Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

CHAPTER XXXI

They argued it long and carefully—not once hotly—not once either failing in courtesy or affection. That was impossible because their mutual respect and affection was too well founded and seasoned—too deep and sincere. But no hint of rancor or unfairness on one part, or suspicion of it on the other, made Snow’s position and arguments the stronger and perhaps did not weaken either Sên’s attitude or his reply.

There was no “quarrel-scene” about it, only regret on both sides, by both frankly acknowledged.

“I dislike it,” Sir Charles began, passing his cigarettes—tobacco marks conference, not dispute—“I dread it utterly, and I ask you to consider it searchingly.”

“I believe I have done that, Sir Charles.”

“When!”

Sên smiled.

“Since, I’ll be bound,” Snow continued, “for I’m convinced that you’d not have done it—spoken. I mean—if you had thought it out beforehand. It came on impulse, I suspect.”

“Quite on impulse,” the other owned.

“It usually does,” Sir Charles Snow smiled as he sighed.

“But I had considered it from every angle, I think, before, as I also have since.”

“And you did not mean to speak?”

“I meant not to speak.”

“But you did; and now?”

“I certainly did,” Sên assented. “It was no speaking of Miss Gilbert’s.”

Both men smiled.

“And now, Sên?”

“I dislike it too,” Sên said quietly, “in some of its aspects.”

“Ah?”

“Because I dread it a little for her.”

“You have more cause to dread it for yourself,” the other said sharply. “Given considerable luck Ivy may go through it practically scot free. But for you, as I see it, it can be nothing but disaster. She may get through it comfortably enough—if she never goes East—” Sên winced a little and his eyes were grave—“but if you persist in it, you are running your head very tightly into a very rough noose.”

“I’ll risk that,” Sên’s eyes were smiling again, “and because I believe I can keep it from being sometimes an inconvenience to her, I do persist in it, Sir Charles.”

“Is it fair to her to persist in what you own you dislike?”

“Some of its possible rasps—probable rasps—only, and between which and her I believe that I can always stand. I intend to. And I like it,” Sên added, “incomparably more than I dislike—know and admit that I should dislike—one or two of its quite possible consequences.”

“Quite possible,” Snow repeated with quiet significance.

“I like it immensely, Sir,” Sên said with a boyish laugh but a man’s steady purpose and pride in his eyes.

“But you fear it.”

“No, scarcely fear it.”

“Fear it,” Snow insisted. “Take the way out. I beg you to—for both your sakes.”

“There is no way out,” Sên King-lo declared, “none that I can take, or will. If your cousin—you have spoken to her, of course, or will——”

“I have spoken to Ivy,” Snow told him grimly, “and made matters worse, if I did anything. She’ll not budge an inch. But you—you are reasonable. You will listen to what I have to say?”

“To every word of it and as long as you like.”

Snow plunged into his arguments—most of them the old ones that every student of “East and West” has heard again and again, and that dozens of pens have twisted and turned into well-grimed shreds. And, quite without offensiveness, he cut very much deeper into physical things—revulsions, apparent, if not actual, abnormality, and so on—than often a pen has dared to do.

In some points, Sên agreed; most he rejected or claimed to be outweighed.

“I saw it as you do, on the whole—until—the other day,” he admitted; “but I see it differently now.”

“You would,” Sir Charles said with a smile that was grim but patient and not unkind.

“I did not know—not until a short time ago—how it was with me. It took me quite by surprise.”

“It frequently does.”

“I was a dunce, of course, not to know where I was drifting.”

“We always are——”

“But when I found out and looked it in the face—I did do that—I firmly determined to——”

“Cut it out?”

“Yes, just that! And then—the other day——”

“It ran you out.”

Sên nodded. “And now,” he added, his face radiant, “I cannot give Ruby up!”

“Or think you can’t,” Snow insinuated. “So you call her Ruby! I like it best, and it suits her too. There is not much of the clinging vine about her, I think, and I assure you there was none at all yesterday when I attempted to say to her less than a tenth of what I have said to you.”

Sên laughed—rather proudly. Sir Charles Snow’s affectionate smile was grimmer.

“I’m afraid I’ve filched your own name for her,” Sên King-lo said. “I too think it suits her the better, and it’s the name I’ve always cared for most—it was my mother’s name.”

“By Jove!” Snow murmured, and added under his breath, “I’d forgotten that.”

