Kinfolk

8

THE HOUSE IN PEKING which had seemed pleasantly ready when James left it last now looked bare and crudely furnished as he led his sisters and Peter into it. Little Dog and his mother had done their best. They had swept the floors and had wiped away the dust and the kitchen stove was ready to light. Upon a small earthenware charcoal stove a kettle was boiling for tea. Chen had been there also and he had brought two green porcelain pots, each holding a small gnarled pine tree. Upon the table in the middle room of the first court, which was to be the living room, he had placed a round white bowl of small yellow chrysanthemums, of the sort which could be bought at the market for a few pennies.

James glanced at the faces of the three as they stood at the wide door of this room, now open to the court. Louise looked about her with resentful eyes. Peter was smiling tolerantly. Only Mary looked with interest at what she saw. “It’s a fine big room,” she said.

“We are now about to live as our ancestors did,” James said. “We can see for ourselves how valuable modern gadgets are and whether happiness is dependent upon them. There is no running water, but the hot-water coolies will pour boiling hot water into the tin tub in the room I have set aside as the bathroom, and Little Dog will temper it with cold water drawn from the well. The stove in the kitchen is of brick and it burns twists of grass. Little Dog’s mother will cook our food there. For light at night I have allowed kerosene lamps instead of the bean-oil lamps or candles which we really should use. And I have bought American beds in the thieves’ market. I thought that there perhaps we could improve upon our ancestors.”

“It can all be made lovely,” Mary murmured.

“With the lattices we don’t need curtains,” James went on, “and upon these stone floors we can lay carpets in winter if we like. There are fine carpets made here in Peking.”

“It is lovely already,” Mary said.

“But the walls!” Louise cried suddenly. “I hate these walls all around the courts — we can’t see from the windows!”

“We can always walk out of the gate,” James said. “The gate will not be locked. Our ancestors liked walls. You’ll find that everybody here still has walls.”

“Where is my room?” Peter asked.

“We can divide the rooms as we like,” James replied. “But I thought you and I would share this left part of the house, Peter, and the girls will take the rooms on the right. By the way, Mary, if you or Louise see something like a rat, it is only a weasel. I think they are all gone, but in case they aren’t they will not stay long after we move in.”

“Weasels?” Louise shrieked. “I never heard of them in houses!”

“You will hear of many things here,” James said, “some pleasant and some not.”

He had not yet made up his mind how he would treat Louise. Until now she had only been the pretty and spoiled little sister in whom he had a sentimental interest. Now suddenly she had become a woman without any of the lingering years between childhood and womanhood. She was a flower which had not been given time to bloom. The bud had been forced. For Mary had told him at last exactly what had happened. In the hours together in their cabin on the ship she had got from Louise the full story. It had been easy indeed, for Louise spent many evenings in tears, and when she found that Mary was not disposed to scold her, tears had led quickly to confidence, often repeated. Mary had told James everything on the train, while Louise and Peter were in the dining car and James had decided that he was not hungry. James had taken a second-class compartment for the four of them, feeling that the crowded open car was too much to bear so soon after America. While the train swayed and shook over the landscape of small farms and barking dogs and shrieking geese, whose blue-clad peasants stood watching the cars rush past, Mary told James.

“Louise thought Philip would marry her. I excuse her that much,” she said at last.

James had listened amazed and angry with Louise. Strangely, he thought, he could not blame Philip. Americans were not taught as Chinese were. When Louise was willing, it could not be imagined that Philip would not accept.

“Louise was a fool,” he said. Outside the window the hills of central China were flattening into the long levels of the north.

“It was first Estelle’s foolishness,” Mary said. She was watching her brother’s face. James must not be too hard on Louise now. The little sister had suffered from her parents. “Estelle persuaded Louise too much,” Mary went on. “I think she made Louise forget she is Chinese. Such things they can do, but we cannot.”

“Philip wouldn’t marry a Chinese,” James said brusquely.

“Anyway, don’t talk to Louise,” Mary begged. “Pa talked so loud, and Ma cried and cried.”

