“But you are going soon,” Dr. Ray said more cheerfully than she felt. “Get her away. That is the only thing to do. And you are going soon now, Ruby said.”
“Farther into China. To my own family. That will be worse, I fear.”
“Oh! I hope not. She wouldn’t stay with me, I suppose, while you went and came back for her? We could take a little trip—to Japan perhaps—she and I. I will part ways with Julia Townsend, for a time, or bring her to reason.”
“I’d give a great deal if she would,” Sên replied. “But she will not. It isn’t even worth trying. Don’t think me ungrateful.”
“I know that you are not that,” Dr. Ray said emphatically.
Mrs. Sên came to them from the drawing-room then, her home letters read, Emma’s cried over a little—for it had told her of Ruben’s first tooth and of a pair of tiny new red shoes he preferred to suck rather than wear—and nothing more of analysis or of confession passed.
It was late when Dr. Ray went back to her hotel down in the city, and Sên walked beside her with his hand on the edge of her chair.
Even in high daylight (day is never garish in Hongkong) the apish incongruities and misfitments of Young China ways and clothes cannot rob Hongkong of its unequaled beauty. The bamboos’ luxuriant, sword-shaped, fern-like beauty still edges with gray-green lace the twisting footpath between Victoria City and the blue-topped Peak. Red Chinese roofs still up-turn here and there among the persimmons and oleanders. Junks and sampans still huddle in the harbor, and the water still croons blue and green and limpid about them. At night Young China seems almost a myth, an unloveliness almost forgotten and quite negligible; the moon and the stars keep their old state up in an imperial sky; lights still shimmer like fireflies and flash like friendly arrows of flame from bush and vine-entangled homesteads and from long pendant lanterns swinging in coolie hands, and down in the great craft-huddled harbor, lights twinkle and proclaim in every color that man-made light can show; queer, passionate Chinese music still throbs now and then through the darkness, and English pianos tinkle long after London’s bedtime; Chinese voices rise and fall in velvet guttural across the night-time stillness, and the laugh of a young English voice pierces it over there behind the thicket of moon-drenched roses; a nightingale sings in an old cherry-tree; and night moths wing their filmy flight from the passion-flowers.
As they turned one of the steep, narrow pathway’s sudden curves, they almost collided with a singing quintet of young Chinese—two girls and three men, swinging along all arm in arm and quite spanning the narrow yellow path. They were singing an English music-hall song stridently, the men dressed in European clothes that were European—Bayswater or Battersea—the two young women in “English” raiment that was not English. One girl swayed a little as she walked, because her golden lilies, disfigured now in sensible English boots, had not “unbound” successfully. They drew aside to let Dr. Ray’s chair pass, backing against the bamboos at the road’s edge, still linking arms, still singing, but much more softly, just keeping it up: “My mother-in-law ain’t no jellyfish.” And they looked, as they were, perfectly respectable and self-respecting.
When the descending chair had passed on, they swung back athwart the path and went on again in step and singing again in louder tones: “My mother-in-law ain’t no lamb, and she ain’t no Venus neither”—crashing it out to the Chinese night, where the moon above showered the yellow path and the gray-green bamboos with a rain of opals, and the nightingale broke off its fragrant song in the old cherry-tree.