If afterwards he was ashamed, when he was cooled by daylight and the soberness of school rooms, still he need not tell himself the thing was dangerous for him and he should avoid it, because there was his duty to the lady, and he could say he was helping her.
It was true he did most carefully watch his sister, and at the end of every evening’s pleasure he waited until Ai-lan was ready to come home, and he never asked another maid to go with him, lest he must take her home and leave Ai-lan. Especially was he so careful because he must justify to himself these hours he spent thus, and he was very zealous and the more because it was true that the man Wu did meet Ai-lan very often. This one thing could make Yuan forget the sweet sickness that stole into him sometimes when the music swayed too much and the maid he held clung closely to him, and it was if he saw Ai-lan turn aside to any other room with that one named Wu, or if she sought a balcony for the coolness. Then he could not rest until the dance was ended and he could go and find her and stay near her.
But be sure Ai-lan did not always bear it. Often she pouted at him, and sometimes she cried in anger, “I wish you would not stick so close to me, Yuan! It is time you went alone now and sought out maids for yourself. You do not need me any longer. You dance as well as anyone. I wish you would let me be!”
To this Yuan answered nothing. He would not say out what the lady had told him and Ai-lan would not press the thing too plainly, either, not even in her anger. It was as though she feared to tell something she did not want told, but when she was not angry she could forget and be as merry a play-fellow as ever with him.
At last she grew cunning and even was not angry with him. Rather she laughed and let him follow her as he would, as though she wanted to keep him friendly to her. For everywhere Ai-lan went, the story teller was. He seemed to know the maid’s mother did not like him, for now he never came to her house. But always at other houses, whether public or of friends, there he was near Ai-lan, as if he knew where Ai-lan was to be. And Yuan began to watch Ai-lan dancing with this man, and he saw at these times her little face was grave. This very gravity sat so strangely on her that Yuan was troubled by it often, and once or twice he was about to tell the lady of it. Yet there was nothing true to tell, for Ai-lan danced with many men, and one night when they came home together Yuan asked her why she was so grave with that one man, and she said lightly, laughing while she spoke, “Perhaps I do not like to dance with him!” And she drew down her mouth and thrust out her little red painted lips to Yuan to mock at him.
“Then why do it?” Yuan put to her bluntly, and she laughed and laughed at this, some hidden mischief in her eyes and at last she said, “I can’t be rude, Yuan.” So he let it pass from his mind, though doubtfully, and it remained a darkening on his pleasure.
There was another thing to mar his pleasure, too, a small thing and usual, and yet there it was. Each time Yuan came out of the heated brilliant midnight rooms where flowers were and food and wine spilled out and more than anyone had needed, he seemed to step out into that other world he wanted to forget. For in the darkness or in the grey dawn, the beggars and the desperate poor stood huddled by the doorways, some to try and sleep, but some to steal, like street dogs, into the pleasure houses after the guests were gone, and grovel under tables to snatch at the broken bits of food that were thrown there. It could be but a brief moment only, for the serving men roared and kicked at them and dragged them out by the legs and barred the gates against them. These piteous creatures Ai-lan and her playmates never saw, or if they saw they paid no heed to them and were as used to them as to stray beasts, and they went laughing and calling to each other from their vehicles, and so went gaily to their homes and beds.
But Yuan saw. Even against his will he saw them, and it came to be that even in the midst of the night’s pleasure, in the midst of music and of dancing, he remembered with great dread the moment when he must go into the grey street and see the cringing figures and the wolfish faces of the poor. Sometimes one of these poor stretched out a hand in despair at such deafness as these merry rich people had, and the hand would lay hold upon a lady’s satin robe and cling to it.
Then a man’s lordly voice would shout out, “Your hand away there! How can you lay your filthy hand upon my lady’s satin robe and soil it?” And a policeman of those who stood there would rush forth and beat the taloned filthy hand away.
But Yuan shrank and bent his head and hurried on, because he was so formed in spirit that he felt as upon his own flesh the beating of the wooden club, and it was his own starved hand that winced and fell down broken. At this time of his life Yuan loved pleasure, and he was unwilling to see the poor, and yet he was so shaped within that he saw them all even while he wished he did not.
But there were not only such nights in Yuan’s life now. There were the sturdy days of work in school among his fellows, and here he came to know better his cousins Sheng and Meng, whom Ai-lan called the Poet and the Rebel. Here in the school these two were their true selves, and in the classrooms or in throwing a great ball about upon the playground, they all, these three young cousins, could forget themselves. They could sit in the decorous listening rows of desks, or leap and shout at their fellows and roar with laughter at some faulty play, and Yuan came to know his cousins as he never did at home.
For as young men at home among their elders are never their true selves, so were not these two, Sheng always being silent and too good for everybody, and secret as to his poems, and Meng always sulky and prone to knock against some small table or other too full of small toys and bowls of tea, so that his mother cried constantly against him, “I swear no son of mine has ever been so like a young buffalo in my house. Why can you not walk smooth and silent as Sheng does?” And yet when Sheng came home so late from pleasure that he could not rise in time the next morning for his school she would cry at Sheng, “I ever say I am the most suffering mother in the world, and all my sons are worthless. Why can you not stay decently at home at night as Meng does? I do not see him slipping out at night dressed like a foreign devil and going I do not know to what evil place. It is your elder brother leads you wrong, as his own father did lead him. It is your father’s fault at bottom and I always said it was.”
Now the truth was that Sheng never went to the same pleasure houses as his elder brother did, for Sheng liked a daintier sort of pleasure, and Yuan saw him often in the pleasure houses where Ai-lan was. Sometimes he went with Yuan and Ai-lan, but often he went alone with some maid he loved for the time, and they two would dance together the whole evening through in silence and in perfect pleasure.
Thus the brothers went their own ways, each absorbed in some secret life of this great multitudinous city. But, although Sheng and Meng were two such diverse souls that they might easily have quarreled, more easily than either with the elder brother, who was too far older than they were, since there were two between, one dead by hanging himself in his youth, and the other given to the Tiger, yet they did not quarrel, partly because Sheng was a truly gentle laughing youth who held nothing worth a quarrel, and he let Meng have his way, but also because each was in the other’s secret. If Meng knew Sheng went to certain places, Sheng knew Meng was a secret revolutionist and had his own certain hidden meeting places, too, though in a different cause, yet in a more dangerous one. And so the two kept silence for each other and neither defended himself before the mother at the expense of the other. But each, as time went on, came to know Yuan and to like him the more, because he told to neither of them what one might tell to Yuan alone.