So James allowed no sign to escape him to let Louise know that now he knew what she had done. But in his heart he agreed that his father had been wise to send her at once thousands of miles away. So young a wound would heal. It would be difficult to marry her now to a man who would forgive her. Yet marriage, it seemed to him, was the only possibility. Louise would not be satisfied to return to girlhood and innocence, even if she could. Everything in her had been forced. A green fruit had been ripened by unseasonable heat.

Yet it seemed to him, after thought, that he must be firm with Louise. She must be treated as a grown woman although as a girl, too, who needed to be watched and restricted. He wished very much that he could arrange a marriage for her in the old-fashioned Chinese way, and transfer to a husband the responsibility for this pretty creature who was no longer a virgin. Only a husband could suffice, even if Louise would scarcely agree to being married off summarily.

He pondered this again while he changed his clothes and arranged his possessions in his new room. Through the open door he heard Peter walking about, flinging down his suitcases, moving chairs and tables. Peter too would not be too easy to look after, but what to do with Louise must be his first care. The thought of Chen came into his mind. If Chen should fall in love with Louise it would be excellent indeed. Certainly he must be careful that none of the doctors who were already married, some to old-fashioned wives whom they kept in the country, grew interested in Louise. There was much looseness in what was called modern society in Peking. Men and women came together and separated. They married and divorced with no more effort than a notice put in the newspapers. There was something about Louise that repelled him and made it hard for him to be affectionate with her in his old brotherly fashion. She looked young and yet experienced. Mary looked the virgin she was, and of the two, Louise now seemed older.

The four came together at their night meal, for they had reached Peking in the late afternoon. Now that the lamps were lit, the rooms looked softened and more homelike. When Young Wang had ordered Little Dog to bring in the dishes of hot food for him to arrange upon the table, they sat down with good appetite. Even Louise looked less sullen, although she was ready at once to complain.

“There are no closets in our rooms,” she said. “Where shall I hang my dresses?”

“I’ll have some built,” James said. “But if you wear Chinese things you won’t need anything but the shelves in the wall cupboard. Our ancestors kept their clothes folded.”

“I shall wear Chinese clothes entirely now,” Mary said.

“Not I,” Louise retorted.

“It’s quiet here,” Peter said suddenly. “You’d never know you were in a city.”

“That’s the beauty of the walls,” James said.

After the meal was over he had to go to the hospital. He had already been away his full week, and he wanted to see his patients, and though he was reluctant to leave the three, yet he must go. They were still at the table, cracking dried lichee nuts and drinking tea, when he rose and stood behind his chair. “If you need me Young Wang can come and fetch me,” he told them. “Tomorrow we will talk over everything and decide what each one is to do. You do not begin work until the first of the month, Mary. You ought to start college, Peter — classes opened last week. But perhaps you all want a few days in which to see the city.”

“We are not babies,” Mary said smiling. “We can look after ourselves. And don’t feel you have to apologize to us for China, Jim.”

He smiled back at her, thankful for her common sense. It was true that, quite without knowing it, he had been fearful lest they dislike everything here, because it was not what they were used to having in America. Mary with her shrewd eyes had understood his fears.

At the hospital he found Chen, in whose care he had left his sick. Chen had been zealous, but in spite of all his care of the patients, a woman had died. She had come into the hospital after birth with puerperal fever, as so many women came. She had seemed better when James left, but the fever had taken a turn for the worse, and she had died quickly the next day.

“Though I was with her, I could do nothing,” Chen mourned. “The fever ate her up. Now she leaves the newborn child. What shall we do with him?”

“Where is he now?” James asked.

“I have him in the children’s ward but he cannot stay there too long — you know how crowded it is, and the nurses are impatient with too many crying at once.”

“I will have my sister Mary come over tomorrow,” James said.

They went the rounds together and Rose and Marie pattered after them. These two nurses had attached themselves to the two doctors whom they liked best and with Kitty, who was a relief nurse, these made a solid core of five in the hospital. They took no part in the social life of the other doctors and nurses and maintained a rigid front toward gossip and love affairs. Had there been only Rose and Marie, this gossip would have reached them and they would have been accused of living with the two doctors they now followed. But the three nurses together made such gossip impossible.

