He had to go near her, though this was what he hated most. She put out her thin long-nailed hand and took his hand in both of hers.
“Your palms are wet!” she exclaimed.
“It is very hot outside,” he said.
“You’ve been hurrying,” she scolded. “How often have I told you never to hurry? It destroys the life force.”
“I like to walk quickly,” he declared.
“It is not what you like,” she said. “You have to consider the family. You are my grandson.”
No, this was what he hated most of all, this sense that to her he was valuable only because he was her grandson, a person to carry on her family.
“I must sometimes do what I like,” he said sullenly.
She gripped his wrist suddenly between her thumb and forefinger.
“You are always doing what you like,” she said loudly. “You think of no one but yourself—it is this generation! I-ko is the same. He has not come near me all day.”
Then immediately she was afraid she had made him angry, so she reached for her comfit box with one hand, still clinging to him with the other, and gave him a candied date.
He would have liked to refuse it, but when he saw it, he felt hungry against his will. He was always hungry! So he took it, frowning, and ate it.
“There,” she said, laughing. “I don’t give these dates to anyone but you.” She began caressing his arm under his sleeve. “They are good for the blood—no one gets them but you and me. Although—” she raised her voice a little so that Peony waiting in the hall might hear, “I know that miserable girl slave steals them when I am asleep!”
“I, Mistress?” Peony’s silvery tranquil voice answered through the open door. “Never, Mistress!”
“Yes, she does,” the old woman said to him. “She steals everything she can, that girl. We’ve had her eleven years but she has no gratitude. She was only seven when we bought her and she was already a thief.”
He did not answer. He was not going to defend Peony and have his grandmother accuse him of wickedness. He had made that mistake before. He pulled his hand away.
“Grandmother, I have a whole English paper to write before tomorrow,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” she said quickly, “you mustn’t sit up too late.”
“Good night, Grandmother,” he said, bowing.
“No, not good night,” she said coaxingly. “Come in again before you sleep.”
“But you’ll be lying stupid under that stuff,” he said rudely.
“No,” she said eagerly, “no, tell me when you are coming and I will be awake for you.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “How can I say when I shall be finished with all those books?”
She sighed. Then her eyes fell on the opium pipe and she wavered.
“Well, that is true,” she murmured. She waited an instant. “Peony!” she called.
“Coming,” Peony answered.
She came into the room on quiet silk-shod feet and helped the old lady to lie down and began to prepare the lamp. I-wan had not gone.
“I put your books on your table,” she said to him.
The old lady’s eyes were already shut.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I-wan whispered. “Pandering to her like that!”
Peony opened her black apricot-shaped eyes widely.
“I have to do what I’m told!” she said. He frowned and shook his head and marched to the door. Then he glanced back. She was stirring the sticky stuff with a tiny silver spoon. But she was not looking at it. She was waiting mischievously for him, and when she caught his glance she stuck her red tongue far out of her mouth. He slammed the door on the sight.
But there was no shutting out that sweet sick smell of opium. Upstairs in his own room he threw his windows wide but it was still no use. The evening air was windless and the smell hung through the house, faint yet penetrating. All his life he had smelled it and hated it. In an old Chinese house courtyard walls would have cut it off, perhaps, but up through these vast halls and piled stairways the ancient odor of opium crept like a miasma. It was the essence of everything I-wan hated, that stealing lethargic fragrance that in its very sweetness held something of the stink of death. The house was saturated with it. It clung in the silk hangings on the walls and in the red cushions on the chairs and couches. I-wan, pulling silk stuffed quilts about him at night in bed smelled, or imagined he did, that reek.
For that reason, he had told himself, he wanted his room bare, as bare as En-lan’s little dormitory cubicle in the university. He made Peony take down the heavy damask curtains which the French decorator, years before he was born, had draped across the windows. Every window in the house had them except now these two in his rooms. Without them the windows stretched tall and stark, and the light fell into his room like a blast of noise. Peony was always complaining about the hideousness of his room. She was always trying to soften this hard light. Today when he came in he saw at once she had been doing it again. In the window she had put a blue vase, and in that a branch of rosy-flowered oleander. For a moment he thought, “What have I to do with flowers? I’ll take them away.”
But he did not go beyond thinking. He did not want to hurt Peony’s feelings because she was the only one in this house to whom he could talk at all. And he had not made up his mind whether or not he would tell even her everything—that is, that he had joined finally that secret revolutionary band and that some day soon he must renounce all else. When he thought of renouncing this house and this life, his heart swelled and shrank too. Still, it was the only way to save the country—to cut off all this old dead life—the life of capitalism!
Yes, I-ko was dead, too, as dead as his grandmother, even though he was a young man. He was dead because he cared for nothing except himself and his own pleasures. Because of his position as the son of the president of a great modern bank, he had an easy place near his father. I-wan himself did not know of all that I-ko did. But he knew enough to know that he would never be like I-ko if he could help it.
