“In Peiping the day was marked by stormy protest from the students. Five thousand university students went on strike against the arrest of twenty-five of their fellows who had been in jail here since yesterday for—”
He winced and turned off the radio. He could live only it safety—that is, in peace. He had better stay where he was. A scholar must have peace. Resolutely he closed his eyes and in a slow murmuring voice began to recite the Book of Songs, written hundreds of centuries ago. It was better than a bromide and in less than a quarter of an hour he was fast asleep.
In the big parlor of the Li apartment Lili was listening to Charlie Ting talk. He had a fluent tongue which spoke an idiomatic American dialect much better than he spoke his own native Shanghai. He sat on the divan beside Lili, his arm thrown behind her. Her mother sat silent and dozing in a distant corner. At the exact moment when her head fell upon her breast he would kiss Lili. He talked on, his eyes upon the dozing figure.
“I wish we were going to Washington instead of London. But everybody says London is fun. I wish the food weren’t so scarce there, but Violet says the black market in Paris is wonderful and of course we can have things sent over. As for that, you and I aren’t diplomats and we can slip over to Paris. What say we get a little apartment there and spend a lot of time in it? Officially of course, we’ll be with the old people, like nice dutiful children, but actually we’ll be on our own. That’ll give them face and give us what we want.”
Mrs. Li’s head fell upon her breast and Charlie pressed his lips to Lili’s soft red mouth. She yielded with entire abandon, throwing back her head and closing her eyes exactly as she had seen movie stars do. She always watched the screen kiss closely in order to learn the American way. Charlie’s head swam a little. He also learned from the movies. It was really the only place to learn modern ways of making love, or perhaps it had better be said, ways of making modern love. There was nothing in China to teach him. He had seen a few motion pictures made in Shanghai and they seldom showed even a kiss. Chinese lovers still only talked, or at most touched hands. He had once read an English translation of an old Chinese book which had been recommended to him as spicy, and it had seemed dull indeed, full of references to flowers and dew, clouds and valleys and wooded mountain-tops, which he had not understood, and where the little feet of women were supposed to be something wonderful.
“Sure you’ve never loved anybody but me?” he inquired jealously of Lili.
She looked at him with large thoughtful eyes and kept silent. She spoke very little, and he was not always sure she understood his English. She did not speak very well herself—cute, of course, the way she talked, but certainly not good American.
“Tell me, darling,” he urged.
“Only once I thought I maybe love a little,” she confessed.
He felt a punch in his chest, where his heart beat against his ribs. “You never told me that,” he said solemnly. “Who was he?”
“Never mind now,” she said softly and laid her head against his shoulder.
“But I do mind,” he insisted. “I can’t be happy till you’ve spilled the whole thing.”
“S-pilled?” she inquired in two syllables.
“Told me,” he translated.
She smiled. “Is nothing at all, truly. When I first came here, I didn’t have experience.” She spoke the long word syllable by syllable. “At that time James Liang fell into love of me—I didn’t understand. I only saw how it is in the movies and I was excited. I let him love only a little.”
“Where is he now?” Charlie demanded.
“Oh, very far away in Peking!”
“What is he doing there?”
“He is doctor in a big hospital.”
“Does he write to you?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, no!” Lili replied in a soft scream, “only once he wrote a long letter asking me to come there. But I don’t answer.”
“That’s all?”
“All,” she sighed.
There was silence for a moment. “Did he kiss you?” Charlie asked in a tight voice.
“Sometimes he did.”
Charlie drew his arm away and sat apart from her. She stole a long look at him. Enough jealousy was good but too much was dangerous.
“I didn’t like it,” she said sweetly. “When he kiss me, I feel it is not nice. And I do not want to live in China any more now when it is so nice here and I think it will be nice in Paris and maybe London, too.”
She leaned toward him and pressed the fragrant palm of her hand against his cheek. “Now I am sorry I s-pill,” she whispered, “but I think I must because I must s-pill everything for you.”
He resisted her for a brief moment and then he turned to her and kissed her again, long and hard. In the corner Mrs. Li began to snore slightly.
Still later did Ranald Grahame sit up talking to Violet. They did not so much share one apartment as live in connecting ones. He had, of course, to seem to live alone, and so for that matter did she. He was not the sort of man who wanted domesticity, and certainly she was not the woman to provide it. He had never married and he never intended to marry. He had explained to Violet so there would be no misunderstanding. He believed in being as honest with women as he was with men.
This honesty compelled him now to demand an explanation of her behavior. He had left the party early because he would not allow himself to make a spectacle before others. After his dance with Lili had been interrupted he had taken a whisky and soda at the bar and then he had gone to pay his respects to Mr. and Mrs. Li. They had looked at him rather vacantly as though they did not remember who he was and this had not made him feel better. He knew Chinese well enough to believe they were only pretending when they seemed hot to know one. They knew everything, actually. They were much more difficult to deal with than the mercurial people of India, who were always bursting with talk and feelings, so that you knew what they were about and could circumvent them easily. Chinese contained their feelings so thoroughly that any more containment was self-immolation.
