Mrs. Liang frowned and pursed her lips. “Pei!” she exploded softly. “Think what it is you have done that you do not want him to know!”
Louise looked alarmed. “Who told him?” she demanded.
“Never mind.”
“It was Mary!” Louise exclaimed.
“Never mind!”
“Oh, Ma!” Louise wailed.
In his study Dr. Liang heard the duet and he rose and opened the door suddenly. Both women looked at him, but he stared only at his daughter. “Go upstairs and put on your clothes. Then come to my study,” he commanded.
“Isn’t she to eat something first?” Mrs. Liang demanded. The presence of one of the children always gave her courage.
“No,” Dr. Liang said and shut the door.
Mother and daughter looked at one another. Then Mrs. Liang spoke. “Go upstairs,” she said softly. “I will fetch you a tray and you can eat while you dress.”
“Scrambled eggs, please,” Louise whispered.
Dr. Liang, listening, heard only the hurrying footsteps of his daughter on the stairs. He leaned back, mollified. He was still obeyed.
Upstairs Louise did not go to her own room. Instead she opened the door of Mary’s room. Mary was at her desk, writing to James, and she saw her younger sister standing with her back to the door, the wide satin skirt of her nightgown whirled around her, and her pretty face pink with anger.
“Mary, what did you say to Pa?” Louise demanded in a loud whisper.
“Peter told me you let Philip kiss you,” Mary said gravely.
“Did you have to tell Pa?” Louise demanded.
“Yes.”
Louise stared at her sister. Something adamant in that soft little face confounded her and she suddenly began to cry. “I hate you!” she sobbed, still whispering, and she opened the door and whirled out.
Mary sat for a long moment, then took up her pen again and wrote, “I think the only thing that can keep Louise from being a fool is for me to bring her to China. If the ocean is between her and Philip perhaps we can guard her.”
When she had finished her letter she sat quite thoughtfully for a long time. Then she got up and began to tidy the small drawers at the top of her bureau.
In something over half an hour she paused in this task, and opening the door of her room she heard the unmistakable sounds of a stick beating upon something soft. Then she heard screams—Louise’s voice—and almost at once her mother’s loud shouts. She ran downstairs swiftly and opened the door of her father’s study. He had his malacca cane in one hand, and with the other he held Louise by the hair. He had bent her back, but he held her head firmly while with his right hand he lifted the cane and struck it upon her shoulders. Mrs. Liang was vainly trying to put herself between the cane and the girl.
“My father?” Mary said distinctly.
Dr. Liang’s face was twisted and purple. But at the sight of his elder daughter he looked dazed and threw down the cane and pushed Louise away from him.
“Take her out of my sight,” he gasped. “I never want to see her again.”
Louise lay on the floor where she fell, sobbing aloud, and Mrs. Liang sat down in a chair. Sweat was pouring down her cheeks and she lifted the edge of her coat to wipe it away.
“Father,” Mary said again. The intense quiet of her voice seemed to bring silence and order into the room. “What you have done is not right.”
Dr. Liang had thrown himself into his leather armchair. His hands trembled and his face was ashen. “She is no longer my daughter,” he said. He looked with contempt upon Louise where she still lay weeping, her face buried in her arms.
“The American girls kiss boys and think nothing of it,” Mary pleaded. “Remember that she has been here all her life. You brought us here, Pa. We can’t remember any other country.”
“It is not only the kiss,” Mrs. Liang said heavily. “There is more than the kiss.” She spoke in Chinese but “kiss” she said in English.
“What has she done?” Mary asked. Her heart began to beat hard. Had Peter lied to her? Did he know?
“Don’t repeat it!” Dr. Liang shouted.
Mrs. Liang groaned aloud. “Eh-yah! I could not—”
Louise suddenly stopped weeping. She was listening. But she did not move and she lay, a figure of young sorrow, upon the floor.
Dr. Liang’s face began to work in strange grimaces. “Everything for which I have striven is now destroyed,” he said in a strangled voice. “I am about to be disgraced by my own daughter. My enemies will laugh at me. My students will deride the teachings of Confucius because my own daughter has derided them.”
Mary was sorry for them all. She stood with pity warm in her dark eyes. She understood her father’s pride and her mother’s bewilderment. And she understood very well Louise, who in eagerness to make herself beloved had confounded herself more than any.
“Pa,” Mary said gently. “I have thought of something. Let me take her back to China.”
“Two girls!” Mrs. Liang exclaimed.
Mary still spoke to her father. “Pa, James is your oldest son. Let him help you. I was about to ask you anyway if you would let me go and keep his house for him until he marries. Let me go and let me take Louise with me.”
Louise turned her face. “I don’t want to go!” she muttered.
“Be silent!” Dr. Liang cried. All his rage choked him again. “You! Do you dare to speak?”
“I won’t go—I won’t go!” Louise wailed.
Dr. Liang’s jaw tightened and two small muscles stood out on his cheeks. Had he not loved his younger daughter with so much pride he would not have been so bitterly angry now. He wanted to beat her again, but he dared not before Mary. Yet the wound of his proud heart was too severe. He could not restrain himself and he cried out, “If you do not want to go, then I say you shall go! We will have no peace until you are gone!”