His other patients were not dangerously ill and when the rounds were over James was loath to part from Chen. He wanted to talk with him. At least he wanted to get on terms of being able to talk with him and even to get his advice, perhaps, about Louise. He would not of course tell even Chen what had really happened. He would merely say that the girl was in the midst of an unhappy love affair, unhappy because her love was not returned, and that it was necessary to take her mind away from her own trouble. But before he said anything Chen must meet Louise. “Come home with me, Chen,” he said abruptly. “You are the first one I wish them to meet.”

Chen blushed savagely. “I never know how to talk to young women,” he mumbled, “especially ones who have just come from America.”

“Oh, come,” James urged. “You will find my sisters very easy. Louise is supposed to be quite pretty and she talks readily enough to any man. She’ll help you.”

After a little more reluctance which James saw only covered Chen’s curiosity and real desire to come, the two set off on foot through the quiet streets. The hutung was very neat and in a few minutes they had reached it. He pushed open the door and was delighted at what he saw. Peter and his sisters were sitting in the large central court under the light of three paper lanterns which Young Wang had strung to the great pine tree. Little Dog had brought out a teapot and some chairs, and Young Wang was squatting on his heels playing a flute. It was just as he would have liked Chen to see them. He was pleased that Louise sat most clearly in the light and that she looked soft and very pretty. He glanced at Chen and saw his gaze already turned to her. He introduced them quickly.

“Liu Chen, my elder sister Mary, my younger sister Louise, my brother Peter. Liu Chen is my best friend, as I have told you, and now let us call each other by our first names. Chen be at home here.”

Little Dog ran to fetch more chairs and his mother fetched bowls and some small cakes and a dish of watermelon seeds and Young Wang retiring behind the pine tree continued to play softly his gently winding airs. It was very pleasant. In a little while they were laughing, for not one of them except Chen could crack watermelon seeds properly, and he was compelled to teach them. It was the first time that James had seen Louise laugh since he had met her in Shanghai. Now with a fat black seed between her white teeth she opened her red lips to show Chen that she could crack it, and Chen began to tell her how to do it. But she was laughing so much she could not.

By the time the evening was over they were all gay, for Chen revealed that he knew sleight of hand. “I had an uncle who was a traveling juggler,” he confessed. “You see, the lane cannot support everybody, and since we were not scholars, we had to work. But my uncle would not work, and since he had long thin hands without any bones, my grandfather feared he might become a pickpocket and disgrace an honest family. Se he apprenticed him to a juggler, and my uncle grew very clever.”

Young Wang stopped his flute playing, and he sat on the outside of the circle on a piece of broken brick, and behind him stood Little Dog and his mother, and they all watched Liu Chen and laughed continually at what he could do. He took bowls of water out of the air and he swallowed lighted cigarettes and made Louise’s earrings disappear.

When all had laughed until they were weary, and the moon was high in the sky Chen slapped his knees. “It is nearly midnight and Jim and I must go early to work.” He rose and tightened the girdle which he wore always about his waist instead of a belt.

“I have tried to persuade Chen to come and live with us,” James said.

“Oh, yes,” Louise cried eagerly. “That would be fun.”

“There is plenty of room,” Mary said, “and we’ll all live more cheaply, several together.”

“I’d like it,” Peter said politely. He was not quite sure, now that he had stopped laughing, what Liu Chen was. A doctor? But he spoke no English apparently. All evening, while they had slipped in and out of English, he had steadily spoken only Chinese.

“Now you see how welcome you are,” James said. “Come, Chen, promise us.”

Chen looked about on them, his eyes glistening in the moonlight and a half smile upon his lips. His eyes fell last on Louise. “Well, well, I will think about it,” he said. “Perhaps it is too soon,” he said, laughing again. “I have bad table manners and when I sleep I snore loudly.”

“Never mind!” Mary said.

The end of it was that in less than a week Chen moved into the house, taking the far end room beyond Peter’s. To Little Dog Young Wang said, “Now there is somebody in the house who knows what must be done. He is no foreigner like the others.” And he slapped Little Dog lightly on both ears, to show him that he, like Liu Chen, would stand no nonsense under this roof.

