Kinfolk

2

THE OCEAN WAS NOT THE RIVER. No bridge could cross it. James stood for hours every day, staring down into the clear green water that foamed into white waves where the prow of the ship clove its way westward. He was lonely and still he wanted to be alone. There were few passengers — two solitary old Chinese who he suspected were Cantonese going home to die, a hard-bitten American businessman, a Standard Oil executive, a journalist, two or three missionaries and their wives. Only the missionaries spoke to him every morning when they passed, and he did not encourage them.

The ocean was not the river. It changed from day to day, from hour to hour. Under a gray sky it was green. Under rain it was gray. In sunshine it was pure royal blue, and under the moon it was a tender silver. The moon was what he could not endure. The moon made him think of Lili. Long ago he had forgiven her. She was mild and sweet, an affectionate child, sad with fear that her father would die while she was away. It had ended like that by the time he left New York. She was afraid her father would die, and she had begged him to wait until the operation was over. He had not waited because he was afraid old Mr. Li might die indeed, and then he would not have the heart to leave Lili.

“It is better for me to go,” he had told her. “If he dies, then you will have the courage to come to me.”

He stretched out in his steamer chair, lying very still, his eyes closed. He was in mid-ocean, days lay behind him, days waited ahead. His body ached with loneliness, defrauded of marriage. It seemed to him now that he had left his father’s house in a confusion of suffering. He had not tried to persuade Lili again and he had seen her only once more, the last night before he went away. It was too late then to change anything, even had there been a change in her. He had already sent cables accepting the job at the hospital in Peking, announcing that he would come alone and therefore would not need one of the resident doctor’s houses, would gladly accept two rooms in the men’s dormitory, and that he was leaving at once. Passports and visas were rushed through with the help of governments. It suddenly became important for Dr. James Liang to reach China. He was to bring with him supplies of drugs, especially the new streptomycin samples for use in tuberculosis. Three-fourths of the students in government universities had tuberculosis from bad food and poor housing after the war.

There had been no change in Lili. She had allowed him to hold her in his arms; she had wept a little; she had let him kiss her, and she told him her father was sure he was going to die and had willed her all his money and the Shanghai house. Her heart was numb and he could not respond. Too much was ahead; his dream, broken, was somehow coming true in a solitary fashion, without her. The dream was older than his love for her and the dream must go on. “Good-by, darling,” he kept whispering to her. “Good-by — good-by—”

The anguish of saying good-by to Lili had served this poor purpose, however — it had dimmed the pain of all other farewells. He had clasped his father’s hand, put his arms about his mother, kissed Louise, and held Peter’s hand for a long moment with no feeling anywhere in him. Only when Mary crept into his arms and clung to him had he felt a spark of sorrow. She had whispered fiercely into his ear, “You are to send for me — don’t forget, Jim! The very first minute!” Her bright black eyes had kept up their demand until the train carried him out of sight.

He sighed. The wind gathering out of the ocean twilight was growing cold and he got up, folded his steamer rug, picked up the books he had not read, and went below to his cabin. No one shared it with him for the ship was half empty. He lay down on the bunk and crossed his hands behind his head, and then into his solitude came again the last moments of his leave-taking of Lili. This had become the habit of his brain, he thought impatiently, and his soul was weary. He tried consciously to push out of his mind Lili’s face, the scent of her person, the childish softness of her flesh, the sound of her voice. He tried to think of his father and mother, of his life in America, the hospital, of plans when he landed in his own country, as new and foreign to him as though he had no Chinese blood in his veins. But his brain went the dreary round that his heart determined. Love was unassuaged.

He set his teeth and listened to the rhythm of the sea, beating against the ship. He opened his eyes and stared at the gray wash of the waves over the porthole. To lie like this in a ship and feel himself tossed upon vast waters was humbling enough. The ship was a midget upon the ocean and he but a mite upon the ship, and why should he think himself important in this vastness of his own country? Four thousand years China had lived without him and she would live thousands more after he was gone. She would never miss him. He began to curse himself for a fool and to think his father was a wise man. He might have lived comfortably in a huge modern city; he might have married Lili and inherited her father’s wealth, and with leisure he might have pursued his way in research which could do for China infinitely more than his meager life. Had he thrown everything away?

The door opened and the cabin boy put in his head. He was a young Chinese, and he had been overjoyed when he found that James could speak his native Mandarin.

“You, sir, must get up and eat your evening meal.”

“I am not hungry,” James replied.

“But they are having very good meat,” the boy urged. “Also there is rice.”

“Even meat and rice,” James said smiling.

The boy came in and closed the door behind him. “I am too bold, but you are ill, sir?”

“No — not ill,” James replied. The boy was young and slender, an ordinary lad with nothing to recommend him. Some time in his youth he should have had his tonsils taken out, and certainly an orthodontist could have done something for his profile. But his teeth were white and clean and his skin was smooth and his eyes were bright. Above his high round forehead his black hair stood up in a brush. He wore the long blue cotton gown of all cabin boys and he had not buttoned the collar.

“Your heart is sick,” the boy said shrewdly. “Have you left your family somewhere?”

“They are in America,” James said.

“But you are not American.”

“No, yet I grew up there.”