“Liang!” his wife cried. “You cannot send two girls alone across the ocean! How will it be when they get to Shanghai? Since the war everything is bad there.”
“Peter shall go with them,” Dr. Liang cried. “Let them all go!” He slapped his outspread hands upon the desk, and then to the horror of his family he began to weep silently, without covering his face. They could not bear it. Mary stooped to her sister. “Come—get up,” she said. “We must leave Pa alone.”
Louise, seeing her father’s face, obeyed and the two girls went out. When the door closed behind them Mrs. Liang rose and went to her husband. She stood behind him where she could not see his face and she put out her two hands and with the tips of her fingers she began to rub his temples rhythmically. He sighed and leaned his head back against her breast.
After a while she spoke. “You must not blame them too much,” she said. “They are like plants growing in a foreign soil. If they bear strange flowers, it is the soil that is evil.”
“You know that I cannot—go back,” he said listlessly.
“I know that,” she said patiently.
“I cannot do my work there,” he went on. “What place is there for a scholar—for any civilized being—in the midst of chaos and war?”
“None,” she agreed. This they had talked about often.
“While chaos has raged in my own country, I have kept its spirit alive here in a foreign land,” he said in a heartbroken voice.
“Everyone knows you are a great man,” she said sadly.
He pulled away from her suddenly. “I suppose you wish you could go with the children,” he said. “You will be lonely here only with me.”
She stood motionless while she spoke, her hands at her bosom. “Liang—would you not go just for a little while?”
He pushed aside the sheaf of manuscript on his desk. “How can I? I have classes about to begin. Besides—how can I earn my living in China—unless I become an official?”
“You could become an official,” she said.
“No, I cannot,” he said loudly. “I can do a great many things for the sake
of peace and our ancient civilization—but I cannot do that.”
She waited another long moment. She turned her head and looked out the window at all the things she hated. She hated living high in the air like this, as though they were birds nesting in a cliff. As a girl she had lived in houses low and close to the earth, where she could step through the open door and feel earth under her feet. She hated high buildings and tall chimneys and bustling streets. But her love for him was still greater than her hatred of these things, although she did not understand him even in the least part of his being. She had come from a simple, goodhearted merchant family in a small town. His family had been gentry for ten generations. She had been chosen for him because her health and vigor, his mother had said, would strengthen his overdelicate youth and renew the family’s vitality. She had loved him from their wedding night.
“If you cannot go, I will stay with you,” she said, “and I will not be lonely.”
Upstairs in her room Mary faced Louise. She tried not to be excitable or angry, but she found it difficult to be calm. Her father’s Confucian teaching of calm under all circumstances had become her conscience. Now, feeling her cheeks hot and her eyes burning, she nevertheless tried to keep her voice gentle.
“Louise, what have you done?” she demanded.
Louise sat down on the edge of the bed. She twisted a curl of her hair around her forefinger and pouted her red lips. She feared Mary more than any member of the family, not because this elder sister was harsh, but because she had an honesty which was not to be corrupted. Did Mary believe that something should be told she would tell it, at whatever cost to anyone, and Louise was not prepared to put herself into such danger.
“You had better tell me so that I can help you,” Mary said.
“I don’t want your help,” Louise pouted.
“Nevertheless I must help you,” Mary said in the same steadfast voice. “What did you tell Pa that made him so angry?”
Tears came into Louise’s eyes. Her courage was not deeply rooted and now it began to fade. What had seemed only a sweet exciting secret when she was with Estelle had become a frightful thing when she was besieged by her family. Chastity for a woman, seemingly so lightly considered by her schoolmates, returned to what she had been taught by her Chinese family—the test of all that woman was.
“What did you tell Pa?” Mary insisted. Her voice, in spite of herself, became stern.
“I told him—I told him—” Thus truth began to trickle from her with her tears.
“Go on,” Mary commanded.
“When he said—when he said—he would never consent to—to an American son-in-law—” she began now to cry in good earnest.
“You said—” Mary prompted her relentlessly.
“I said it was too late!” The words came out of Louise in one burst.
“You haven’t married Philip secretly!” Mary cried.
Louise shook her head, and then she said in a very small voice, “No. But I can never marry anybody else—because—because—”
She could not finish but now Mary knew. She sat quite still, gazing at Louise, who turned and flung herself face down on the bed and sobbed aloud. There had been many times when Louise had lain there sobbing for some small trouble and always Mary had gone to her to soothe and comfort her, as the elder sister. But now she did not move. She felt sick and she did not want to touch Louise. It had never occurred to her to imagine that Louise would have let Philip—she could not put the thought into words, even in her own mind. That Louise could be silly, could allow Philip perhaps to kiss her and fondle her, that she could dream of his marriage to her, all was believable. But not this—
She rose, not able to endure her own sickness, and she went to the closet and took out a dress for the street. Without speaking, while Louise sobbed on, Mary changed into this blue dress and brushed her hair and touched her lips with red. It was not often she painted her lips, but now they felt pale and dry. Her face in the mirror was pale and her eyes looked strange. Louise looked sidewise at her in the midst of her weeping. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Outdoors,” Mary said. “I want to be alone.”
