Читать книгу Mr. & Mrs. Sên - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 5

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The men lifted their hats, and passed on. General Cordez knew Lucille and had met the Senator’s daughter, but he felt no necessity to join the group of girls on the grass, and no impulse. And the younger man, knowing none of them except for a very slight “bowing acquaintance” with Miss Smith, showed no impulse—if he felt any.

“That was Sên King-lo,” Lucille said, almost excitedly, when the men were out of earshot. “I wish General Cordez had stopped and introduced him to you. He’s all the rage. I did just meet him once. But he never gives me a chance to push it a mite.”

“What is he—what’s his nationality?” Ivy asked.

“Chinese.”

Ivy’s lip curled. “What queer cards Miss Julia knows,” she said.

“Yes, doesn’t she? And the last woman in the world you’d think would,” Mary Withrow agreed. “Papa wouldn’t like me to know some of the people Miss Townsend does.”

Their talk debouched then to fashions and clothes. Ivy followed it with listless inattention. The others tossed and tore it eagerly and hotly. None of them, not even Lucille, who “had heaps of her things from Paris—and paid heaps for them, if you want to know”—cared quite as much for pretty and becoming hats and gowns as the English girl did. But she had so little money to spend on what she wore that talk of it always rather stuck in her throat.

The well-born and the well-clothed, the traveled and the noted, strolled about the festival grounds, admiring the flowers, sat in groups at the exquisitely laid little tables that dotted and white-starred the shady nooks, an attendant white-clad darky, important and cordial at each, keeping the flies off with long white-handled brushes of peacocks’ feathers, and replenishing the dishes and baskets of ice-cream, charlotte russe and fruit, the cups of tea and coffee, the jugs of butter-thick cream, and the cold-beaded glasses of cup—delicate cup of claret or moselle or cider for the “ladies,” mint juleps in strong perfection and very tall glasses for the men guests. No one could better Uncle Lysander at mixing juleps—he wore white cotton gloves when he pulled the mint from the kitchen brook-side—and few could equal Julia Townsend, of the Townsends of Virginia, at the concocting of cup.

Towards sunset, all the burnished hour’s splendor of colors glowing and melting over the blue and silver Potomac, a tinkle of banjos came from behind the tomatoes and asparagus beds. Miss Julia never permitted her blacks to obtrude jarringly their gift of ripple and rhythm, but always banjos in the distance played her garden party guests out of her gates. And as “Dearest May” signaled softly Miss Julia moved slowly gatewards.

“Now darkies come and listen, a story I’ll relate;

It happened in de valley ob de ole Ca’lina State.”

The Italian Minister bent over Miss Julia Townsend’s hand.

“Down in de cornfield whar I used to rake de hay—”

Lady Giffard had had “such a perfect afternoon.”

“I worked a great deal harder when I thought of you, dear May.”

A great diva paused a moment to listen, as she held her hostess’ hand.

“O May, dearest May, you are loblier dan de day,

Your eyes so bright dey shine at night

When de moon am gone away.”

The diva’s eyes filled with tears. “They are the sweetest singers,” she said softly, and went quickly. Miss Julia flushed delicately. She ruled her negroes with no lax hand—but she loved them. She knew their faults, blackberry thick! She knew their virtues, their worth and loyalty. And she never heard their music, the blackbird music that flutes up from their ebon throats, the music that tripped from between their broad finger tips and their banjo-strings, without an affectionate throbbing in her own heart.

“My massa gabe me holiday, I wish he’d gib me mo—”

Miss Julia went a step beyond the gate with Miss Ellen Hunter—for Miss Hunter was older than herself, and very poor.

“I t’anked him berry kindly as I pushed my boat from sho—”

Miss Julia gave a Chicago banker her finger tips; the Jewish financier a fuller clasp.

“And started for my dear one I longed so for to see—”

The sunset was fainting on the river’s breast. The banjos thrummed more softly, the sugared, golden voices sank almost in a whisper. Servants were hanging here and there a lantern on a low-branched tree—long, iron-ringed, glass, plantation lanterns. That, too, was a signal—not a signal to go; a signal to stay. It meant that there would be supper presently for a favored few—youngsters probably. Julia Townsend loved to gather “boys and girls” about her for a more intimate hour when her statelier hospitalitied had been banjo-dismissed, and already she had told one here, one there, “I hope you can stay until ten.” And they knew there’d be fried chicken and quivering icy jellies, and perhaps a little dancing on the lawn—and a punctilious, if pompous, darky servant to see you home, if you were a girl whose chaperon had been delicately and tunefully sent home.

“And ’twas from Aunt Dinah’s quilting party I was seeing Nellie home.”

Lena Blackburn looked at Miss Julia longingly. Miss Julia wished her good-by very kindly. Mr. Sên saw the tiny comedy, and so did Ivy Gilbert. Their eyes met—just that.

“On my arm her light hand rested, rested light as ocean foam.”

The last sent-home had gone, and Miss Townsend turned back towards the house.

“I want to be in Dixie——”

Julia Townsend stood at attention—and so did the remaining guests gathered near her. Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan must have done that in the presence of Julia Townsend listening to “Dixie”—and the soldier who rode a breathless twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek would have done it with the sunny sweetness of a prince—like the prince he was. The South had its Barbara Frietchies—the North had its Stonewall Jacksons.