The boy’s eyes sparkled. “America is very good,” he announced. “Americans are funny. They get angry quickly. Then they hit you. But they give you money afterward.”

“I have not seen this aspect of Americans,” James said.

“I know many Americans,” the boy went on. He was enjoying a chance to make conversation. “They come and go on this ship. At night they take young women behind the lifeboats and kiss them.”

“Do you watch them?” James asked. While he talked he need not think.

“I watch them,” the boy admitted. “Only thus can I know them.”

“How did you come to be on this ship?” James asked.

“My uncle is the cook,” the boy replied.

“Yet by your tongue you come from Anhwei, which is far from the sea.”

“We are Anhwei people, but in a famine we went to Shanghai to beg, and my uncle stayed and did not go back to the land. At first he pulled a ricksha, then he got a job with a foreigner to pull his private ricksha and be coolie, and then he worked well and went into the house as number three boy and then he became number one boy and he learned cooking and when the cook died, he was cook. When the war came the foreign master went away, and my uncle came on this ship.”

“And will you always stay on this ship?” James asked.

The boy opened the door and looked up and down the corridor.

“No steward,” he said in a low voice, and his face crinkled with silent laughter. He closed the door.

“Sit down,” James said.

The boy sat down on the edge of the couch against the outer wall of the cabin. He pulled up his sleeves from his hands and prepared himself for more enjoyable conversation. “Only you can speak our language on this ship except my uncle. My uncle is very tired all the time and he will not talk much. If I talk too much please tell me.”

“Talk as much as you please,” James said. “I know no one else on the ship.”

The boy considered. Then he looked at James half mischievously. “What shall I talk? I have many things in my life.”

James laughed for the first time in days. “What do you think about when you are alone?”

The boy smiled delightedly. “My home,” he said.

“Then tell me about your home.”

The boy cleared his throat and pulled up his sleeves again. “We live in a small place,” he began. “It is the Three-mile Village of the Wangs. Our family name is Wang. I am the middle son and so I have no good place in the family. Two brothers are older than I, three are younger. What happens to me is not important.” He laughed at himself and went on. “This is good, because my father and mother do not care what I do. So I can do anything.”

“But what do you want most to do?” James asked. This was the first time he had ever talked with what he thought of as a real Chinese — that is, someone who belonged to the earth of China.

The boy scratched his scalp with his little fingernail, and looked thoughtful. “What I want is too foolish,” he said shyly.

“What most people want seems foolish,” James said to encourage him. He was somewhat astonished to see that he had unwittingly uttered a truth, and it led him to another. “The important thing is to know what one wants.”

“I would like to become a ship steward,” Young Wang said earnestly. “This is foolish for no one in our family has been in ships except my uncle and me. We do not know anything about ships. We are farmers.”

“Why do you want to live on ships?” James asked.

“To come and go across wide waters.”

“What makes you want to come and go?” James pursued this boy’s mind with rising interest.

Young Wang crossed his legs. “It is this way,” he began again. “My heart goes up when I cross the sea. China is good and America is good. I can buy better rice in China but the oranges in America are sweet. More ships, more fun for everybody. Also it is good business. I can get rich quick.”

James laughed. “You don’t want to go to school?” he asked.

Wang shook his head. “In old times learning was good business,” he said affably. “Now on ships is a better way for riches.”

Out in the corridor a dinner gong sounded loudly and Young Wang leaped to his feet. “The chief steward will let out his rage at me,” he exclaimed and darted to the door. There he paused for a moment. “Meat and rice are very good today,” he cried and disappeared.

James laughed and got out of the bunk. He was suddenly hungry. Meat and rice were very good.

He was proud of the skyline of Shanghai. This astonished him. In spite of the photographs and stories from friends he had not believed that there were such tall buildings in China. The long flat approach to the city had not been reassuring. For hours the ship had steamed slowly between mudbanks in a river of mud that fanned wide into the green ocean.

“No bath this morning, please,” Young Wang had said cheerfully soon after dawn. “Only river water.”

So as soon as he was dressed he had gone on deck. No shore was in sight and the ocean had changed to a muddy brown. It was his first glimpse of the soil of China, washed by the river from a thousand miles of land. Later the land itself had stolen almost imperceptibly to the horizon in the long barren mudbanks. These gave way to flat green fields and a few squat farmhouses, some low-built warehouses, a mill, a village, a town. He went below and ate his breakfast quickly and came back to stand again at the rail. There was nothing beautiful in the landscape except the brilliant blue sky, which today was cloudless. Had it been gray, the dun of land and water and sky would have frightened him.

Then suddenly at midmorning against this bright sky a new skyline had broken. He saw high buildings massed together and he perceived with a pleasurable shock that it was Shanghai and that it was as modern, from this distance, as he had been told it was by patriotic countrymen. “China is not all ignorant peasants and thatch-roofed villages,” they had said impatiently. “We have our modern cities, too. One city is more important than a thousand villages.”

He felt relief. The homecoming was not to be too strange. He did not step from his father’s comfortable apartment into a mud-walled hut.

Someone was at his elbow and he turned. It was Young Wang, his face sparkling and his eyes shining. “Very nice day,” he remarked.

