“A little money,” she said scornfully. “How much? Maybe in one month what I paid yesterday for my necklace. Baba is right.”
His arms grew cold around her. “Do you mean you don’t want to marry me?”
She wept again loudly and she threw her arms about his neck. “I do—I do—but please, here, in New York, I like it so much!”
He said gravely, “I must go.”
His arms dropped and she put them back again. “No, you must love me, please!”
In her distraction she was so beautiful, so helpless that he held her again, while his heart broke. So they sat a long time, and he did not know what thoughts went on in her mind.
It was she who spoke first after a while. She wiped her eyes and swallowed her sobs and said in her soft voice, “There is only one way, James. You must go first, without me. When Baba lets me, I will come.”
“You mean—go without being married?”
She nodded. “It is the only way,” she said. “Baba will not make me marry another man right away now if I cry every day. Maybe he won’t die. Then—after you make money—buy a house maybe—or just even rent a nice house—”
He sat staring at her and she did not look at him. She twisted her little wet handkerchief into knots and then untwisted it and spread it on her knee, pulling the lace edge, doing everything, he thought, to avoid his eyes.
“This is what you want me to do, is it, Lili?” he asked at last.
She lifted her eyes to his. “Not what I want—” she whispered.
He was very gentle, very tender. “Then, dear, couldn’t you come with me—run away, maybe?”
She shook her head positively. “I—can’t,” she said in a small sweet voice. “Oh, no!”
“You really are sending me away—alone?”
She began to cry. “It is you who want to go alone—if you stay here everything is all right. I am not troubling—it is you—you—”
He did not try to comfort her. He sat listening; he saw the tears on her cheeks and felt her little hands pressing his. The palms were hot. When her sobbing died and she fell silent he saw her peeping at him from under her wet lashes. She even tried to smile. But he would not allow himself either love or pity.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “It is I who want to go—even alone.”
And he rose and went away, refusing at the door, in his one backward look, the appeal of her startled eyes, her hands suddenly outstretched.
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 wa
r. 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?”