Mrs. Liang’s letter reached her children only after a month. She had not understood that extra stamps were needed for airmail and so it had been carried across the ocean by an ordinary steamship, had waited the pleasure of a clerk in the Shanghai post office who had just got himself married and was in no haste about his work, and had reached the hospital in mid-autumn.

The autumn was unusually mild. There had been no high winds and therefore little dust, and the camel caravans had not yet come in for the winter to stir up the streets with their huge flopping feet. Since it was the first really peaceful year since the Japanese had withdrawn, the chrysanthemums were large and fine. Gardeners in private houses and in commercial gardens had vied with each other to produce the sort of flowers that they had before the war. Mary had gone drunk with pleasure in them. Chrysanthemum vendors had learned that if they came to the gate early in the morning before she went to the hospital or late after she came back, they were sure of a sale. She had bought dozens of pots. The court was lined with them, and they stood against the walls of the house inside the rooms. In her own room the window was a bower with her favorites, whose curled scarlet petals were lined with gold.

She was very happy. She loved the house, and she missed nothing of what she had had in New York. The closeness of this house to the earth, its snugness under the heavy roof, the privacy of the court, the shade under the great leaning pine, all was as she liked it. Especially she liked the simplicity of life in such a house. There was no machinery to vex by breaking down when it was most needed. Little Dog’s mother and Little Dog himself were excellent servants, provided one made certain of a few rules of cleanliness. Little Dog must not wash his clothes in the dishpan, and Little Dog’s mother must not wash the rice bowls by running her fingers around them in a pail of cold water. They obeyed her with smiling tolerance, or she thought they did. She explained to them earnestly about germs, and argued with Chen when he simply said everything must be eaten hot.

“I am sure that Little Dog understands, and I have told Young Wang to watch the other two.”

“Young Wang is a good fellow,” Chen said, “but I trust my own intelligence rather than his. I prefer to eat my food hot, especially as there is still some cholera in the city.”

Chen and Mary argued over many things. Both were stubborn and neither yielded to the other. Louise always took Chen’s side, whatever the argument. It seemed sometimes that she did not love her elder sister, and Mary more than once went away with tears in her eyes, which she was too proud to show. After she had so left them one day, Louise said to Chen, “Mary has never let me feel free. It was really her fault, I believe, that Pa made us come here.”

Chen by now knew that she had been in love with an American and that her parents had sent her away. James had told him this, and Chen had listened, his heart beating rather fast and his blood feeling hot in his veins. He was angry that an American should look at a Chinese girl, but he felt sorry for Louise. She was very young, and too pretty for her own good. He discussed with James at some length the problem of beauty in a woman, and whether it was her fault that her strength was not equal to her temptations. “This strength,” Chen said, “might actually be greater than that of an ugly woman, but the ugly woman is praised for a self-control which may in fact be very slight indeed.”

“I hope you are not sorry that you have come to Peking?” Chen now said to Louise. He was surprised and somewhat alarmed at the tenderness he felt was in his voice, and hearing it he became bashful.

“I don’t like it here as well as I do in New York,” Louise said.

“But you have a very gay time, don’t you?” Chen urged. He knew how eagerly James hoped that this younger sister would want to stay here, and how much he hoped, indeed, that she would find a husband.

Louise pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “There is nothing very gay in Peking,” she said.

“There are the palaces,” Chen reminded her. They had spent several Sunday afternoons, all of them together, visiting the Forbidden City, and they had been invited on some picnics by Dr. Su and Dr. Kang to go outside the city walls and see the Summer Palace and the fine old monasteries in the hills.

“What I mean is that there is nothing here like Radio City,” Louise said with contempt in her large black eyes.

Chen was speaking in Chinese but she spoke English always.

“I was never in New York,” Chen said somewhat humbly.

“Then you never saw the best of America,” Louise retorted.

“Perhaps,” Chen said thoughtfully. He continued to look at Louise.

“Why are you staring at me?” she demanded.

“Because you are very pretty,” Chen said. This truth came out of him so suddenly that he was astonished and then ashamed and he turned red.