“You are going ashore?” James asked.

“By and by,” Young Wang replied. “You go to hotel?”

“Yes,” James replied.

Young Wang stayed until the last possible moment and then rushed downstairs to his duties. Meanwhile the Bund loomed toward the ship. It was really quite beautiful. The street was wide and paved, and a park was green at one end.

As the ship edged to the pier, James looked down into a crowd of his own people. Their brown faces were upturned, curious, gay, patient. Here and there a white face was lifted startlingly clear against the universal brown. It was a reversal of New York where the crowd was white, and the brown face startling. He had grown up immunizing himself to the stares of white people as he walked along the streets, but here it would be comforting to belong to the crowd. In a few minutes he would be lost in it, and no one would look at him twice. Here was where he belonged.

He felt an exhilaration which was very nearly happiness. His country would not be strange to him. Why had Lili and her family ever left it and why did they not want to come back? Perhaps they had left too soon after the war. At the thought of Lili, constant in his mind, he went below to finish his packing. The sooner he reached his hotel the sooner he might find a letter from her, sent airmail, to be waiting for him.

But when he reached his hotel, an hour later, there was no letter. An indolent clerk in a dirty white gown ruffled some envelopes.

“Let me see, please,” James said.

The clerk pushed the envelopes toward him and flung out a clatter of words in Shanghai dialect to his assistant who laughed. James could not understand and he pretended not to hear. He looked at each envelope slowly. There was no letter from Lili but there was a square envelope of heavy pink paper and upon it was scrawled in large vinelike letters his name. On the back in the same loose combination of tendrils he saw the name Thelma Barnabas, Rue du Consulat. He tore open the envelope and took out a single pink sheet and the black letters flung themselves at him.

Dear Dr. Liang:

With what enthusiasm do the intellectuals of Shanghai await the arrival of the son of the great Liang Wen Hua! Dare I hope you will gather with us at my house? I have had the temerity to invite our small, but, I think, distinguished circle. We dine at seven tonight. A car will call for you half an hour before.

Yours in expectation, Thelma Barnabas

This strange epistle James turned over once or twice and then thrust into his pocket. There was no elevator in the hotel and he mounted a flight of dirty marble stairs, a bellboy with his bags leading the way. They reached the door at the end of a winding carpetless hallway. The boy struggled with a door, flung it open, and went in. James went into a large shabby room whose tall windows were hung with Chinese silk curtains of a faded rose. A soiled Peking carpet was on the floor and upon the double brass bed was a cover of dingy embroidery. Once the room had been handsome, but negligence had given it a look of decay. Upon one wall, however, was a framed water color of misty hills, which he liked at once.

He tipped the boy and closed the door. The telephone jangled and when he lifted the receiver he heard a woman’s voice, dominating, ardent, gushing, “Dr. James Liang?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Dr. Liang — how wonderful! Welcome to poor old war-torn Shanghai! What an honor to have the distinguished — have you got my letter?”

“I have,” James replied, disliking the voice very much.

“You will come?” The voice was persuading, coaxing, compelling.

James hesitated. “I’ve only just—”

The voice broke in. “Oh, but you must! You don’t know us but we know you — you’re Liang Wen Hua’s son! We’ll have to introduce ourselves — a little group of pure intellectuals — it’s so important these days, don’t you think, when everything is so materialistic! Surely you’ve heard of the Dialectic Society? That’s our group — of course I’m only honorary, not being Chinese, but the poor things do need a place to meet and my house is theirs. I tell Charles — he’s my husband — that it’s the least we can do — the intellectuals are really starving — and they’re so important. But you know — your wonderful father is international honorary president—”

He did know but he had forgotten. Liang Wen Hua was the honorary president of many intellectual groups. The Dialectic Society of China was, as Mrs. Barnabas said, a small group of men and women, educated abroad or in modern schools here. They wrote articles and essays and edited a thin weekly in English, where they published their writings and criticized what they wrote. His father had once been one of them.

“I will come,” James said.

“Oh, wonderful,” Mrs. Barnabas sang. “I’ll send the car for you at six-thirty.”

It was a diversion, at least, James told himself. The air of Shanghai seemed flat to him even though he recognized its cause. It was absurd that a bit of paper bearing Lili’s words to him would have changed the entire city, but so it was. He went to the window and gazed into a street which might have belonged to any modern city except that the people were polyglot. Watching that restless moving throng he caught its restlessness. He must get out in it and move with it. Where were these thousands of persons going? Each, of necessity, must be on his own errand, and yet they were flowing in two concentrated opposing currents. Well, he had his private errand, too. He would go and see Lili’s home, the house which might have been his, had he been willing to obey Mr. Li. He knew where it was, and he locked his door and went downstairs.

Outside the open door of the hotel lobby he stepped into one of the pedicycles which had taken the place of old-fashioned rickshas on the streets of Shanghai. A thin lackadaisical man, still young, grunted at the directions James gave him and pedaled dangerously into the traffic of streetcars, wheelbarrows, busses, cars, and carriages. Far more dangerous than vehicles were these thousands of people who came and went upon the streets. They spilled over the sidewalks and flowed among the traffic in a dark stream, cursed by drivers and cursing in return. The streets were a continuing brawl. Most of the people looked poor and their faces were strained and anxious, but among them were also the well dressed and complacent, winding their way unobtrusively among the others.

