“You can trust me,” he said. “I won’t give up.”
He was somewhat daunted, however, by Lili’s air of resolute calm when she arose with undulant grace to meet him that evening, as he entered the elaborate living room of the Li apartment. She put out her hand and took his and led him to the sofa where she had been sitting. On the sofa opposite, Mr. and Mrs. Li sat with some formality and their faces were solemn. When he greeted them they inclined their heads and did not speak and he knew at once that Lili had told them what he had asked. He knew, too, that they had discussed the matter and had decided what their answer would be. Their reserve frightened him. Were they favorable surely they would not have looked so grave. He concealed his fears and sat down beside Lili, accepted the tea she offered him, and declined the suggestion of what she called “viskee-sodah” from the small tray on the table in front of the empty ornate fireplace. They were being very Chinese, he realized, and a mingling of stubbornness and humor with his dismay made him determine to be also as Chinese as he could.
“The night is mild,” he announced. “The sky is the color of rain.” Because he did not want to speak English tonight he spoke in Mandarin Chinese, native to him but foreign to Mrs. Li’s Shanghai-bred tongue.
Nevertheless she answered him in an attempt at the same language. “The river will grow more damp, and it will be bad for our cough.”
James drank a little tea and set down the bowl. “There are many varieties of climate in this large country,” he remarked. “Would it not be well for you to travel to the West where the air is dry and there is constant sunshine?”
Mrs. Li shook her head. “We cannot leave New York,” she sighed. “It is like Shanghai. And where else can we buy fresh ginger and bamboo shoots? In Chinatown the markets are at least as good as in small towns in our own land.”
Mr. Li rumbled forth his cough. “The soy sauce is quite good here,” he remarked.
Lili said nothing. She sat in repose, her exquisite hands crossed on the lap of her apple-green satin robe. She wore a white gardenia in her hair and green jade earrings. The scent of the gardenia wrapped her in fragrant air, and stole into the young man’s heart. He grew impatient with the slow preambles of Chinese courtesy and he suddenly cast them aside. Leaning forward he addressed himself to Mr. Li in English.
“Sir, I think Lili has told you that I have asked her to marry me very soon and go with me to China. I have come to ask your permission.”
Mrs. Li rose immediately. “Come, child,” she said to Lili in her Shanghai dialect. “We shall leave this matter to the two men.”
Lili obeyed, and Mr. Li maintained a grave silence while they left the room together. When they were gone he rose and went to the door and closed it. He wore tonight Chinese robes which covered his portly figure and gave him great dignity. James had seen him until now only in the new Western clothes he had bought when he first came to America, and although they were expensive and of excellent quality, they did not suit his shoulders rounded from a lifetime in comfortable Chinese garments and they revealed too harshly his hanging belly. The thinness of his legs, too, was concealed now by the long and richly brocaded satin robes of a dull blue. When he returned he sat down beside James and put out his plump tapering fingers and began to talk in Chinese.
“What I am about to say has nothing to do with you.” His Mandarin was stilted but intelligible. Every businessman was compelled to know Mandarin, wherever his home in China. “I am very willing for you to marry Lili. It will be a weight off my mind. But you ask me to allow you to take my daughter back to the country from which we have escaped. Now, do not mistake me. I hate this foreign country and I love our country. But I tell you, times are very bad in China. Even without my gall bladder I found business hard. Only a few of us have money, and since the Americans always want to have fifty-one per cent and we Chinese are determined to keep fifty-one per cent, business stands still. This is why I took the opportunity to come to this country and get my gall bladder cut out. When I go to the operation next month, it would comfort me to think my daughter is married safely to a good young man with ability, such as you are. Then I can die without distress.”
James broke in. “Sir, it is not necessary for you to die. I understand those things and—”
Mr. Li put up his pale soft hand and stopped him. “You are not cutting me open,” he said gently. “Were you holding the knife I would not think of death.”
James quivered with inspiration and anxiety. “Sir, if you can trust me to perform the operation—”
Mr. Li looked instantly alarmed. “No — no—” he exclaimed. “Americans are used to cutting. Besides, you are young and I am an important man.”
He sighed and rubbed his belly with the palm of his hand. “Yet I wish — no, it cannot be. The doctor has been chosen and I have already paid out some money. In the night, I will tell you, I am afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid, sir,” James urged. “The surgeons here are excellent.”
To this Mr. Li replied in a mournful voice, “A Chinese does not willfully kill. But Americans think nothing of it. You did not see their soldiers in Shanghai. They rode about in their small cars and killed anyone in their way. On one street in one day near our house they killed seven people without stopping to find out what they had done. Why should they spare a single old Chinese like me? And, more than that, I have inquired and found that even though I die I must pay them. What injustice is this? Yet I am helpless. I cannot cut open my own belly. If the doctors were Chinese they would not expect to be paid for killing me, as you know. They might expect to be sued. But here it seems doctors cannot commit murder, whomever they kill. I have inquired and I have been told that even the President of America would have to pay his doctor were he killed. As you know, we would never consent to such extortion.”
Mr. Li’s earnest soft voice flowed on and on. He spoke little before his wife and daughter, and when he was alone with a man all this talk came flowing out of him. He felt very near to this handsome young Chinese. He had lost his only son in childhood and he felt he was getting back a son again, one stronger and healthier and better in every way than the poor little boy whose mother had smothered him to death with too much love. Little Ah Fah had died of a dose of opium which Mrs. Li had commanded for a stomachache he had developed after eating too many sweet rice cakes. A zealous but ignorant nursemaid had doubled the dose. Mr. Li had felt himself so confounded and overwhelmed by women that after his son’s death he had withdrawn from life. His sexual impulses, never strong, had left him completely, and he refused the concubine whom Mrs. Li had proposed for him as atonement for her carelessness. Her grief, however, had touched his heart, and at last he turned to her. Outside his enormous and richly decorated house in the French Concession of Shanghai he had been an astute and successful businessman, but at home he was subdued, indulgent, and almost totally silent.
James did not attempt to contradict anything Mr. Li now said. He realized that it was somehow a relief to the older man to pour out all his fears and prejudices and he sat, half smiling, listening, seeming to agree, waiting for the end when he supposed Mr. Li would give his consent.
“Now,” Mr. Li said, “here is what I ask. Do not go back to China for a few years. Later, certainly! I do not wish to be buried here and if I die, as I expect to do, under the foreign knife, my body is to be placed in a metal coffin. The coffin is to be filled with lime and sealed and placed in storage. I do not wish to be buried in this American earth. When the affairs of our country are improved enough for you to take my daughter’s mother, my daughter, and I hope my grandchildren back to Shanghai, my body must go with the family. The house in Shanghai is yours. It is very large, and it is completely furnished, on the eastern side Chinese, on the western side foreign. The garden is very large indeed, at least ten foreign acres, fifty Chinese mou, and there is a very old pine tree in the center of the rock garden. Under the pine tree is a space which I prepared for my grave when I made the garden twenty years ago. The family cemetery is in our village outside Soochow, but I wish to lie for a generation or so among my grandchildren. Later, when you want to be buried there yourself you can have me moved to the family place. By that time I shall be used to being dead and it will not matter. After a hundred years we are all dust.”