“Sir, I think Lili has told you that I have asked her to marry me very soon and go with me to China. I have come to ask your permission.”
Mrs. Li rose immediately. “Come, child,” she said to Lili in her Shanghai dialect. “We shall leave this matter to the two men.”
Lili obeyed, and Mr. Li maintained a grave silence while they left the room together. When they were gone he rose and went to the door and closed it. He wore tonight Chinese robes which covered his portly figure and gave him great dignity. James had seen him until now only in the new Western clothes he had bought when he first came to America, and although they were expensive and of excellent quality, they did not suit his shoulders rounded from a lifetime in comfortable Chinese garments and they revealed too harshly his hanging belly. The thinness of his legs, too, was concealed now by the long and richly brocaded satin robes of a dull blue. When he returned he sat down beside James and put out his plump tapering fingers and began to talk in Chinese.
“What I am about to say has nothing to do with you.” His Mandarin was stilted but intelligible. Every businessman was compelled to know Mandarin, wherever his home in China. “I am very willing for you to marry Lili. It will be a weight off my mind. But you ask me to allow you to take my daughter back to the country from which we have escaped. Now, do not mistake me. I hate this foreign country and I love our country. But I tell you, times are very bad in China. Even without my gall bladder I found business hard. Only a few of us have money, and since the Americans always want to have fifty-one per cent and we Chinese are determined to keep fifty-one per cent, business stands still. This is why I took the opportunity to come to this country and get my gall bladder cut out. When I go to the operation next month, it would comfort me to think my daughter is married safely to a good young man with ability, such as you are. Then I can die without distress.”
James broke in. “Sir, it is not necessary for you to die. I understand those things and—”
Mr. Li put up his pale soft hand and stopped him. “You are not cutting me open,” he said gently. “Were you holding the knife I would not think of death.”
James quivered with inspiration and anxiety. “Sir, if you can trust me to perform the operation—”
Mr. Li looked instantly alarmed. “No—no—” he exclaimed. “Americans are used to cutting. Besides, you are young and I am an important man.”
He sighed and rubbed his belly with the palm of his hand. “Yet I wish—no, it cannot be. The doctor has been chosen and I have already paid out some money. In the night, I will tell you, I am afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid, sir,” James urged. “The surgeons here are excellent.”
To this Mr. Li replied in a mournful voice, “A Chinese does not willfully kill. But Americans think nothing of it. You did not see their soldiers in Shanghai. They rode about in their small cars and killed anyone in their way. On one street in one day near our house they killed seven people without stopping to find out what they had done. Why should they spare a single old Chinese like me? And, more than that, I have inquired and found that even though I die I must pay them. What injustice is this? Yet I am helpless. I cannot cut open my own belly. If the doctors were Chinese they would not expect to be paid for killing me, as you know. They might expect to be sued. But here it seems doctors cannot commit murder, whomever they kill. I have inquired and I have been told that even the President of America would have to pay his doctor were he killed. As you know, we would never consent to such extortion.”
Mr. Li’s earnest soft voice flowed on and on. He spoke little before his wife and daughter, and when he was alone with a man all this talk came flowing out of him. He felt very near to this handsome young Chinese. He had lost his only son in childhood and he felt he was getting back a son again, one stronger and healthier and better in every way than the poor little boy whose mother had smothered him to death with too much love. Little Ah Fah had died of a dose of opium which Mrs. Li had commanded for a stomachache he had developed after eating too many sweet rice cakes. A zealous but ignorant nursemaid had doubled the dose. Mr. Li had felt himself so confounded and overwhelmed by women that after his son’s death he had withdrawn from life. His sexual impulses, never strong, had left him completely, and he refused the concubine whom Mrs. Li had proposed for him as atonement for her carelessness. Her grief, however, had touched his heart, and at last he turned to her. Outside his enormous and richly decorated house in the French Concession of Shanghai he had been an astute and successful businessman, but at home he was subdued, indulgent, and almost totally silent.
James did not attempt to contradict anything Mr. Li now said. He realized that it was somehow a relief to the older man to pour out all his fears and prejudices and he sat, half smiling, listening, seeming to agree, waiting for the end when he supposed Mr. Li would give his consent.
“Now,” Mr. Li said, “here is what I ask. Do not go back to China for a few years. Later, certainly! I do not wish to be buried here and if I die, as I expect to do, under the foreign knife, my body is to be placed in a metal coffin. The coffin is to be filled with lime and sealed and placed in storage. I do not wish to be buried in this American earth. When the affairs of our country are improved enough for you to take my daughter’s mother, my daughter, and I hope my grandchildren back to Shanghai, my body must go with the family. The house in Shanghai is yours. It is very large, and it is completely furnished, on the eastern side Chinese, on the western side foreign. The garden is very large indeed, at least ten foreign acres, fifty Chinese mou, and there is a very old pine tree in the center of the rock garden. Under the pine tree is a space which I prepared for my grave when I made the garden twenty years ago. The family cemetery is in our village outside Soochow, but I wish to lie for a generation or so among my grandchildren. Later, when you want to be buried there yourself you can have me moved to the family place. By that time I shall be used to being dead and it will not matter. After a hundred years we are all dust.”