The pedicycle rider flung a hand toward a building as they went on and James leaned forward to catch what he said. He heard the two words Wing On, and remembered what Mr. Li had told him. The building had been rebuilt and it was a thriving department store again. Lili ought to see it, he thought. Then she would forget the horror of the day when it had nearly carried her to death in its destruction. There was little sign of that now. He craned to look at the great ornate structure, cheaply built and yet somehow effective in the strange hybrid design an architect had given it.

The driver stopped before a gate, sweating and mopping his face. “The Li Palace,” he announced loudly. James got out and bade the man wait. He would not stay long. It was a palace, he supposed. He could see nothing except the high gray brick wall, topped by green dust-laden trees. A row of broken glass was set into the cement which covered the ridge of the wall. The driver beat upon the gate with his closed fists and a uniformed gatekeeper opened it.

James spoke in his best Chinese. “I am a friend of the Li family, who are now in New York. I should like just to look at the home where they used to live.”

But the gatekeeper was surly. Whether he spoke only Shanghai dialect or whether he had orders to let no one enter, who could tell? He growled a refusal. James looked over his shoulder and saw an immense square brick house surrounded by deep verandas, set in a green lawn and palm trees. Then the gate shut in his face. There was nothing to do but go back to the hotel.

He was awakened by the raucous telephone and still half asleep he took up the receiver. The clerk’s voice purred in his ear. “Cah donstaahs waiting you.”

“Coming!” James cried.

Six-thirty — impossible! But so it was. He leaped up, and realized that he had slept all afternoon, needing sleep upon solid earth after the interrupting rise and fall of the ship. He felt rested, and before the mirror, brushing his stiff black hair into its usual pompadour, he saw that fatigue had faded from his eyes. He looked forward with mild interest to the evening, expecting amusement, at least.

Yet where had Mrs. Barnabas hidden this car during the war? A White Russian chauffeur held the door for him and he stepped into cushioned comfort. A silver vase of roses, attached to the seat, scented the stillness. For when the doors were closed no noise penetrated their insulation. The jabber and chatter of the streets, the wails of beggars, were shut away. Even the smooth monotone of the engine could not be heard. Between him and the chauffeur was a wall of glass and he had not the courage to lift the speaking tube at his right hand and ask who Mrs. Barnabas was and how she had this princely car.

In silence he was carried through the summer evening, through the crowds who stared at him with hatred in their eyes, as he soon perceived. They were asking who he was and how came he to be riding in such splendor and alone. He looked away from them and wished that the Russian did not honk the horn so loudly and constantly and he longed for darkness to hide him.

Before darkness fell, however, the car paused at a great gate which swung open to receive it, and he was carried up a broad driveway between high magnolia trees to a great house of gray brick, as solid as a bank. At white marble steps under a wide porte-cochere the car stopped, and the door was opened by a Chinese manservant in a red silk robe tied with a wide soft girdle of crushed blue satin.

“This way, please,” he told James and led the way into a huge hall filled with heavy Chinese tables and chairs of blackwood.

“Oh, Dr. Liang!”

James heard the rushing dominating voice of the telephone, and he saw his hostess. His first impression was of a tall slender brilliant bird. Her middle-aged face was negligible. Small-boned, highly colored, it was merely a spot upon which to focus for a moment. Above it was a brilliant turban of cloth of gold, the same fabric that made her high-necked, semi-Chinese costume. She held out thin jeweled hands to clutch his and he felt her hot and tenacious fingers dragging him toward an open door.

“Come in — come in — we’re all here waiting—”

“I’m afraid I slept—”

“And why shouldn’t you sleep — why shouldn’t the son of Liang Wen Hua do whatever he likes—”

They were in an enormous glittering room. Thirty or forty men and women, most of them Chinese, were sitting or lounging on low chairs, divans, and hassocks upholstered in brocades. A stout tall American, bald-headed and red-faced, was mixing cocktails.

“My husband, Barny—” his hostess announced, “and the others — the Dialectic Society of China—”

He was introduced to one after another, always as the son of his father, and he met cold eyes, cynical eyes, coy eyes, careless eyes, envious eyes, and when it was over he sat down on the end of an overcrowded sofa.

Mr. Barnabas strode toward him. “Hello, Dr. Liang. Glad to welcome you home to China — have a Martini — I’m the only person in Shanghai who can make ’em taste like New York—”

James accepted the glass and held it without tasting its contents. He felt overwhelmed, drowned in color and noise, as everyone began to talk exactly as though he were not there. Mrs. Barnabas was smiling coquettishly at a handsome young Chinese. She laid her brightly ringed hand on his for a moment. Mr. Barnabas stood gazing at this and at everything, swaying a little on his black patent-leather toes, smiling vacantly as he sipped his cocktail. Then he sat down on the floor beside James, his long legs tangling.

“Well, how does it seem to be home?” he asked.

“I cannot realize it yet,” James replied.

“You won’t find it so different from New York,” Mr. Barnabas said proudly. “This bunch now — every one of ’em talks English. Don’t know any Chinese myself — don’t have to. Mrs. Barny, now, goes in for art and literature and so on, but I’m just a plain businessman. Course I like her to have a good time.”

