That night the bride and groom with the little boy took the train southward to Shanghai. It was a strange wedding party, and yet a happy one. James and Mary and Chen saw them off and stood until the train disappeared into the night, shades drawn against possible bandits and only the great engine headlight flaring.
Gazing after the moving train, James buttoned his coat about him tightly. “Now I must cable Pa,” he said.
Mary clung to his arm as they turned to go home again and Chen fell in beside her. “I know we have done right,” she said with her old sweet stubbornness. “It doesn’t matter what Pa says.”
“Louise would never have been happy here,” Chen said. They began to trudge together in common step down the half-empty street. The night was cold and there would be frost. People walking by gathered their robes together and hurried on.
“It takes a certain kind of person to live in China now,” Chen mused.
“What kind of person?” Mary asked.
“Someone who can see true meanings; someone who does not only want the world better but also believes it can be made better, and gets angry because it is not done; someone who is not willing to hide himself in one of the few good places left in the world—someone who is tough!”
They were passing an ironmonger’s shop and the ironmonger being behind with his work had not yet put up the boards. Upon his anvil he beat a piece of twisted iron that he was making into a knife which a student had ordered that day. The flaming metal threw out sparks and lit up his black face in a grimace of effort. His white teeth gleamed. This same light fell on the three and Chen looked down into Mary’s upturned face as they passed.
“Somebody tough,” he repeated half teasingly, “somebody like you—and me—and Jim.” Mary laughed and she took her other hand out of her pocket and put it in Chen’s arm, and they marched along, in step.
Peter stayed in his own room during the wedding. Young Wang had been amazed and horrified and when the others had gone he went to Peter’s door. He liked this younger son of the family and longed to come to good terms with him. He imagined them almost friends, rather than master and servant. Sometimes, brushing Peter’s large shoes after a rain and cleaning cakes of Peking mud from under the soles, he imagined himself talking thus and even saying Peter’s name. “Pe-tah, hear me! I am older than you, although born in a low family. Your family are gentry, mine are small farmers only. Nevertheless in these new times who is high and who is low? Let us be friends. I tell you, students are no good. In the old days we common folks looked up to scholars and students. They were the governors. I tell you,” here Young Wang brushed the shoes with fury, “now we know that it is we common folk who must resist scholars and warlords and rich men and magistrates. These four are the enemies of the people.”
Was Peter a Communist? That was what Young Wang continually wished to find out. He himself was not, since the government cut off all Communist heads or else shot them dead. But he listened sometimes in the corners of the teashops and winehouses. At his village when he had gone to rescue his family from the island to which they clung he had heard a young man and woman who came together and helped them move and stayed while they put up fresh earthen houses on their fields, and they had kept saying, “Where are your landlords? Where are your wonderful students? Where is your government? Does no one come to help you? Only we help you, we the Communists.”
The villagers had been much troubled by their help, well knowing that in this world no one does anything for nothing, and they had been casting about in their minds as to why this young pair with such bold faces had come to their aid. When they found they were Communists they fell into awful terror, for no one in these regions could be Communist and live, seeing that the government sent armies every day against Communists. Worse even than their own government, for they were used to their own, were the Americans, who now demanded, the villagers were told, that every Communist be killed. So Young Wang and his family had joined with the villagers in driving these two young Communists away with hoes and rakes and bamboo poles. The two had gone off singing one of their songs and they shouted back at the villagers.
“We offered you peace, but now you reject us and we will come back with swords and guns!”
Young Wang had been as frightened as the rest. Nevertheless, this stuck in his mind as truth—no one did anything for men like him and their families. They struggled along as best they could, starving in famine, dying with sickness, their children were dirty and unlearned, and all this was in spite of their continual labor. Who indeed had helped them build anew their houses after the flood?
That Peter was angry at something Young Wang well knew. He had heard the young man argue with his calm older brother and with Chen. “You with your tolerance and your patience,” Peter had said bitterly to those two. “The only way to wake our people up is to use violence on them.”
“You mean kill them?” Chen had inquired politely. “Alas, people do not wake from the dead!”
“I mean kill everyone who will not change,” Peter had declared.
“Oh, Peter, don’t be silly,” Mary had exclaimed.
James had listened in his usual thoughtful manner. Then he said, “When men start killing other men, a craving for death enters their heart, and to kill becomes the solution for every difficulty, however small.”
“There is something of Pa’s Confucius in you,” Mary exclaimed.
“Perhaps there is,” he had replied.
Now Young Wang walked softly to Peter’s room and looked into the window. The young man sat by his desk writing furiously. Even as Young Wang looked at him he put down his pen and sat frowning and troubled. Young Wang went to the door and coughed.
“Go away,” Peter said, recognizing the cough. “I am busy.”
Young Wang opened the door enough to put in his head. “Will you not even go to the train to see them off?” he asked in a mild voice.
“Get out,” Peter replied.
Young Wang weighed the tone of his voice. The words were harsh like an American’s, but the voice was not too much so. He came in looking meek and stood with his back to the door. “I said get out, didn’t I?” Peter cried, looking up with high impatience.