Louise laughed. “Have you only just found it out?” she asked.

“Yes,” Chen said abruptly. He felt much distressed that he had spoken so coarsely and without saying anything more he went away.

Ever since that day, now some two weeks ago, he had been troubled by his conscience. Should he not tell James that he was beginning to think often of Louise? But having said this, what else could he say? He did not want to take a wife. He had some vague ideas that he had not yet worked into reality even in his thinking. He was not at all sure that he wished to continue much longer here at the hospital. What it was he wanted to do he did not know and if he took a wife, he would be compelled to stay here, particularly if it were a young modern woman such as Louise. Yet he recognized the danger of staying near her, and of allowing his eyes to see her every day. Yet what was he to do? James would certainly demand the truth from him, and he would be ashamed to tell him that this younger sister stirred up his blood at the same time that he knew he did not want to marry her. This was coarse and he did not wish to reveal such coarseness in himself. He had always prided himself on being a better man than Su, for example, or Kang, or any of the exquisites in the hospital, and now he was feeling just as they did over a pretty girl.

When he left her thus abruptly, Louise had looked after him thoughtfully. She had waited daily for a letter from Philip, or even from Estelle. To Estelle she had poured out her hatred of everything in this medieval city and all her longing for New York. To Philip she had written six heartbroken pages. Neither had answered. When the days began to slip into weeks something hard appeared in her heart. She had refused to go to school and on the pretext of keeping house she had stayed at home, idling her days away. There was nothing to do. Little Dog and his mother under the supervision of Young Wang kept everything smoothly running. The house was comfortable in its fashion, while the weather was still warm. She slept a great deal, and she borrowed books from the English library at the hospital and read novels. There was a motion-picture theater and she went there sometimes, although always with Little Dog’s mother as chaperone. Chen had spoken to James about that.

Now, leaning back in the wicker chaise longue in which she spent so many hours, she toyed with the idea of making Chen love her. Then she frowned restlessly. What was the use of it? He would only want to marry her, and she did not want him. She was so cold to him for a few days that he felt relieved.

In the hospital as at home Mary was almost completely happy. That she was not altogether so was because of her sincere anger whenever one of the doctors failed to be as careful of the children under her care as she thought he should be. Dr. Kang especially she heartily hated and she quarreled with him often. He evaded her laughingly, secretly angered that she was not a nurse whom he could simply dismiss.

“Can I help it that I prefer adults to children?” he demanded one day.

“But a child!” she breathed at him hotly, her eyes filled with fury.

“I am a hardhearted wretch,” he agreed. “I am all that is hateful. But I do not like children.”

She retorted by never calling on him, and by insisting on James as the surgeon. It was her habit to dismiss from her thought and her life all whom she disliked.

One Saturday morning, as she was preparing to go home for the midday meal, she stopped at the hospital post office to fetch the mail, and there she found her mother’s letter. She took it out with warm pleasure. It was thick and it would be full of news, and they could read it aloud at the table together. She did not open it, therefore, thinking that to do so would be selfish. She tucked it into the bib of her apron, and later, it their noontime dinner, when their first hunger was over, he drew the letter out.

Saturday was always a pleasant day, for they did not hurry back to the hospital and Peter had a holiday from the college. This afternoon they had planned to walk to the chrysanthemum market. James had been a little late, and she waited for him to finish his first bowl of rice. Then she said, “Here is a letter from Ma.”

“Good!” James exclaimed. “I was secretly beginning to worry, for Pa has not written at all, although he promised he would.”

Chen rose. “I will go away,” he said politely.

James pressed him down, his hand upon Chen’s shoulder. “Sit down, sit down,” he said. “Now you are our brother.”

“There is no telling what is in Ma’s letters,” Peter said with mischief.

“I will go,” Chen said, starting to get up again.

“Stay,” James insisted, putting out his hand again.

Louise had taken no part in this. She continued to eat, her large discontented eyes downcast.