Now he took off his dark blue school uniform and put on a long robe of soft gray-green silk. This was because his grandfather disliked to see him at home in the rough school uniform.
“When you come into my presence,” he had directed I-wan, “appear in your natural garb.”
“When I renounce them all,” I-wan thought to himself as he fastened the small buttons of twisted silk, “I will never wear anything but the uniform.” For of course in that life of revolution to which he would go, this robe would be absurd. To clamber over rocks, to march long miles among country villages, to preach on the streets to the people and tell them they ought to revolt against the rich and those who oppressed them—one could not wear a silk gown for such things. He must even change his name. No one would believe in the son of a rich Shanghai banker—
He heard a little cough and suddenly Peony put her head in at the door.
“Your grandfather asks why you delay, and your parents command you to come at once,” she announced.
“I’m coming,” he said shortly.
Her voice changed. She came into the room and went straight toward the window.
“Did you see the oleander?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” he said.
Now he was taking off his leather shoes and putting on black velvet slippers. If his grandfather heard him clacking on the floors in his school shoes he would simply have to turn around again and come back and change.
“Aren’t they beautiful with the light shining through them?” Peony asked.
He looked up. For the first time in his life he suddenly saw Peony not as Peony, the bondmaid with whom he had played and quarreled as long as he could remember. She was a pretty girl standing by those flowers. If he did not know she was only Peony, he would say she was a pretty girl.
“I didn’t look at them,” he said. And without a word he went out. Why did he now notice how Peony looked? He remembered when Peony was a small yell
ow-faced mite who never seemed to grow at all.
“Certainly she costs us nothing in food,” his mother always said…. No one could say Peony was yellow, now. She would never be tall, but she was not yellow.
He crossed the great square upstairs hall and he stood before a heavy walnut door opposite his own and coughed.
“Come in,” his grandfather called.
So he went in.
It was impossible to despise his grandfather as he did his grandmother. His grandfather knew many things, though, being old, he forgot much. But he would allow greater knowledge to no one. Even though I-wan perceived the absurdity of this in an old man, he continued to be a little afraid of his grandfather. When anybody said the foreigners did thus, his grandfather could always say whether they really did or not. When anyone asked him to tell something about the foreign countries, he always said, “I was in all the western countries, and each is different from the others and all are different from us—that is the chief thing.”
If pressed further he would tell of strange things he had seen. At first, fifty years ago, these things seemed stranger than they did now. A train, for instance, fifty years ago was like nothing so much as a dragon. To people listening he said, “Imagine a dragon roaring across the country, smoke pouring from its nostrils—” Now of course there were plenty of trains. Everybody in Shanghai had seen trains. The old man could say no more about them. But he maintained his dignity.
“Sit down,” his grandfather said. “What have you studied today?”
I-wan sat on the edge of his chair and began. “Sir, I studied today history, geography, English, and mathematics.”
“No military science?” his grandfather asked sharply.
“Tomorrow is science, sir,” I-wan answered.
“Military science—military science is the thing,” his grandfather said. “Now when I was in Germany I saw troops passing in review, and I received certain definite ideas. That is why I hired a German tutor for you last summer.”
I-wan sat staring at his grandfather without seeing or hearing him. He had trained himself to do this by much experience. Germany fifty years ago—what had it to do with him? He sat thinking and not thinking, his eyes following his grandfather’s thin yellow hand as it moved up and down in his white straggling beard. If he should tell Peony tonight when she came to make up his bed that he was a revolutionist—but if he told her that some day he must renounce them all, that he could never come home again, of course Peony would not see him again, either. Then she would cry. Perhaps he would not tell anybody—just not come home any more when the day of revolution broke. In the secret meeting today Liu En-Ian had said, “Next spring—”
“Now you may go,” his grandfather said kindly. “You listen well and I have great plans for you, I-wan.”
I-wan rose, bowed, and turned. At the door he bowed again. He seldom spoke in his grandfather’s room unless he must answer a question. He was always glad to get away, too. The room was full of old books and too much furniture. It was musty and unaired and smelled of an old man. His grandfather did not open the windows often. In the daytime he declared it was cooler to keep them shut and at night he feared the moist air. I-wan shut the door behind him.
“This house is full of smells,” he thought. Even Peony had a smell. She used a jasmine scent. It was too sweet and he had told her so, but she loved it and would not give it up.
“The trouble is with you,” she always insisted. “Your nose is too keen to smell. What other people like, you dislike. You make a point of it.” She said such things in her pretty voice. The words were sharp but they sounded soft….
Now he must go to his parents, and then he would be free. He knocked at another door and entered at once without waiting. Here were the two huge rooms which he knew best of all, because as a baby he had learned to walk on this smooth parquetry floor covered with heavy Chinese rugs. He knew every ornament, from the vases in the carved blackwood cabinet, which he was never allowed to touch, to the ivory balls and elephants with which he could always play as much as he liked. He still liked sometimes to take the big hollow ivory filigree ball into his hands and turn it and try to separate with his eye the seventeen different ivory balls within, each separate and turning.