“I will get out,” Young Wang promised. “But first I tell you what I heard today. Something is being planned at the marble bridge.”
Peter shot him a sharp look. “Where did you hear that?”
“A chestnut vendor told me.”
Peter had taken up his pen but now he threw it down again. “Go on,” he commanded, “tell me what you heard.”
“He passed by at midnight a few nights ago,” Young Wang said in a low voice. “He had been to a theater to sell his chestnuts. That is why he was so late. He passed by and he saw some people under the bridge. Of course he thought they were beggars sheltering there. Then one of them cried out with pain. One of the others had let a spade or a hoe fall on his foot. And this cry was no beggar’s cry, the vendor said. It was the voice and the curse of a student.”
Young Wang paused.
“Well, what of that?” Peter asked.
“The vendor went back the next night and the next,” Young Wang went on, “and he goes every night. He is being paid now by the secret police.” Young Wang looked down at Peter’s shoes. “I brush your shoes every day,” he said suddenly. “Yesterday they were clean. But tonight there was yellow clay on them. I know there is yellow clay under the bridge. Our soil elsewhere is sandy and dusty. But under the bridge there is clay. Doubtless when our ancestors sank the great stones into the bowels of the river, they brought yellow clay here from the south to hold hard the foundation.”
Peter leaped from his chair and rushed at Young Wang. But Young Wang slipped through the door like a tomcat.
Nevertheless Peter locked the door after him and went to the desk and taking the sheets of paper upon which he had been writing, he tore them across again and again and he emptied the bottle of ink upon them and threw them into the wastebasket. T
hen he began most restlessly to pace the floor.
13
DR. LIANG WAS VERY ANGRY. James’s letter had come by airmail and had thus reached him some two weeks before Louise could be expected. He who had proclaimed so often before audiences in classroom and lecture hall the wisdom of the doctrine of fate could scarcely persuade himself of the inevitability of what had already happened to his family and therefore to him. It now seemed to him that it would have been better to have had Louise marry Philip Morgan, whose father was in Wall Street and therefore rich. Who knew what this new fellow was, this Alec Wetherston? James had put the address of the family in his letter. It was an address of a somewhat middle-class sort. Dr. Liang had a flair for a good address, and he knew that this one was only partly good. It was not distinguished and very wealthy people would not be in that part of the city. He decided to ignore the Wetherston parents, refusing to recognize publicly his own secret fear that they might not be pleased with a Chinese daughter-in-law.
To his wife, however, he spoke with complete frankness, and in the height of his irritation at fate, he bullied her a good deal in small ways. “It would be very pleasant now, wouldn’t it, if this soldier’s family did not like to be connected with us?” he demanded of Mrs. Liang.
“On the other hand they might like us,” she suggested reasonably. “For example, can we not ask why this Alec does not object to a Chinese wife? He has received no teaching against our people. Doubtless his parents also have no strong objection.”
The reasonableness of this incensed Dr. Liang. He tasted his coffee and set the cup down again. “How strange that after twenty years you still cannot tell good coffee from bad,” he remarked.
“Neh-lee!” she called, but he put up his hand.
“She drinks anything herself,” he said. “Therefore she has no taste. It is you, my wife, who should be able to know the difference, even by the aroma, between good and bad coffee.”
“But I don’t like coffee, Liang,” she objected.
“That has nothing to do with it,” he retorted.
She sighed. She must prepare to bear upon her own shoulders the brunt of her husband’s displeasure. She brooded in silence, her eyes downcast, while he finished his scrambled eggs, broiled kidneys, and the bad coffee, munching as she did so on a piece of toast.
This munching next annoyed Dr. Liang. He looked at her and compared her large somewhat flabby face with Violet Sung’s exquisite one. “What a noise you are making with that toast!” he exclaimed. “It sounds like a mill crushing grain.”
She stopped and looked at him across the table. Her mouth was full of the half-chewed toast and she did not know what to do.
“Swallow it,” he said violently.
She drank some tea, held her handkerchief before her face, and swallowed. The bit of toast she had been holding in her hand ready for the next bite she put down. She sat neither eating nor speaking until he had finished his breakfast and rising with dignity had gone to his study and closed the door. Then she finished the toast, took another piece, and spread it with strawberry jam. Butter she could not abide for it tasted of cows and milk. The teapot was empty and she called cautiously, “Neh-lee!”
Nellie came in wiping her hands on her apron. “Want more tea?” she asked kindly. She and the madam got on all right.
Mrs. Liang nodded. “What you think, Neh-lee?” she asked in a half whisper.
“What?” Nellie asked, with the teapot in her hand.
“Louise is marrying,” Mrs. Liang whispered, “American fellow and a baby!”
“Louise got a baby?” Nellie exclaimed in the undertone they used when Dr. Liang was in the house.