So Mary began to read. Every now and then she paused and turned the letter this way and that, for their mother’s writing was entirely individual and she went by sound rather than by the correct way of shaping a character. Upon this Peter gave some advice. “You make a mistake to examine Ma’s writing,” he said. “Take a deep breath as though you were about to run a race, and then go as fast as you can, by sense only, and not by sight.”

They laughed and Mary, in fun, did what Peter had told her to do. Thus she rushed straight into the part of Mr. Liang’s letter where she told of the possibility of a concubine and her determination to leave the house in such case. There Mary stopped. They looked at one another aghast. Even Louise was startled and put down her chopsticks.

“I told you I should not be here,” Chen said.

“Why not?” demanded Mary. “If Pa has been so foolish—”

“I do not believe it,” James said severely, but in his head he was dismayed to find that he was not sure that his father could not be foolish.

Peter turned to Louise. “You know Pa better than any of us,” he said. “Can you think of anyone who seemed — special to him?”

Louise looked thoughtful. It was painful to remember the gaiety of those days in New York in comparison with the dullness of her present life, but she forced herself to do so. “It is hard to think of anyone,” she said at last. “You know how women are about Pa. They gather in a circle so close to him — to hear what he says.”

“Louise!” Mary cried. “That is not Pa’s fault.”

Peter grinned. “Pa never pushes them away,” he remarked.

“Pa never puts his hand out to touch anybody,” Mary retorted.

Louise continued to look thoughtful. “I do think that Pa used to talk more to Violet Sung than to any of the others,” she said.

Peter groaned loudly. “Oh — that female!”

“Hush!” James said. “Who is Violet Sung?”

Louise cast a sidelong look at her brother. “She is a friend of Lili’s,” she said.

James compelled his face not to change. He had only once spoken to Mary of Lili. There had been but a few words. “Is — Lili married yet?” So he had asked Mary.

“No, she is not,” Mary had replied. “And please do not ask me about her. I never saw her except that once after you left.”

Since Lili had not written him one letter, it seemed folly to speak more of her. Yet he had wanted to talk about her, perhaps to heal his own heart. “I know that she and I could never marry,” he had said. “We would make each other very unhappy.”

“I am glad you see that,” Mary had said. Her round pretty face had looked so severe that he had said no more.

Now that he heard her name on Louise’s lips, however, it occurred to him that Louise was the one to whom he should have spoken. But this was not the time or the place. He put on his most elderly brother look and he said quietly, “In any case I feel sure that Pa will do no such thing. Give me the letter, Mary. I will finish it in private, and then I will write to him for us all. Of course if we are wrong about Pa, it is quite true that Ma must come to live with us.”

“Then I will go and take care of Pa,” Louise said eagerly. “I am sure Violet will not be a good housekeeper. She is very beautiful, in that French sort of way — she has always lived in Paris. And you know how Pa is — he’s very intellectual, but at the same time he’s used to the way Ma looks after him, and Violet would never put a hot-water bottle in his bed or see that his ties are cleaned and his shoes brushed.” Her face was eager and her eyes shone and they all pitied her, for they knew that it was not to their father that she wished to return. “Louise,” James said, “I wish to speak with you alone.” He rose and went into the other room, and Louise, pouting, followed him.

The others left behind ate what they wished for the remainder of the meal. Mary’s appetite was gone, and Chen, feeling sorry for her, had not the heart to seem hungry. With his chopsticks he picked a bit of meat here and a strip of vegetable there. When she put down her chopsticks he put down his and taking the tea bowl he went out into the court and rinsed his mouth thoroughly and spat behind the pine tree. Only Peter ate another full bowl of rice, and to him Mary talked in subdued angry tones.

“If I thought Pa really were so wicked, I would declare myself not his daughter,” she said. Every day in the newspapers in Peking daughters and sons declared themselves free of their parents, because, they said, these parents were too old-fashioned and did not have the interest of the nation at heart.

“Pa is very deep,” Peter said. “He is full of Confucianism and all that rotten old stuff. You should hear the fellows here at college talk about Confucius. Why, Confucius was a reactionary, and he kept the old traditions alive that have made the nation weak and the people slaves.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mary said impatiently. “You know the people here are not slaves. Everyone does as he wishes. In the hospital we have signs everywhere that there is to be no spitting but everybody spits just the same wherever he likes.”

