“Yes.”
“Oh, Dr. Liang—how wonderful! Welcome to poor old war-torn Shanghai! What an honor to have the distinguished—have you got my letter?”
“I have,” James replied, disliking the voice very much.
“You will come?” The voice was persuading, coaxing, compelling.
James hesitated. “I’ve only just—”
The voice broke in. “Oh, but you must! You don’t know us but we know you—you’re Liang Wen Hua’s son! We’ll have to introduce ourselves—a little group of pure intellectuals—it’s so important these days, don’t you think, when everything is so materialistic! Surely you’ve heard of the Dialectic Society? That’s our group—of course I’m only honorary, not being Chinese, but the poor things do need a place to meet and my house is theirs. I tell Charles—he’s my husband—that it’s the least we can do—the intellectuals are really starving—and they’re so important. But you know—your wonderful father is international honorary president—”
He did know but he had forgotten. Liang Wen Hua was the honorary president of many intellectual groups. The Dialectic Society of China was, as Mrs. Barnabas said, a small group of men and women, educated abroad or in modern schools here. They wrote articles and essays and edited a thin weekly in English, where they published their writings and criticized what they wrote. His father had once been one of them.
“I will come,” James said.
“Oh, wonderful,” Mrs. Barnabas sang. “I’ll send the car for you at six-thirty.”
It was a diversion, at least, James told himself. The air of Shanghai seemed flat to him even though he recognized its cause. It was absurd that a bit of paper bearing Lili’s words to him would have changed the entire city, but so it was. He went to the window and gazed into a street which might have belonged to any modern city except that the people were polyglot. Watching that restless moving throng he caught its restlessness. He must get out in it and move with it. Where were these thousands of persons going? Each, of necessity, must be on his own errand, and yet they were flowing in two concentrated opposing currents. Well, he had his private errand, too. He would go and see Lili’s home, the house which might have been his, had he been willing to obey Mr. Li. He knew where it was, and he locked his door and went downstairs.
Outside the open door of the hotel lobby he stepped into one of the pedicycles which had taken the place of old-fashioned rickshas on the streets of Shanghai. A thin lackadaisical man, still young, grunted at the directions James gave him and pedaled dangerously into the traffic of streetcars, wheelbarrows, busses, cars, and carriages. Far more dangerous than vehicles were these thousands of people who came and went upon the streets. They spilled over the sidewalks and flowed among the traffic in a dark stream, cursed by drivers and cursing in return. The streets were a continuing brawl. Most of the people looked poor and their faces were strained and anxious, but among them were also the well dressed and complacent, winding their way unobtrusively among the others.
The pedicycle rider flung a hand toward a building as they went on and James leaned forward to catch what he said. He heard the two words Wing On, and remembered what Mr. Li had told him. The building had been rebuilt and it was a thriving department store again. Lili ought to see it, he thought. Then she would forget the horror of the day when it had nearly carried her to death in its destruction. There was little sign of that now. He craned to look at the great ornate structure, cheaply built and yet somehow effective in the strange hybrid design an architect had given it.
The driver stopped before a gate, sweating and mopping his face. “The Li Palace,” he announced loudly. James got out and bade the man wait. He would not stay long. It was a palace, he supposed. He could see nothing except the high gray brick wall, topped by green dust-laden trees. A row of broken glass was set into the cement which covered the ridge of the wall. The driver beat upon the gate with his closed fists and a uniformed gatekeeper opened it.
James spoke in his best Chinese. “I am a friend of the Li family, who are now in New York. I should like just to look at the home where they used to live.”
But the gatekeeper was surly. Whether he spoke only Shanghai dialect or whether he had orders to let no one enter, who could tell? He growled a refusal. James looked over his shoulder and saw an immense square brick house surrounded by deep verandas, set in a green lawn and palm trees. Then the gate shut in his face. There was nothing to do but go back to the hotel.
He was awakened by the raucous telephone and still half asleep he took up the receiver. The clerk’s voice purred in his ear. “Cah donstaahs waiting you.”
