She rose and began to collect the dishes. Yet as always her heart relented toward her husband. It was true that New York was hot. Certainly it was not so hot as Shanghai was in the summer, but he forgot that. He had forgotten so much about China. It would be no great expense to go to some small place in the mountains to the north. She pattered back into the living room to tell him so. But he was asleep, stretched out on the long sofa, breathing deeply and calmly.
She gazed at him for a moment and wondered if he looked thinner and decided he did not. When they were first married he had been very thin and tall and to her surprise he wept when anything was hard. His mother said he had always wept easily and therefore he must be shielded from distress. It was, she had said, his scholarly temperament. Mrs. Liang, then a ruddy strong young woman, had listened and she did not understand her young husband, but evidently he was some sort of treasure. She still did not understand him, but he was still her treasure. She would not wake him.
So turning away she mounted the stairs slowly to find Mary and then she felt sleepy also and yawned. After all, she was not so young as she had been. The house was very quiet. The children must have gone outside, perhaps to the park. The letter from James could wait. She opened the door of her bedroom softly and then closed it. The room looked cool and pleasant and she took off her silk robe and folded it carefully across a chair. Then she lay down on the bed; her jaw fell, and she was instantly asleep.
On a bench by the river, Mary, Peter, and Louise discussed this first long letter from James. He had sent a cable announcing his arrival in Peking, and they had awaited the letter with impatience. By it they would judge whether China was what they hoped it was or feared it was not. On the whole, the letter was favorable. The journey northward, James wrote, was something to experience rather than talk about. He was inclined sometimes to think that the worst they had heard from Chinese who had fled to New York was not bad enough. Filth and poverty were everywhere. The train was something that could not be imagined and the callousness to death had frightened him. It was not only that an old man had been swept from the ferry, or that the dead lay in the streets of Shanghai. There was some sort of cruelty here, toward the helpless — he was not ready yet to define it. The animals were wretched, even the donkeys and mules carried loads far too heavy and these loads were laid on raw sores on the beasts’ backs. Yet he supposed that animals must share the miseries of men, and men staggered under dreadful burdens.
Mary had been reading the letter aloud solemnly to the two on either side of her. Now she paused and the letter fell to her lap. She gazed at the bridge, shimmering in the afternoon heat. The water in the river was as smooth as oil. “This helps me to understand something about our mother,” she said. “She is cruel to animals, too, though she is kind enough to people. How she hates the little dogs that women make pets of here!”
“They are pretty silly, though,” Peter said.
“She doesn’t like to see animals treated as human beings,” Louise suggested.
“It’s more than that,” Mary said soberly. She took up the letter again and read on.
When James had reached Peking, he wrote, he had gone straight to the hospital and had found two comfortable rooms ready for him. It was like stepping back into New York. The hospital was very fine and luxurious, built by Americans with American money. The Japanese had left it alone, or very nearly, and the equipment, while not of the latest, was still very good. The view from his windows was superb. The city roofs were delicately shaped and old courtyards were rich with ancient trees. Over the city wall in the distance were the bare outlines of mountains. He had been here only a week and so he had not taken time to do any sight-seeing, but Peking was the way he had dreamed China looked. The streets were wide and the gates were massive and beautiful. Everything had been built with the outlook of centuries in the past and centuries yet to come. The city seemed indestructible. It made him proud to be a Chinese. He had gone to see the marble bridge because their father had told him it was even more beautiful than the George Washington Bridge. It was impossible to compare them. This bridge in Peking was made of marble and stone and there were sculptured lions on it. It was true that the mounting curve was matchless.
The three, reading, lifted their eyes again to the curve of steel beyond where they sat. It soared against the sky, as modern as the century in which they lived. They could not imagine a bridge of marble with sculptured lions.
Peking, James wrote, made him want to send for them all. People told him that the winters were cold and that in the early spring yellow dust floated over the city, borne by bitter winds from the northern desert. Summer was the perfect season. He was really very happy. Something deep in his soul was being satisfied. He worked hard but he did not tire as he had in New York. He felt relaxed. Nobody hurried and yet more work was done, he believed, than he had ever seen done before. People moved at an even, steady pace, their minds at ease. They seemed ready for any fate. They were sturdy and self-confident. He was beginning to understand Americans better than he had even when he was with them. He felt now that Americans suffered from submerged feelings of guilt, as though they knew they were not as good as they wanted to be or wanted people to think they were. But here in Peking people did not care what other people thought, and so they could be only as good as they wanted to be. Life flowed, like a river.
“It sounds like heaven,” Mary said, and her eyes dreamed.
Neither Peter nor Louise answered.
She read on. “I feel that if Lili saw this place she would be willing to come to me,” James wrote. “Houses are not hard to find. We could live very happily — she would not need to work. She could live as idly as a lily, indeed, and being so beautiful who would blame her?”
Mary stopped here. What James commissioned her to do in the next few sentences was only for her eyes. But Peter gave a yelp. He rose and straightened the fold in his trousers carefully. “Tell Jim he is way back in the past so far as that young woman is concerned. She’s been tentatively engaged to three men since she was tentatively engaged to him.”
“Don’t talk so,” Mary commanded him.
“Ting told me,” Peter retorted. “Ting says he is going to get his dad to put pressure on old Li. It’s the only way to pin Lili down.”
“What pressure?” Mary asked.
“Ting says old Li was really a collaborator with the Japs and his dad has the proof. He skipped out just in time to avoid getting put in jail — or coughing up a couple of million to put into certain outstretched hands.”
Both girls stared at him. “Really?” Louise murmured. She enjoyed gossip.
“Tell Jim unless he can put on pressure, too, he had just better forget the whole business,” Peter said. He set his straw hat at an angle. “’By, kids! I promised Ting to meet him. We’re going to run out to the beach with a couple of girls.”
His sisters did not speak. They watched him thoughtfully as he sauntered to the street, hailed a taxi, and disappeared.
“Do you think we ought to tell Mother what he does?” Louise asked.
“She can’t do anything,” Mary said. “He needs to go away from America. I wish Jim would send for him.”
“Peter doesn’t know enough to be of any use anywhere,” Louise yawned. “I’m going home to sleep — Estelle wants me to go to a dance with them tonight.”
“Where?” Mary asked.
“Some roof or other,” Louise answered indifferently. She hid from her shrewd elder sister the excitement of her heart. Tonight she would dance with Philip. Estelle was making it a party of four.