Sên King-lo looked up in amazement from the match he was striking, and his eyes were not pleased. How came this Englishman to have heard that? A Chinese gentleman does not name his wife to another man—and in China her children may not speak it.

They smoked on in silence. Sir Charles was musing.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked suddenly.

“No,” the Chinese told him, “though I was confirmed at Public School—they made it part of the ‘course,’ as they did cricket and footer—and I took it all as part of the ‘English’ I was there to learn.” He added, but with absolute courtesy, “Are you?”

“I believe in God,” Snow said stoutly.

“So do I.”

“But not in our God, not in hers!”

“I think I do,” Sên King-lo assented. “I believe that there is only one God—many gods, but only one God. Does it matter what we call him? I think not. Or matter how we reach him? I can’t believe it. And, on my soul, I don’t believe that there is much difference between any two religions that are both sincere and devout.”

“Would you say that in China?” Snow demanded quietly.

“I hope so,” Sên King-lo replied, “if I had any reason to do so, to any one who had the right to ask. There still are parts of China, of course, in which it wouldn’t be altogether safe to whisper it even—not for a Chinese to do so—and in them I should not go out of my way to megaphone it. We have not, as it happens, spoken together about religion—Miss Gilbert and I; but I shall not try to convert her to any one of our old Chinese religions. I can promise you that. And they are crumbling fast. Christianity’s the coming religion of China.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I do,” Sên persisted. “And why not? It is an Oriental faith—as every great faith has been and is—from Zoroastrianism to Christian Science—Spiritualism thrown in, if you like, and the faith of the Friends.”

“Admitted. Well, I won’t pretend to think that religious difference is the principal bar. But tell me this, Sên: had your mother been living, would you have asked my cousin to be your wife?”

“No,” the other answered promptly. “I would not hurt my mother or deceive her.”

“Would you take an English wife to China?”

“No—I’ve thought that out, and I would not—not yet at least. The time is not ripe—but it’s coming.”

“I doubt it.”

“I intended to live my life out in China. Even the other day, I asked her if she would let me take her there.”

“You needn’t tell me what she answered. I know.”

“Of course.”

“She’d go like a shot and be infernally miserable after she had. The East is paradise for European women, unless they are married to Eastern men, and then it is hell.”

“Precisely. And that is why I shall not go back to China.”

“You always have wished to?”

“Intensely. But everything is changed now. A man’s work must go on, of course——”

“It should,” Snow interjected.

“And I may need to make flying visits now and then—sure to, I think—but she shall not come. England shall be our home.”

“That will be a sacrifice,” Sir Charles began.

“Yes. But I shall be glad to make it. I intend to make them all. And they’ll not cost me much—for that matter. They can’t, for—she is all the world to me.”

Charles Snow knew better than that. But he knew that Sên King-lo meant it, and he let it pass.

“Have you thought of your children? Yours and hers?”

“Desperately hard,” Sên answered, gravely. Snow had drawn blood at last.

“It will be worse for them than for her or for you,” he urged.

“It would be, in China,” Sên agreed sadly.

“Damnable!”

“Our children shall be English.”

“Half-English,” the other reminded him, “Eurasians!”

Sên King-lo flushed a little. His Chinese soul winced at that word. Snow had meant that it should. But he was sorry to thrust so at Sên King-lo, here in the room—Snow’s own room—where they had smoked so many “peace-pipes” and held such intimate and cordial conference.

Charles Snow saw that the other’s face was troubled now, but he saw no receding.

After a moment he rose and unlocked a drawer in a tall cabinet—the only Chinese thing in the room—and came back with a small oval thing in his hand. “No one but I ever has looked at it,” he said with one hand on Sên King-lo’s shoulder, “since the day it was given to me.” And he laid the miniature down at Sên’s hand.

Sên King-lo saw the face of a very beautiful Chinese girl painted on the oval of ivory, and painful color crimsoned his face.

“My mother,” he said huskily. For an instant his eyes were enraged.

“No,” the Englishman replied quietly, going back to his chair, leaving the miniature on the smoking-table between them. “Your mother’s sister. Her milk-name was ‘Lotus.’ ”

“The nun!”

“She was not a nun when I knew her,” Charles Snow said.

“I have seen your mother, too, Sên King-lo,” he added presently, “both as a girl in her father’s home and as a wife in her husband’s.”

“I never saw her!” Sên Ruby’s son said sadly.