“Coming!” James cried.
Six-thirty—impossible! But so it was. He leaped up, and realized that he had slept all afternoon, needing sleep upon solid earth after the interrupting rise and fall of the ship. He felt rested, and before the mirror, brushing his stiff black hair into its usual pompadour, he saw that fatigue had faded from his eyes. He looked forward with mild interest to the evening, expecting amusement, at least.
Yet where had Mrs. Barnabas hidden this car during the war? A White Russian chauffeur held the door for him and he stepped into cushioned comfort. A silver vase of roses, attached to the seat, scented the stillness. For when the doors were closed no noise penetrated their insulation. The jabber and chatter of the streets, the wails of beggars, were shut away. Even the smooth monotone of the engine could not be heard. Between him and the chauffeur was a wall of glass and he had not the courage to lift the speaking tube at his right hand and ask who Mrs. Barnabas was and how she had this princely car.
In silence he was carried through the summer evening, through the crowds who stared at him with hatred in their eyes, as he soon perceived. They were asking who he was and how came he to be riding in such splendor and alone. He looked away from them and wished that the Russian did not honk the horn so loudly and constantly and he longed for darkness to hide him.
Before darkness fell, however, the car paused at a great gate which swung open to receive it, and he was carried up a broad driveway between high magnolia trees to a great house of gray brick, as solid as a bank. At white marble steps under a wide porte-cochere the car stopped, and the door was opened by a Chinese manservant in a red silk robe tied with a wide soft girdle of crushed blue satin.
“This way, please,” he told James and led the way into a huge hall filled with heavy Chinese tables and chairs of blackwood.
“Oh, Dr. Liang!”
James heard the rushing dominating voice of the telephone, and he saw his hostess. His first impression was of a tall slender brilliant bird. Her middle-aged face was negligible. Small-boned, highly colored, it was merely a spot upon which to focus for a moment. Above it was a brilliant turban of cloth of gold, the same fabric that made her high-necked, semi-Chinese costume. She held out thin jeweled hands to clutch his and he felt her hot and tenacious fingers dragging him toward an open door.
“Come in—come in—we’re all here waiting—”
“I’m afraid I slept—”
“And why shouldn’t you sleep—why shouldn’t the son of Liang Wen Hua do whatever he likes—”
They were in an enormous glittering room. Thirty or forty men and women, most of them Chinese, were sitting or lounging on low chairs, divans, and hassocks upholstered in brocades. A stout tall American, bald-headed and red-faced, was mixing cocktails.
“My husband, Barny—” his hostess announced, “and the others—the Dialectic Society of China—”
He was introduced to one after another, always as the son of his father, and he met cold eyes, cynical eyes, coy eyes, careless eyes, envious eyes, and when it was over he sat down on the end of an overcrowded sofa.
Mr. Barnabas strode toward him. “Hello, Dr. Liang. Glad to welcome you home to China—have a Martini—I’m the only person in Shanghai who can make ’em taste like New York—”
James accepted the glass and held it without tasting its contents. He felt overwhelmed, drowned in col
or and noise, as everyone began to talk exactly as though he were not there. Mrs. Barnabas was smiling coquettishly at a handsome young Chinese. She laid her brightly ringed hand on his for a moment. Mr. Barnabas stood gazing at this and at everything, swaying a little on his black patent-leather toes, smiling vacantly as he sipped his cocktail. Then he sat down on the floor beside James, his long legs tangling.
“Well, how does it seem to be home?” he asked.
“I cannot realize it yet,” James replied.
“You won’t find it so different from New York,” Mr. Barnabas said proudly. “This bunch now—every one of ’em talks English. Don’t know any Chinese myself—don’t have to. Mrs. Barny, now, goes in for art and literature and so on, but I’m just a plain businessman. Course I like her to have a good time.”
“What is your business, sir?” James asked.
“Export—furs, racing ponies—I get ’em from Manchuria—native oils, tungsten, anything.”