For this reason he did not believe for one moment that Violet did not know what she had done. He had waited two hours for her in a state of cold rage mounting to absolute frigidity by the time she came in, beautiful in her pallor.
He was waiting in her sitting room, and she lifted her eyes in surprise at him. “You still here, Ranald!” she said in her lovely modulated voice. She threw off the short sable coat. “Shall I make you a drink?”
He had risen meticulously when she came in and now he sat down again. “No thanks—I shan’t stay but a moment. You must be tired.”
She sat down gracefully weary and pushed back her hair. “I am, rather. Pierre wanted to show me a new nightclub—a French one. A lot of his friends were there. It was fun—or would have been if I had not been already tired. That was a stupid big party, wasn’t it? But curiously distinguished, too—frightfully Chinese, I thought. It looked as though everybody were there, but when one examined the crowd, there was really not one person who was wrong, you know.” She had the trick of speaking English in various ways, to an American as an American, to an Englishman as an English woman. She spoke five other languages as easily, one of them Russian.
But she was not a spy, nor anything indeed except what she seemed to be, a rootless beautiful woman, floating on any surface, and without depths of her own into which to retire. Frequently she did not like her life, but she did not know how to make another. Her father had been an old-fashioned Chinese, whose origins even she did not know, and she had never known her French mother. She might have become a famous model for artists, but to her they seemed dingy men, and she had continued to live strictly as a nun in her father’s great dark Paris house, which was filled with Chinese furniture and rugs and paintings. What he did not want he sold and what he liked he kept. Such goods reached him in secret ways from China, and imperial treasures passed through his hands or stayed in his house.
Among ivory statues of Kwanyin Violet had grown up t
o look like one herself, consciously modeling herself upon the goddess. When her father died, leaving no will and no other family, she had continued in the house, except when she traveled with her servants, a married French couple who made her home wherever she was, hiring transient help in whatever country they were. Until she met the Englishman, she had had only one lover, an impetuous, jealous White Russian who had made her wretched and yet who had made it impossible for her to live alone. She had fled from him, and then she had really fallen in love with Ranald in her quiet peculiar way. She liked his subdued heat and his tenacious strength, and she liked his complete self-control. He was restful and he gave her a sense of security. She hoped that she need never have another lover, and that they could keep their relationship steadfast until they grew beyond the need of such things. By that time she hoped she could find something she really enjoyed doing.
This steadfastness she wanted above all else, and she had felt it threatened tonight by the passionate and handsome young Pierre du Bois, whom she had met for the first time. He had immediately told her that he was nobody, only a third secretary to somebody, but he thought she was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. She had missed something of the Russian in the quiet Englishman and his quiet rather selfish way of making love.
“I quite realize that you and I have no claim on one another,” Ranald was saying, “and I make no claim now.” He was very straight and tall and his pale firm face was distinguished looking. “Nevertheless, I cannot have it said that you allow yourself to be exhibited by a Frenchman or any other man. I demand of my mistress the same good taste I might demand of my wife.”
She leaned forward when he said this and she looked at him earnestly. Her face was molded in soft curves and flat bones, and her body was slender at the waist and more full-breasted than it would have been had her blood been purely Chinese. She smiled somewhat wistfully.
“You needn’t say that to me, Ranald. All my Chinese common sense tells me I shall never find as good a man as you. There are times when you seem a little dull to me, you know, and then Pierre or somebody like him is fun—just for an hour or so. But if you don’t like it, I can easily do without fun. I’d much rather be able to count on you and have you count on me.”
He acknowledged to himself at once that her honesty was equal to his. “Thank you, my dear,” he said with some heartiness and entire sincerity. “So long as we understand one another! All the same, I’d advise not dancing too long with one man—or too often. Or sitting too long, for that matter. You went to the extreme with Dr. Liang the last time. I didn’t say anything, for I felt you couldn’t be interested in him—a wishy-washy sort of man, I thought.”
“Distinguished,” she murmured in her Chinese way. “With us a man does not have to be brutal or strong. Delicacy is also appreciated. Subtlety is admired.”
He was not without his own subtleties. “You are more French than Chinese under that smooth golden skin of yours,” he reminded her.
She laughed. “That is exactly what is the matter with me,” she agreed.
He allowed himself a smile. He was really very fond of her. She knew how to be comfortable as well as passionate. The combination was irresistible.
10
THE WHOLE THING BEGAN AT the chrysanthemum market on that bright autumn day when James had written the letter which had so disturbed his parents. With some delay they had proceeded with their afternoon’s jaunt. Indeed they were the more impatient to get out of the house and into a change of scene, because they felt helpless. James had written the letter at once and had read it aloud to them, even Chen being there at the demand of everybody except Louise, who had kept silent, and they had waked Peter to listen. The letter was approved. James had made it short but clear.
