CHAPTER LIII
The rural social strongholds in England are far less complacent and easy-going than London is. London is something of a jade and unbends to any fun. The “county” is a prude, respectable to a degree. “County” never bends. London’s the more human and undoubtedly has the better time. If “county” has a finer art of living, London has the prettier knack, and the gayer, more amusing.
“Give me the county for my funeral,” Emma told Sir Charles, “but let me live in London every time.” But Lady Snow was frivolous and meant to stay so.
And even Sir Charles, who saw through most things, could not see why the Sêns had moved to Surrey in October, almost on their return from China. London could be trusted to keep its welcome of Mr. and Mrs. Sên warm, but he doubted considerably whether the semi-county of Brent-on-Wold would welcome them at all.
Sên King-lo had his reasons, of course, and probably they were good ones; but Sir Charles could not think what they were.
It was Sên’s doing, not Ivy’s, Snow was sure.
Ruby had been quite willing to make the home-move that her husband had suggested, but not glad. London was her Mecca and always would be; but she was content to live wherever Lo wished, if it might be with him and not in China. She knew that she would not be prisoned in Surrey, or forbidden long drinks of London’s wine. King-lo was no wing-clipper, least of all of hers. If he longed for country life, or chose it for some other reason, she was more than willing to have it so. It was his turn to have his way, she felt sincerely. And what did it matter, if they were together, with Ruben, bonnier than ever, toddling at their feet, clutching at her skirts? Sên King-lo had no entire monopoly of loyalty and sunny niceness, or of fineness and bigness.
Sên King-lo had not suggested their moving because of any longing he felt for flowers and trees, open spaces, and running water. All such things were one to him now. London meant a great deal to Sên. And his opportunities for the big Anglo-Chinese work he still meant to do, and to do with his might, opportunities for the personal touch and mutual yeasting of friendly minds and foemen’s, which are so much of all international work’s success, were in London tenfold what they could be in any other spot in Europe. But he knew that he was very tired, and that unless he rested certain mental and personal forces of his that had suddenly worn thin, his hand might lax hopelessly and fall away from its helm. There was work to do that needed him for its best doing. Ruby needed him, and would need him more and more as Ruben grew older. For Sên King-lo already knew what no one else suspected, not even Charles Snow, that Ruben’s Saxon body was but the sheath of a mind and spirit and inclination intensely Chinese. Sên saw a coming day when it might be for him to stand between Ruby and their boy; to curb Ruben, to comfort Ruby, to spare her all he could, to save Ruben from mistakes that were the heritage of the father’s son. And the child that was coming in December—how might it not need him, how might not Ruby need him because of it?
It was because of all this that Sên King-lo had turned from the vivid rush and inexorable pull of London life to the haven-quiet of the place he found and bought in Surrey.
Winter was mild that year in England. The drooping weeping-ash trees were naked of their leaves, fires were comfort as well as “company,” of course; but the grass still kept a hint of greenness; the holly was scantily berried; here and there a tiny flower-face peeped up from the rock garden; an heroic, insensitive, old rose-vine was erratic enough to put forth a shivered, puny bud; a japonica-tree at the sunniest stretch of the south wall frankly threatened to flower. There was no demand at all for skates, but there was some for racquets by young and enthusiastic players.
The Snows were staying with Sên and Ruby, and the cook took her orders from Lady Snow, for a time. There was a trained nurse in the house, and the local doctor whom Mrs. Sên had chosen “dropped in” at tea-time fairly often, at Sên King-lo’s request.
Today Ruby had not come down to breakfast, Emma had left the cook to her own devices, and Sir Charles thought that the doctor was upstairs now and had been there a deuce of a time.
Sir Charles Snow was smoking strenuously, not in the big drawing-room, but in the pink-and-white absurdity which the servants called “the downstairs boudoir”—the big drawing-room’s near neighbor, almost annex—and that was worse, for the “boudoir’s” dainty, expensive fripperies were perfect caches for smoke-smell and smudge. But a man, at least an English man, has a right to do what he likes when a whole house is at sevens and sixes, every woman in it looking important, meals late, fires neglected, and men ignored or snubbed.