“What is your business, sir?” James asked.

“Export — furs, racing ponies — I get ’em from Manchuria — native oils, tungsten, anything.”

“The war did not hurt your business?”

Mr. Barnabas laughed. “Not a bit! I made a deal, of course. The Japs let me alone. I didn’t like them, mind you — rather have the Chinese any time — but what I say is you can always make a deal.”

“Dr. Liang!” Mrs. Barnabas sang her high notes. “Please come here—”

She patted a seat beside her on the divan. James rose and sat down beside her. She turned her small, pale-green eyes upon him.

“Now you really must settle this for the whole Dialectic Society. We’ve debated so often — do be the judge!”

“The question?” James asked smiling. How absurd this woman was!

“Do you think that Robert Browning’s work improved or deteriorated after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett? Now wait — let me say it — of course hers improved — really, she had written nothing — she caught the flame from his lighted torch! But he was the true genius, don’t you think — and the real inner meaning of the question is — does the true genius flower alone out of its own solitary power, or can it — must it — have the sunshine of great love — or great suffering, or something on that order?”

She was serious! Listening and gazing into the little crimson birdlike face James let laughter subside in amazement. He looked at the faces about him, all turned to him, waiting. He longed to cry out at them, “Do you really discuss such things — even here, even now?” But he had not the heart to hurt them.

“I am only a scientist,” he said modestly. “I fear I have no opinion on Browning — or genius—”

There was a moment’s silence. Mrs. Barnabas cried out. “Oh, we can’t believe that — when your father’s such a genius!” But her outcry was drowned in a rising tide of voices, all subdued, all working together to cover and conceal what he had said. He found himself alone again and was glad when a moment later a resplendent servant announced dinner.

At the long table, however, in the privacy of the many guests, while Mrs. Barnabas talked with a pale and elongated young man who had been introduced as the Chinese Shelley, James entered into conversation with a rather pretty young woman who sat at his right. She spoke to him first and in English. “Shall you stay in Shanghai, Dr. Liang?”

“No, I am going to Peking, to the medical center there.”

“Ah, Peking!” she breathed. “It is quite nice there now. Everybody has money.”

“Indeed?” James could not decide what this young woman was. Chinese, certainly, but what else?

“While the war was going on, everybody had jobs. It was not too bad.”

“You were there?”

“Yes.” The young woman had a pretty mouth, small and red. “I sing also. I gave some concerts there — for the Europeans. Of course I studied in Paris. My name is Hellene Ho.”

“What do all these other people do?” James asked bluntly.

Hellene pointed with her little finger. “He is essayist; he is poet; he is novelist; she is costume designer; she is artist; she is sculptor—”

“They can’t live by these things,” James suggested.

Hellene laughed brightly. “Oh, no, certainly they cannot. They live by other ways — some teaching, some selling things, some just borrowing money from Mrs. Barnabas.”

“Why does she—”

“Why she does?” Hellene broke in. “Really she is rather kind, but otherwise she gets some attentions to herself. Nobody cares too much to come and see her, and Mr. Barnabas is just merchant prince. If she can say she is patroness of young Chinese thought leaders, she can invite some important guests, like you, Dr. Liang! Can you come only to see Mrs. Barnabas which you don’t know? Naturally you come to meet Dialectic Society, don’t you?”

The profuse and rich meal went on, course after course. Mrs. Barnabas neglected him except to ask an occasional bright question. “Isn’t that brilliant father of yours coming home to stay? But of course he’s doing such wonderful things for America, isn’t he!”

James met these remarks with calm. After the dinner was over he took his leave early. Mr. Barnabas had disappeared and the Dialectic Society looked sleepy and overstuffed. Only Mrs. Barnabas still glittered.

“Do, do come again, you dangerous young man,” she sighed as James shook her hand.

“Dangerous?” he repeated blankly.

“So handsome!” Mrs. Barnabas sang. “All the charm of the East and yet something wonderful — electric — from the West.”

James ground his teeth in silence, bowed, and went quietly away. The scarlet-robed menservants were pouring liqueurs and nobody saw him go.

In three or four days he was wholly impatient with Shanghai. Behind the facade of the Bund the city was crowded, dirty and noisy. His hotel looked rich and comfortable on the surface but he found his bathroom grimy and he doubted the freshness of his sheets. The towels were gray and scanty. When he spoke to his room boy of these matters, the fellow grinned. He had soon learned that James could not understand his Shanghai dialect, and spoke to him as if he were a foreigner. “Allee samee wartime, now,” he said, and made no effort to change towels or sheets.

Two or three Chinese businessmen, heads of local guilds, sent their cards and came to call upon him, and on the third night they combined in a feast of welcome at a restaurant. There were a few good dishes, sharks’ fins in chicken broth, a sweet pudding of glutenous rice, a river carp broiled whole, but the rest of the food was mediocre. Nothing was as it had been, they declared. The country was sinking to ruin. Prices were impossible to pay and no one had any pride left. After the small feast the sons of the merchants gathered around him and asked him eagerly how they could get to America. Here there was nothing to do, they told him. Schools were no good; there were no jobs. He thought as he looked at them, listening, that all of them were too pale and thin. When the main dishes had been brought in by a dirty waiter they had eaten ravenously.