“The war did not hurt your business?”
Mr. Barnabas laughed. “Not a bit! I made a deal, of course. The Japs let me alone. I didn’t like them, mind you—rather have the Chinese any time—but what I say is you can always make a deal.”
“Dr. Liang!” Mrs. Barnabas sang her high notes. “Please come here—”
She patted a seat beside her on the divan. James rose and sat down beside her. She turned her small, pale-green eyes upon him.
“Now you really must settle this for the whole Dialectic Society. We’ve debated so often—do be the judge!”
“The question?” James asked smiling. How absurd this woman was!
“Do you think that Robert Browning’s work improved or deteriorated after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett? Now wait—let me say it—of course hers improved—really, she had written nothing—she caught the flame from his lighted torch! But he was the true genius, don’t you think—and the real inner meaning of the question is—does the true genius flower alone out of its own solitary power, or can it—must it—have the sunshine of great love—or great suffering, or something on that order?”
She was serious! Listening and gazing into the little crimson birdlike face James let laughter subside in amazement. He looked at the faces about him, all turned to him, waiting. He longed to cry out at them, “Do you really discuss such things—even here, even now?” But he had not the heart to hurt them.
“I am only a scientist,” he said modestly. “I fear I have no opinion on Browning—or genius—”
There was a moment’s silence. Mrs. Barnabas cried out. “Oh, we can’t believe that—when your father’s such a genius!” But her outcry was drowned in a rising tide of voices, all subdued, all working together to cover and conceal what he had said. He found himself alone again and was glad when a moment later a resplendent servant announced dinner.
At the long table, however, in the privacy of the many guests, while Mrs. Barnabas talked with a pale and elongated young man who had been introduced as the Chinese Shelley, James entered into conversation with a rather pretty young woman who sat at his right. She spoke to him first and in English. “Shall you stay in Shanghai, Dr. Liang?”
“No, I am going to Peking, to the medical center there.”
“Ah, Peking!” she breathed. “It is quite nice there now. Everybody has money.”
“Indeed?” James could not decide what this young woman was. Chinese, certainly, but what else?
“While the war was going on, everybody had jobs. It was not too bad.”
“You were there?”
“Yes.” The young woman had a pretty mouth, small and red. “I sing also. I gave some concerts there—for the Europeans. Of course I studied in Paris. My name is Hellene Ho.”
“What do all these other people do?” James asked bluntly.
Hellene pointed with her little finger. “He is essayist; he is poet; he is novelist; she is costume designer; she is artist; she is sculptor—”
“They can’t live by these things,” James suggested.
Hellene laughed brightly. “Oh, no, certainly they cannot. They live by other ways—some teaching, some selling things, some just borrowing money from Mrs. Barnabas.”
“Why does she—”
“Why she does?” Hellene broke in. “Really she is rather kind, but otherwise she gets some attentions to herself. Nobody cares too much to come and see her, and Mr. Barnabas is just merchant prince. If she can say she is patroness of young Chinese thought leaders, she can invite some important guests, like you, Dr. Liang! Can you come only to see Mrs. Barnabas which you don’t know? Naturally you come to meet Dialectic Society, don’t you?”
The profuse and rich meal went on, course after course. Mrs. Barnabas neglected him except to ask an occasional bright question. “Isn’t that brilliant father of yours coming home to stay? But of course he’s doing such wonderful things for America, isn’t he!”
James met these remarks with calm. After the dinner was over he took his leave early. Mr. Barnabas had disappeared and the Dialectic Society looked sleepy and overstuffed. Only Mrs. Barnabas still glittered.
“Do, do come again, you dangerous young man,” she sighed as James shook her hand.
“Dangerous?” he repeated blankly.
“So handsome!” Mrs. Barnabas sang. “All the charm of the East and yet something wonderful—electric—from the West.”
James ground his teeth in silence, bowed, and went quietly away. The scarlet-robed menservants were pouring liqueurs and nobody saw him go.
