What made me sad was that here gathered about the long table in New York I saw the same young Chinese men who at home were earnestly and unconsciously destroying their own country and its culture. Yet they could not understand what they were doing, for they could not believe it when told. I had already learned that people can be taught only what they are able to learn. It was a lesson I needed to remember years later in my own country. By that time Dr. Kiang had died in a Communist prison in China and Communists were the rulers there.
I returned to China that year by way of Europe, lingering in England and the exquisite Lake Country. A lovely haze hangs over the memory of that prewar England, a succession of scenes and experiences. In quiet towns and old villages the Second World War seemed as impossible as once the First World War had seemed, and the countryside was steeped in beauty.
One day leaps forward to be remembered. The Sidney Webbs had invited me to luncheon and I had accepted. They were already old and living in the country, and though they had given me meticulous driving directions, I lost my way once or twice and was a little late. At last I turned into the probable lane, and there at the far end I saw two figures who surely could never have existed except in England. Upon a wooden bench, immobile and waiting, they sat together, Sidney Webb with his hands crossed upon the gold knob of his walking stick, his beard upthrust as he gazed steadfastly down the lane, and beside him Mrs. Webb very straight and rigid in a full-skirted grey cotton frock and a white mobcap, also gazing down the lane. When they saw my car they rose, side by side, waved vigorously and then walked ahead as guides, Mrs. Webb turning now and then to shake her head to prevent me from stopping the car to descend and then waving again to indicate that I was to follow. In a few minutes we reached a neat lawn and a modest-looking house. I stopped and got out and we shook hands.
“You lost your way,” Mrs. Webb said in an accusing voice.
“I did,” I replied, and apologized.
“Surely the instructions were clear?” she said, still severely.
I explained my habitual stupidity in the matter of directions, which they accepted without contradiction.
Everybody was waiting, two maids, a dog and another guest, an American man, and almost at once we were seated at the table, Mrs. Webb still in the mobcap, whose ruffle hung over her face to the extent of reminding one of the Marchioness and Dick Swiveller. Of that memorable day I actually remember only these, to me amazing, incidents. In the middle of the luncheon conversation which consisted of a duet between the Webbs while the two guests listened, the American, a rather stolid and humorless young man, new to England, startled us all by mishandling the siphon bottle of soda water and accidentally releasing a volume of fizzing water full into Sidney Webb’s face. He was talking at the time, and the American was so aghast at what had happened that he could not instantly remove his finger from the siphon. Streams of water dripped down Sidney Webb’s cheeks, wet his beard and fell into his plate. He gave one subdued gasp and then went straight on as though nothing was happening. Mrs. Webb, too, sternly ignored the incident, her attention to her food resolutely unshaken, while one maid snatched the bottle from the American and the other seized Sidney Webb’s plate. Mrs. Webb then took over the conversation with courage while Sidney Webb wiped his face surreptitiously with his napkin, his interest fixed politely upon what she was saying. The American was speechless and so continued to the end of the meal.
After it was over, Mrs. Webb announced that we would take a walk, for her husband’s health. He looked unwilling although he prepared to obey, and when we went out allowed the Americans to go ahead with his wife while he muttered to me that he did hate these walks. We went on, nevertheless, Mrs. Webb at a tremendous pace and stopping every few minutes to turn and beckon us on. After an hour of this we went back to the house and I prepared to take my leave. Mrs. Webb, however was not quite ready to let me go. Still wearing the mobcap, she shot out her forefinger at me.
“Now why,” she said in her most positive voice and fixing me with a gaze piercingly clear, “why didn’t you put any homosexuality into your Good Earth? Because it’s there, you know, among the men!”
I was too startled to reply more than feebly. “I never thought of it.”
“Ah, you should think,” Mrs. Webb said reproachfully.
I gathered myself together. “Really, Mrs. Webb, I have no information on the subject, I’m afraid. And if you ask my opinion, I should say that there is less homosexuality among the Chinese than among any other people.”
“Now, now,” Mrs. Webb said, still with the forefinger outstretched, “You’ve just told me you have no information.”
“No, but just thinking aloud, Mrs. Webb,” I went on, “Chinese families marry their sons so early, you know, and besides, there is never much homosexuality in countries where there is no real militarism, where the young men are not segregated young when their sex impulses are most strong, into camps and so on.”
She capitulated suddenly, her forefinger retreating. “Perhaps you are right,” she said abruptly.
I left, and the American with me, and at the end of the lane we paused to look back. The endearing old couple had walked after us and were sitting on the bench again, side by side, Sidney Webb’s hands crossed on his gold-headed cane, and Mrs. Webb upright, the snowy ruffle of her mobcap fluttering in the breeze.
From English countryside I went once more to London, purposely to discover its Dickensian past, which first I had discovered long ago on the wide southern veranda of our bungalow on the Chinese hill. I remember one day, while wandering about the city, that I came upon The Old Curiosity Shop, exactly as I had imagined it, and I stood gazing at it for many minutes in a dream of pleasure, obstructing the sidewalk where I stood and creating a human eddy so that pedestrians were obliged to part on one side of me and come together again on the other side, which they did with dogged English patience. In the same way Charles Lamb came alive again, too, in the dim and narrow streets of the Inner Temple.
From London I went next to Sweden, and found a country so crisply modern that in many ways it made me think of the United States, except that being a smaller country it was better organized and governed. The advantages of a small country are enormous in times of peace, and even in times of war I suppose that Switzerland, and Sweden, too, have proved the positive possibility of a neutral and prosperous existence, provided that the country is not in the way of conquest. On the other hand, the swift rise of Hitler could never have taken place except in a small, relatively homogeneous country. Nowadays, when I view with frequent unease certain events in my own nation which remind me of Germany before the Second World War, I reassure myself merely by reflecting upon our size and variety. It would take more than a mastermind to shape us into totalitarianism, I still believe. But I was uneasy enough at the end of the war, although Hitler had blown himself to bits, to inquire of an intelligent German woman who had seen the rise of the Nazi drama, to explain to me exactly how the whole brutalizing process had taken place in Germany and I put what she said into a book, which I called How It Happens. And the last lines of that book are these:
“A long silence fell between us.
“‘Have we finished our book?’ I asked at last. She lifted her head and I met her grave grey eyes. She said,