“They were very alike—the sisters.”

“Very,” Sên agreed. “I have a miniature of my mother, here in my rooms, that might almost be this. My father gave it to me, from his robe, as he died.”

“They were painted by the same brush,” Snow told him. “I have seen your miniature, Sên King-lo. Their father trusted me, and so did yours.”

Sên gave his English friend a filial look.

“I am going to tell you the story. I thought it was shut away in my own keeping forever, but I am going to tell it to you—now.”

“If you’d rather not——”

“I’d much rather not. But I must. I am going to tell you what I’d far rather keep an old locked sweetness—a far away thing, but my own—going to tell it in my final attempt to save you and my cousin from the hideous mistake and life-long misery from which your grandfather saved me and his daughter years ago.”

The two children’s voices in happy clamor rang out in the hall, and their mother’s voice joined in, laughing.

“I have loved but two women, desired but two, in all my life, Sên King-lo.”

“I, only one,” the Chinese said gravely.

“You are young,” the older man told him, gently, a kindly twinkle in his blue eyes. “I love my wife very dearly, Sên——”

“I know that, sir.” And he knew also that, whatever this unexpected story which Charles Snow was about to entrust to him, there was no discredit in it—a perfumed breath of the long-ago, no slightest stench of any time or place.

Sir Charles Snow told it slowly—pausing again and again—striking a match, drawing a whiff of smoke from his cigarette. It is not easy for Englishmen to tell such stories at all.

“The second year I was in China, I spent two months in a monastery that lay on the edge of your grandfather’s place—a friend or two with me for part of the time, for the rest alone. The monks had an excellent cook—or one of them was—and a good bottle or two. They, good men, were no sour zealots.”

Sên King-lo smiled.

“I came and went as I would and did as I liked. It was liberty-hall for me, that old monk-kept inn, in the pines on the hill. There were no other guests. It was rest and peace and relaxation—perfect that—until I held a Chinese girl in my arms. Yes, King-lo, I have held a Chinese nun in my arms—and,” a queer, tender smile in his grave eyes, “your mother, too.”

But Sên King-lo only smiled back with a tranquil face.

“One afternoon I was squatted with a book at the edge of the pines, nearer your grandfather’s house than I was to the monastery, reading a little, doing nothing most of the time—being, not doing at all. The sun was setting—I can see it now. Looking up from a page—it was Han Yu, by the way—I saw a plume of flame lick up from the low, widespread, red-roofed house, and then—the day was very still—I heard a girl cry. You know what things of old wood most Chinese houses are, and how they burn if once they start.”

Sên nodded. He knew. All China knows.

“I ran, of course—no ceremony then between me and the devil-guards on a Chinese man’s forbidden gate. I pelted in and I carried two Chinese girls out—they didn’t weigh much, the pair of them. They were very like their pictures. . . . The servants ran about like tipsy rabbits and were of no possible use.”

Sên nodded again. He found that easy to believe.

“It turned out that all the men of the family were miles away—hunting. And my idea of what was best to do with those two little things in my arms was—well, hazy. I didn’t speak Chinese then quite as well as I did afterwards, and the gibbering servants knew no Mandarin. At least, if they did, they didn’t trot it out then, and their language was completely new to me. I didn’t quite know what to do with those girls. One giggled—your mother—” Sên smiled—“the other cried. Ivy’s laugh has reminded me of your mother’s sometimes.”

Sên looked at him curiously, but Snow did not bite his lip—propaganda forgotten—for he and his cigarette were far away, living again an old love-story. A song of Grieg’s came from the drawing-room. It was Ivy’s touch, Sên King-lo knew, but Charles Snow did not hear.

“So—I took them to the monastery. There was a small consternation, but the top monk cleared out of his cell, heaped it with the best things in the place—rugs and cushions and things—and there they slept. Their women were with them, and some score of the men servants and coolies jabbering and smoking outside, while I did sentry-go outside the cell door, and the fraternity told their rosaries and chanted their prayers half through the night.

