She hated peonies now. She always should. She hated all of this. The bamboos that bent over there in the breeze mocked her. She had been pilloried here in Ho-nan. To live and be with thickly painted, chattering women who tittered all the time; who never had the dignity of a sorrow, or the blessing of a care; who had no responsibility—hadn’t even the grit or tang of jealousy—but tottered about, because their feet were deformed; who were vain of their hideous deformity; and who gorged on sickly sweetmeats and scandal! She couldn’t understand a word they spoke or whispered, but she knew Mayfair and Washington too well and too shrewdly not to know the sound of scandal when she heard it! To eat with a posse of giggling chattering women, young and old, or to eat alone, half her meals, while a dancing bear reared above her shoulder and growled for tit-bits! To see cats chained and tethered like house-dogs and hear them wailing how they liked it! Sên Ya Tin was addicted to cats, and on one moonlight night the screech and yowl of twenty tethered and outraged cats had well-nigh crazed Ruby Sên. Lo had not been there to slake her nervous fury, for he had been in an all-night attendance on Sên Ya Tin in the ko’-tang or hawking in the moonlight with his kinsmen.
China! Oh—to go! Oh—never to have come! She would escape the place. They could not keep her—they should not! But could she ever escape the memory?
Would she love her child—her second baby? She did not love it now. Could she ever love it—would she when she heard its cry—a child begotten in this China! She loved Ruben, second to his father; she loved Ruben, her fair-haired, Saxon-seeming baby son. She was dearly proud of Ruben. A young queen-mother might envy her Ruben. But this unborn child of hers—would she live to hate the flesh and blood that were bud of her own? Might she live to be ashamed of her own baby? What if China marked it!
CHAPTER L
Old women’s ignorant, unscientific tales, silly peasant chatter—English tales, English chatter—ribaldry lurched threateningly to her recollection. Laughed at, turned from in disgust, when she had heard them, they half distracted her now—and she had been near enough distraction without their sudden menace. What if . . .
Trembling violently, she crouched still lower on the ground and hid her face on the old tree’s trunk.
King-lo, coming to find her, heard her wild sobbing long before he saw her.
He quickened his pace; but he came very quietly, and when he reached her he knelt down and laid his hand upon her shoulder and left it there without a word.
And as he waited for the rougher paroxysm of her grieving to wear itself a little out, he saw that it was an old apple-tree that lay upon the ground, an apple-tree struck down by some raging storm of China, in one of those fury times when the Yellow Sorrow lashed and churned its low banks into wide, endless miles of hideous flooded wreckage and of seaweed thick with stark and twisted floating human bodies, and when angry winds mowed peasant homes and huts of mat and reeds as sickles mow the ripened grass; but that, so stricken, the tree still lived and grew and bore, its good roots still holding securely in the earth. His face, already tender for his stricken woman, took an added softness and an added strength. So, he thought, a man knocked to the ground might hold with steadfast fibers to the foundations and nourishment of being, still grow and give.
He knew the old tree well. He had climbed it and rifled it of its tasteless, rosy, scented apples often when a boy.