C’hi Yamei wore her Chinese robes to-day. Out of her own sleeping
room she never did that in London--rarely even there, so entirely had
her father imbued her with his own “when in Rome.” But to-day was an
anniversary and she had tired her hair as she wore it on gala days at
home in Shan-si, and had taken from the copper studded red leather
box, where she kept her most intimate treasures, a suit of her pretty
Chinese garments--trousers, long overhanging tunic, little padded
shoes--and had slipped into them just because she wished to; had put
them on for a few moments and then had felt that she could not take
them off--that she could not wear English clothes to-day. So the soft
pongee biscuit-colored tunic with its edge of intricate embroidery,
and its high spruce collar, and the shimmering blue and green crêpe
trousers still appareled her when she went down to share her father’s
very English breakfast.
She had half expected C’hi Ng Yelü to chide her gently, probably with a
laugh--perhaps even to bid her change.
But C’hi did not. She reminded him too greatly of another Chinese
girl, who before Yamei’s birth had come to him across China to be
the one perfect flower of all his fragrant courtyard, reminded him
too poignantly of his girl-wife who had trembled so exquisitely when
his arms had folded about her, lifted her out from her bride-chair,
and borne her across his threshold. All her bride-belongings were
carried behind her by her father’s coolies and among them was that
same box of crimson leather that stood now at the foot of Yamei’s bed
here in England as it had stood for years at the foot of her mother’s
sleep-couch, smelling then as now, when you opened it, of carnations
and heliotrope and violets.
The footman threw the butler a glance and the impeccable butler did not
rebuke him by so much as the glower of an eyelash. C’hi Ng Yelü made no
comment on tunic, stick-pins or just-showing trousers; and Miss C’hi
stayed as she was all day, even to the tiny gold ear-rings that almost
all unemancipated Chinese women wear, the tight-packed blossoms above
her ears and the delicate straight-cut fringe of hair on her forehead
that proclaimed her an unmarried girl--the very short downy fringe that
would disappear at marriage, unless it grew deeper and heavier because
her nuptial portion was that of a “number-two.” But no C’hi girl had
been given so in marriage for three thousand years; to be born a C’hi
girl was to be born the first wife of some man who was sash-wearer and
lord-one.
Two years ago to-day the fighting fish of Sên Yolu had beaten the
fighting fish of Sên Pling in the amber pool among the bamboos and
soap-trees. Did Sên Ruben remember?
That was what C’hi Yamei kept asking herself all day long. She
had asked it as she woke, asked it as she dug her spoon into her
grapefruit, wishing the grapefruit a pomolo; asked it as she carried
her pretty loose-hanging draperies and her trembling stick-pins to the
pleasant upper room which was peculiarly C’hi Yelü’s and hers, the
sitting room to which English visitors rarely were admitted--not even
Miss C’hi’s English girl friends. For C’hi Yamei had made many girl
friends in London, liked several of them very much indeed and felt real
affection for one or two.
The long room had windows at each end that looked out on to the quiet
leafy square that fronted the house and down on the garden where a
sun-dial on the velvet grass told the hour as often as the English
sun would let it. There were roses beyond the dial, and wistaria and
clematis disputed the red brick garden walls with jasmine and juniper.
Yamei’s doggies were chasing and tumbling on the lawn, Chinese dogs
that were Chinese born and bred.
C’hi Yamei stood a long time at the window watching them and laughing
at them; asking herself if, by any chance, Sên Ruben would remember the
anniversary of a Ho-nan fish fight. Why should he? Well--just possibly
because he had so disapproved of it, as she had.
Out of the other windows Yamei would not look. Why should she watch the
street below their front door? She was not interested in its traffic.
She was expecting no one. Who would call at this hour? Probably she’d
not trouble to see any one that did call later. She would not waste
this Chinese dress of hers on a supercilious crowd of chattering
visitors down in the drawing-room, who would not appreciate its lovely
symbolic embroideries, or dream how many Chinese needles had plied
in its patient making. And she had a fancy to stay all day gowned as
she was now. Perhaps Sên No Fee was thinking of her now--naughty No
Fee who had watched the horrid fish fight, and watching had sickened
in the soap-tree’s hollow. No Fee would not know that this was the
anniversary of the fish fight. No’s little feather mind was not notched
by dates--or much else--unless her approaching marriage really had
notched it deep. But that madly gay one, for all she was as prankish as
any pair of sleeve-dogs, had a warm and constant heart. No Fee had not
forgotten her, C’hi Yamei was sure. It was a pity-thing that Sên No
Fee could not write or read. Many of the Sên ladies could do both, but
No Fee had scorned to learn and Sên Kai Lun had so spoiled her! No Fee
would have written to her sometimes, for all she was a lazy minx-one,
and she in turn would have written back to No and told her rare things
of London. No Fee would have been glad to hear that they had met Sên
Ruben, and his mother, seen the house they lived in, spoken with them.