“That, too, is because of Confucianism,” Peter declared, with his mouth full of steamed duck. “Hygiene and science are equally unknown here, because Confucius has held back our people.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with Pa!” Mary cried.

“It has everything to do with him,” Peter said, filling his bowl with rice again. “Pa is a reactionary, too. That’s why he doesn’t dare come back to China. He is afraid someone will stab him in the back in a dark alley.”

He said this terrifying thing so solemnly that Mary held her tongue for a half minute. Seeing the impression he had made, Peter went on. “I have already learned a lot at the college. I never knew before how much the fellows here hate Pa. Everybody knows him and everybody hates him. They say he is an old-fashioned intellectual, that he wants to be considered a scholar of the old school, and those old scholars are in league with the warlords, the landlords, and the government to oppress the people.”

“Peter!” Mary cried. “Take care how you speak.”

“I’m only saying what I hear,” Peter said doggedly. “It is not pleasant to be Pa’s son, I can tell you. I have to say openly that I don’t agree with him.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Mary said warmly. “Your own father!”

“Yours too,” Peter said. “It was only a minute ago that you were talking about being independent of him.”

Thus caught, Mary lost her temper. “Oh, shut up!” she said in English, and feeling the tears come to her eyes she rose and went into the court to be alone.

Chen, however, was still there. He had sat down on the bench under the great pine to pick his teeth and to consider how he could be useful. When he saw Mary he hid the toothpick in his hand and rose politely. With her he was always formal.

“Do not get up,” Mary said. “I am only passing through the court.”

“Please,” Chen said, “sit down for a moment. I have been thinking about the letter. My conclusion is that your mother has made some mistake. If your father were really considering such a step he could not take it in America, where a concubine is not a recognized person. Whatever he did must be secret there. Since he is so famous, it would be difficult to keep anything secret. Moreover, I have discovered that intellectuals seldom carry on a genuine love affair. They do not have the physical strength for it. Take the doctors in our hospital — they talk a great deal about love and women when we are alone together. Actually I do not know of one who does more than talk. For them love is entirely theoretical. Your father is no longer young. He is the less likely then to undertake a love affair in practical terms. Please write to your mother and tell her that she is probably mistaken.”

Mary had listened to this somewhat long speech without removing her eyes from Chen’s face. Never before had she looked at him so steadily. As he stood there under the pine tree with the sunlight falling through the branches she saw as if for the first time that he had a broad honest face, a square big mouth, a large strong nose, and fine eyes. The look in his eyes was good, friendly, and true. She spoke with involuntary thanks. “Chen, you are very kind to say this to me. I think you are right. I think it is Ma who is old-fashioned and suspects Pa. I shall tell her so.”

Chen smiled somewhat timidly. “Do you think with all this trouble that we must give up our walk to the chrysanthemum market?” he asked.

She had forgotten it, but now when he spoke of chrysanthemums it seemed to her that this visit to the famous market where she could choose pots of her favorite flowers and bring them home would comfort her more than anything. “I don’t see why we should not go,” she exclaimed. “I will go and find James.”

“Wait,” Chen exclaimed. “Listen!”

They stood and listened. They could hear the murmur of James’s voice, and then Louise’s, in earnest conversation.

“They are still in the stream of talk,” Chen said. “Let us give them a little longer.”

“Where is Peter?” Mary asked.

Chen smiled and pointed his forefinger toward the open door. Peter, filled with rice and duck, had thrown himself down on the wicker couch that stood against the wall and was sound asleep lying on his back, his hands folded under his head.

“Come and rest under the pine tree,” Chen said to Mary. “The air is cool and fragrant. You need not talk. Let us just sit in quietness.”

