CHAPTER VII
Fewer girls create a sensation, when they make their presentation curtsey at Buckingham Palace, than are said to have done so. Too many pretty débutantes follow each other to the Royal footstool for any one of them to be singled out very especially by those who stand watching them.
Miss Sên did not create a sensation at the court of St. James that night, but she was noticed and she thoroughly enjoyed herself through all of the function that so many girls find an ordeal. “I wasn’t frightened one single bit—not once,” she said gleefully as she drove home with her mother and Ruben, who had joined them as they left the Palace.
Why should she have been—the girl who came of a clan whose women had been court ladies when Britain was a wilderness, whose women had been of rank for thousands of years, and one of whom had been an Empress when Chinese ruled in China, before the Manchu came to its throne!
She carried her birth with her—its composure and sunny ease, its dignity and suavity. Sir Charles, watching her as the girlish figure in girlish gown swept softly across the palace floor and bent before the throne, said to himself as he had a thousand times before, “How birth tells!”—a very trite saying that is the truest of them all.
Ivy Sên did not create a sensation at the Drawing-Room, but she did in the season it opened for her. Society made much of her, perhaps largely for the reason she had given bitterly to Lady Snow. But what the girl had anticipated sorely as a very “bitter pill” she found an exceedingly sweet morsel. Society liked her; she loved it. Ivy scarcely would have exchanged places now with her mother’s pathetically plain kitchen maid.
Ivy forgot her grievance, forgot to be unhappy—for a time.
No one slighted her. Men told her that she was lovely, and told her that they found her charming; said it with their eyes, told it because they sought her.
The girl was girlishly happy; and because she was happy, suddenly docile and sweet.
Mrs. Sên was radiant and grateful; her one trouble had passed. Ruben went back greatly relieved to keep his last term at Cambridge.
“Mother,” Ivy suggested at breakfast, “let’s cut everything out this morning and go off to the Academy early while the rooms are comfortably empty. I’d like to see a few of the pictures, wouldn’t you? We’ve been twice, and I haven’t seen a thing but other women’s hats.”
“I have a fitting at eleven, dear; and you know the Bessingtons are lunching here—and Caverley.”
“Chuck the fitting; it will keep. We’ll be back for lunch if we go now. You must come with me; we never have five minutes together now. You can’t want any more breakfast, you’ve had lots. Come along! I’ll race you to see who can change quickest and we’ll be off before the bores begin to gather.”
Mrs. Sên laughed and pushed back her chair obediently. It was nice to go off alone with Ivy for the morning—nicer that Ivy wished it.
“I’ll race you up the stairs,” the girl offered as they went through the hall. Ivy’s arm about her mother’s waist.
“Race yourself—if you feel like it in a habit after an hour’s ride. I decline to run up two flights of stairs. How did Polyanne behave?”
“Like a vixen, but I took it out of her—had a scrumptious ride.”
Ivy scurried up the stairs to change her habit. Mrs. Sên followed her happily, a little more slowly.
They had breakfasted really early—as they often did even in the whirl of Ivy’s first season, Ivy daintily ravenous after her earlier ride. Burlington House was comfortably uncrowded when they wormed their way through the turnstile.
They both liked pictures, of course. Who doesn’t? But neither mother nor daughter knew much about them. But one must have a look at the Academy, at least the Picture of the Year and the portraits. Mrs. Sên made it a rule to read up the Academy of the year in the Morning Post, and to know what to look at, and what to think of them when she did, before she went. But she really hadn’t had time to do it this year—what with her clothes and Ivy’s, choosing and fittings, a perfect jungle of engagements to keep, invitations to answer and send, and all the rest of the fashionable technique of Ivy’s first season. She did not even know which was the picture this year or who had painted it.
But here they were, Ivy glad to have had her way about coming, Mrs. Sên glad because they were together, and they did their duty, slowly and cheerfully and carefully, giving at least a glance to every picture, even marking their catalogues now and then, a good, useful precaution for future table talk. They did their duty by Rooms I, II, and III.
“Most enough for one day?” the girl suggested.
“Darling, we must see Maud Towner’s miniature! She’ll never forgive us if we don’t.”
“Run along and look at it then, you poor dear conscientious mother. I’ll wait here nice and comfy on this torture of a red bench until you come back, and then we’ll go home, don’t you think? You can tell me what Lady Towner’s miniature has on, if it has anything, and how its hair is done, and I’ll be able to rave about it to her every bit as well as you.”
Mrs. Sên nodded indulgently and plodded off to the Miniature Room.
There were not many here yet though it was nearly noon. It was August; the Academy had run its course. A sprinkling of artists, a few country late-comers were about all here to-day—no one Miss Sên had ever seen before, no one that interested her now.
But she noticed a thin crowd gather once or twice at a canvas across the room and linger there a little.
“Think of painting her!” she heard a girl say indignantly to another as they turned out of the small group about the picture.
“No accounting for tastes!” the other stranger replied with a shrug.
So it was some woman’s portrait. Was she notoriously déclassée, or only plain, Ivy wondered idly.
She got up and went to have a look for herself, less because she was curious than because she was far from “comfy” on the settee which she herself had called not too unkindly a “torture.”
Two men—more of her own class than any one she had noticed here this morning before—turned away from the canvas as she reached it. They both were grinning.
“Devilish pretty Chink, I call her,” the younger man said, and they both laughed.
Ivy stiffened, gave them a cold little haughty stare, and passed them to the picture.