“We lived there for four or five weeks—all of us, your grandfather and his four sons—a runner found them the next day, and they came hot-haste. The service I’d done wasn’t much, just carrying two little things kitten-light, and not much more than kitten-big, from under a roof that was blazing to one that wasn’t—nothing but that and keeping my head while a gang of ‘the babies,’ as your people call their retainers, completely lost theirs; but the father made a mountain of it Omi-high. Chinese gratitude is gigantic—always. We lived there together as one family, I as free of the two girls as their brothers were, and when a new house was run up near where the other had been—your grandfather made ‘the babies’ work like Egyptian slaves—he made me welcome there, and I was as free to go into the ‘flowery’ courtyard and garden as their own brothers were; and I did so very much oftener than they did. He could not have allowed any Chinese man what he allowed me. He held that the race-bar put me as much out of personal bounds—as far as his daughters were concerned—as if I’d been the man in the moon. They might have married a vase or a man dead and cremated; but they could not marry an Englishman, and the thought of such a thing could never arise. He was right, and he was wrong. So I stayed at the mandarin’s home rather more than I did at the monastery—sat in the courtyard with the tulips and musk while Lotus tweaked her lute and Ruby sorted her silks and ‘pulled the flowers up’ in the silk on her loom. They were very alike—so alike that some of the servants, and the brother who saw them least often, could not always tell them apart; but I always could. The lady Ruby had the prettier laugh—a tinkle of silver bells—carried her head the prouder; Lotus had the softer eyes, her hands were a shade the tinier, her mouth had the longer bow—and I had touched her hand by chance, as it lay on my coat the time of the fire, and once again when we’d reached on one impulse to gather narcissus that grew by the brook where the monks caught their breakfast trout. I learned more Chinese in those four weeks than I’d learned in two years. . . . The usual thing happened—to both of us. It was a dream—a courtyard madness. But I planned to keep it. And one day, by the lily-pond, I touched her hand again and told her. And her eyes answered me until they fell from mine, and then their lids answered me—they were trembling, and her fingers fluttered and answered me too. I knew that I should never return to England but stay always in China. . . . When I told her father—I went and found him and told him then, leaving her alone there by the lily-pool. . . . I never saw her again. When I told him, his amazement was terrible. He was kind—very kind. But he convinced me. He shattered my dream. He showed me the thing I contemplated as the monstrous impossibility it was. In my reason, I think, I thanked him even then. He saved two lives from misery and lasting regrets. I know it now. And I never look on my children or hear them at play that I do not thank him. I left Pechilli that same day. And I never have been there again. Two years later when she ‘took the veil’—I forget what it’s called in China—she wrote me a letter—her last day at home—out in the courtyard—a little red letter. Your grandfather gave it to me in Pekin. I have it still. I have not looked at it for years, but I have kept it. I do not know if she lives——”

“Yes,” King-lo said softly—there were tears in his eyes—“an abbess, happy and loved. I saw my aunt the last time I was at home.”

“Thank you. I am glad to know. . . . And your grandfather gave me that miniature. A great portrait-painter—the greatest of that day—a woman—had painted it and one of her sister for him, and they were among the few things that were not burned. An old blind servant had had the wit to snatch them, as he ran, knowing how his master valued them. This is the one your grandfather gave me. The other you have—I have no doubt it is it. Your father showed it to me. After your mother’s marriage, being in Ho-nan, I called on your father—your grandfather had asked me to do it. Sên Wo T’ring made me very welcome, and took me at once to your mother where she sat in her courtyard, working flowers on a tiny coat—her women about her. She sent them away and presently he left us—alone. I was there for an hour, and she gave me her hand and a rose for my coat—I’m afraid I haven’t it now—when your father went with me to the outer gate. He was a very gracious gentleman, your father, Sên King-lo. But he would not have taken me into his wife’s courtyard if I had been Chinese—or your mother have given me her hand and a flower. You were born, the next week. I never saw Sên Ruby again. But Sên Wo T’ring I saw often. Because of what your grandfather had told him, because I had carried your mother from a house that was burning, and, I think, because Sên Ruby had asked it, he held me his friend. And I held him mine and valued it greatly. . . . I want to stand his friend today, and hers, and yours. Sên King-lo, for the love of the dead, for the sake of the unborn, and in pity of them—give it up!”

“I am sorry,” Sên King-lo said earnestly; but his face was set firm, and Sir Charles Snow knew that he had failed.

“Shall we ask Lady Snow to give us some tea now?” was all he said.

“Not today, thanks very much,” was Sên’s answer. And they parted then with a grip of their hands.

Sir Charles Snow sat for a long time with the old miniature in his hand. Then he locked it away and went to romp with his children and chat with his wife until the dressing-bell rang.