In the other room, a small room which they had made into a study and library, James was listening to Louise, asking a question now and then, guiding her to talk, but saying little himself. This sister of his with whom he had lived in one house for nearly all the seventeen years of her life, he now realized had been a stranger to him. He knew how she looked, and he could even remember how she had looked as a baby and a little girl. In those years she had been for the family a toy and a plaything. Mary had been serious and impetuous, always a person, but Louise had seemed to have no life except as she drew it from others. She had always sat on somebody’s lap until only a year or two ago, when suddenly she had stopped of her own accord, and yet none of them had noticed it. Imperceptibly she had ceased to be a little girl and had become a young woman, and they had not noticed this, either. She had done well enough in school, but it had not mattered that she did no better. None of them expected or indeed wanted Louise to be bookish or brilliant. She had seemed always gracefully unselfish, because she was the one who brought Pa’s slippers, or filled his pipe; she was the one to fetch a book somebody wanted or to bring in the dishes from the kitchen and take them out again. No one noticed that she never did any real work, even to make her own bed. Behind the facade of prettiness and graceful unselfishness she had grown into someone quite different, a small hard separate woman, James now perceived as he let her reveal herself. How had they let her grow up without heeding what she was?

“I hate it here,” Louise was saying. “You may think these crumbling old palaces are wonderful, Jim, but they repel me. I don’t like living in a country where everything is falling to pieces and all that is worth talking about is the past.”

“But, Louise, you are wrong. Something wonderful and new is taking place here.”

“What is it?” she asked doubtfully.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But I feel it. We have finished with one age and we are about to begin another. I stay here because of the future, not the past. I know Pa is always dwelling on the past, but I do not.”

“It happens that I don’t like anything here!” she said passionately. “I don’t like the young men. I don’t like the people on the street. The children are filthy. Jim, I wish I hadn’t been born a Chinese. I wish I could stop being a Chinese. Oh, Jim!”

Here she broke down into tears and he let her cry.

“All this,” he said after a moment, “is because you have let yourself fall in love with an American. At your age love shapes the universe.”

She continued to sob, and he went on gently. “I know, too, what it is to love someone. I think I loved Lili with all my heart. Even now, when I know we shall never marry, when I think of her, or someone speaks her name, the world trembles. But it does not crash about me. I know that there is a life that must be lived happily without Lili. Just now I feel as though for me it would always be lived alone. But I know this is only feeling. I shall marry and have children. I want to marry here and have my children here. And I shall never let them leave our country. They must stay here until there is no possible danger in their going away, because however far they go, they will always come back, and wherever they are they will dream of coming back and whatever they do it will be for our people. And they must marry here, too, and their children must be born here. So much I have decided.”

Louise stopped crying and looked at him half angrily. “You are very old-fashioned, Jim.”

“There is something here that I want,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but I shall find it. And I shall find it not with this—” he tapped his brain cap—“I shall find it by my blind roots pushing down and down.”

She was not stupid and she listened to him. “You are a man,” she complained, “and you can do what you like.”

“Now it is you who are old-fashioned,” he said heartily. “A woman can do what she likes too, nowadays, even in China. You must change what you want most. Instead of grieving for Philip, who does not want you, you must keep saying that you do not want him. And after a while it will be true. Then you will be free to find what you really want.”

She did not answer and he could not tell how much she believed. He gazed somewhat wistfully and with great tenderness at her lovely and still childlike face, and it crossed his mind with a sort of wondering shyness, that of all of them, only this child knew what the mystery of the flesh was. And yet she did not really know, for she had not crossed the valley and slowly climbed the hill of life to the forts of happiness. Instead, like a child she had rushed up that hill and had beaten at the gates and clamored until they opened. She did not know anything about love and its true consummation. He felt a great pity for her, because what she had done could never be undone, and whenever the true consummation came, if ever it did, it would be spoiled.

“We really came here to talk about Pa,” Louise said suddenly.

“And now I do not feel that I want to talk about him,” James said.

“I don’t think Violet Sung would have him,” Louise said. “After all, Pa is old. He looks handsome enough, especially in the evening, and of course he has a wonderful speaking voice — so deep and gentle. Women like it. But any woman would soon know he has no passion in him. And Violet isn’t intellectual — not really. I mean—” she broke off.

A great revulsion fell upon James at the ease with which this young creature spoke these words. “I daresay you are right,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Ma is so simple,” Louise said ruthlessly.

“And very good,” James said gently.