Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

Ruby sat on the ground, as she had been sitting for almost an hour. She crouched there in misery, so motionless and still that the little squirrel had not scampered away when he’d come, and scarcely was eyeing her now, as he completed his toilet and preened and plumed his feathered, furry tail. He would have whisked off squirrel-quickest at the farthest sight of a dog; but he had been born fearless of human creatures, as fearless as he was of the patient, friendly buffaloes on whose humped backs he often rode, for Chinese are never cruel to such soft, small, woodland things, and never kill them but at need. Rats, and even puppy dogs, if of valueless breeds, have quick despatch in China often; but wild little things of softer, longer fur and swifter speed are rarely molested and never teased, and so are scarcely wild at all. But this wee squirrelling would have kept his greater distance and washed his face in greater seclusion had the woman there on the grass been less stock-still.

Her brooding eyes were fixed and hard, staring bitterly at the lovely, laughing landscape before her. It was prison bars to her, all of it, and the site of her shame.

For it had come to that: Ivy Sên was ashamed, not of King-lo, never that! but ashamed of her own displacement and not unashamed now of the birth of her child.

But she was sickening for the sight of Ruben, the song of his inarticulate baby voice, the feel of his fat, naked, pink and white foot in her gloating hand, the precious down of his head against her cheek, the intimacy of his fearless eyes, the baby claim of his imperious little hand on her bosom. It had been stingingly hard to leave him, cruelly so too, because the day of her leaving him had been also the day of his weaning; but the wrench of that parting had been less than the dull ache of her waxing missing of him. She wanted her baby, and every hour she wanted him more.

If King-lo did not take her back to Ruben soon. . . .

Six months ago!

How had she stood it?

How much longer could she stand it?

She had been so proudly glad when she first had known that a babe was soon to lie in her arms, so exultant when it had come!

But now her inmost being shivered and cringed, because she knew that again a new-born child would lie in her arms. But not here! Not here in this horrible China! That should not be. It had come to her in China, this poor little unborn one, but she would not bear it in China: they must go home, she and it.