“I came back because I believe that I can do something useful here,” he said.

They looked at one another with blank eyes. “There is nothing you can do,” they declared. “There is nothing anybody can do.”

Defeat was the smell of the city. In his hotel a few sullen American businessmen loitered over whisky sodas, waiting for old times to begin again. They would wait and then go home. In New York a Chinese delegate to the United Nations had said to him, “I would not say this before Americans, but I tell you — do not be shocked at what you see in China. You will not be proud of your country. Your father is wiser than you.”

“But my father is very proud of our country and he has taught us to be so, too,” he had retorted.

The delegate had smiled and gone his way. It was a familiar smile, one which James had often seen when he spoke of his father to a Chinese. He had not been sure what it meant. Now he began to understand.

On the sixth day he had explored the city enough to know that he never wanted to see it again. It was a mongrel of the lowest breeding. Scum from everywhere in the world had come together to produce this hateful spawn. Nobody looked to see whether faces were white or black or brown because all were there, sometimes in a single face. Was this what came about when races met and mingled? Rich and poor were equally hateful. The ladies of the rich, lingering in the hotel lobby at night, displayed their filmy nylons imported from America, their brocades from India, their diamonds and emeralds and sables, and all the talk was of how much they had paid for such baubles. Their tongues ran to millions of American dollars and if much of this was bombast and he could reduce millions to thousands, still it was foul. For on the streets when he rose restless at dawn there were scavengers going about picking up the dead. These were the beggars and the refugees who had starved during the night. Their bodies were heaped into carts and dragged away before the sun rose.

In this world Lili had been born and reared. The thought came to him like a blow across the heart. This explained her sweet, almost childish indifference. All the rich women had it. The women, the young girls, all of them had her gentle, cool selfishness.

Selfishness — he could not avoid the word. But who could avoid it in Shanghai? Here was a little island of tight luxury set in a vast sea of utter misery. To step off the island was to be drowned in the sea.

On the afternoon of the sixth day there was still no letter from Lili, but there was one from Mary. He seized it from the clerk’s dirty hand and went up to his room to be alone and found his door open, although he had left it locked. He went in and there sat Young Wang in the easiest chair. He wore an ordinary blue cotton jacket and trousers and he had a bundle tied in a square of faded blue cotton cloth. On his head he wore a sailor’s cap of white duck, stiff and clean. He rose when James came in and laughed.

“This big turnip that I am, I feared you had already gone to Peking.”

“I have not been able to get a railway ticket yet,” James said. He longed to read his letter. Now that he had news of Lili in his hand it was unbearable not to know what it was, for surely Mary would tell of her.

“You must stay night and day at the station or you can get no ticket,” Young Wang said. He laughed again. “Of course you cannot do this, master, but I can do it for you and me together.”

James looked at him. The round good-humored face was sly and twinkling. “Good it would be for you if you would hire me as your servant,” Young Wang said. “Good for me, too.”

“But the ship?” James felt a stealing desire to have this healthy young peasant between himself and whatever was to come.

“The ship is gone to Manila,” Young Wang said cheerfully. “My uncle gave me a big fight. He smokes opium, very lazy, and every morning I have his work and mine, too. I am a better cook than he is now, but he takes cook cash, not me. So yesterday I told him this is new China, and old people cannot rule young people. He hit me with the coal shovel. I am more strong than he is, young and not smoking opium. I pushed him once and he fell down and went to sleep. But this is very bad, too, and I think it is better I am not there when he wakes up, because his face is lost too much.” Young Wang laughed heartily and in spite of himself James smiled.

Young Wang’s face glistened with sweat and he wiped it on the tail of his jacket. “As to wages,” he went on, “I will take whatever you give me. Suppose you pay for my food, some clothes, one bed, then never mind. Maybe some dollars at feast day. Just now I have cash. But better you give me dollars for railway tickets. You go second class, good enough, first class too much. I will buy fourth-class ticket for me and sit by you as servant in second class.”

James listened to this arrangement of his life and yielded. He took out his wallet and handed Young Wang a roll of dollars. Young Wang received it reverently and counted each bill aloud in a hushed voice. “You are very rich, master,” he said gently. “I leave my things here while I take so much money.” He put his bundle under the table in a far corner, smiled, and let himself out of the door without noise.

James felt vaguely comforted by this new alliance, even though the fellow was only a servant. He needed the comfort a few minutes later. As his eyes hurried over the pages of Mary’s careful neat handwriting he began to grow frightened. There was no mention of Lili. Then at the very end, squeezed against the corner, he saw her name. “Mr. Li did not die,” Mary wrote. “Sometimes I wish he had. Jim, you mustn’t mind. Lili is going everywhere with Ting. Nothing has been announced.”

That was all. Ting, the son of a Chinese official in America, was a handsome gay young student at Yale. James had known him for years, for they had gone to the same preparatory school. Mr. Ting was kind enough, a harried gray-haired man, somehow holding his post through many changes in government. But Charlie Ting was an idler and a wastrel. In Chinatown he had to pay cash even though he was an official’s son. He had once married secretly an American hat-check girl at the Waldorf and it had cost his father five thousand dollars to make her willing to divorce Charlie — or Ting, as the Americans always called him.

