The ferry had a few early passengers, and they all stared at Mayli, but she did not speak. On the other side of the river she found a car waiting which the Ones Above had sent to meet her, and the driver was a young soldier who saluted her and drove away over the rough road so quickly that the car shook and squeaked in every joint. When this was ended, she came down again and found a sedan chair, waiting for her to take her up a hill, and so by many vehicles she came near to a plain brick house, and surely it was no palace, and yet here was where the Chairman and his lady lived. A guard or two stood at the gate but they knew of her coming, and let her pass, and she walked across a small garden space and to the house. And in the house a serving man took her into a plain room, furnished half with Chinese goods and half with foreign, and in it nothing was rich or costly, and she sat down and waited.
She had not long to wait, for in a moment or two she heard footsteps soft and quick, and there was the lady herself, very fresh and pretty with the morning. She put out both her hands to Mayli and Mayli felt those strong hands, small and slender and firm, and holding so much within them.
“So you are your mother’s daughter!” the lady cried. “Let me look at you. Yes, you look like her, the same big eyes and the fortunate nose. I remember your mother was very beautiful.” She sat down on the long foreign couch, all her movements quick and full of grace, and she pulled Mayli down with her.
For the first time in her life Mayli was shy and speechless, to her own dismay. Never before had she been so that words would not roll to the end of her tongue, but now she sat and only stared at the lady. The lady was dressed simply but very richly in a dark blue silk, the sleeves cut short. But over the robe she wore a little jacket of velvet of the same color, and this dark hue set off her clear skin and red lips. This was a very handsome face. The features were each handsome enough, but what made it most remarkable was the proud intelligence in the eyes, and the changefulness of the mouth and the fearlessness of the head carried high upon the slender and most graceful body. She was not a young woman, this lady, but she looked imperishably young. Of her temper Mayli had heard many stories, and now she could believe them, for there was too much power and passion here to mean an easy temper.
“And tell me about your father,” the lady said smiling. “The Chairman thinks very highly of him, you know. Yes, it is true he listens sometimes to your father’s advice, and then I grow jealous.” She burst into clear laughter as she said this. “He will not always listen to me,” she said, twisting her lovely mouth into pretended pouting. “Oh, what a disadvantage it is today to be a woman! Do you not feel it so?”
She put the question and looked so beautiful that Mayli was compelled to laughter, too. “I cannot think of any disadvantage it is to you to be a woman,” she said.
“Oh, but it is,” the lady said quickly. “You cannot imagine. I long to do this and that — anything and everything — I see so much to do, and then sooner or later it comes. The Chairman says, ‘Remember that you are a woman, please.’ ”
She laughed again, willful, charming, impetuous laughter, and for the first time in her life Mayli had no wish to talk but only to listen and watch the laughter and the earnestness play like light and shadow over this most lovely face.
Then suddenly the lady fell silent. They heard a footstep at the door. The lady rose. “It is he,” she said. Mayli rose, too, and so they were standing when the door opened and into the room came the Chairman himself, with no guard or servant to announce him.
He was a slender figure, seeming taller than he was. He had the carriage of a soldier and such a face as Mayli had never seen before. First she saw the eyes. They shot their beams direct upon her and she felt him looking at her so clearly that it seemed she felt two shining dark blades pass through her brain. And yet she did not feel he saw her at all, but only what she was thinking. That she was young or a woman or beautiful meant nothing. What she was thinking meant everything.
“This is Mr. Wei’s daughter, Mayli.” The lady said to him. “Do you remember I have told you about her mother?”
The Chairman came forward. “I do remember,” he said. Now his face was kind, and he took her hand. His hand was hard and thin and strong, sinewy like his face and body. But it seemed steel and not a man’s hand and she felt her own soft warm flesh against that touch of steel. Even his voice was not like a man’s voice. It had a high thin quality, steely too, and it sounded as though it came from far away in the man. He turned to the lady.
“We must breakfast,” he said. “The generals are waiting for their orders. They must return at once to their posts.”
He led the way and the lady followed, taking Mayli’s hand again. How different were the hands of these two, the woman’s so warm and soft and enclosing, and the man’s so thin and hard, and yet both so strong!
They sat down to a small table and food was brought, half foreign, half Chinese. The lady ate bread and coffee and egg, and the man ate rice and salted foods. There was this division between the two. The man was of his own time and his own country and people, and the woman was herself, a creature speaking now in one language and then another, as easily in English as in Chinese, and thinking now on one side of the world and now on the other. Her thoughts flew from country to country and she seemed made of them all. But the man was Chinese, and he spoke only Chinese and sometimes when she spoke too long in English, he fell into deep silence, as though he had forgotten her. Then quickly the woman, always seeing him and everything he did and how he looked, began to speak in Chinese again, and if he did not answer she would recall him by a touch, or a question.
He spoke very little and she spoke very much. She pressed Mayli with many questions, and then did not listen for the answers. And yet she seemed to pluck answers out of the air. From two or three words she comprehended all.
“Did the Americans think the enemy would attack them?” she asked, and then when Mayli began to answer she answered her swiftly. “Of course the Americans never think anything at all. They are so busy.” She frowned and bit a crust of bread with her white teeth. “I need money for my war orphans. I have not enough. And it is absurd that we have not more planes. I tell the Chairman—”
He looked up, his face mild for the moment and kind. “The planes have been promised us,” he said.
She made a pretty face of laughter at him. “Oh, you who always believe!”
“I believe our allies,” he said.
“Those who ask receive,” she retorted. “Does it not say so in the Bible?”
“We have asked,” he said.
“There are many ways of asking,” she answered him, “and we have only asked as gentlemen ask — with our words. Others are not so gentlemanly and they receive when we do not.”
This it seemed was an old argument between them, for stubbornness settled between the man’s brows. And stubbornness hardened the woman’s beautiful mouth. Silence came down upon them both. And yet in spite of the quarrel and stubbornness and silence none could sit in this room with them and not know that the woman’s uneasy world lay in the man, but that the man’s heart was not wholly in the woman. Half hatred, half love, something flashed between them like lightning. In Mayli the thought of Sheng quickened. The Chairman, too, had once been a nameless young man, the son of a plain good family among the people such as Ling Tan’s was. He was not learned to this day nor had he risen by any power except his own. When he wed this woman there had been great wonder everywhere, Mayli had heard her father say, for the lady was the daughter of rich people, educated in many schools. Nor had he yielded to her imperiousness. There were stories all over the land of the quarrels of these two. This proud woman had married him as her equal and she would be equal to him, and yet time and again he made her take the place of a woman. There was the time when the governing council met, at which no women were allowed, and she would go, but guards had stopped her at the door, though she was his wife.