“I want to be in Dixie——”

The brown English eyes and the black Chinese eyes met again. Something nearly a smile touched the girl’s lips. And she noticed that the Chinese—Senn, she thought Lucille had said his name was—held his hat in his hand.

Was he staying to supper then—a Chinese? Surely not.

But, as it proved, he was. He not only stayed, but he sat on Miss Gilbert’s left hand. She was not over-pleased.

Of course it was for Miss Julia to select her own guests. That was understood and accepted. But the nursery governess did a little resent the supper seating arrangements. Miss Julia herself made them.

Ivy Gilbert was too thoroughly English to draw the social color-line as white Americans drew it. She had seen Hindoos and Japanese on a perfect—or so it seemed—parity with the other undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. A duchess, who was an acquaintance of Lady Snow’s, had, to Ivy’s knowledge, made straining and costly efforts to secure as her guest a Persian prince not many seasons ago, and on doing it had been both congratulated and envied. She had seen her own Royal Family in cordial conversation with a turbaned Maharajah, even the royal lady who was reputed most exclusive and proud. And, though her own small experience of social functions at home had been rather of Balham and West Kensington than of Mayfair, she would have been not only interested but flattered to know well any Indian—of sufficient rank and European or Europeanized education ... but a Chinese—well, really!

However, the fault was far more Miss Julia’s than his—he couldn’t help being Chinese, of course—and since he was here, Miss Julia’s invited guest, it was for her, another guest, not to be impolite. So, perhaps feeling that a more brilliant remark would be a faux pas, too unfair a strain on Chinese savoir faire, she turned towards Sên King-lo slightly and asked him pleasantly, “How do you like America?”

A smile flickered across the man’s mouth.

“Very much as the curate liked his egg, Miss Gilbert,” he told her gravely, then added with a franker smile, “which is how I like most countries, I think.”

“Ah! You are homesick!” But having said it, the girl blushed angrily—angry with herself for having said what she felt, as soon as she’d said it, to have been far from in good taste.

“Terribly,” Sên said gravely—“sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I said that,” she said quickly. “I ought not,” she added with a little guilty sigh.

“But,” he disputed her courteously, “I am glad to answer any question you are good enough to ask. And, if there is one thing of which no man should be ashamed, it is being homesick, surely. And you made me no risk of criticizing your country—since you are not American—but English.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me.”

“I? We never have spoken to each other until now.”

“But you told me yourself, Miss Gilbert. I heard you speak as General Cordez and I were walking together. I heard you say several words. If I had heard you speak but one, I’d have known that you were English. An English voice in English speech is one of the few things that cannot be mistaken.”

The girl flushed again—delicately this time, and with pleasure.

“We Chinese,” he continued, “have a proverb, ‘If one word misses the mark, a thousand will do the same.’ And, if one English word spoken by an educated English voice does not proclaim nationality as nothing else can, it is because it falls on very dull or quite deaf ears.”

“Have you many proverbs in your language?” she asked, fishing about a little desperately for her next thing to say.

“Millions,” he said decidedly. “And we all know them all, and all say them at once. Probably at this moment, in China, four hundred millions of people are saying, ‘He that grasps, loses,’ or ‘The knowing ones are not hard, the hard ones are not knowing,’ or ‘The serpent knows his own hole,’ or ‘Those who know how to do a thing do not find it difficult; those who find it difficult know not how to do it,’ or ‘Even the tiger has his naps.’ No, though, I am wrong. It is both night-time and day-time in China now—my country sprawls so wide from East to West—but I have no doubt that at home, easily a hundred million Chinese are quoting time-honored adages and proverbs at this moment.”

“How perfectly terrible!” she laughed.

Sên King-lo laughed back with her. There was no familiarity in his laughter, but a good deal of deferential good-fellowship.

“I have never heard Chinese spoken,” Miss Gilbert told him. “It is a terribly difficult language to learn—for a foreigner, I mean, isn’t it?”

“No,” Sên said stoutly. “That is always said—has been said ever since Marco Polo’s time. But it is not true. Chinese is very easy to learn really.”

“I have never heard it,” she repeated.

“Would you care to? Shall I?”

“Please.” She scarce could make any other answer.

He said something in a low, clear voice. It ought to have reached her alone under the hum of the general table talk. But at Miss Julia’s board no one spoke shrilly, and, whatever happened in China, in the dining-room of Rosehill all did not speak at once. And the inevitable rise and fall of intonation—which is nine-tenths of the Chinese vocabulary—rang it through to others. Two or three people stopped talking, and half a dozen pricked up questioning ears.

Miss Julia challenged her guest frankly. “What are you saying?” she demanded.

Sên King-lo bowed his head towards his hostess, and answered:

“Something that Confucius said a long time ago, Madame. This: ‘Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’”

“True and admirable!” Miss Julia said proudly. Her old eyes flashed. She was thinking of Appomattox—of a cause that she never would yield as permanently lost. And Sên King-lo, a far-off look in his dark, masked eyes, was thinking of Shantung. The East and the West do meet sometimes in the selfsameness of human emotions.