Ruby, the wife of Sên King-lo, journeyed like a queen when her husband took her from Hongkong to the home of his fathers.
They went a short way unromantically enough on the new railroad. Then they made their long slower progress across China in palanquins and by junks.
The second night they camped in a wayside inn’s nondescript garden. Sên would not take his wife into the comfortless, unspeakable native hostelry. He had no wish to go there himself.
After they’d eaten, they sat a long time beside the great sweet cone fire their coolies had lighted outside Ruby’s tent; for as night neared, a cool tang came in the evening air.
A young crescent moon cut with its sickle the silver and cinnabar sky, and a thousand stars pricked it with emerald and sapphire and the red of Mars’ and of Saturn’s ring. The atmosphere indescribably clear, the fireweed still showed a crimson glow at the edge of the gorge its lush growth fenced and hid, and the perfumed smell of wild white roses and the heavier scent of forests of honeysuckles was everywhere; but the violets looked now swathes of white on the grass about them, and the death of the sunlight had stolen their green from the bamboos thicketed behind the squalid inn, leaving the graceful, soft swaying but silent bamboos a mistier, ghostlier gray, and their jointed stems a duller bisque.
Voices chanted on the distant pathway, for it was springtime, the unmatched spring of China, and there as in Chaucer’s England when spring comes with its up-moving sap and its tender crinkling leaves “then longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.” A band of crickets chirruped to the moon, bathing their horned flanks in the dew on the ferns. And Sên King-lo knew that the hour had come to say what he dreaded to say: the first positive, personal dread that ever had thwarted his comfort and ease in her presence, with her hand in his, a fold of her dress on his knee—for they sat on the fern-bushed grass.
He would say it now, but still he waited a little for his words.
A temple bell in the distance answered its mallet.
Sên King-lo had been eager to quit Hongkong, more eager than glad; for fear had clutched cold on his heart as they had turned from the island, off into China.
But even as they newly journeyed his soul had quickened and throbbed to his country. All that Europe had wrapped about him as an intimate garment fell from him as ash falls from a cigar. He was Chinese again, only Chinese, wholly Chinese, and at home. Westminster, Oxford, New York and Virginia were farther from him and more alien than Mars and Orion. Men he had known and liked, broken bread and thought with, in London and Washington were as gone from him, as nothing, as children’s names that the inexorable pulse of the great tide has washed and ironed from the seashore sands. The West was scarcely a dream, less than a wraith or a sun-sucked mist that’s forgotten in the yellow throb of an August day. Of all the West, only one thing stayed with him now: the woman he loved and their child—that, too, was exquisitely, sacredly she—part of her body as of his, part of his soul as of hers—the physical and spiritual fruit of the spiritual and physical love of man and woman who were one—the tangible signature of life’s greatest impulse.