Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

They gave her a chamber of her own and a courtyard of her very own, too, but even the fear of Sên Ya Tin could not keep the other women out. They were all over her—chattering, laughing, tweaking queer little instruments, scolding servants who scolded back, handling her most intimate belongings, handling her. The “flowery” was a beehive of women, and sometimes Ivy’s indignation called it a monkey-house of them.

They were the kindliest, merriest things on earth. They were curious, of course, childishly curious, to gaze on the human curio she was to them—not one of them ever had seen a European before—but their close pressing and constant attentions, that she so abhorred, were at least nine-tenths sheer womanly kindness. Even the concubines were sorry for her—so far from her own home and so uncouth and untaught—she hadn’t even a painted face, poor thing—and they all were heartily anxious to sister her and make her at home. And they went to work at it with one united will. They gave her their baubles; they tried to teach her blind-man’s buff—and failed as Blanche and Dick had failed before them; they tried to lend her their prettiest clothes, their pipes, and their face paints. They implored her, in words she could not understand, and in gesture and clutches she could, to gamble with them; and Mrs. Sên, who had bought her platinum and diamond wrist-watch with bridge winnings, was disgusted. And they never left her alone.

The prettiest woman there—and even Ruby saw how pretty she was—was the youngest concubine, and her baby was the prettiest baby of all the fat, dimpled lot. The girl had a tender heart and an unspoiled soul. Her eyes filled with tears sometimes when she saw Sên King-lo’s foreign wife sit silent and listless apart. One night La-yuên cried on her mat because she was so sorry for Sên Ruby, and the next day she brought her tiny baby and laid him in Ruby’s lap. And the baby, after one startled look, laughed and held up his wee hand and clutched at Ruby’s beads. And Ruby caught him closer and held him to her face—snuggling and loving him in spite of his sad, smirched birth; forgetting, not sensing, that the sins of the East are not the sins of the West.

They were all sorry for her, and sorriest because it was whispered that the lord King-lo, even in the terrible land where they lived, had not even one concubine; and they all were very kind to her.

Nowhere else are social barriers at once so high and so negligible as they are in China. A Chinese lady chums with her maid—between the whiles she cuffs and beats her—eats with her, consults with her, gossips with her. And this disconcerted and revolted English Ivy even more, if the truth must out, than the ever present and patent concubinage did.

Sên King-lo came to his wife as often as he could. At Sên Ya Tin’s decree, startling but not to be questioned, rules of social sex decorum were scandalously relaxed. Sên King-lo had access to his wife at all times, of course, and because—that she never need lack friendly faces and voices about her—she was quartered so unisolated from her new kinswomen, in going and coming to her King-lo came more in touch with the haremed ladies of his kinsmen than was Chinesely decent, and far more than old Madame Sên would have cared to have it whispered abroad. And he saw several Chinese girls now—unmarried daughters of the house, but he thought little about any of them, and neither the wives nor the maidens seemed to resent it—unless giggling is a protest. Ruby still wore her Chinese dress invariably, but he came now and then in his English clothes. The first time he did there was a harem riot, for one of the women had spied him, or a eunuch or a slave girl had seen him and told; and the little painted ladies tore pell-mell into Ivy’s room, pushing and jostling each other in their mad rush to see and to touch, and women who never had left their own precincts or seen a forbidden man, much less let one see them, nearly ripped Sên King-lo’s coat off his back.

And one tripped and fell—fell thump across King-lo’s knees, and Sên King-lo chuckled and chortled with glee, and so did the tumbled one’s husband who came in then to see what all the noise—excessive even in a Chinese “flowery”—was about. He’d no business there of course, in Sên Ruby’s apartment; but she went freely among his kinsmen, so that did not so much matter; but that he was here with his kinsmen’s unveiled Chinese women was an enormity. But no one seemed to mind in the least, and the fun ran fast and shrill. Sên Po-Fang caught his wife up by her girdle and shook her, and she slapped his face, and they both giggled—and so did every one else except Mrs. Sên King-lo.

They devised many a rout and festive function for foreign Sên Ruby—games, temple picnics, fireworks, peacock-races, kite contests, juggling, wrestling, a play enacted by performers sent for from many miles away—and when the monthly festival came they kept it with even unwonted observance and noise—for Sên Ruby. All that China was they tried to give her, all that China had to show they showed her—because she was a stranger come within their god-guarded gates, and because the lord King-lo had held the cup of hot marriage wine to her maiden lips and drunk it with her.

But Ruby thought it all absurd, uncivilized; found it tame and paltry.

Miss Julia would have revelled in it, would have found and greeted the soul in it all and threaded out its meaning, learned its histories, loved its pictures. In a slighter way, Ruby would have done so too, had she come upon it merely in privileged travel, had she not been the English wife of a Chinese man—the English mother of a half-Chinese child.