But Peng Liu lingered. “Is this where you live?” he asked with wonder. He looked up at the huge square brick house with columned porticos.
“I can’t help it,” I-wan said. “My grandfather built it and my father lives with him, and naturally as yet I live with my father.”
“It’s a fine foreign house,” Peng Liu said.
But I-wan despised the humility in his voice. He thought, “Peng Liu would like to come in, but I won’t ask him. Besides, I-ko would despise him.”
“Good-by,” he repeated aloud.
“Good-by,” Peng Liu replied.
I-wan turned away sharply and ran up the marble steps and let himself quietly into the house. But he could not be quiet enough for his grandmother when she was not drowsy with opium. And because she loved him so well she tried every day not to be drowsy when he came home from school.
He was late today because of a secret meeting and because after it he had been hungry and stopped at the sweet-shop and that was why her voice was impatient when she called, “I-wan, come here! Where have you been?”
At that moment Peony came out of his grandmother’s room and took his books and his hat. She framed her soft red lips into voiceless words.
“She is very cross!”
He shrugged and frowned.
“Coming, Grandmother!” he answered. “Has I-ko come home?” he asked Peony. He waited until he saw her shake her head, and then went into his grandmother’s room.
Every day since he was six years old and starting school he had to come straight to his grandmother as soon as he reached home, and every day he hated it more. He was sullen whenever he thought of it, that this old woman was waiting for him and that he must come to her. In their secret meetings when they talked of throwing off family bondage, he had sprung to his feet and shouted, “Until we are free of our families we can never accomplish anything!” He was thinking of his own family, but especially of his grandmother.
“Here I am, Grandmother,” he said sulkily.
But she never noticed his sulkiness. She was sitting on the edge of the big, square couch. The lamp and pipe were ready for her use. She had only been waiting for him.
“Come here,” she said. So he went a little nearer. “Come here, so I can feel you,” she insisted.
He had to go near her, though this was what he hated most. She put out her thin long-nailed hand and took his hand in both of hers.
“Your palms are wet!” she exclaimed.
“It is very hot outside,” he said.
“You’ve been hurrying,” she scolded. “How often have I told you never to hurry? It destroys the life force.”
“I like to walk quickly,” he declared.
“It is not what you like,” she said. “You have to consider the family. You are my grandson.”
No, this was what he hated most of all, this sense that to her he was valuable only because he was her grandson, a person to carry on her family.
“I must sometimes do what I like,” he said sullenly.
She gripped his wrist suddenly between her thumb and forefinger.
“You are always doing what you like,” she said loudly. “You think of no one but yourself — it is this generation! I-ko is the same. He has not come near me all day.”
Then immediately she was afraid she had made him angry, so she reached for her comfit box with one hand, still clinging to him with the other, and gave him a candied date.
He would have liked to refuse it, but when he saw it, he felt hungry against his will. He was always hungry! So he took it, frowning, and ate it.
“There,” she said, laughing. “I don’t give these dates to anyone but you.” She began caressing his arm under his sleeve. “They are good for the blood — no one gets them but you and me. Although—” she raised her voice a little so that Peony waiting in the hall might hear, “I know that miserable girl slave steals them when I am asleep!”
“I, Mistress?” Peony’s silvery tranquil voice answered through the open door. “Never, Mistress!”
“Yes, she does,” the old woman said to him. “She steals everything she can, that girl. We’ve had her eleven years but she has no gratitude. She was only seven when we bought her and she was already a thief.”
He did not answer. He was not going to defend Peony and have his grandmother accuse him of wickedness. He had made that mistake before. He pulled his hand away.
“Grandmother, I have a whole English paper to write before tomorrow,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” she said quickly, “you mustn’t sit up too late.”
“Good night, Grandmother,” he said, bowing.
“No, not good night,” she said coaxingly. “Come in again before you sleep.”
“But you’ll be lying stupid under that stuff,” he said rudely.
“No,” she said eagerly, “no, tell me when you are coming and I will be awake for you.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “How can I say when I shall be finished with all those books?”
She sighed. Then her eyes fell on the opium pipe and she wavered.
“Well, that is true,” she murmured. She waited an instant. “Peony!” she called.
“Coming,” Peony answered.
She came into the room on quiet silk-shod feet and helped the old lady to lie down and began to prepare the lamp. I-wan had not gone.
“I put your books on your table,” she said to him.
The old lady’s eyes were already shut.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I-wan whispered. “Pandering to her like that!”
Peony opened her black apricot-shaped eyes widely.
“I have to do what I’m told!” she said. He frowned and shook his head and marched to the door. Then he glanced back. She was stirring the sticky stuff with a tiny silver spoon. But she was not looking at it. She was waiting mischievously for him, and when she caught his glance she stuck her red tongue far out of her mouth. He slammed the door on the sight.
But there was no shutting out that sweet sick smell of opium. Upstairs in his own room he threw his windows wide but it was still no use. The evening air was windless and the smell hung through the house, faint yet penetrating. All his life he had smelled it and hated it. In an old Chinese house courtyard walls would have cut it off, perhaps, but up through these vast halls and piled stairways the ancient odor of opium crept like a miasma. It was the essence of everything I-wan hated, that stealing lethargic fragrance that in its very sweetness held something of the stink of death. The house was saturated with it. It clung in the silk hangings on the walls and in the red cushions on the chairs and couches. I-wan, pulling silk stuffed quilts about him at night in bed smelled, or imagined he did, that reek.
For that reason, he had told himself, he wanted his room bare, as bare as En-lan’s little dormitory cubicle in the university. He made Peony take down the heavy damask curtains which the French decorator, years before he was born, had draped across the windows. Every window in the house had them except now these two in his rooms. Without them the windows stretched tall and stark, and the light fell into his room like a blast of noise. Peony was always complaining about the hideousness of his room. She was always trying to soften this hard light. Today when he came in he saw at once she had been doing it again. In the window she had put a blue vase, and in that a branch of rosy-flowered oleander. For a moment he thought, “What have I to do with flowers? I’ll take them away.”
But he did not go beyond thinking. He did not want to hurt Peony’s feelings because she was the only one in this house to whom he could talk at all. And he had not made up his mind whether or not he would tell even her everything — that is, that he had joined finally that secret revolutionary band and that some day soon he must renounce all else. When he thought of renouncing this house and this life, his heart swelled and shrank too. Still, it was the only way to save the country — to cut off all this old dead life — the life of capitalism!