James accepted the glass and held it without tasting its contents. He felt overwhelmed, drowned in color and noise, as everyone began to talk exactly as though he were not there. Mrs. Barnabas was smiling coquettishly at a handsome young Chinese. She laid her brightly ringed hand on his for a moment. Mr. Barnabas stood gazing at this and at everything, swaying a little on his black patent-leather toes, smiling vacantly as he sipped his cocktail. Then he sat down on the floor beside James, his long legs tangling.
“Well, how does it seem to be home?” he asked.
“I cannot realize it yet,” James replied.
“You won’t find it so different from New York,” Mr. Barnabas said proudly. “This bunch now — every one of ’em talks English. Don’t know any Chinese myself — don’t have to. Mrs. Barny, now, goes in for art and literature and so on, but I’m just a plain businessman. Course I like her to have a good time.”
“What is your business, sir?” James asked.
“Export — furs, racing ponies — I get ’em from Manchuria — native oils, tungsten, anything.”
“The war did not hurt your business?”
Mr. Barnabas laughed. “Not a bit! I made a deal, of course. The Japs let me alone. I didn’t like them, mind you — rather have the Chinese any time — but what I say is you can always make a deal.”
“Dr. Liang!” Mrs. Barnabas sang her high notes. “Please come here—”
She patted a seat beside her on the divan. James rose and sat down beside her. She turned her small, pale-green eyes upon him.
“Now you really must settle this for the whole Dialectic Society. We’ve debated so often — do be the judge!”
“The question?” James asked smiling. How absurd this woman was!
“Do you think that Robert Browning’s work improved or deteriorated after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett? Now wait — let me say it — of course hers improved — really, she had written nothing — she caught the flame from his lighted torch! But he was the true genius, don’t you think — and the real inner meaning of the question is — does the true genius flower alone out of its own solitary power, or can it — must it — have the sunshine of great love — or great suffering, or something on that order?”
She was serious! Listening and gazing into the little crimson birdlike face James let laughter subside in amazement. He looked at the faces about him, all turned to him, waiting. He longed to cry out at them, “Do you really discuss such things — even here, even now?” But he had not the heart to hurt them.
“I am only a scientist,” he said modestly. “I fear I have no opinion on Browning — or genius—”
There was a moment’s silence. Mrs. Barnabas cried out. “Oh, we can’t believe that — when your father’s such a genius!” But her outcry was drowned in a rising tide of voices, all subdued, all working together to cover and conceal what he had said. He found himself alone again and was glad when a moment later a resplendent servant announced dinner.
At the long table, however, in the privacy of the many guests, while Mrs. Barnabas talked with a pale and elongated young man who had been introduced as the Chinese Shelley, James entered into conversation with a rather pretty young woman who sat at his right. She spoke to him first and in English. “Shall you stay in Shanghai, Dr. Liang?”
“No, I am going to Peking, to the medical center there.”
“Ah, Peking!” she breathed. “It is quite nice there now. Everybody has money.”
“Indeed?” James could not decide what this young woman was. Chinese, certainly, but what else?
“While the war was going on, everybody had jobs. It was not too bad.”
“You were there?”
“Yes.” The young woman had a pretty mouth, small and red. “I sing also. I gave some concerts there — for the Europeans. Of course I studied in Paris. My name is Hellene Ho.”
“What do all these other people do?” James asked bluntly.
Hellene pointed with her little finger. “He is essayist; he is poet; he is novelist; she is costume designer; she is artist; she is sculptor—”
“They can’t live by these things,” James suggested.
Hellene laughed brightly. “Oh, no, certainly they cannot. They live by other ways — some teaching, some selling things, some just borrowing money from Mrs. Barnabas.”
“Why does she—”
“Why she does?” Hellene broke in. “Really she is rather kind, but otherwise she gets some attentions to herself. Nobody cares too much to come and see her, and Mr. Barnabas is just merchant prince. If she can say she is patroness of young Chinese thought leaders, she can invite some important guests, like you, Dr. Liang! Can you come only to see Mrs. Barnabas which you don’t know? Naturally you come to meet Dialectic Society, don’t you?”
The profuse and rich meal went on, course after course. Mrs. Barnabas neglected him except to ask an occasional bright question. “Isn’t that brilliant father of yours coming home to stay? But of course he’s doing such wonderful things for America, isn’t he!”
James met these remarks with calm. After the dinner was over he took his leave early. Mr. Barnabas had disappeared and the Dialectic Society looked sleepy and overstuffed. Only Mrs. Barnabas still glittered.
“Do, do come again, you dangerous young man,” she sighed as James shook her hand.
“Dangerous?” he repeated blankly.
“So handsome!” Mrs. Barnabas sang. “All the charm of the East and yet something wonderful — electric — from the West.”
James ground his teeth in silence, bowed, and went quietly away. The scarlet-robed menservants were pouring liqueurs and nobody saw him go.
In three or four days he was wholly impatient with Shanghai. Behind the facade of the Bund the city was crowded, dirty and noisy. His hotel looked rich and comfortable on the surface but he found his bathroom grimy and he doubted the freshness of his sheets. The towels were gray and scanty. When he spoke to his room boy of these matters, the fellow grinned. He had soon learned that James could not understand his Shanghai dialect, and spoke to him as if he were a foreigner. “Allee samee wartime, now,” he said, and made no effort to change towels or sheets.
Two or three Chinese businessmen, heads of local guilds, sent their cards and came to call upon him, and on the third night they combined in a feast of welcome at a restaurant. There were a few good dishes, sharks’ fins in chicken broth, a sweet pudding of glutenous rice, a river carp broiled whole, but the rest of the food was mediocre. Nothing was as it had been, they declared. The country was sinking to ruin. Prices were impossible to pay and no one had any pride left. After the small feast the sons of the merchants gathered around him and asked him eagerly how they could get to America. Here there was nothing to do, they told him. Schools were no good; there were no jobs. He thought as he looked at them, listening, that all of them were too pale and thin. When the main dishes had been brought in by a dirty waiter they had eaten ravenously.
“I came back because I believe that I can do something useful here,” he said.
They looked at one another with blank eyes. “There is nothing you can do,” they declared. “There is nothing anybody can do.”
Defeat was the smell of the city. In his hotel a few sullen American businessmen loitered over whisky sodas, waiting for old times to begin again. They would wait and then go home. In New York a Chinese delegate to the United Nations had said to him, “I would not say this before Americans, but I tell you — do not be shocked at what you see in China. You will not be proud of your country. Your father is wiser than you.”
“But my father is very proud of our country and he has taught us to be so, too,” he had retorted.