His mother was sitting by the window embroidering, and his father was at a huge blackwood desk at one end of the room. He was still in the foreign dress he wore at the bank and he looked up as I-wan came in.
“Ah, you’ve seen your grandparents,” he said. “I am only just come home—I must change.” But he did not move. “Has your brother come in?” he asked.
“No, Father,” I-wan answered.
Madame Wu looked up from her satin with her soft doubting face and put out her hand to her son.
“Come here,” she said in English. She spoke English well and was proud of it. In her youth her father had kept an elderly English lady for years as her governess. “You look tired, I-wan.”
“I am tired,” he answered in English. He liked speaking English. He could leave off the long courteous phrases he had to use in Chinese. In English one could not sensibly say, “Your honorable—” and “I, the humble one—” Still his mother was very Chinese sometimes. She had certain superstitions which did not at all suit her pure English accent. All his little boyhood he went with a silver lock and chain about his neck to lock his life in. He used to pull at it in secret, but he could not break it. The silversmith had welded the last link fast around his neck.
“You are so late,” his mother said.
“We had a meeting after school,” he replied.
“What are these meetings?” his father asked in Chinese.
“Political meetings,” I-wan answered, still in English.
“Don’t get yourself entangled,” his father said. Now he spoke in English, too, as he did only when he wanted to be sure the servants could not understand. He spoke English fluently but badly, confusing his l’s and r’s and n’s, as he did in French and German also. “Young students can do nothing to change those in control. But those in control can cut off your heads.”
“I-wan!” his mother cried. “Promise me—”
His father went on without heeding her.
“The government is not going to hear any nonsense from boys and girls,” he said warmly. “Besides, none of you understands all that is involved in running a country. You are full of criticisms and rebellions. But what do you understand of money and banking, of foreign loans, for instance?”
“Why do we need foreign loans?” I-wan burst out. They had been talking about foreign loans this afternoon in the meeting and En-lan had got up and in the quietest way had offered his life to their cause, as a protest. Until that moment they had not understood the importance and danger of the new million-dollar loan from Japan, for which the surety was to be a certain great iron mine in the north.
“This latest loan from abroad,” En-lan had said, “is not given freely any more than any other loan. There are certain privileges that go to the foreign nation that lends us money. The students have protested to the government officials but they pay no attention to us. With your permission, I will conceal a pistol in my sleeve and shoot the Minister of Finance as he goes home for dinner with his new concubine.”
No one spoke. They were all staring at him. And he drew back his lips in a snarl, and between his shining white teeth he hissed, “His new concubine cost him ten thousand dollars! Only Ministers of Finance can keep buying new concubines!”
It was the first time one of their group had offered his life to kill an enemy. It had been done often enough elsewhere so that well-known men were doubling their bodyguards, especially since a student had broken into the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. That was after the twenty-one demands that Japan had made…. They broke into excited talk. But then it was decided that En-lan could not be spared yet—too much was to come.
Nevertheless what he had offered to do had made the hour intense for their cause.
“Why do we need foreign loans?” his father repeated. “Because every country in reconstruction needs foreign loans.”
He was a large man with a handsome flat-cheeked face, and he prided himself on being a modern man. Among his friends were many foreigners of all nations, but chiefly Japanese. Mr. Wu was one of those Chinese who believed in close friendship with Japan. “Asia for the Asians,” he liked to quote, after the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs had first used these words in a speech before the League of Nations.
“You cannot understand,” he now said to his son kindly, “because you are at the idealistic age. I also at twenty had certain ideals. I was a secret follower of the Young Emperor and his reforms. Most young men were. I daresay you also follow some such cult with your fellows.”
“I-ko never was like this,” his mother murmured.
“I-wan is more like me,” his father said sharply.
I-wan sat down. He did not answer his parents. Long ago he had learned that trick. It was at once filial in respect and by it he told nothing. His mother had taken up her embroidery again, and his father his pen. He did not care what his father said, he told himself, and yet—his father could so easily prick something in him with a few words, and make him feel small and young. As if the revolutionists now could be compared to whatever those young men had been under the weak Emperor! His father was busy and rich and successful now, though he had been a spoiled child, coaxed and coddled as I-ko had been when for so long he was the only son. The old servants still in the house were full of stories about his willfulness as a child. But somehow his father had not been made weak by spoiling. Instead he only continued to be opinionated and domineering and to do as he liked. I-wan knew that sometimes his parents quarreled bitterly, but he did not know about what. His mother had been a rich man’s only daughter and there were few women so well educated as she had been in her youth. But still she obeyed her husband, even though they quarreled. Everyone obeyed him, even his parents, although he made a show of yielding to them, since that was suitable.
“May I go now, Father?” I-wan asked.