Louise broke into a fresh wail. “Aren’t you going to help me?”
Mary’s hand was on the door, but she paused. “Yes, I will help you, but just now I don’t know how. I shall have to think.”
She went out and closed the door softly, and softly she crept down the stairs. In her father’s study she heard her parents’ voices murmuring and she tiptoed past the door and out into the hall. The elevator man was talkative and she could scarcely force herself to answer his questions. “Yes, thank you,” she said, “my brother in China is quite well. Yes, he likes it there. Of course, after all it is our home. Yes, some day doubtless we will all return to China. Yes, of course we do like it here—but it is not our country.”
She was out in the street at last. It was hot and dusty with the late summer lingering into autumn and people looked tired. She walked slowly toward the river, biting her lips and trembling as she went. She longed exceedingly for James. Yet how could this ever be put into a letter? And what could she do indeed? Her parents, she knew, were worse than useless. They would be utterly bewildered. In old China Louise would have been put to death. But old China was gone. Young Chinese women since the war—well, there had been plenty of American GI babies with Chinese mothers. That would be no argument with her parents. In a strange mixed fashion, for all her father’s modernity, he still belonged to the old China because for him China was something Confucius had made, and Confucius would have said that certainly Louise ought to die, because she had dishonored the family. Her father would not say Louise had to die, but he would make up his mind never to forgive her.
Mary sat down on a bench by the river and lifted her eyes toward the bridge. It shimmered a beaten silver, and in the haze of noonday the arch lifted high above reality and the distant end was miragelike. James seemed lost to her, as though he were in another world. China was another world, a better one than this, she ardently believed. She felt profoundly lonely without her brother, the only person in the family with whom she could communicate. She had never, as Louise had, thrown herself into her school life. Around her was always the cloak of indifference, of being Chinese, and on guard alike against hostility or too lavish adoration, she had maintained herself separate. Only James had crossed that barrier and with him alone had she found friendship and companionship. Since he had gone, she had scarcely spoken to anyone beyond the casual talk of small necessities.
Now her pent-up heart demanded frankness, and as she sat there, a small solitary figure, resolutely ignoring the tentative eyes of curious men as they strolled past and yet feeling them with a sort of subdued anger, residual from her disgust with Louise, she began to think of Philip. There was Philip. He, too, had been responsible, and he ought to know what he had done to their family. A Chinese girl was part of her family until she married and became part of another family, and nothing could separate her. What had happened to her brought its weight upon them all. She ought to go and talk to Philip. If James were here he would talk to him, without doubt or hesitation, but James was not here, and Peter was too young, and so she must do it, for obviously her father could not. Her father could be angry and he could even beat Louise but he would not lower himself to talk to Philip. He would say and perhaps rightly that Louise was to blame because the woman is always to blame.
She sighed and then got up and crossed the street to a drugstore. There at the pay telephone she called Estelle Morgan. A maid answered. Miss Estelle was not back yet from the sea-shore. Was Philip there? Mr. Philip was just leaving for an appointment at his father’s office. Could she speak to him, then? It was urgent. A moment later Philip’s fresh tenor voice came over the wires.
“Hello?”
She knew him a little, not much. She had seen him two or three times when he came for Louise, but usually Louise met him outside. She remembered him as tall, and somewh
at too slender for his height, and she remembered that his face looked too young and perhaps too fine-featured for a man.
“Philip Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mary Liang. Could you—may I—talk with you for a few minutes? Not over the telephone, I mean. It’s—it’s quite important.”
A second pause, then two and three before he answered. “Yes, of course, Mary. Only it just happens that I have to meet my father. He’s waiting at the office for me.”
“If I got into a taxi, could you wait for me and we could drive downtown together?”
There was a second’s pause again, then two, then three.
“All right, Mary.”
He hung up the receiver and she flew to the door and caught a passing taxi and gave the address while she slammed the door.
In ten minutes she drew up before the quiet house in Sutton Place, and then she saw Philip come out of the door. He smiled in answer to the doorman’s greeting, and she caught a fleet look of surprise on that doorman’s face when he opened the taxi and saw her there.
“Hello, Mary,” Philip said. He sat down beside her.
“Hello,” she replied, and felt his wary diffident mood.
“Stays hot, doesn’t it?” he asked, trying to be casual.
“Yes,” she replied. Then she took her heart in her hands. She had only a few minutes. But she needed only a few minutes to find out all she needed to know.
“Philip,” she began impetuously, “I have to hurry because I know you haven’t much time. But I must tell you that my father has found out about you and Louise. He is very angry. He has told her that she must go to China right away. She doesn’t want to go. I think you know why. But I want to know how you feel. I mean—what I want to say is—if you are in love with Louise—”
Her face burned scarlet and she turned her head away. The taxi was racing downtown. She wished it would go more slowly. There had to be time. A light changed to red and the taxi stopped. She forced herself to look at Philip. His pale face had turned even more pale.
“I’m not in love—with anybody,” he said.