James stirred. “Sir, I want to work—”
Mr. Li put up his hand again. “It is not necessary,” he said gently. “I have money enough to support at least five generations. I saw perfectly what the Japanese intended to do. Anyone could see what would happen when the foreigners stopped what they called their first world war. I sold my mills when the Japanese reached Manchuria. By then of course war was inevitable. All my fortune is in banks here in New York. I do not mind telling you that I am one of the largest depositors in three banks in this city.”
Mr. Li smiled dimly and put up his hand again when he saw that once more James was about to speak.
“Wait — this is not all. I will settle everything on you, as my son, on the day I go under the foreign knife. I can trust you. You will take care of an old father and mother. Yes, you will be my real son. I ask only one return — that you will take my name when you marry my daughter; it is an old custom with us, you know, when a man has no son.”
He looked shrewdly at the grave young man who suddenly pressed his lips together and hurried on. “The surname Li is honorable. It is among the Hundred Names. And your father has another son. I am not robbing him. Now then, everything is clear between us. Certainly I give my permission for the wedding. Let it be at once. Say two weeks from today? That gives time for new clothes and the guests to be chosen and so on. It gives me nearly a month before my death. With luck I even hope that before I die my daughter may conceive. Well, that would be very good luck, and that is perhaps too much to ask. Still—” Mr. Li pursed his lips and smiled.
James had no heart to break the old man’s dreams, and yet it must be done. Trained as a surgeon, he went swiftly to the task. “I do not believe you will die, sir,” he said, “and it is better if you do not take it for granted. The mind must help the body to live — we doctors know that. But, sir, please do not ask me to change the plan I have made for my life. I am surnamed Liang, and I must remain what I am born. I thank you deeply and I will be to you as a son, whatever my name.”
Mr. Li winced and tears filled his eyes. James looking away from his face saw the fat white hands lying on the satin lap begin to tremble. He looked away from the hands and went on. “I am glad that you want Lili and our children to live in our own country. So far we are agreed. I have grown up here and it is not good for us. We are exiles, however kind the people. But even that is not why I want to go home. I have a hope — fantastic, perhaps — that I can do some good for my own people.”
“The times are so bad,” Mr. Li’s voice was a wail.
“I know — and that is why I feel I must go back,” James said.
He could not tell Mr. Li what it was that made his purpose hard in his heart. He had never said even to Mary that in some deeply repressed corner of his being he grieved that his own father had chosen to live in exile during the years of their country’s hardship. He knew all the arguments, that a scholar could not work in the midst of turmoil and war. He believed these arguments were true. He knew that his father’s delicately balanced mind needed safety and quiet and security in order to do its work. But he had long ago determined that he would work where he was most needed, in the midst of turmoil, even in war. He would not allow his mind to be delicate nor his heart remote.
Mr. Li came to the attack again, not harshly or boldly but with pleading. “Lili has been gently reared. She grew very nervous and ill during the bombing of Shanghai. Perhaps she has not told you how nearly she was killed?”
“No!” James cried in a low voice of horror.
Mr. Li nodded. “She was shopping in Wing On’s department store. I had told her she could buy a sable coat. The Russians sent in very good furs to us. She was trying it on when the bomb fell. Luckily she had gone to the stairs, where there was a window, to see the fur by the daylight. Thus she was able to run down the stairs, and escape before the whole building collapsed,” Mr. Li sighed. “Unfortunately she threw off the coat, thinking it would be too heavy. Otherwise she would have kept that, too.”
James did not speak. He continued to look steadfastly at Mr. Li, his face very grave.
Mr. Li went on. “For this reason she is easily frightened, and perhaps will be so all her life. Now maybe Shanghai is better, but we cannot be sure of this. All sorts of disaster still threaten. What if the Communists win? Who can know Heaven’s will? For that reason, even as you say you will not accept our name, I must say that Lili shall not go to China now.”
This was Mr. Li’s ultimatum and James knew it. He knew also that by Chinese reasoning, had he been willing to yield and change his surname, Mr. Li might have made compromise and allowed him to take Lili to China. If one does not give, one cannot expect to receive. He felt the soft implacable net of the reciprocity of Chinese life spread about his feet, and his heart grew firm. He had lived in freedom and he stood alone. He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and squared his shoulders. “I shall be sorry to leave my wife here in America to wait alone until China is fit for her to live in. But my work must come first.”
Sweat broke out on Mr. Li’s pale face. “You are too foreign,” he said. A dull ferocity flamed in his face. His lips turned slowly blue. “With a Chinese, family comes first.”
James looked down steadfastly into the upturned face. With understanding and sympathy the younger man looked at the older, and still he could not yield. More than his own life was held in this moment. He had lived for all the years of his adolescence and young manhood in the presence of a dream, and the dream was his country, in peril and need, and himself, devoted to her rescue. He could not give up his dream, for then he would die. And it was worse for a young man to die than an old one. Mr. Li, James told himself hardily, had never done China any good. He was one of those who had lived for his own family. To family how often China had been sacrificed and by how many!
He felt his soul blaze into solitary fire. “Whatever I am, I am first myself,” he told Mr. Li as he turned and left the room and walking down the hall went out of the house.
He could not go home. The night air was soft and the streets were quiet. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was eleven o’clock. There was all night yet to face. He walked slowly, hatless, his hands in his pockets, down the streets and across to the river. There the bridge was, the George Washington Bridge. The name meant something. He had grown up with American heroes. George Washington was more living to him than Confucius. Confucius was a preacher or maybe a teacher, like his father, but George Washington was a doer and the creator of a new nation. The bridge stretched across he enormous span of the river. Mists were rising in soft swirls from the chilled water, and the farther end of the bridge was hidden. It reached from the near shore endlessly into the distance, into the future, and his rich imagination made it a symbol. He would cross the bridge of his dreams, even though he walked alone.