He had written to his father: “We cannot be sure that Ma has understood you rightly. We think she has not, for we cannot believe that you would take a concubine now when it is illegal by Chinese modern law to do so and would certainly bring disgrace on the family and shame us before all Western peoples, who know your name. Our faith is in you and we hope you will set Ma right on this matter. We are only concerned because she seems unhappy. If, on the other hand, it is we who are wrong, then please let Ma come to us at once, and we will look after her. You can say you have divorced her, and then there will be no public disgrace, at least, since many people in America are divorced.
“We are well and Mary likes her work and Peter to his own surprise enjoys the university—”
Peter had interrupted James to deny this. “I don’t enjoy it,” he said. “But I see there is some sort of a job to be done here. In America the students only have a good time and they do not trouble themselves about other people. But here where the people cannot speak for themselves we have to speak for them. Yesterday, for example, a bunch of us saw a policeman beating a ricksha puller over the head with his club. We stopped and asked him what the man had done, and it seemed he had only let the wheel of his ricksha run by accident over the policeman’s foot. There was no law broken. We made the officer let the miserable fellow go.”
“But that was enjoyable,” Mary said warmly.
“No, it wasn’t,” Peter retorted. “Actually we were more angry at the ricksha coolie than at the policeman. He should have stood up for himself instead of cringing. He hadn’t done anything wrong. We followed him and when he tried to thank us we gave him a couple of whacks over the head ourselves for being such a coward.”
“Peter!” Mary cried. “How wicked of you!”
“It wasn’t,” he insisted. “I get into a rage with our stupid common people, letting themselves be run by anybody with a club or a gun. Why don’t they fight back?”
“Because they have no clubs and guns,” James said quietly. He folded the letter and put it into the stamped envelope, sealed and addressed it. “Come, let us go now to the market and see the chrysanthemums. Mary, you must not spend too much money.”
“What do you call too much?” Mary demanded. “Today a hundred dollars in our paper bills is worth something under ten American cents.”
“I mean you must not pay more than half what the vendors ask,” James replied.
“We’d better get there before they double their prices to get ahead of inflation,” Chen said, laughing still more loudly than the others.
Money had become a joke and yet an inflated paper had to be given for purchases, and so with their pockets stuffed with rolls of bills they had gone to the flower market. Young Wang followed behind them to bring back the flowers. Imperceptibly they had lost their American ways enough so that they yielded to Young Wang’s determination not to allow the members of his master’s household to be seen in public places carrying any load, however pleasant.
They all agreed afterward that there was something peculiar about the day. The air was so still and clear as to seem almost solid. People were magnified by it, faces were sculptured, eyes made bright. Especially beautiful were the faces of old people, for every line seemed drawn with meaning. Since there was not a flutter of wind, the garments the people wore fell in quiet folds, the colors even of faded blues and red were sure and rich, and human flesh looked brown and warm. Smiles and white teeth, the sounds of voices and musical instruments, all were enhanced by the silent magnetic atmosphere.
When James led his brother and sisters and Chen to the great square which was the market place, the scene struck him with all the force of a magnificent stage. An old palace stood in the background, its heavy roof of blue porcelain tiles lifted against the clear sky. Maple trees had been planted on either side of it centuries ago, and these were gold and red with autumn. Since there was no wind the leaves did not scatter, but now and again in the ripeness of the season a leaf loosed its hold upon the parent branch and fell slowly to the ground. In the leaves little children played. They were drunk with happiness, although they were the children of the poor and they wore ragged clothes. Some of the boys had laid aside their shirts and their smooth brown bodies gl
istened with sweat.
The whole center of the immense court was filled with the chrysanthemums which vendors had brought to be sold. They stood in pots, hundreds together, and each owner with his wife or son watched over his own. Between the pots the people walked, exclaiming and praising until they saw one bloom irresistibly beautiful when reluctantly they felt themselves compelled to buy. Rich and poor were here together, for all alike revered these flowers, imperial in their size and hues. There were even a few foreigners and among them an occasional American soldier, on leave, perhaps, and out to see the sights. Yet here, as everywhere, the poor far outnumbered the rich. They were unable to buy any flowers, they could only stand and admire wistfully, and yet seemingly without envy, the purchases of the rich. Even when a flower by some ill chance was broken off, these poor did not dare to pick it up. They watched while the woman servant of some rich lady took up the flower and thrust it into her hair. It was the same quality in these poor that had made Peter so angry at the ricksha puller, and that James himself had seen in the wards of the hospital, where they received gratefully everything that was done for them, and if one of them died, there was no thought of revenge for his death.
Mary was at his side, and her seeing eyes perceived this difference between the people. “Look at the poor ones,” she said to James. “They think it is enough to gaze at the flowers.”