Ivy Sên flushed an angry crimson as she saw a very beautiful picture—a full-length figure of a gorgeously robed, richly jeweled Chinese woman; a woman with tiny deformed feet and embroidered trousers. She was wearing elaborate nail protectors, but one long-nailed finger was uncovered, a jeweled protector lying beside a long silver-pipe, a queer little musical instrument of some sort, and a squat little earthenware god on a table of shiny black wood. The sumptuous figure was not belittled by an overemphasized background, but the pictorial temptation of still-life accessories had been beyond the painter’s full resistance. A great embroidered curtain swept behind the girl—a great sprawling dragon of green and bronze on the sunflower yellow folds, and through an open window at the canvas’ edge a distant pagoda was glimpsed.
Did she look as heathen-Chinee as that, in spite of the soft gray Paris frock and the girlish Bond Street hat? More Chinese perhaps because of the attempted disguise of her English clothes?
Had that man with the ruddy hair meant the girl in the picture was a pretty Chink, or that she was? They had been coming towards her as he spoke, and not three feet away. If he had meant her, he had not had even the courage of his insufferable impudence; for the puppy had flushed a sheepish pink when he met her eyes and saw that she had overheard. She had not noticed the other man, but they both had laughed.
Mrs. Sên coming back was startled at Ivy’s stiffened pose and the chill angry misery on the girl’s face. Ivy stood with her back to the picture, but near it, as if defying any one to overlook her who looked at it. She stood very still—with a small bitter sneer on her small red mouth.
The winter of Ivy Sên’s discontent had come again.
The mother saw that it had, and saw why.
They appeared—the girl on the canvas and the girl in the flesh—as China Smiling in Sunshine and China Frozen in Shadow.
Ruby Sên’s mother-heart stood still for a moment. Then she smiled and said gaily, “Here I am, dear.”
“I think that we are the picture of the year,” Ivy said clearly—others beside Mrs. Sên must have heard her—with a queer little gesture towards the “A Chinese Lady.”
Then without another word Ivy led their way out of the rooms, down the stairs, across the entrance hall out on to the porch, down again and across the quadrangle. The girl walked proudly, and her narrow slant-set black eyes were sultry and bitter, hard with pain and defiance: China in Storm.
Under the Piccadilly Archway Mrs. Sên stopped abruptly and held out her hand to one of two men who were lighting their cigarettes there.
“Why, Roland! It is you, isn’t it?”
The ruddy-haired man of Ivy Sên’s discomfiture said, with his foot on the cigarette he had flung down, hat, gloves and stick dexterously clutched in his left hand, that it certainly was.
“It’s Roland Curtis, Ivy; Cousin Lillian’s youngest boy,” Mrs. Sên explained.
Curtis went red, and dropped his gloves. But Ivy Sên smiled sweetly and held out a cousinly hand.
“I saw you admiring my portrait in there just now, Cousin Roland,” Ivy said, innocently.
Roland Curtis mumbled something—no one understood what; he least of all.
Ivy laughed—a pretty, friendly laugh of sheer amusement And Mrs. Sên and the man who had picked up the glove Curtis had dropped both saw that the girl gave Roland’s hand a tiny friendly squeeze before she dropped it.
Mrs. Sên smothered a sigh. Ivy was up to mischief! She knew Ivy so well, and the quick-witted woman instantly had reconstructed the small incident that she had not seen in Room IV.
“Your friend?” the woman said with a glance that said, “You may introduce him, Roland,” and, of course, had to be obeyed.
Roland Curtis’s only wish was to disappear quickly and permanently; he gave the introduction reluctantly and awkwardly.
“Oh—don’t you know Tommy Gaylor?”
“No, we never have met but I knew his father and mother very well indeed when I was in Madrid years ago. You must be Sir William’s son, Mr. Gaylor, for you might be he. Won’t you come with Roland to see me and tell me all about your people? In Delhi now, aren’t they?”
Gaylor said that they were, and said how glad he’d be to call if he might—and meant it.
“You’ll come soon, won’t you, Roland?”
Roland promised that he would, and vowed to himself that he would not—soon or ever.
“Why don’t you bring them home to lunch with us now?” Miss Sên suggested.
Yes; Ivy was going to make trouble! Mrs. Sên knew it, and Tom Gaylor suspected it.
“Sorry—awfully sorry,” Curtis hastily refused the invitation that Mrs. Sên had not given, and intended not to give, if she could avoid it gracefully. “Got to catch the one-fifteen at Victoria; Tommy and I are going to—to Frimley to cousins of his for the week-end—the Burton-Hamiltons. I’ll bring him to see you next week though. So jolly glad we ran into us—you, I mean. Can I get you a taxi, or have you got a car waiting? I say, Tom—we’ve cut it rather fine, haven’t we!”
“We are going to walk,” Ivy said before her mother could speak. Mrs. Sên was half afraid Ivy was going to suggest walking toward Victoria. “Can I call you a taxi, Cousin Roland?” the girl ended concernedly.
Curtis was speechless.
Gaylor came to the rescue. “No—thanks awfully, Miss Sên. Can’t afford half a taxi between us to-day. We’ve got to penny bus it.”
She let her new-found cousin escape then—but she made him shake hands with her again.
Mrs. Sên made no comment as she and Ivy went leisurely homeward. She would choose a wiser time.
She wished they had not come to the Academy. She wished she had slipped past Roland Curtis without “seeing” him. That would have been easy and plausible enough; for she had not seen him for years, and had no idea that he was in England.
She hoped that Ivy would be nice to the Bessingtons at lunch.
Ivy did not come down to lunch. Her head was bursting; she’d have to lie down in the dark, she said as they turned in at their gate.
It was true.