Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

Whose was the fault?

Not Sên King-lo’s. He had not failed her. Her English fairness, her heritage of centuries, knew it and said it. Never had man failed woman less, or mate mate. He never had failed her once, not for a breath, not by the width of a hair.

Nor had her heart failed him. She did not love him less than she had. His quality appealed to her not less but more as they passed hand in hand through the long glade of days. Her husband’s quality was her highest and firmest pride. He never had grated on her once nor affronted her taste, and she knew how rarely even the happiest wives could say that. His charm, that perfume and weapon of personality that cannot be defined or expressed, held her almost increasingly; it gripped her securely and close. And she knew that, be the years however long, let them bring whatever they might, stretch wherever they might, she should love her man to the end.

She knew how generous he had been to her—how he had warded off from her every ill thing, great or petty, that he could. He had been tender of her every failure, her miserable little shames, her worthless shrinkings and had covered and condoned them—had covered them gently as a hen its chicks under its wing. And what it must have cost him to see her shrink and “turn”! Would a Chinese woman have failed an English husband as she had failed her Chinese husband? She believed not. Was China’s then the better part? China that she disliked and was ashamed of! She had made no sacrifice in marrying Sên King-lo, but she knew now that he had made a sacrifice in taking her to wife, and could but have known that he did. For he had known both his country and hers, his people and hers, had known both well, and she had known only her own. He had known all the spiritual barrier, the fundamental prohibition. He must have realized her disqualifications! And when pay-day had come, how gaily he had paid the price, how ungrudgingly! Paid for both. For she knew that his tally had been tenfold hers. If it had vexed her to be here, to suffer the repugnance of odd and uncongenial ways, what must it not have been to him?—and she—his wife—knew that the texture and nerves of his soul were as fine and sensitive as those of his strong sensitive hands. (She had seen him balance by its stem a long peacock feather on the tip of his finger until it ceased to seesaw or move at all, and she had seen him lift Reginald Hamilton, bulky and heavily clothed, up off his saddle and swing him lightly down to the ground.) What must it not have been to Sên King-lo to see her scarce-smothered dislike of his home and kindred, of all that meant all to him; what must it not have cost him to bring her here, knowing, as he must have known, how poor a thing, unfitted and unpolished, she would seem to Sên Ya Tin, to all his kinsmen, to the women of the domain, to the very coolies?

She had meant so well and so bravely, and she had done so ill and so cowardly!

She had been happy in Hongkong. And Hongkong’s scorn and innuendo had reached her. (In that one thing she had been cleverer than he.) And she had not cared. She had been unaffectedly indifferent to it all, because Sên King-lo was “MacGregor,” and she sat on his right hand.

But here, where it had mattered most, here where she had garnered up her dream of infinite and exquisite sharing with him, here where he had been at her woman’s mercy, his English wife’s mercy, her happiness had sickened, her comradeship and pluck had crumpled.

The little furry thing had finished his toilet, and he scampered away. The woman never moved.

Oh—to see Ruben! Oh—to be in England! Her husband’s people were not her people, his home was not her home!

Ruben’s baby voice called her. England called her. The shabbiest, grimiest taxi in the Strand was more to her than all the pagodas and lacquers and peonies in China!