Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

Mrs. Sên clapped her hands and the “boy”—a wrinkled-faced Chinese of sixty—brought in the teapot and the crumpets.

She had seen Lo’s chair as the bearers carried it up the path, and she was sure he’d want his tea as soon as he could get it, after being coolie-jolted all the way from the Bund to the top of the Peak, this broiling, brazen day. She knew she wanted hers.

She frowned a trifle impatiently as she rearranged her tea-table a little. To Sung had forgotten the sugar again. Lo didn’t take sugar here—but she did. Well, she’d not take sugar today, for Lo would be here in a moment now and, if she called the servant back to bring it, probably Lo would hear and see; and she didn’t want her husband to know that To Sung had forgotten her sugar again—if he had forgotten it. It had infuriated Sên King-lo when it had happened once before. His face had blazed and he had hurled some terrible words at old To Sung, and Ruby had seen a Chinese side of her husband that she never had seen before. To Sung had listened with an expressionless face to the torrid abuse and had gone for the sugar basin when Sên had ended. But only Mrs. Sên’s insistence had saved him dismissal. “I thought you had to be deferential to every old person,” she said as she sugared her half-cold tea. “Every rule has its exception, even in China,” Sên had told her, “and I’ll have no servant of ours forget the slightest service to you.”

She did not dare, for poor old To’s sake, to have Lo know that he had forgotten, or neglected, to bring her sugar again.

They were wonderful servants, these Chinese house-servants of hers, and the bungalow on the Peak ran on even smoother and more noiseless wheels than her admirable London ménage had: more tempting dinners even more perfectly cooked—service swifter and surer. But now and then some personal English need of her own was overlooked. And for all the expertness and well-nigh perfection, Mrs. Sên felt that it was a chillier service than that her London servants had given her. She ignored it, tried to believe that she did not know why it was, brooded over it rather, and hid it from Lo whenever she could.

It was the one small blemish in her delight in her new life in a new place, though she began now to wonder how soon people would begin to call.

“Young China” has done some remarkable things to Hongkong, if it has done nothing else. Sên King-lo found Victoria less to his liking than it had been. But Ruby, who was seeing her first of the Orient now, was entranced with Hongkong. It was all so unexpected, so unlike anything she ever had seen or imagined, that its every oddity and burlesque had a charm and seemed a picture. She never really tired of the bizarre kaleidoscope of the Hongkong streets, but when she was a little satiated with the incredible medley and cram of the odd human mêlée and the narrow, sign-hung streets, she had only to rest her eyes on the boat-flecked water, or lift them for refreshment and delight that never failed to the Peak and its slopes; and always she had the home-haven of the bungalow and its hillside garden.

Sên saw it differently. Whatever his country had gained in freedom and in international grip, he had an appalling feeling that it had lost in beauty and in manners. And once or twice he felt that the soul of China was tarnished, and his taste, if not his reason, veered more and more to Sir Charles’ attitude: “Would that the Manchu were back on the dragon-throne.” It seemed to him that the new Chinese Democracy was overblown and that it was underbred. His countrywomen, that he saw everywhere in the city streets, hurt him almost intolerably. Chinese girls, no longer girlish, “walked out with their ‘young men,’ ” girls so preposterously clad that conjecture often might leave their sex a toss-up, figures so absurd and meaningless that no comic paper in Europe would have reproduced them, or known what to call them if it had. Chinese women wearing spats and rakishly tilted fur caps, thin peek-a-boo blouses and scant tweed skirts cut half-knee high and violently patterned with checks so big that neither a “darky” woman nor a “nigger minstrel” would have worn them in St. Louis or Chicago, stood in strident groups on thoroughfare corners, discussing in shrill, unabashed voices diseases and “causes” of which the courtyard-sheltered woman never had heard. He saw one making a “book” at Happy Valley, he heard another call her escort “old bean,” and when he heard two young Chinese girls placidly discussing abnormalities, sex, and grimmer things with men not much older than they, and saw an undoubtedly respectable matron at a restaurant wearing a monocle and reading through it a French novel of which he would not have allowed Ruby to touch the cover, Sên King-lo felt that Ts’z-hi had died too soon, and all the sweetness and soundness of Chinese womanhood with her.

But he reflected that Hongkong always had been a drag-net for flotsam and jetsam, and he hoped and prayed that when he had journeyed on into the interior he should find his country less “advanced” and changed, the waters still clear and tranquil in the lily-tanks, the tulips and violets still at ease in the gardens, the wild roses by the bamboo-edged waysides still white and sweet. The emancipation of his traveled mind failed him a little, and his soul revolted hotly that East no longer was East.

His countrymen struck him as less changed in appearance, and less unmannered, than his countrywomen did; but he missed the costume he himself had not worn for many years. He missed old ceremonial greetings, old suavities, old detachment, and even the down-hanging queue and the tight braids of hair closely bound about half-shaven heads. Many a man with whom he had business offered him a whiskey and soda or a big cigar who yesterday would have given him a tiny bowl of tea or a long-stemmed, small-bowled, betasseled pipe. Sên King-lo was as homesick for China in Hongkong as he ever had been in Washington and was homesick in a sorrier way.