Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

The other small cloud was a name-cloud, too, and more permanent.

Mrs. Sên did not know what to call her husband. “King-lo” she did not care for—she thought it had a heathenish sound, and smacked of Limehouse laundries—though she had the sweet good taste never to tell Sên so. “King” by itself she particularly disliked. “It would be too silly to call you ‘King’ all over the place when you’re only a Mister. And I won’t call you ‘Sên,’ for you are not a peer.” She tried to invent a name of her own for him but couldn’t find one. Finally she called him “Lo” thinking it funny and short and belittling at first. But she soon forgot that she had, and Sên thought its sound from her lips the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

And beyond these two Ivy had never felt a shadow since she sailed from New York City in a jade-colored green dress that she had worn once at a Rosehill garden party.

The baby could not write its name yet—some five-months-old babies cannot—and no question had arisen as yet as to whether that important signature would be “Ruben Sên” or “Sên Ruben.” Sên King-lo had named their firstborn, rather insisting on “Ruben” in place of the “Ruby” he had wished. But he realized that even a Chinese man—very probably a future great President—could not appropriately go through life and international preëminence under the winsome name of Ruby. But the father liked the sound of “Ruben” better than the mother did.

Ruby—the young mother—enjoyed her social popularity keenly, and neither she nor Sên suspected that it had grown even more from the estimate in which several eminent people held him than from the undeniable charm of her personality and easy adaptability. She loved her home, especially the rose-covered crib with only room for two. She enjoyed her husband’s “vogue” and his cordial welcome in high places. But most of all she loved her husband and child—and King-lo the dearer of the two.

No one looked at them with unpleasant surprise. London has an easy grace of the darker strangers within her imperial gates. And Mrs. Sên soon realized that in Mayfair there was more distinction than disgrace in being the English wife of Sên King-lo. And, whatever they thought or felt about it there, they were very kind to Mrs. Sên at Portland Place where the five-colors flag flew. She made his Chinese friends welcome and was sweetly cordial to them, and most of them liked her. The Chinese in London grow in numbers, and there are many of a birth and class that do not affiliate with Limehouse. But their home and home-life were English. Kwan Yin-ko hung beside their bed, and an old Chinese miniature of an older “Ruby” was locked away in Sên King-lo’s own “den.” But there was nothing else Chinese in the house. Few smart houses in Hampstead, Mayfair, Chelsea or Kensington but had more Chinese curios than the Sêns’ had. It was both kind and wise of Mr. Sên, many sage folk said. But they misjudged him there. It was Sên’s doing, not his English wife’s; but it was a selfishness—almost his sole one. He did not wish too many material reminders about him of the homeland he had forsaken. England was his home now, and he did not intend ever again to be homesick for China, and he cut the risks of it as close as he could. But he still read his own classics, when he sat alone in his den, and the love-songs of Li-Po. A man cannot forgo the books that were the mother’s milk of his soul.

And Sên King-lo still brushed many a letter to friends in Chinese—not all of them business letters. And he still sometimes played a game of chess with an opponent in Shansi, and he often heard the Yellow Sorrow surge and creak—in his dreams as he slept.

But most of his nights were untroubled and dreamless, and whatever his sleep, he woke each day to a deeper and more tender love of the girl who lay beside him.

King-lo always woke the earlier. For centuries his people had waked at dawn, and the old race-habit stayed.

When King-lo woke he scarcely stirred lest he disturb her. Sometimes he drew a book from his bedside table and kept himself quiet with the volume’s pages till she moved and he turned to greet her waking. But oftener Sên King-lo lifted his chin on an elbow-supported hand and watched and worshiped the girlish loveliness of the delicate face asleep on its pillow. He thought of the girl on whose face he had laid his face as they stood by an old fallen apple-tree, the girl he had taken to wife one early morning in a crumbling, dreary church, on an old-fashioned street—a church that had not been any god-place of his churchless people—in the crown-city of an alien people, the Queen City of the Potomac. Though he’d loved the girl well, and had dared to risk for her the convictions of his being and the future of all his years, in defiance of the instincts of centuries and the laws of his fathers, she had not been loved as he loved his wife resting beside him, sleeping safe and secure in his love and in the keeping of his manhood. Day after day Sên King-lo’s soul kept a sacred tryst with the woman who slept happily there while the sun came back from China, going its way to China, rose over New York City, throwing splashes of gold over skyscrapers, Central Park, boat-busy river, “Flat Iron” and ocean.