Mary’s letter dropped to the floor and he seized sheets of the coarse hotel paper and his fountain pen and began to pour out his demanding heart to Lili. The thought of Ting, who had slept with a dozen girls, daring to touch her soft hand sickened him with rage. He wrote for an hour and a half, and then laid down his pen and gathered up the sheets and read them over half aloud, trying to imagine her face when they reached her. Would his words touch her heart? He grew gloomy. What power had words in the living flashing presence of Ting? He dropped the sheets on the table and laid his head upon his arms. He would not allow himself the folly of tears, but he sat in grim silence, his face hidden. Outside the open window he heard a brawl rise suddenly and end in the dull sound of a thudding club, but he did not get up to see what it was. The city was full of such brawls. There were too many starving people, and policemen treated them as criminals. Perhaps they were. There was no line between starvation and crime. He felt himself torn in the division of reality. The world, the whole world, was divided into two parts, the island of the rich and the ocean of the poor. Where would he live? He still had his feet on the island, but he was facing the rough dark waters. He must go back — or else he must leap. Lili, his gentle love, could never follow him if he took that leap. She was a flower, a delicate thing, whose roots must grow in the loam of plenty. There was still time for him to go back to America. A cable, his hand on the telephone, a few words, and he could tell her he was coming. The letter was no use. Either he must go back — or take the reckless leap.

The door opened and Young Wang came in and closed it carefully. James lifted his head. Young Wang’s jacket was torn, the buttons ripped from their moorings, and he had lost his sailor’s cap. But in his hand he held an envelope. He came to the table and shook out the contents. They were railroad tickets.

“I spend too much money, master,” Young Wang said solemnly. “But I think it is good to spend it so. To get a ticket honestly we must wait many days. This way I bought two tickets from a man privately inside the station.”

“Why are your clothes torn?” James exclaimed.

“Other men also wish to buy,” Young Wang said, grinning. “Never mind — I fix my coat.”

He got down on his hands and knees, found his bundle, and opened it. From a small paper box he took six safety pins. “Foreign ladies drop pins on the floor and I pick them up,” he said. “In my village no one can buy them, and I take them home to my mother. But now I use them to keep my skin from leaking out.” He pinned his jacket neatly together, and James watched him.

“What day are the tickets for?” he asked.

“Tomorrow morning, six o’clock. But I think it better if we go now, master. Many people will wait at the station and jump in the train. We must jump first, or tickets will be no good. Tickets are only for the train conductor, not for passengers.”

“Let’s get ready and go,” James said. He tore the letter into small bits and dropped them into a huge brass cuspidor that stood by the table.

This is not to say that he could forget Lili. In the night at the station he sat upon a rail seat that rose out of a sleeping mass of people on the floor, leaning against baskets and bundles, and thought of nothing but Lili. Part of the time he thought of her with bitter clearness and when he dozed into exhaustion he dreamed of himself successful and famous and somehow drawing her to him again. Ting would never be anything, but he, James Liang, would certainly be something, and surely there would come the day when Lili would see what she was doing. He woke to gaze down into Young Wang’s bland and peaceful face as he slept back to back with a stout old man. Young Wang had chosen this wide back against which to lean and had almost at once gone to sleep. The day had been warm, but toward evening it had begun to rain and inside the cement-floored station the night air was now almost chill. Once in two or three hours a train whistle blew and the crowd staggered to their feet and seized their bundles and pressed through the gates, only to come surging back and fall upon the floor to sleep again. Each time Young Wang had gone to see whether by any chance the train north was making an unscheduled departure. “Sometimes people too many, train sneaks away,” he explained to James. The last time he had come back dawn was beginning to break and he would not let himself fall asleep again. He yawned ferociously, smiled at James, and announced that he had just bribed the stationmaster to tell him when the train was really going north.

In something less than an hour the stationmaster sauntered by, looking neither to right nor to left, and Young Wang seized all the baggage he could carry and James rose to follow him. From somewhere two coolies appeared and silently tied the rest of the suitcases together and followed behind.

Outside on the platform the air was misty and cool and the electric lights were feeble. There was no train in sight. A few anxious souls were asleep even on the platform and they still slept. But Young Wang peered into the distance. “Train comes,” he announced in a tense whisper. Nothing could be seen but his eyes pierced beyond sight.

“How do you know?” James asked.

“Feel the earth under my feet,” Young Wang answered.

In a quarter of an hour the train pulled into the station and the crowd pressed through the gates and began climbing into doors and windows alike. But Young Wang was ahead of them all. Yelling and pushing with sharp elbows, he commandeered two seats, heaped them with baggage and sat on top of them. James, caught like driftwood on a wave, heard him roaring at the top of his lungs that his master was a Big Man from America. When he came into sight, Young Wang climbed down, smiled, and showed him a pleasant enough corner by the window.

“Bags must stay here,” he said. “If no bags, then seat will be gone soon.”