In three or four days he was wholly impatient with Shanghai. Behind the facade of the Bund the city was crowded, dirty and noisy. His hotel looked rich and comfortable on the surface but he found his bathroom grimy and he doubted the freshness of his sheets. The towels were gray and scanty. When he spoke to his room boy of these matters, the fellow grinned. He had soon learned that James could not understand his Shanghai dialect, and spoke to him as if he were a foreigner. “Allee samee wartime, now,” he said, and made no effort to change towels or sheets.
Two or three Chinese businessmen, heads of local guilds, sent their cards and came to call upon him, and on the third night they combined in a feast of welcome at a restaurant. There were a few good dishes, sharks’ fins in chicken broth, a sweet pudding of glutenous rice, a river carp broiled whole, but the rest of the food was mediocre. Nothing was as it had been, they declared. The country was sinking to ruin. Prices were impossible to pay and no one had any pride left. After the small feast the sons of the merchants gathered around him and asked him eagerly how they could get to America. Here there was nothing to do, they told him. Schools were no good; there were no jobs. He thought as he looked at them, listening, that all of them were too pale and thin. When the main dishes had been brought in by a dirty waiter they had eaten ravenously.
“I came back because I believe that I can do something useful here,” he said.
They looked at one another with blank eyes. “There is nothing you can do,” they declared. “There is nothing anybody can do.”
Defeat was the smell of the city. In his hotel a few sullen American businessmen loitered over whisky sodas, waiting for old times to begin again. They would wait and then go home. In New York a Chinese delegate to the United Nations had said to him, “I would not say this before Americans, but I tell you—do not be shocked at what you see in China. You will not be proud of your country. Your father is wiser than you.”
“But my father is very proud of our country and he has taught us to be so, too,” he had retorted.
The delegate had smiled and gone his way. It was a familiar smile, one which James had often seen when he spoke of his father to a Chinese. He had not been sure what it meant. Now he began to understand.
On the sixth day he had explored the city enough to know that he never wanted to see it again. It was a mongrel of the lowest breeding. Scum from everywhere in the world had come together to produce this hateful spawn. Nobody looked to see whether faces were white or black o
r brown because all were there, sometimes in a single face. Was this what came about when races met and mingled? Rich and poor were equally hateful. The ladies of the rich, lingering in the hotel lobby at night, displayed their filmy nylons imported from America, their brocades from India, their diamonds and emeralds and sables, and all the talk was of how much they had paid for such baubles. Their tongues ran to millions of American dollars and if much of this was bombast and he could reduce millions to thousands, still it was foul. For on the streets when he rose restless at dawn there were scavengers going about picking up the dead. These were the beggars and the refugees who had starved during the night. Their bodies were heaped into carts and dragged away before the sun rose.
In this world Lili had been born and reared. The thought came to him like a blow across the heart. This explained her sweet, almost childish indifference. All the rich women had it. The women, the young girls, all of them had her gentle, cool selfishness.
Selfishness—he could not avoid the word. But who could avoid it in Shanghai? Here was a little island of tight luxury set in a vast sea of utter misery. To step off the island was to be drowned in the sea.
On the afternoon of the sixth day there was still no letter from Lili, but there was one from Mary. He seized it from the clerk’s dirty hand and went up to his room to be alone and found his door open, although he had left it locked. He went in and there sat Young Wang in the easiest chair. He wore an ordinary blue cotton jacket and trousers and he had a bundle tied in a square of faded blue cotton cloth. On his head he wore a sailor’s cap of white duck, stiff and clean. He rose when James came in and laughed.
“This big turnip that I am, I feared you had already gone to Peking.”
“I have not been able to get a railway ticket yet,” James said. He longed to read his letter. Now that he had news of Lili in his hand it was unbearable not to know what it was, for surely Mary would tell of her.
“You must stay night and day at the station or you can get no ticket,” Young Wang said. He laughed again. “Of course you cannot do this, master, but I can do it for you and me together.”
Kinfolk Page 7