caught her breath a little.
“I want to, more than I have ever wanted anything. Do you mind, Mother?”
“Of course not!” She hoped he had not heard the tremble she had felt in
her voice. “When?”
“Soon, Mother. Couldn’t I go for a few months soon after I come down?”
“Why not?” Mrs. Sên said brightly. “Of course you shall. But you won’t
see _much_ of China in a few months, Rue. It’s a vast place.”
“It will be ever so much better than nothing!” the boy said gleefully.
“Thank you so much, dear, for letting me go. And it is just one part of
China that I most want to see: Ho-nan. I want to see our home. I think
that I ought to, and I long to, before we decide what I am going to do
with my life, Mother.”
“Yes!” his mother agreed through lips that felt stiff. But her boy had
said, “before _we_ decide.” We--the sweetest word a mother can hear
from a son, said as Ruben had said it.
“You couldn’t come too? You wouldn’t leave Ivy just now, I suppose?”
Ruben asked wistfully.
“Oh--no, Ruben! I have no fear for you--ever. I do fear for Ivy. I have
been thinking constantly, for a long time now, of what life was going
to do to our Ivy, and of what you were going to do with your life. Idle
rich is no rôle for you!”
“No fear!” was Ruben Sên’s sturdy answer. “May we leave what it is to
be until I come back from Ho-nan?”
“You will come back? You will come back to me, Ruben?”
Ruben Sên laughed merrily, a laugh that caressed her. “I _must_,” he
told her with his face between her palms where he had drawn them. “We
are together for as long as we both live--you and I. I wouldn’t go
without you this time, if it were not for Ivy. We’ll go home together
next time.”
Mrs. Sên lifted her eyes to her husband’s--in his picture--asking them
for something of which Sên King-lo had never failed her, or scanted
her: sympathy and help.
But the pictured eyes only smiled at her.