There would have been no need to tell No Fee how often she’d made
speech with Sên Ruben. But something of him No would like to hear for
No Fee had had much affection for her cousin-one Sên Ruben.
One would have been wise to write with caution to Sên No Fee; No had
a babbling tongue. And much that one did and permitted here in London
would not be understood in Ho-nan; would seem more and other than it
was.
The long room was sparsely furnished; the sparse furniture was rich.
C’hi Ng Yelü always called it, when speaking to his daughter, _Shu
Chai_--which Englished is “Reverence Books room”; to the servants--the
C’his had only English servants in London--he always spoke of it as the
library. Library was an absurd misnomer; the long room housed scarce
more than a score of books. C’hi Ng Yelü was charming, intelligent, a
great reader of one or two daily papers, but he was neither scholar nor
bookworm.
But the Chinese nomad who had lived in England so much, and was, unlike
most of his countrymen, so instinctively a citizen of the world that he
had come to find life more comfortable and much more amusing in London
than in China, still was Chinese at heart. His memories of China were
good; his memories of Shan-si were dear and tender. He called this
almost bookless room of his London house _Shu Chai_ in memory of a room
in hill-cupped, river-washed Shan-si, in which C’hi Ng Yelü had learned
to read and to brush his characters, his infant hand so small that it
did not grasp easily or too surely the mahogany stem of his writing
brush; the room in which C’his more scholarly than he had stored and
treasured their priceless books and scrolls for many leisured centuries.
This room of theirs, that few others ever entered, had many more
traces of Yamei his daughter than it had of C’hi Ng Yelü. The girl’s
work-basket stood on the top of the Brinsmead, high up there to keep
it out of the reach of destructive canine paws and jaws. Yamei’s
embroidery frame stood in a corner. Her lute, which she sometimes
played, was on its low table, the girl’s low stool beside it. The
open grand piano which she very rarely touched was hers too, and
more distinctively feminine belongings than the little ribbon-decked
work-basket littered the piano’s long rosewood top.
Yamei sat down beside her embroidery frame and drew a needle out of
an apple-blossom, and began “painting” with it rather listlessly.
Miss C’hi was more intent on a fish fight in Ho-nan than she was on
needlework.
Had Sên Ruben by any odd chance remembered?
Of course not!
But perhaps he had, after all; for the box a servant brought to her as
she sat tinting a blossom’s petal was full of pale yellow roses--and
she had plucked a yellow rose and carried it in her hand to the house
with her when they had gone together from the bamboo walk, across the
garden to the _kuei_ door--she and Sên Ruben--that first day of all.
And the girl fell a-dreaming, idle at her work frame, a dimpled face
bent wistful-eyed over an open florist’s box of pale yellow roses. She
would not have told No Fee a word of those yellow roses if she had been
writing. Often Mr. Sên had sent flowers to Miss C’hi before this--very
often. There was nothing in it, of course. Every man did it to every
girl in London. But No Fee could not have understood it at all. Men
did not do it in Ho-nan. Probably it happened often enough in Hong Kong
and those places now--all sorts of barriers were down in the treaty
ports--but it did not happen in Sênland, nor in C’hiland either. C’hi
Yamei laughed softly, cuddling a big box of roses on her knee, drawing
a yellow rose across her face--just because the satin petals were
fragrant and pleasant to feel. She laughed softly, trying to think what
the nuns at An Mu-ti would say if they heard of “such goings on.”
But roses are thirsty things and yellow roses must not be
neglected--not by a Chinese girl who should treat all yellow roses
with great reverence, because in the home of the wild white rose, the
gardeners who train them over trellises of lacquer ko’tow to the yellow
roses that grow in the imperial gardens.
C’hi Yamei swept all her belongings off the piano, and put her roses
there in a great crystal bowl of cool water. She did it herself. And
one rose she kept back from its fragrant fellows; C’hi Yamei drew its
long stem through a buttonhole of her tunic. It was such a rose that
she had drawn through such a tunic’s buttonhole as she passed into the
_kuei_ two years ago in Ho-nan.