Both of them looked at her and could not move their eyes away and this Ai-lan saw too, and laughed a little cry of pure delighted triumph. This broke the mother’s gaze and she said quietly, “Whom do you go with tonight, my child?”
“With a friend of Sheng’s,” she answered gaily. “A writer, mother — and famous for the tales he writes, too — Wu Li-yang!”
It was a name that Yuan had heard of sometimes — a man in truth famous for his tales written in the western manner, tales very bold and free and full of talk of love between man and maid, and ending very often in death somewhere, and Yuan was not a little curious to see him, although his tales were such that Yuan read them secretly and even so he was ashamed to read them.
“Some time you might indeed take Yuan,” the mother said mildly. “He works too hard, I tell him. He ought to have a little pleasure sometimes with his sister and his cousins.”
“So you should, Yuan, and I have been ready for a long time,” cried Ai-lan, smiling lavishly and looking at him from her great black eyes. “But you must buy the clothes you need. Mother, make him buy foreign clothes and shoes — he will dance better with his legs free from those robes. Oh, I like to see a man in foreign clothes — let’s go tomorrow and buy him everything! You’re not ugly, you know, Yuan. You’d look as nice as any man in foreign clothes. And I’ll teach you to dance, Yuan. I’ll begin tomorrow!”
At this Yuan blushed and shook his head, but not with his first decision, for he felt what the lady had been telling him, and he could not but think how kind she had been to him, and this was a way to repay her. Then Ai-lan cried, “What will you do if you cannot dance? You can’t sit keeping alone at a table — we all dance, we younger ones!”
“It is the fashion, true enough, Yuan,” the mother said, half sighing, “a very strange and dubious fashion, I know, brought over from the West, and I hate it and I cannot think it wise or well, but so it is.”
“Mother, you are the oddest, old-fashioned soul, and yet I love you,” said Ai-lan, laughing.
But before Yuan could speak the door opened and Sheng came in, dressed in the black and white of foreign clothing, and with him another man, whom Yuan knew was the story teller, and with them was a pretty girl, dressed exactly like Ai-lan except in green and gold. But to Yuan all girls looked the same these days, all pretty, all slight as children, all painted, and all with tinkling voices and little constant cries of joy or pain. He did not see the maid, therefore, but he looked at the famous young man, and he saw a tall smooth man, his face large and smooth and pale and very beautiful with narrow red lips and black and narrow eyes and straight narrow black brows. But the man was notable most for his hands which he moved incessantly even when he did not speak; large hands they were, but shaped like a woman’s hands, the fingers pointed at the ends and thick and soft at the base, and the flesh smooth and olive and oiled and fragrant, — voluptuous hands, for when Yuan took one in his own for greeting, it seemed to melt and flow warmly about his fingers and Yuan hated suddenly the touch of it.
But Ai-lan and the man drew together intimately in their looks and his eyes told her boldly what he thought of her beauty and seeing it the mother’s face was troubled.
Then they were suddenly gone, like a flower-laden wind, the four of them, and in the quiet room Yuan sat alone again with the mother, and she looked at him straightly.
“You see, Yuan, why I ask you?” she said quietly. “That man is already wed. I know. I asked Sheng to tell me, and at first he would not, but at last he made light of it and told me it was not thought now, if the man’s wife were old-fashioned and chosen by his parents, a dishonor if he walked with other maids. But I wish it were not my maid, Yuan!”
“I will go,” Yuan said, and now he could forget what had seemed wrong to him, because he did it for this lady’s sake.
Thus it came about that Yuan was bought the foreign clothes and Ai-lan and her mother went with him to the foreign shop and there a tailor measured him and stared at his shape, and fine black cloth was chosen for one suit and a dark brown rough stuff for a suit to wear by day. And leather shoes were bought and a hat and gloves and such small things as foreign men may wear, and all the time Ai-lan was chattering and laughing and putting out her pretty fluttering hands to pull at this or push that away, and she put her head on one side and looked at Yuan to see what would make him prettiest, until Yuan, half shy and shamed, was laughing too, and merrier than he had ever been his life long. Even the clerk laughed at Ai-lan’s talk and glanced at her secretly, she was so very free and pretty. Only the mother sighed while she smiled, for this maid did not care what she said or did, and thought only to make people laugh at her and she searched, not knowing it, to see what was in anyone’s eyes and if he found her pretty, and he always did, then she grew more merry still.
So Yuan was garbed at last, and the truth was that once he was used to a certain feeling of nakedness about his legs, where he had been accustomed to his swinging robes, he liked the foreign clothing very well. He could walk freely in it, and he liked the many pockets where he could store small things he needed every day. It was true, too, that it was pleasant to him the first day he put his new garb on himself to see Ai-lan clap her hands and hear her cry, “Yuan, you are handsome! Mother, look at him! Doesn’t it become him? That red tie — I knew it would sit well beneath that dark skin of his and so it does — Yuan, I’ll be proud of you! — Look, here we are — Miss Ching, this is my brother Yuan. I want you to be friends. Miss Li, my brother!”
And the maid pretended so to introduce him to a row of pretty girls and Yuan did not know how not to yield to his shyness and he stood smiling painfully, the dark blood in his cheeks as red as the new tie. But still it was somehow sweet, too, and when Ai-lan opened a music machine she had and set the music beating through the room, and when she seized him and laid his arm about her and took his hand and gently forced him to a movement, he let her do it, half confused, and yet finding it very pleasant. He found a natural rhythm in himself, so that before very long his feet were moving of their own accord to the pace the music set, and Ai-lan was delighted at the ease with which he learned how to move himself to music.
Thus Yuan began this new pleasure. For he found it was a pleasure. Sometimes he was ashamed of a craving it aroused in his blood, and when this craving came, he must restrain himself because he longed to seize closer the maid he held, whatever maid it was, and give himself and her to the craving. Indeed it was not an easy thing for Yuan, who until this hour had never touched even a maid’s hand, nor spoken to any maid who was not his sister or his cousin, to move to and fro in warm lighted rooms to the strange twisting foreign rhythms of music, and in his very arms a maid. At first, the first evening, he had been so torn with fear lest his feet betray him and go astray that he could not think of anything else except how to set them properly.
But soon his feet moved of their own accord and smoothly as any other pair of feet, and the music was their guide, so Yuan did not need to think of them again. Among the people of every race and nation who gathered in the pleasure houses of that city, Yuan was only one, and he was lost among their strangeness, who did not know him. He was alone, and he found himself alone and with a maid against his body and her hand in his. He saw no maid better than another, in these first days, and they all were pretty and they all were friends of Ai-lan’s and willing enough, and anyone did as well for him as any other, and all he wanted was a maid to hold and to set his heart burning with a slow sweet smothered fire to which he dared not yield.