CHAPTER XVI
From then they were thrown together almost constantly—not by others, but by circumstances and social accidents. And both to her surprise and to his—more to his than to hers—their acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. It was nothing freakish, it was comradeship direct and unsilly. They met often, and knew that they liked each other, and liked to be together. They soon knew that they liked each other, but had no realization of how much. Sên King-lo suspected it first. Their divergences were a zest. And they had much in common, and that made between them a bond. Each was lonely—Ivy sometimes, King-lo almost always. Each was an alien, apart in an alien place. Each was at once homesick and homeless. Each found refreshment and tonic in the other. There were English traits and Chinese surprises in Sên, and personality that attracted her strongly. They had a score of English experiences in common. They were a boon to the homesick girl. The girl was virginal, and that attracted greatly the man of a people who cherish and reverence only one quality—maternity—more intensely than they do virginity. He knew that her friendliness had in it nothing mawkish. And in the wholesomeness of their friendship, and the wholesomeness and manliness of the man, Ivy quite forgot her first cheap desire to pique the girls who “ran after” him not too nicely. She was glad that Charles and Miss Julia valued Sên so highly, and she gave no more care or thought to what any one else thought or said of her new camaraderie. Not greatly educated, the English girl was beautifully intelligent: that attracted Sên King-lo even more than it at first surprised him. They liked and disliked many of the same things. They shared many prejudices. He was grateful to her for being beautiful, and for a hint of his own race now and then in eyes, gesture and voice. She was grateful to him for being always deferential, and often amusing, always companionable and interesting, and for his dependability to know whether Eton or Harrow had won at Lords, whether Surrey or Middlesex was at the top of the cricket average, and all about every stroke Oxford and Cambridge had made from Putney start to Mortlake finish.
The girl found the keener interest, the man stumbled into the stronger liking. But while she found no fault in him, he found a terrible fault in her, and it rankled his quickening and strengthening liking sorely; her indifference to all children, even to her own little cousins. The opal owes its loveliness and its lure to its flaw. The Chinese soul of Sên King-lo could see nothing but deformity and disease in the slightest flaw that even specked a girl’s womanliness. It grieved him that a girl who, he knew, attracted him more each time they met did not care for little children. He held it an enormity; it rankled and it bit.
Inside another month, all Washington—the “four hundred”—knew that Mr. Sên and Miss Gilbert had become—to put it nicely—“great friends.” A few were disgusted, most were amused, and not a few were jealous: Reginald Hamilton and a few dozen women.
In all the antipathetical bewildering psychology of East and West there is nothing more baffling than the lure of European women to Asiatic men. Know the East longest, search it most tirelessly, grow most in sympathy with it, and still you can see but darkly and not far into that inter-racial puzzle and secret of human nature.
The average and the typical men of the Orient are excellent husbands—polygamous?—granted. But what of their women? The “rights” the men denied their wives for centuries of centuries those wives would have resented as insult, spurned as outrage and burden. It is not facile to enfranchise a race, a caste or a sex that will have none of it. Even in Earth’s “freest” country you may coax, or lead or prod a woman to the polling-booth, but you can’t make her vote. Not yet. And in this new day of our greatest enlightenments when enfranchisement is peeping seductively over the shoulders of Oriental women, it is those women who hang back and hesitate, not their husbands and masters who hold them back or coerce them. The Oriental husband is not a tyrant. His wives rule and coerce him oftener than he does one of them. He locks them up in some places, and in some castes. They’d berate and punish him if he did not. The most ruthless ruler Afghanistan ever has had could not control or direct his favorite wife. She over-sat, she over-ate, and she over-smoked very badly indeed. Her physicians protested and warned. The Amir was thoroughly frightened, greatly distressed. He cajoled, he pleaded, he bribed with the moving bribery of pearls and jeweled tissues and thick perfumes, and it is reported that at least twice he wept. But the result was nothing. His wife laughed and pouted and scoffed and defied and calmly and obstinately lolled, ate sweetmeats, and smoked herself to obesity and death.
The Chinese man who launders undergarments and table linen or barters chop suey in Chicago or St. Louis, living in a dearth of Chinese women, marries an American wife and makes her an admirable and a generous husband. The Chinese merchant in the Straits Settlements chooses a wife from any one of a score of non-Chinese races, and they jog on together most comfortably, and he lets her rule such of their life and hours as are mutual far more than he, although in intelligence, education and principles she is his inferior, and he knows it. Chinese men of education, of some natural taste and refinement, and with ideals and sterling personal worth sometimes “take in washing” for a profession, but American women of commensurate qualities do not marry them. The Eastern man is proud of his woman, admires her and is satisfied with her and her ways. He guards and he pampers her more often than not—unless he’s a Japanese—the Parsi, the Sikh, the Chinese, the Burmese (he has to), the Cingalese, the Hindoo, yes, and the strict Mohammedan too! And every Eastern man regards the “white” races as inferior to his own, is convinced that they are, and looks down upon them. He does not find Westerners companionable, he does not find them handsome or beautiful. He dislikes their customs, abhors their dress, and despises their creeds. And he loathes their food. Why, then, the desire of the Oriental for a European (and the blonder the better) mistress or wife? It seems inexplicable. But it is. The fact remains. More than one ruler of an “independent” Indian State has married a European of rougher birth, less education, more inferior mind, uncouther manners than his own, and imperiled his throne and succession, even his life in doing it—and knowing that he did.