The aisles were full and men and children sat even on the baggage racks overhead. The noise on the roof meant that those who had not found places inside were on top of the car. The engine gave a series of jerks, people screamed, a few fell off, the train started northward, and James found that for a full hour he had not had time to think of Lili.

If the day was long and hideous, the night was less so only because from exhaustion he fell into a daze of unconsciousness which was not sleep. He dreamed that he was held in some prison full of writhing people who had nothing to do with him and yet he was one of them. He woke to gaze out of the dusty windows at a dull landscape whose colors he did not see.

On the morning of the second day Young Wang broke a window pane. Fresh cool air rushed in and James felt his brain cleared suddenly. He had been sitting in deep depression, unwashed, for there was no water on the train. When he had struggled to the lavatory he had found it occupied by two women, their bedding, and three children, and he had retreated again. When the train stopped Young Wang had allowed him out only with great anxiety, and had begged him not to leave the side of the train, because no one knew how quickly the train might go. Then Young Wang, rearranging his possessions to allow him to lie on top of them, had thrust a heavy oiled paper umbrella he had bought from a vendor through the cracked glass of the window.

Now James leaned toward the hole and breathed in the air. He had been poisoned by the fetid atmosphere within the car. He drank in the freshness of the morning and saw to his surprise that the land was not dim and colorless. Instead it was brilliantly green and against the vivid hue men and women in blue garments worked in the fields. Small brick-walled villages studded the level plains and on the horizon were violet-colored hills.

“Forgive, forgive!” a gentle trembling voice said. An old gentleman in a crumpled silk robe pushed past him, put his head through the opened window and was violently sick in a deprecating courteous fashion.

James waited, pinned beneath him, and at last the man stepped back, smiling with desperate calm. “I am too coarse,” he said. “But I have been trying for hours not to soil the train.”

“Do you have pain in you?” James asked.

“No pain, thank you,” he replied. “The train rolls me inside. It is a pity we must travel in such ways. A sedan chair is more healthy. The speed is too much nowadays.” He sighed and returned to his place on the floor. It was impossible not to like this old man. He had spread a quilt neatly under him and he drew it about him so that he need not touch the persons on either side of him. One was a soldier who slept with his mouth open and smelled of garlic and wine and the other was a young woman who suckled two children, an infant and a boy of three.

James turned his face again to the landscape. The old gentleman had been very careful and neat and there was no vomit on the window.

The train was many hours late. Long ago they should have reached Nanking, and only now were the purple hills looming into view. Young Wang sat up when he saw them, and began to fasten bundles together again. Somehow or other he had accumulated several more than he had brought on the train. At various places when the train stopped he had bought packages of tea, of dried fish, of fried brown bean curd, or larded cakes. Each town had its specialty and vendors brought them to the train. Since there was no food served, anything to eat was valuable and Young Wang had stored up enough for himself and James, and what was left he would give to his family as presents at some distant day. He prudently bought nothing that was fresh except at midnight two large bowls of hot soup, one of which he had given to his master. At Nanking the train stopped, and they must take a ferry and cross the river to take a north-bound train again on the other side.

“You get ready, please,” he bade James with authority. “Here is one big fight for the ferry first.”

When the train slid loudly into the station the baggage was slung about his person like armor and he plunged relentlessly into the crowd, creating a space in which James followed him with a doggedness that was almost ruthless. By this means they reached the ferry in time to find a place that was not on the edge of the boat.

“Too many people drown,” Young Wang told James over his shoulder. “Push, push, splash!”

So it happened that when they were on the ferry James saw the unlucky old gentleman, clawing his way on at the last moment, gain a tiny space as the ferry left the banks. In mid-river there was indeed a splash. A few voices cried out that the old man had fallen in the water. The ferry continued on its way, but with a shout James leaped through the crowd. He fell heavily. Young Wang had clutched his ankles and would not be shaken off.

“Let go, you fool!” James shouted. But nothing would loose the hands locked at his feet. Scores of hands reached out to prevent him when he tried to drag himself to the edge of the ferry. “Too late, too late!” they cried. “It is destiny! The current has taken that old head far away.”

It was indeed too late. The river swirled with a hundred wicked crosscurrents and had James plunged it would have been to search in vain for the quiet old man. He stood dazed for a moment, speechless with a terrible silent anger. Then he turned on Young Wang.

“Let go!” he roared. The brown hands unlocked, but Young Wang stood between him and the water. James turned his back on him and Young Wang reached out and unseen he took hold of the end of his coat and held it until they reached the shore.

On the northern shore James turned and looked back at Nanking, the capital of his country. It lay hidden behind a high gray wall, centuries old. Beyond it he could see the double crest of Purple Mountain, where Sun Yat-sen’s tomb had been built. He knew from scores of photographs how the tomb looked. Some day when he had discovered his own country he would go there and look at the tomb of the man who had lived too long, or died too soon — he did not know which.

When the train reached Peking he was in a fever of weariness. He had been traveling for days and he realized that he had become utterly dependent on Young Wang. The sprightly young man had provided him with food and hot tea at intervals, had night and morning fetched him hot water in a tin basin wherewith to wash, had pushed soldiers and women and callous men off the seats he had pre-empted for himself and his master, had fanned away flies, had again broken a window pane, and had made life somehow endurable.