CHAPTER XII
Mrs. Sên, in her prettiest rest gown, lounged happily in her favorite chair, her hand on Ruben’s hair.
They were not talking now and had not been for some time. They had had a long, happy, restful day together—Ivy was on the river with the Blakes—and they had thrashed out a good many things together. They often did that, and always frankly and without embarrassment.
But two things of vital importance had not been mentioned between them, though both were thinking of them constantly these last weeks of Ruben’s last term at Cambridge, and had been thinking of them especially all day to-day: Ivy’s future and Ruben’s own.
Most mothers and sons who are lovers and congenial, canvass together the boy’s probable future and his choices of future, almost from the lad’s earliest school-days. Oddly enough this mother and son never once had. That they had not Ruben had come to feel a barrier between them lately. He did not mean to let any barrier stand between him and his mother. And he thought the time had come to crash through it.
Not that he believed he’d really have to crash with much force. It would crumble at a touch, for surely it was but a thing of film, an accidental, careless reticence, nothing that was meant.
Ruben Sên loved his mother’s room as much as Ivy disliked it. His liking of it was fourfold: it was a charming room, and Ruben was susceptible to all such things; it was his mother’s room which made it sacred to him and perfumed it; always they were almost sure to be left alone there, and most of his mother’s pictures of his father were in this room. That last was not the least of Ruben’s liking of his mother’s own sitting-room.
The oil portrait that they sat facing never had been hung at Burlington House, but it could not have been rejected there, even if a less distinguished painter’s name had signatured it. How fine it was merely as a picture neither Ruby nor Ruben knew, but Sên King-lo, her husband, lived on that canvas and for that Ruby Sên loved it. She had never kept even a snap-shot of King-lo that was not “just like” him. Mrs. Sên would tolerate no half-likeness of him of whom she needed none. She always could see King-lo without looking at photograph or canvas; and she wished their children to learn their father’s outer seeming as it had been in his lifetime.
Ruben was looking up at Sên’s portrait, studying it gravely, as he very often did.
“I wish I were more like him!” the boy said at last. “Don’t you, Mother?”
“Yes,” the woman answered quickly. But in her heart she knew that she might have felt it a handicap to Ruben if he had had even the unemphasized Chinese look of his father. And she knew that she must have resented any living replica of Sên King-lo. There had been only one Sên King-lo. She felt, as Charles Snow did, that she would not look upon his like again. Nor did she wish to; not even in other flesh that but hinted his, and that in doing so, just possibly might have diverted or blurred even a little her living memory of her husband.
“Was Father no darker than that?” Ruben asked without turning to her, his eager young eyes still clinging to the slightly smiling pictured face of his father.
“No,” the mother told him. “The likeness could not be better in any particular, I think. Cousin Charles thinks so too; and so does old Kow Li, for all his contempt for Western artists. I have tried to find a fault in it and I never have found one. I used to make him stand beside it just as he is standing there; and I could not find even the tiniest improvement to suggest. It is a wonderful picture, Ruben.”
“You have no picture of Father in Chinese clothes, have you? Not even a photograph?”
“Oh—no.” The quick reply came a shade unsteadily. And Mrs. Sên dreaded what Ruben might ask her next.
“I wish you had,” Ruben said. “We ought to have. It’s an indignity to his memory, and to us, that we haven’t.”
Mrs. Sên was thankful that her boy’s face was still turned from hers—he still gazing at his father’s picture.
“Why haven’t we, Mother?” Ruben asked it affectionately. But Ruby Sên felt the question ruthless. And it stung her conscience. She had thought little of it at the time—in China. She was obsessed by her own homesickness for Europe. But she had wondered since if King-lo had known how she had disliked seeing him in Chinese garments.
“Your father never wore anything but English dress here or in America, Ruben, and when we were in China together he did not either, only in Ho-nan. Most Chinese have adopted Western clothes, even in China, now, I think; and, you know, they all wear it here—all but funny old Kow—” the half laugh she broke off with was a little tremulous, a trifle forced.
“I’d give anything for a good picture of my father in his Chinese dress,” Ruben replied. “I say, Mater, I wonder how I’d look Chinese dressed!”
Mrs. Sên laughed again, softly. “Rather funny, son, I fancy. You are so very English to look at! Ever so much more English looking than I am!” She did not add how little she would like to see Ruben in Chinese clothes or how the suggestion had startled her. But she knew.
“Yes—worse luck! Did you wear Chinese things too, in Ho-nan, Mother? How did you look in them? Did you look Chinese? How I wish I could have seen you.”
“I think I looked rather nice, dear.” Mrs. Sên’s little tinkled laugh was natural this time. “I didn’t look a mite Chinese though. But they were very comfortable; and they were very beautiful. I grew fond of my Chinese clothes. I felt almost sorry when I left them off.” She was glad to be able to add that.
“It’s a pity Ivy and I can’t change skins and faces, isn’t it, Mother? I can’t help envying her her Chinese look; and I think she envies me my Saxon appearance pretty badly.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Sên replied with a sigh, “I know she does.” The sigh was not all for Ivy, or for Ivy’s discontent. Ruben had startled her. Only once—and very briefly—in China, when she unexpectedly had seen King-lo in Chinese clothes, had it seemed to her at all unnatural that she was the wife of a Chinese husband. But she had been glad when Ruben had proved a very English baby; and even now she had no wish to have a Chinese son; knew that she would have not been proud of it.