“He got baby,” Mrs. Liang explained. “Before time another Chinese wife.” It was the one thing that James, after some thought, had decided not to make clear. The baby’s mother, he had written, was the former wife of the American. Why, he asked himself, should the child assume a stigma when it reached America? In China people did not blame a child for the failures of its parents.
“Whaddya know,” Nellie said. “Will they live here? It’ll be kinda nice to have Louise home at that. Though a baby—still, there’s the diaper service.”
“His father and mother live also in New York,” Mrs. Liang told her. “So maybe they live that side. But I am so glad to have some child again.” She touched the corner of her napkin to her eyes.
“The mister is kinda tough on you, ain’t he!” Nellie said with sympathy. “Well, cheer up now, madam. I’ll fetch the hot tea.”
She went away and Mrs. Liang sat alone and thinking, the lines of her face growing kind and soft. She would go down to Chinatown and find Mrs. Pan and tell her everything. It was so nice to have a woman friend again.
Behind his closed study door Dr. Liang sat moodily staring out of the window. Nothing in his philosophy, so closely derived from Confucius, prepared him for what had now happened. He did not know what to do. Louise had suddenly become no longer important to him. She was not a favorite child now that she had chosen to defy him and marry an American. Neither was the man important. Dr. Liang could, for his own part, live as though neither of them existed. He would not disown his daughter or dignify her by any such notice. The young couple could come here and pay their respects to him and he would greet them carelessly, as though nothing they did mattered to him. Children were disappointing. One produced them and cared for them and taught them and paid huge sums in school fees and then they did what they liked. It was America that spoiled them. In China—the old China—children remained subject to their parents as long as the elders lived. For this they were recompensed by becoming elders in their turn. Thus society was sound and the generations proceeded in order. That China, he knew, was gone. It was already passing when he himself was young, and had insisted that he would not have an illiterate girl for his wife. But he believed that the old wise ways would return. A nation that did not organize its generations in proper relationships was doomed to disintegration.
All this philosophy did not help him at the moment. The important thing, he discovered after he had sorted his thoughts, was what the Wetherston family was like. Were they entirely mediocre? How could he approach them? Should he approach them or should he wait for them to approach him? He could answer none of these questions, and his wife, he knew, would not even understand why he asked them. It would be her nature to rush over at once to see the new family and get on a footing of immediate and absurd friendliness which might involve him later in all sorts of obligations unsuitable to his position. If the Wetherstons proved to be poor and crude, for example, they might even seize at the chance to be connected with a famous man, though a Chinese.
In his indecision he took up the receiver of the telephone and dialed the number of Violet Sung’s apartment. They had never mentioned Ranald but Violet had said, “It is quite safe to telephone me in the morning, but please not at night.”
So he waited for a moment and then heard her voice, still rather drowsy. “Yes?”
“Violet?” he said very softly, for Mrs. Liang had an acute ear.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, recognizing him.
“Please forgive me for calling you so early. I have had bad news. I need you.”
“Tell me,” she said with the warmth in her voice which was so charming to him.
“My youngest daughter has unexpectedly married an American. The letter came this morning. His family, unfortunately, is here in New York.”
“How strange,” she murmured.
“Yes, so I feel it,” he agreed. “Now I must have your advice. What shall I do?”
She hesitated a moment, then she repeated his question. “What shall you do? But what can you do if they are already married?”
“Yes, that I know,” he said a trifle impatiently, “but how shall I behave with the family? How can I know what they are and how they will feel? Doubtless by now they know what their son has done and perhaps they will be expecting me to—or ought I wait for them?”
/> “Where do they live?” Violet asked.
He gave the mediocre address and she considered it thoughtfully and so long that he asked rather piteously, “Can you suggest anything?”
“I will go to see them,” she said at last. “I will call upon them, saying that I am a friend of your family.”
He was relieved and deeply grateful, for he had not thought of such a thing. Yet it was in excellent Chinese tradition—a go-between, so to speak, someone who would break the blow of compulsory acquaintance.
“Who but you—” he murmured, breaking his sentence there. “Who but you would be so kind, so beautiful, so understanding—” any of these things could be said. But he preferred not to be explicit.
She laughed a soft wistful laugh. “I am really not much use in the world,” she said. “I’d like to be of use to you.”
“Of such use,” he said gravely, “that I cannot live without you.”
He put the receiver down upon that.
14
THE HOUSE FELT EMPTY after Louise had left it. While she was there each separate member of the family had felt her discontented presence and each had tried to please her in some small way, to make her smile at least for the moment. Now there was no more need for such effort. When the four came home at their various times, they could go their own ways, give greeting or not, and they had no duty to a lonely little sister.
Yet they missed her. Because of her very loneliness Louise had compelled them all, James and Mary, Peter and Chen, to come out of themselves and to enter into her being. And there were times when she was not sulky, times when she played with the kittens and laughed, times when she found a fledgling bird, or a new flower growing in the ancient court. She was so pretty, her little face so pleasant to see when she was happy, that they remembered her tenderly now that she was gone. Only Peter seemed careless, and when the others spoke of her he put his mind elsewhere and sat silent.