James stirred. “Sir, I want to work—”
Mr. Li put up his hand again. “It is not necessary,” he said gently. “I have money enough to support at least five generations. I saw perfectly what the Japanese intended to do. Anyone could see what would happen when the foreigners stopped what they called their first world war. I sold my mills when the Japanese reached Manchuria. By then of course war was inevitable. All my fortune is in banks here in New York. I do not mind telling you that I am one of the largest depositors in three banks in this city.”
Mr. Li smiled dimly and put up his hand again when he saw that once more James was about to speak.
“Wait—this is not all. I will settle everything on you, as my son, on the day I go under the foreign knife. I can trust you. You will take care of an old father and mother. Yes, you will be my real son. I ask only one return—that you will take my name when you marry my daughter; it is an old custom with us, you know, when a man has no son.”
He looked shrewdly at the grave young man who suddenly pressed his lips together and hurried on. “The surname Li is honorable. It is among the Hundred Names. And your father has another son. I am not robbing him. Now then, everything is clear between us. Certainly I give my permission for the wedding. Let it be at once. Say two weeks from today? That gives time for new clothes and the guests to be chosen and so on. It gives me nearly a month before my death. With luck I even hope that before I die my daughter may conceive. Well, that would be very good luck, and that is perhaps too much to ask. Still—” Mr. Li pursed his lips and smiled.
James had no heart to break the old man’s dreams, and yet it must be done. Trained as a surgeon, he went swiftly to the task. “I do not believe you will die, sir,” he said, “and it is better if you do not take it for granted. The mind must help the body to live—we doctors know that. But, sir, please do not ask me to change the plan I have made for my life. I am surnamed Liang, and I must remain what I am born. I thank you deeply and I will be to you as a son, whatever my name.
”
Mr. Li winced and tears filled his eyes. James looking away from his face saw the fat white hands lying on the satin lap begin to tremble. He looked away from the hands and went on. “I am glad that you want Lili and our children to live in our own country. So far we are agreed. I have grown up here and it is not good for us. We are exiles, however kind the people. But even that is not why I want to go home. I have a hope—fantastic, perhaps—that I can do some good for my own people.”
“The times are so bad,” Mr. Li’s voice was a wail.
“I know—and that is why I feel I must go back,” James said.
He could not tell Mr. Li what it was that made his purpose hard in his heart. He had never said even to Mary that in some deeply repressed corner of his being he grieved that his own father had chosen to live in exile during the years of their country’s hardship. He knew all the arguments, that a scholar could not work in the midst of turmoil and war. He believed these arguments were true. He knew that his father’s delicately balanced mind needed safety and quiet and security in order to do its work. But he had long ago determined that he would work where he was most needed, in the midst of turmoil, even in war. He would not allow his mind to be delicate nor his heart remote.
Mr. Li came to the attack again, not harshly or boldly but with pleading. “Lili has been gently reared. She grew very nervous and ill during the bombing of Shanghai. Perhaps she has not told you how nearly she was killed?”
“No!” James cried in a low voice of horror.
Mr. Li nodded. “She was shopping in Wing On’s department store. I had told her she could buy a sable coat. The Russians sent in very good furs to us. She was trying it on when the bomb fell. Luckily she had gone to the stairs, where there was a window, to see the fur by the daylight. Thus she was able to run down the stairs, and escape before the whole building collapsed,” Mr. Li sighed. “Unfortunately she threw off the coat, thinking it would be too heavy. Otherwise she would have kept that, too.”
James did not speak. He continued to look steadfastly at Mr. Li, his face very grave.
Mr. Li went on. “For this reason she is easily frightened, and perhaps will be so all her life. Now maybe Shanghai is better, but we cannot be sure of this. All sorts of disaster still threaten. What if the Communists win? Who can know Heaven’s will? For that reason, even as you say you will not accept our name, I must say that Lili shall not go to China now.”
This was Mr. Li’s ultimatum and James knew it. He knew also that by Chinese reasoning, had he been willing to yield and change his surname, Mr. Li might have made compromise and allowed him to take Lili to China. If one does not give, one cannot expect to receive. He felt the soft implacable net of the reciprocity of Chinese life spread about his feet, and his heart grew firm. He had lived in freedom and he stood alone. He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and squared his shoulders. “I shall be sorry to leave my wife here in America to wait alone until China is fit for her to live in. But my work must come first.”
Sweat broke out on Mr. Li’s pale face. “You are too foreign,” he said. A dull ferocity flamed in his face. His lips turned slowly blue. “With a Chinese, family comes first.”
James looked down steadfastly into the upturned face. With understanding and sympathy the younger man looked at the older, and still he could not yield. More than his own life was held in this moment. He had lived for all the years of his adolescence and young manhood in the presence of a dream, and the dream was his country, in peril and need, and himself, devoted to her rescue. He could not give up his dream, for then he would die. And it was worse for a young man to die than an old one. Mr. Li, James told himself hardily, had never done China any good. He was one of those who had lived for his own family. To family how often China had been sacrificed and by how many!
