He tested the pen on a bit of paper. “This is one of those self-come ink pens,” he said. “I wish very much someday to have one. But still why should I have it when I cannot write my own name?”
These last words Young Wang said with more sorrow than he had said anything and a flush of shame rose from his neck and spread over his face. He covered the pen again and laid it on the table. “Shall I bring you some night food?” he asked.
“No,” James replied. “I must return to the hospital and see how my patients are before they sleep. I will eat later in the dining hall downstairs.”
“They give you good food here?” Young Wang asked wistfully.
“Excellent.”
“Do the servants eat what is left?”
“I will see that you get your food,” James replied. He knew that doctors often had their private servants. They were fed, probably at the hospital kitchens.
Young Wang immediately looked cheerful. “With my belly certain of fullness three times each day, I fear no god or man,” he declared.
“That is good,” James replied. He went away to his patients and left Young Wang standing before the mirror, arranging the belt about his thin waist.
5
JAMES LIANG WAS NOT A MAN who put his thoughts easily into words. He had learned to distrust words as gestures and flourishes of the mind, more especially of his father’s mind. As a child and a boy he had sat through long evenings in the big comfortable living room and had listened to his father and his friends, elegant and educated in the cultures of England and Europe. Whatever they discussed, and they discussed everything, was spun into a web of words which yet had no substance. By the end of an evening instead of conclusion and conviction the web had dissolved into a mist, and the mist itself dissolved in the silence of the room when they had gone. His father, so genial and brilliant with his guests, came back from the door silent and empty. If the boy James asked a question he was impatient. “It is time for sleep,” he always said shortly.
In this distrust of words James had turned to his American schoolmates, who spun no webs either of thoughts or of words. A hard-hitting fist was more honored than a graceful phrase, and a fact was always more valuable than an idea. Action instead of feeling was what he had learned outside his home, and action he preferred when his father yielded often to the inexplicable melancholy of the exile. From this melancholy his father’s only escape again was in words. A mood, caught from a gray sky over the river and a chill autumn wind, was translated into an essay of tragedy. James was grown before he understood that nothing his father wrote was from conviction. All was from feeling, transient enough. Therefore the young man had learned also to distrust feeling.
Thus, he had nothing with which to understand his own melancholy as the summer ripened in the ancient city. That he was not happy he knew. That he was lonely he knew very well. He tried to believe that this was because of Lili but his too honest heart told him that it was not. He came to putting it in words only in the few brief letters which he wrote to his sister Mary, among the dutiful ones he wrote his father and mother.
“I may as well tell you that there is too much here that is rotten,” he wrote to Mary. “I suppose this is partly because we are an old people and much dead wood has not been cut away. There is decay here — I cannot find out just where, but I see it in Su and Kang and Peng and others. It is even in the nurses. But also it is in the cooks and the orderlies. Money sticks to every hand. Well, it sticks to many hands in America, too, but here there is no pretense about it. Maybe pretense is not good. Anyway, I somehow feel I have no home in the world.”
In this letter he said nothing about Lili, and reading it in the solitude of her own room Mary rejoiced. Then she read the letter again slowly. It had come to her at a moment when she herself was restless. The summer in the Vermont mountains had filled her with health and energy which as yet had no purpose. She had no lover. She had rejected with some disgust a young Chinese journalist who had pursued her. To accept an American would have been to violate the profound love of her country which was the true passion of her heart. She had quarreled all summer with Louise when she found that this younger sister moped when the mail was delayed. It had not taken too long to discover that Louise read a letter from Estelle almost as eagerly as she read the less frequent ones from Philip.
Mary had taken Louise for a walk when she discovered this, and upon a path fragrant with pine trees in the sun she had faced her sister. “Louise, don’t be a fool.” Thus their talk had begun.
Louise had blushed. Both girls stood still, and by chance it was Louise who stood in the sunshine. Mary looked at her intently and severely. “So you blush!” she cried.
Louise tossed her curled hair. “No, I don’t blush.”
“Your face is red,” Mary said. “I can see something in your eyes. Do you think Philip will marry a Chinese girl? You are silly, Louise. His father and mother will not allow it.”
“Who talked about marriage?” Louise asked. She began to walk on quickly. Mary had waited a moment, watching the slender figure of her sister in its pale yellow dress. Then she had followed with impetuous steps.
“I hope you are not thinking of anything else, Louise,” she said. She seized her sister’s hand. “Louise, do not forget — we are not American. Although we have never seen our own country, yet we are Chinese. We cannot behave like American girls.”
Louise pulled her hand away. “Let me alone,” she cried, and suddenly she began to run down the path and Mary had not pursued her. She sat down on a log and sitting alone she had tried to think what she should do, whether she should tell her parents, whether even she should write to James.
In the end after the family had come back to the city she had talked to Peter, but he had been scornful. “It doesn’t matter what Louise does,” he had said in his young and lordly fashion. “I tell you Louise is already spoiled.”
Mary’s heart had stopped. “Peter, what do you mean?” she had demanded.
Peter had laughed at her look. “Perhaps they have not slept together, if that is what scares you. Mary, you are very old-fashioned. No, but if Philip wanted Louise she would go to him.”
“Doesn’t Philip want her?”
Peter shook his head.
“You mean you have talked with him about Louise?” Mary cried.
Peter looked unwilling. Mary and he breakfasted early and usually alone, and they were talking in the dining room before their parents had come down. “I saw him kiss her one day,” he said at last.
“No!” Mary whispered. “Did Louise let him?”
Peter grinned. “She helped.”
Mary was silent for a moment. As plainly as though she had been in Peter’s place she saw the tall young American with Louise in his arms. “I shall tell Pa,” she said.
Peter shrugged his shoulders. “You have always had too much courage,” he said. He had risen from the table at that, and had gone away to his own affairs. He had only two weeks left him before college and nothing else was important to him.
When Dr. Liang came down ten minutes later he found his elder daughter looking very pretty but preoccupied. He wondered if she were thinking about some young man. Her marriage was the subject of frequent conversation between him and Mrs. Liang and he intended as soon as he saw a suitable young man to make the proper preliminary approaches. Now, observing his daughter’s pretty face and figure, it occurred to him that he ought not to delay too long.
“Good morning, Pa,” Mary said.
“Good morning,” he replied. He sat down and sipped the glass of orange juice at his plate.