But in the attraction that Sên King-lo felt in this English girl there was no abnormality—unless the friendly touch of yellow and white hands is in itself abnormality. He had been educated in her country and in its ways. In much he was English. He not only could read, write and speak her language, but he could think in it—and often did. He had read more English books than she had, knew more English facts than she did—and knew far more of the deeds, the years, and the thought that have made England. And between the typical English and the typical Chinese the difference is surprisingly small—and is mostly superficial: a matter of skin-tints and of bone-formation. There is a spiritual difference—we in England have not learned to repose on Nature, to merge in her as the Chinese do, and we reverence ancestry and old age less, guard childhood less loyally, less tenderly. But England grows—as America does—in all this. And if the race of Shakespeare and Shelley and Newman lives up less to its ideals, grasps them less and less generally than does the race of Han, the ideals of the two—at best—are the same. We—Anglo-Saxons and Celts—have less vision than the Chinese and its interknit and absorbed races have, but a gleam glows in the sky of the Occident—it peeps through the blanket of our dark. We are less insular than we were—some of us at least. The Oriental lectures—than which nothing in London is more worth having—at the School of Oriental Studies in Finsbury Circus are sparsely attended, but some of us do go, and come away grateful. The East always will be East—in spite of intermittent, ape-like freaks. Probably the crasser West always will be West. But the two may meet yet, concordant parts of one splendid whole.
The attraction of the Western woman for the Eastern man in the West is a simpler and a more normal thing than her attraction of him in the East. Debarred from the womanhood of his own race in London or New York, because there are no such women there, an Oriental’s leaning towards an East-and-West marriage or intimacy has something of the humdrum quality of poor Hobson’s narrowed choice.
Sên King-lo never had seen a Chinese girl!
Ivy Gilbert’s attraction of Sên first and last was a matter of personality and of person.
Probably its next strength was a matter of caste. She seemed to him wholly and charmingly patrician. Sên King-lo—as many young Chinese have done ever since Wang-Ah Shih made an Empire and an Emperor ridiculous—believed himself to be “republican”; but he was not. He could not be. He saw in Ivy Gilbert the caste of his mothers—the ancestral women he worshiped. He saw in Ivy—a slip of English girlhood—the imperial feminine of a great, puissant, imperial people.
Republic, commonwealth, kingdom, democracy, empire—take your choice. There are things to be said of them all—they all have their points. You may not be able to choose an empire, if you’re too long about it—so they say—well, we shall see, or our children’s children will. Prophecy’s a thankless, perilous pastime. And even the writing on the wall blunders sometimes. But this much is true; our old shifting Earth has but two empires left her now—China’s and England’s. Japan doesn’t count—yet. It mixes and meddles, but in the ultimate soul bigness it does not count. And China’s a republic you say? China is not—never has been and never can be, except in the fevered dreaming of a day of midsummer madness, the demented throes of a short nightmare; there are intrinsic qualities of peoples as of individual characters which no label can change. Under another name China may not be so comfortable a place to live in, but it is an empire still, disfigured, demented, but neither shattered nor lost—but not less than empire while the soul of the Sages, whom she wombed and who too begat her, breathes through the soul of her people, the poppies and bamboos hang at the edge of the Yellow Sorrow, and the silkworms gorge on the mulberry leaves and empurple the looms. And while those twin empires stand—in so much alike, so much unalike—a something will show in many faces of two races’ women which shows in no others. It is not distinction—though it often includes it; it is not courage—though it never lacks it; it is not flare or flame; it is not beauty; though never unfeminine it is not femininity; it is not dignity, though it never is cheap, it never asserts itself—it has no need to; it is not self-conscious; it is neither humble nor proud and yet it is both; it is neither virtue nor individuality; still less is it cant; it is empire—racial empire and personal empire: a part and a whole. A thing to admire? That’s as you think. But while the wild white rose perfumes the graves of Li’s ancestors, and the Augean goats browse by the graves of English boys in Gallipoli, that something will show in the faces of one type—the best type—of Chinese and English women. Ts’z-hi had it, and Ivy Gilbert, whatever medley her ancestry, undeniably had it, and the eyes of a Chinese man, who had been a sash-wearer for thousands of years, saw it and gloated. She wore it here in Washington; in the nursery schoolroom, in the ballroom or at Rosehill, as Ts’z-hi had worn it in the Vermilion Palace.
That Sên King-lo was attracted by Ivy Gilbert was not odd. That he attracted her, would be longer to explain, if one could—more intricate and difficult to trace. But he did. And her liking and friendliness turned to him in the good old hackneyed way that sunflowers have turned to the sun ever since Adam made the meanest and truest excuse in human history.
She tempted him—though he didn’t know it yet.
Youth called to youth. Loneliness answered to loneliness. Sex called to sex.