He felt his soul blaze into solitary fire. “Whatever I am, I am first myself,” he told Mr. Li as he turned and left the room and walking down the hall went out of the house.
He could not go home. The night air was soft and the streets were quiet. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was eleven o’clock. There was all night yet to face. He walked slowly, hatless, his hands in his pockets, down the streets and across to the river. There the bridge was, the George Washington Bridge. The name meant something. He had grown up with American heroes. George Washington was more living to him than Confucius. Confucius was a preacher or maybe a teacher, like his father, but George Washington was a doer and the creator of a new nation. The bridge stretched across he enormous span of the river. Mists were rising in soft swirls from the chilled water, and the farther end of the bridge was hidden. It reached from the near shore endlessly into the distance, into the future, and his rich imagination made it a symbol. He would cross the bridge of his dreams, even though he walked alone.
… But in the night, alone in his bed, Lili crept out of his heart and into his mind. He lay in the darkness thinking of her, loving her with all the strength of his young repressed manhood. He had grown up among American boys and girls, seeing their horseplay of sex, and not sharing in it. The knowledge that he was not of their race had been barrier enough, but the delicacy of his soul was the real barrier. He did not want to kiss any girl, to fumble breasts and dance thigh to thigh. It was not sin, but it was not pleasure. More than once a girl had made him feel that she did not mind his being Chinese. It was not enough and he had pretended he did not understand her. He would marry his own kind and they would glory in being Chinese. His pride had been fulfilled in Lili. When she came fresh from China he saw that she was more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in America. All his restraints tumbled in this night and he determined that he would not give her up. He would go to China and he would take her with him.
When he got up from restless sleep he looked fresh and strong with determination. He bathed; he shaved; he dressed himself carefully in his new gray pin-striped suit and he put on a wine-red tie. When he came to the breakfast table only Mary and Peter were there, and Peter was studying while he ate and did not look up. But Mary cried out at the sight of him. “My, you’re handsome this morning! Did Baba say yes?”
James grinned and sat down to a heaping bowl of oatmeal. “Baba said no, and I’m going over there this morning to take Lili by force.”
“I wish you luck,” Mary said. She was suddenly grave, and she whispered under her breath, “Oh, how I wish you luck!”
He pretended he did not hear her while he poured cream and heaped sugar into the bowl.
For a moment when the door opened into the Li apartment he thought that Lili had been forbidden to see him. Mollie the maid looked distressed. She shut the door softly and glanced up the stairs. “They had some sort of a row here,” she whispered. “When I got in this morning—” She shook her head.
Then Lili herself interrupted them. She came to the head of the stairs, looking exquisite and pale in a blue silk gown and little black slippers, and walked slowly down. Mollie disappeared and James went forward and took Lili in his arms. She crumpled against his shoulder and began to sob softly.
“You made Baba so angry,” she wept.
He was distressed by her weeping, and he led her along in his arms until they were in the small music room off the hall. Here he shut the door and sat down with her on a love seat. “Lili darling, don’t cry,” he coaxed. He pulled out the fresh new handkerchief he had put into his breast pocket and wiped her eyes, holding her face up by his hand under her chin as though she were a child. Her lips were pale this morning and they quivered, and he kissed them. She did not open her eyes and large tears rolled out from under her lashes.
“Was he very angry with you, dear?” he asked tenderly. He drew her head to his shoulder again.
“Baba says I mustn’t marry you,” she sobbed. “He says he will find me another husband.”
James felt his heart knock at his ribs. “He can’t do that, darling—not if you don’t want him to—”
She dabbed at her eyes with her own
handkerchief, a small scrap of silk and lace. “You must help me,” she murmured.
He was trembling with fear and love. “I will, darling, of course. But you must be brave, too, Lili. If we stick together, no one can force us apart.”
Her tears rolled again. “Baba can,” she said faintly.
“No, Lili—not even he.”
Despair all but overwhelmed him. She was so yielding, so soft, so trained to obedience. What if he could not put strength into her soul? Ah, but he must! Somehow he must inspire her to see what the bridge meant and when she saw he would be strong enough to walk beside him, wherever it led them.
“Listen to me, darling.” He brushed away the soft curls of her hair from her ear. “You have such pretty ears, Lili!” He kissed the small ear she turned to him. “Think while I talk, dear. Try to understand how I feel. Our people are good—our people are wonderful. China is great. She is not really weak, she is only in distress. All the great strength is simply waiting until we come to her help: She has lived in an old, old world and she needs to be born into the new one. I am a doctor and think naturally in terms of birth—of bringing forth life—”
She was looking at him with wide blank eyes. “But if Baba won’t give us any money how will we live in China?”
He laughed at this. “I will work and make money.”
To his shocked surprise she grew angry at this and she stamped her little foot on his. It did not hurt him, and yet the dig of her heel wounded his heart. “You talk only silly,” she exclaimed. “In China you cannot work. There is no money.”
“The hospital will pay me,” he retorted.
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