Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

As she and Ivy sat alone for an hour in the garden after lunch, they spoke only of Washington. The visitor felt no impulse to question young Mrs. Sên. Her trained eyes had seen with their first glance in the drawing-room that all was well with Sên King-lo’s English wife. There was not a cloud the size of a baby’s palm in Ivy Sên’s horizon—or, if there were, Ivy had neither seen nor sensed it. Their friend too had seen, clearly enough, that the affection and confidence between husband and wife had endured and grown. But she had caught a look once or twice in Sên’s Chinese eyes that she had not liked. And when Ivy in her turn left Dr. Ray and King-lo alone for half an hour—not in neglect of a guest but because the English letters had come and because she knew how well they two would entertain and satisfy each other—the physician turned to Sên presently and asked him, as the quality of their mutual friendship and respect licensed her to, “Tell me, my friend, how has it worked?”

“Can’t you see?” Sên King-lo questioned for question.

“I see that your wife is perfectly happy. I see that you are beautifully satisfied in each other and that, if you and she could shut the world out and keep it shut out, all would be very well indeed with you both. But that is just what none of us can do—and perhaps have no right to attempt to do. Most of our troubles come to us from outside, I think. I believe that the vital germs of every one of them—always—are in ourselves, either in some quality of ours or in some conduct, but that it usually is the friction of cross-currents that develops them. Something troubles you, Mr. Sên. May I know? Can I help? It is the friend that asks, but it just might be possible for the doctor to help—to see the way out.”

“May I smoke?” King-lo asked her, and lit his cigarette slowly. Through its slender smoke he sat and watched the bungalow garden, its bamboos and tulips and fern-trees, and Hongkong down below the twisting roadway, with its blur and huddle of Chinese homes and shops and markets, and the gaunter, though prouder, assertion of Europe’s overlordship, and the turquoise sea beyond it.

“It has worked perfectly,” he said after a time. “We have had no regret—neither of us. Ruby, I think, has not had an anxiety. I, when Ruben was coming, had my bad half-hours. A Chinese baby would have been a complication, even in London, the kindest, least censorious place on earth and the most sincerely cosmopolitan. You see a greater and a more obvious mingling—or, at least, mixture of races in many other places; Constantinople, Venice, San Francisco, and twenty others. But it is only in London—only in London of all the world—that there is genuine welcome for the strangers within the gates. But in London itself there would have been no place for a Chinese child of ours. And also, I wondered how the sight of a Chinese baby in her arms—at her breast—would affect Ruby. I have the type of Chinese face—that we Chinese have now and then—that does not bear country stamped on it too strongly. I might pass as any one of several races, two or three of them not Oriental or only remotely so, but it’s not a family trait. Every other Sên I ever saw and every other Pei-fu—my mother was a Pei-fu before her marriage—has been unmistakably, strikingly Chinese in appearance. And Ruby was used to me. She scarcely remembered, except in a hazy, detached way, that I was not English. But Nature plays many tricks, but will brook none played on her. The Mongolian is a persistent type; and such mixed marriages as ours, through some inscrutable law of Nature, seem almost sure to perpetuate, and even to emphasize, one racial type and to ignore the other.”

“Yes,” the physician murmured.

“I knew that our child might be born more Chinese than the Chinese—and I wondered if I might not see my wife shrink, even a little, from the child our love had given us. I was hideously anxious for her. And I dared not say one word, give one hint, to prepare her; help her, as that perhaps might have done, to resist an almost inevitable revulsion—to destroy it before it existed. But Nature spared us!”

“This time,” the physician thought to herself.

“When I saw how lily-fair our babe was——”

“So you quite forgave him for looking so little like your own people? I wondered, if you had, if you could, when I saw his picture just now.”