Читать книгу Mr. & Mrs. Sên - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 9

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If Sên King-lo had such a desire, he was scarcely aware of it. And a Chinese usually knows perfectly what all his own wishes are. There is very little that floats; most is securely fixed in Chinese mentality and character.

He had liked her at Miss Julia’s supper table, and on the porch after supper, better than she had liked him, but she had interested him less than he had interested her. In the garden, under the live-oaks she had arrested his attention intensely. At the supper table probing, not impertinently or even intentionally, but just as we must probe any stranger with whom we speak for the first time—unless character and personality mean nothing to us, and to Sên King-lo they meant a very great deal—he had found little to hold him; nothing but pleasant girlhood and a touch of bitterness that, while he pitied it, did not attract him. In the garden she had charmed him and simply and solely because, as he had told her, she for a moment had looked to him less un-Chinese, or, to coin a fitter word, less dis-Chinese than any not Oriental woman had before, or than he’d have credited that any could. She, the tilt of her head, her coloring, a look in her eyes, the movement of her fine, blue-veined wrist, the jade-green of her straight-cut gown, the scarlet peppers dangling charm-like at her breast, the fan-used fern-frond, had made a sudden picture of home to him. And Sên King-lo was homesick—sometimes very homesick. And if she had looked to him a little Chinese-like, and he had been grateful to her for that, what he’d by chance heard her say had quickened his admiration as no mere beauty of person could have done—and Sên King-lo worshiped beauty. In that he was true to type. Chinese religions are somewhat a farce, a convention and not a force, but the Chinese strictly speaking religionless, are intensely and vitally religious, and they worship but two gods: ancestors and beauty. The technical gods of China are among its servants—hewers of wood, drawers of water—engaged often by the year or the day, treated and paid accordingly, punished when recalcitrant or slothful, dismissed without a character if too unsatisfactory. All of which the gods take lying down, and far more like unto lambs than Chinese servants do, who often make the welkin ring with their wailing and cursing.

When Ivy Gilbert had inveighed against kissing and being kissed she had spoken straight to the soul (and the taste) of China, and the Chinese soul of Sên King-lo had sprung to her in response. Sên King-lo was no yellow-tinted “plaster saint.” But our Western habit of kissing, meaninglessly and otherwise, revolted him as much today as it had when his astonishment and disgust first had observed it. And he had avoided it—always. Girls, and here and there a wife, here in America, across the Atlantic, in several capitals—well, Sên King-lo knew that he might have kissed, if he would. A girl who stayed away from a presumably pleasant gaiety rather than receive a young hostess’ friendly kiss had intrigued him. And that charm and approval held when he had found less than he’d hoped in the girl at supper, and still held. But if she had interested him less than he her, she had not altogether failed to interest him, and he had liked her.

He had sent his violets (they’d cost a fraction of what Miss Julia’s carnations had) with far less thought of further acquaintance than of gratitude for the picture she’d made—she and her gown and peppers and fan of fern. For that and for one other reason. Because of the picture she’d made, and because her name was “Ivy.” He’d heard her called so—and it had made an oddly strong appeal to him—a Chinese appeal.

He had bought and sent the little offering of fragrant flowers not from any light or sudden impulse—Sên King-lo very rarely acted on impulse—but in quiet acknowledgment of a debt; and because her name was Ivy! Not very usual reasons for the sending of flowers—but then Sên King-lo was Chinese.

In one thing Lucille had gossiped truly enough. Sên King-lo never had sent flowers to a girl before. And he had done it this time without either intention or any flicker of warmth. Just possibly the call of her youth to his had sent its young, quick message through more than he realized. Twenty-seven is not omniscient—not even twenty-seven of the quicker sense and Chinese born. He had known no “girls” of his own race. The many he’d known of the American and, but more slightly, half a dozen European races, had sent no message along the nerve wires of his personality, partly because they had both looked and seemed to him so utterly foreign, and because they had not seemed to him altogether girl-like. Miss Gilbert had had a hint of familiar look to him; she had said a Chinese-like thing—the first thing he’d heard her say—and if afterwards, she had not whipped his mind into foam and excitement, he had thought her maidenly.

He had thought and sensed her maidenly. He was twenty-seven. And he was a man.

And perhaps for this—certainly for something else—his face warmed when the English girl’s note of thanks—the merest, meaningless line—came to him on Monday.

Before he read it he saw how much he liked this girl’s writing. No other people take handwriting so seriously as the Chinese do—put so much into it, read so much from it. This was round, clear writing, individual and decided; nothing Spencerian about it—as refreshing as a cup of cold well-water on a very hot day—in a country where almost all handwritings were disconcertingly, monotonously alike. It was an attractive handwriting, and he thought it looked like its writer. It pleased him. But it was something else that brought a soft flush to his face, a new look in his eyes.

She had signed it in full:

“Sincerely,

“Ivy Ruby Gilbert.”

“Ivy Ruby! How strange!” he said under his breath. And he stood for a time at the window looking out at the opposite house, and not seeing it. Seeing a homestead in China where the hollyhocks and persimmons that crowded about it were almost as gay as the roof of his birthplace, where the flamingoes filched coolness from the tiny streamlet where the trout were pinkest and sweetest—perhaps because of the tang of the citron and lemon trees that hung over it, and the musk and mint and verbena that clothed its banks, and the violets his mother had loved best of all flowers grew in their delicate millions—his girl-mother whom he had never seen, his mother, at whose grave his father had worshiped until he’d gone to her “on high,” his mother who had died that his life might come: a service of motherhood that gives a saintship of its own in China, where mothers not so set apart are loved by sons as mothers are nowhere else—a service that lays on a Chinese son a double duty and joy—and, too, sorrow—of worship and remembrance. His mother had been fifteen at his birth and her death. And her “milk-name,” the name her husband always had called her, and called her in his sleep till he went to her, was “Ruby.”