All but less than a year of her married life had been spent here in Europe. She had in no way grown Chinese. To many beside herself Sên King-lo had seemed almost English. Only Sir Charles Snow had known how little English, or any sort of Western, Sên ever had been.
A great deal that is English Sên King-lo had made his own, liked and worn it easily, as he had English speech and clothes. And English and Chinese have a great deal in common—the two upper classes a very great deal. But Ruby Sên came of a race less adaptive than Sên’s. He had come to her, not she to him.
American women who marry and live in England often grow almost English; sometimes so nearly English that neither their own countrymen nor English strangers discover that they are not. Even English women, far less adaptive, sometimes become surprisingly French or Slavic through such marriage and permanent sojourn. But it is not in any Western woman to become an Eastern—not even the versatile American woman. It would be rash and unobservant to assert, though, that it may not befall her some day—or she accomplish it.
Ruben’s next question startled Mrs. Sên even more and she had to meet his eyes when he asked it; for he turned at her knee, where he still sat on the floor, and faced her, looking up at her earnestly.
“You wouldn’t like to live in China, would you, Mother?”
“I don’t think you would, dear.”
“It is my country,” he reminded her. But he did not repeat the question she had evaded.
“I feel sometimes that I ought to be there. China needs her sons now.”
“They need not all be in China to serve her,” Mrs. Sên said quickly. “Your father left China to do her service, and he never slacked in doing it, not even when we lived in Surrey. Kow Li loves China, I am sure. He is a very rich man now, Cousin Charles says. He says that Kow is worth fully a million.”
Ruben grinned at that.
“Your father’s old servant a millionaire! And I suspect that Kow sends most of his profits to China; but I don’t think he ever means to go back there. And more and more Chinese come here to stay each year now. You have some Chinese friends at Cambridge, haven’t you, dear?”
“Indeed, I have—and out of it. I make every Chinese friend I can, Mother. I have so wanted to bring some of them home.”
“Why haven’t you? Do.”
“Ivy wouldn’t like it.”
“That is no reason for depriving you of such a pleasure. Bring them, your friends, home by all means. I shall love to make them welcome.”
“Ivy wouldn’t. Ivy can be trying; we both know—”
“This is your father’s house, Ruben. While I am its mistress no countryman of his will receive any discourtesy in it.”
“Ivy can convey a good deal of insult from under the edge of an eyelid. I don’t think we’ll try it, Mother.”
Mrs. Sên nodded wearily. She knew only too well. She knew that better than Ruben did.
“We will find a way,” she told him. “I never have wished to keep you from knowing your father’s countrymen.”
“And mine!” her boy reminded her again. “I know that, dearest.” Then, “We won’t do anything to worry Ivy just now,” he added. “She is having such a ripping time since she was presented. I don’t think Ivy will be allowed to remain Ivy Sên very long; she’s too lovely.”
“Oh! Ruben! How I puzzle over that! So much depends upon it for Ivy—more than for most girls even. If that goes wrong with Ivy, it will go very wrong indeed. And I can help her so little, if at all.”
That was all they said to each other of Ivy then. It was difficult. It was easier to long to help Ivy Sên than to plan how to do it.
“There’s a chap at Trinity,” Ruben said after a little, “that has a great case full of ripping pictures of China—photographs he took there before he came over. They have made me homesick for my fatherland. Do you know, Mater, I have been a little homesick for China ever since I was a small boy, I think. I think that I ought to see my own country some day,” Ruben persisted gently.
“And you would like to—go there?” Ruby Sên caught her breath a little.
“I want to, more than I have ever wanted anything. Do you mind, Mother?”
“Of course not!” She hoped he had not heard the tremble she had felt in her voice. “When?”
“Soon, Mother. Couldn’t I go for a few months soon after I come down?”
“Why not?” Mrs. Sên said brightly. “Of course you shall. But you won’t see much of China in a few months, Rue. It’s a vast place.”
“It will be ever so much better than nothing!” the boy said gleefully. “Thank you so much, dear, for letting me go. And it is just one part of China that I most want to see: Ho-nan. I want to see our home. I think that I ought to, and I long to, before we decide what I am going to do with my life, Mother.”
“Yes!” his mother agreed through lips that felt stiff. But her boy had said, “before we decide.” We—the sweetest word a mother can hear from a son, said as Ruben had said it.
“You couldn’t come too? You wouldn’t leave Ivy just now, I suppose?” Ruben asked wistfully.
“Oh—no, Ruben! I have no fear for you—ever. I do fear for Ivy. I have been thinking constantly, for a long time now, of what life was going to do to our Ivy, and of what you were going to do with your life. Idle rich is no rôle for you!”
“No fear!” was Ruben Sên’s sturdy answer. “May we leave what it is to be until I come back from Ho-nan?”
“You will come back? You will come back to me, Ruben?”
Ruben Sên laughed merrily, a laugh that caressed her. “I must,” he told her with his face between her palms where he had drawn them. “We are together for as long as we both live—you and I. I wouldn’t go without you this time, if it were not for Ivy. We’ll go home together next time.”
Mrs. Sên lifted her eyes to her husband’s—in his picture—asking them for something of which Sên King-lo had never failed her, or scanted her: sympathy and help.
But the pictured eyes only smiled at her.