Then to while the time away when they were seated after courtesies, and his cousin had shouted for tea to be brought, Yuan asked, “What do you now, elder cousin? For I see your fortunes have risen.”
At this the man laughed and was well pleased and he fumbled at a thick gold chain hung across his great belly, and he answered, “I am a vice president of a newly opened bank now, Yuan. There is good business these days in banks in this foreign place where wars cannot touch us, and they have opened everywhere. People used to put their silver into land. I remember our old grandfather never rested until all he had was made over into land and yet more land. But land is not so sure as it once was. There are even places where the tenants have arisen and taken land from landlords.”
“Are they not stopped?” asked Yuan, astonished.
And the lady thrust in sharply, “They ought to be killed!”
But the cousin shrugged himself a little in the tightness of his foreign coat and flung up his pudgy hands and he said, “Who shall stop them? Who knows how to stop anything these days?” And when Yuan murmured, “Government?” he repeated, “Government! This new confusion of warlord and student and that we call government! What can they stop? No, each man for himself these days, and so the money pours into our banks and we are safe enough guarded by foreign soldiery and under foreign law. … Yes, it is a good prosperous place I hold, and I have it through the grace of friends.”
“My friends,” his lady put in quickly. “If it had not been for me and that I grew friends with a great banker’s wife and through her came to know her husband and begged for you—”
“Yes, yes,” the man said hastily. “I know that—” and he fell into silence and discomfort of a sort, as though there were something there he would not discuss too clearly, and as though he had paid some secret price for what he had. Then the lady asked Yuan very prettily, for there was a sort of cool polished prettiness in all she said and did now, as though she had said and done everything before a mirror first, “So, Yuan, you are home again and a man and you know everything!”
When Yuan smiled mutely to deny his knowledge, she laughed a little set laugh and put her silken kerchief to her lips and said again, “Oh, I am sure you know much you will not tell of, for you have not come out of such years knowing as little as you did when you began them!”
What Yuan would have said to this he did not know and he felt uneasy, as though his cousin’s wife was false and strange, and as though she were encased about with falseness so he could not know how she really was, but at this moment a servant came in leading her old mistress, and Yuan rose to greet his aunt.
Into this rich foreign room the old lady came, leaning on her servant. She was a thin upright figure, her hair still black, but her face wrinkled into many crossing lines, though her eyes were as they were, very sharp and critical of all they saw. To her son and son’s wife she paid no heed, but she let Yuan bow to her and took his greeting and sat down and called to the servant, saying, “Fetch me the spittoon!”
When the servant had so done, she coughed and spat very decently, and then she said to Yuan, “I am as sound as ever I was, thanks to the gods, except that I have this cough and the phlegm comes up in me especially in the mornings.”
At this her daughter-in-law looked at her with great distaste, but her son said soothingly, “It is always so with the aged, my mother.”
The lady paid no heed to him. She looked Yuan up and down and asked, “How does my second son in that outer country?” And when she heard Yuan say Sheng was well she said positively, “I shall wed him when he comes home.”
Now her daughter-in-law laughed out and said uncautiously, “I do not see Sheng being wed against his will, my mother — not as the young are nowadays.”
The old lady cast a look at her daughter-in-law, a look which showed she had spoken her feelings against her many times and now it was no use, so she said on to Yuan, “My third son is an official. Doubtless you have heard. Yes, Meng is now a captain over many men in the new army.”
This Yuan heard again, and again he smiled secretly remembering how this lady had once cried against Meng. His cousin saw the smile and put down the bowl of tea he had been sipping loudly and he said, “It is so. My brother came in with the triumphant armies from the south, and now he holds a very good high place in the new capital and has his own soldiers under him, and we hear very brave and ruthless tales of him. He could come any day now to see us, for he is safe enough since the old rulers are swept so clean and flown to every foreign land for safety, only he is busy and cannot be spared.”
But the old lady would not suffer any talk but her own. She coughed and spat again loudly and then she asked, “What position shall you take, Yuan, now that you have been abroad? You ought to win a very good high pay!”
To this Yuan answered mildly, “First, as you know, Ai-lan is to be wed three days hence and then I go to my father, and then I shall see how the way opens up before me.”
“That Ai-lan!” said the old lady, suddenly, fastening on the name. “I would not let my daughter wed a man like that! I would put her in a nunnery first!”
“Ai-lan in a nunnery!” cried her son’s wife, hearing this, and she laughed her little false and bitter laugh.
“If she were my daughter, so I would!” the old lady said firmly, staring at her daughter-in-law, and she would have said more except that she choked suddenly, and she coughed until the servant must rub her shoulders and strike her back to let her breathe again.
At last Yuan took his leave, and when he went homeward through the sunny streets, choosing to walk this fair day, he thought how good as dead this old pair were. Yes, all the old were good as dead, he thought joyously. But he was young and the times were young, and on this brilliant summer’s morning it seemed to him he met none but young in this whole city — young laughing girls in light-colored robes, their pretty arms bare in the new foreign fashion, and young men with them free and laughing. In this city all today were rich and young, and Yuan felt himself one of these rich and young, and his life was good to him.
But soon none had time to think of anything these days except Ai-lan’s wedding. For Ai-lan and the man were well known everywhere among the young rich of the city not only of their own race, but among those of other peoples too, and there were bidden to the marriage more than a thousand guests, and to the feast afterwards very nearly as many. Yuan had no time for any speech with Ai-lan alone, except for a little hour on the first day when he came back. Yet even then he felt he did not truly talk with her. For her old teasing laughing self was gone, and he could not penetrate into the lovely finish and assuredness that wrapped her about now. She asked him with what seemed her old frank look, “You are glad to be home, Yuan?” But when he answered he saw that her eyes, for all they looked at him, did not see him at all, but were turned inward in some thought of her own, and they were only lovely shapes of dark liquid light. So through all the hour, until Yuan was bewildered by the distance all about her and he asked uneasily, blurting out the words, “You are different — you do not seem happy — do you want to marry?”
But there the distance still was. She opened her pretty eyes very widely and made her voice very cool and silvery and laughed a small clear laugh and said, “Am I not so pretty, Yuan? I have grown old and pale and ugly!” And Yuan said hastily, “No — no — you are prettier, but—” and she said, mocking him a little as she used to do, “What — shall I be so bold as to say I want to be wed and must be wed to this man? Did I ever do anything I did not want to do, brother? Have I not always been naughty and willful? At least I hear my aunt say so, and mother is too good to say it, but I know she thinks it—”