“It is too damned still,” Snow grumbled irritably to his third cigar.
Suddenly the big man jumped like a nerve-ridden woman—at least his heart did—at a sudden sound.
But it was only a sympathetic tail thumping ingratiatingly at his feet.
“Hello yourself!” Snow replied, glad even of a terrier to speak to. “You’ve no business in here. Wait till my lady wife sees you—only, if you take my advice, Bimbles, you won’t, old boy.”
Bimbles yapped a pleased reply.
“Oh, all right,” Sir Charles retorted; “if you don’t care, I don’t.”
Even a dog’s company was better than none.
The door opened, and Emma hurried in—but before his wife had closed the door again, Snow had heard a tiny cry.
“Well?” he demanded anxiously. Emma looked “bad,” he thought. And that wasn’t her way!
His wife made no reply, except to sob and throw herself, almost vixenishly, in a chair.
“Tell me,” he begged her brusquely.
“Oh, Charlie, it is too terrible,” Emma wailed angrily.
“Ivy?”
Lady Snow shook her head. “All of us. It’s a Chinese baby.”
Charles Snow looked at her with gloomy eyes.
“The ugliest baby I ever saw. It isn’t like a baby. It’s like a hideous little Chinese god, and it looks ten thousand years old.”
“Then it mustn’t,” Sir Charles remarked grimly; “only an emperor may look ten thousand years old.”
“Well, then,” his wife retorted, “it looks twenty thousand. It hasn’t any eyes—just up-and-down wrinkled slits. It’s all cheek-bones and yellow—cheek-bones right up to its awful little eyebrows. It hasn’t any nose, and what it has is wider than its mouth, and those horrid up-and-down slits that I suppose are its eyes, if it has any eyes, keep waggle-waggling all the time, blink, blink, blink.”
Snow sighed, a smothered, dreary sigh. Emma’s description sounded Chinese enough.
“Looks like Sên, then?” he said.
“It does nothing of the kind!” Lady Snow stormed. “I tell you it is the most hideous, living thing I ever saw—and more Chinese-looking than any Chinaman I ever saw. It looks like Low Tease, or whatever you call him, when he was nine hundred years old, in those awful illustrated Chinese books of yours, and it looks twice as Chinese as Low Tease does.”
“Lao Tze was a mere boy of two or three hundred when he died, dear,” Sir Charles murmured gently.
“I don’t care!” Lady Snow snapped through her angry weeping. “It looks a disgrace! So there!”
“Are you sure? Sure that Ivy’s baby looks so very Chinese?”
“Sure? Of course I’m sure! I’ve seen it, haven’t I? I tell you, it is Chinese. Nothing on earth would make me believe that it was Ivy’s child at all—if I didn’t know.”
“Has she seen it—seen it as you have?”
“She’s seen it, and I suppose she saw it. She saw a speck of fluff or something on his coat when King-lo gave her a drink, and laughed at him for being untidy, and flicked it off.”
“Did she seem to mind?” Snow asked.
“Mind? Mind a speck of fluff? Oh, the baby! Mind the awful Chinese look of it? She didn’t seem to, but she must. And she’ll hate it! How she’ll hate it!”
“I hope not,” Charles Snow said gently.
“Of course she’ll hate it. I hate it now! And King-lo ‘minded’!”
“How do you know?” Snow asked quickly.
“Oh, I don’t know—but he did. How can I explain every single thing to you? You ought to know by yourself. I’m too upset to go on talking forever. He minded terribly, I tell you. He went to the window and stood looking for ages—at nothing. Even his back minded. He never stirred until Ivy called him back to her. He minds. I nearly dropped. Don’t you mind, Charles?”
“I’m not glad,” Sir Charles said gravely.
“Well,” his wife conceded bitterly, “that’s something. Not glad! Wait till you see it, Charles Snow! ‘Finest race on earth!’ Well, perhaps they are, but—” She finished the sentence and began another, but the rest of her words were quite inarticulate through the thick smother of fresh sobbing.
“Boy or girl?”
The commonplace and very usual question seemed to steady her.
“That’s the worst of it,” she answered desperately but clearly. “It’s a girl.”