James looked at him. The round good-humored face was sly and twinkling. “Good it would be for you if you would hire me as your servant,” Young Wang said. “Good for me, too.”
“But the ship?” James felt a stealing desire to have this healthy young peasant between himself and whatever was to come.
“The ship is gone to Manila,” Young Wang said cheerfully. “My uncle gave me a big fight. He smokes opium, very lazy, and every morning I have his work and mine, too. I am a better cook than he is now, but he takes cook cash, not me. So yesterday I told him this is new China, and old people cannot rule young people. He hit me with the coal shovel. I am more strong than he is, young and not smoking opium. I pushed him once and he fell down and went to sleep. But this is very bad, too, and I think it is better I am not there when he wakes up, because his face is lost too much.” Young Wang laughed heartily and in spite of himself James smiled.
Young Wang’s face glistened with sweat and he wiped it on the tail of his jacket. “As to wages,” he went on, “I will take whatever you give me. Suppose you pay for my food, some clothes, one bed, then never mind. Maybe some dollars at feast day. Just now I have cash. But better you give me dollars for railway tickets. You go second class, good enough, first class too much. I will buy fourth-class ticket for me and sit by you as servant in second class.”
James listened to this arrangement of his life and yielded. He took out his wallet and handed Young Wang a roll of dollars. Young Wang received it reverently and counted each bill aloud in a hushed voice. “You are very rich, master,” he said gently. “I leave my things here while I take so much money.” He put his bundle under the table in a far corner, smiled, and let himself out of the door without noise.
James felt vaguely comforted by this new alliance, even though the fellow was only a servant. He needed the comfort a few minutes later. As his eyes hurried over the pages of Mary’s careful neat handwriting he began to grow frightened. There was no mention of Lili. Then at the very end, squeezed against the corner, he saw her name. “Mr. Li did not die,” Mary wrote. “Sometimes I wish he had. Jim, you mustn’t mind. Lili is going everywhere with Ting. Nothing has been announced.”
That was all. Ting, the son of a Chinese official in America, was a handsome gay young student at Yale. James had known him for years, for they had gone to the same preparatory school. Mr. Ting was kind enough, a harried gray-haired man, somehow holding his post through many changes in government. But Charlie Ting was an idler and a wastrel. In Chinatown he had to pay cash even though he was an official’s son. He had once married secretly an American hat-check girl at the Waldorf and it had cost his father five thousand dollars to make her willing to divorce Charlie—or Ting, as the Americans always called him.
Mary’s letter dropped to the floor and he seized sheets of the coarse hotel paper and his fountain pen and began to pour out his demanding heart to Lili. The thought of Ting, who had slept with a dozen girls, daring to touch her soft hand sickened him with rage. He wrote for an hour and a half, and then laid down his pen and gathered up the sheets and read them over half aloud, trying to imagine her face when they reached her. Would his words touch her heart? He grew gloomy. What power had words in the living flashing presence of Ting? He dropped the sheets on the table and laid his head upon his arms. He would not allow himself the folly of tears, but he sat in grim silence, his face hidden. Outside the open window he heard a brawl rise suddenly and end in the dull sound of a thudding club, but he did not get up to see what it was. The city was full of such brawls. There were too many starving people, and policemen treated them as criminals. Perhaps they were. There was no line between starvation and crime. He felt himself torn in the division of reality. The world, the whole world, was divided into two parts, the island of the rich and the ocean of the poor. Where would he live? He still had his feet on the island, but he was facing the rough dark waters. He must go back—or else he must leap. Lili, his gentle love, could never follow him if he took that leap. She was a flower, a delicate thing, whose roots must grow in the loam of plenty. There was still time for him to go back to America. A cable, his hand on the telephone, a few words, and he could tell her he was coming. The letter was no use. Either he must go back—or take the reckless leap.
The door opened and Young Wang came in and closed it carefully. James lifted his head. Young Wang’s jacket was torn, the buttons ripped from their moorings, and he had lost his sailor’s cap. But in his hand he held an envelope. He came to the table and shook out the contents. They were railroad tickets.
“I spend too much money, master,” Young Wang said solemnly. “But I think it is good to spend it so. To get a ticket honestly we must wait many days. This way I bought two tickets from a man privately inside the station.”
“Why are your clothes torn?” James exclaimed.
“Other men also wish to buy,” Young Wang said, grinning. “Never mind—I fix my coat.”
He got down on his hands and knees, found his bundle, and opened it. From a small paper box he took six safety pins. “Foreign ladies drop pins on the floor and I pick them up,” he said. “In my village no one can buy them, and I take them home to my mother. But now I use them to keep my skin from leaking out.” He pinned his jacket neatly together, and James watched him.
“What day are the tickets for?” he asked.
“Tomorrow morning, six o’clock. But I think it better if we go now, master. Many people will wait at the station and jump in the train. We must jump first, or tickets will be no good. Tickets are only for the train conductor, not for passengers.”
“Let’s get ready and go,” James said. He tore the letter into small bits and dropped them into a huge brass cuspidor that stood by the table.
This is not to say that he could forget Lili. In the night at the station he sat upon a rail seat that rose out of a sleeping mass of people on the floor, leaning against baskets and bundles, and thought of nothing but Lili. Part of the time he thought of her with bitter clearness and when he dozed into exhaustion he dreamed of himself successful and famous and somehow drawing her to him again. Ting would never be anything, but he, James Liang, would certainly be something, and surely there would come the day when Lili would see what she was doing. He woke to gaze down into Young Wang’s bland and peaceful face as he slept back to back with a stout old man. Young Wang had chosen this wide back against which to lean and had almost at once gone to sleep. The day had been warm, but toward evening it had begun to rain and inside the cement-floored station the night air was now almost chill. Once in two or three hours a train whistle blew and the crowd staggered to their feet and seized their bundles and pressed through the gates, only to come surging back and fall upon the floor to sleep again. Each time Young Wang had gone to see whether by any chance the train north was making an unscheduled departure. “Sometimes people too many, train sneaks away,” he explained to James. The last time he had come back dawn was beginning to break and he would not let himself fall asleep again. He yawned ferociously, smiled at James, and announced that he had just bribed the stationmaster to tell him when the train was really going north.
In something less than an hour the stationmaster sauntered by, looking neither to right nor to left, and Young Wang seized all the baggage he could carry and James rose to follow him. From somewhere two coolies appeared and silently tied the rest of the suitcases together and followed behind.
Outside on the platform the air was misty and cool and the electric lights were feeble. There was no train in sight. A few anxious souls were asleep even on the platform and they still slept. But Young Wang peered into the distance. “Train comes,” he announced in a tense whisper. Nothing could be seen but his eyes pierced beyond sight.
“How do you know?” James asked.
“Feel the earth under my feet,” Young Wang answered.
In a quarter of an hour the train pulled into the station and the crowd pressed through the gates and began climbing into doors and windows alike
. But Young Wang was ahead of them all. Yelling and pushing with sharp elbows, he commandeered two seats, heaped them with baggage and sat on top of them. James, caught like driftwood on a wave, heard him roaring at the top of his lungs that his master was a Big Man from America. When he came into sight, Young Wang climbed down, smiled, and showed him a pleasant enough corner by the window.
“Bags must stay here,” he said. “If no bags, then seat will be gone soon.”
The aisles were full and men and children sat even on the baggage racks overhead. The noise on the roof meant that those who had not found places inside were on top of the car. The engine gave a series of jerks, people screamed, a few fell off, the train started northward, and James found that for a full hour he had not had time to think of Lili.
If the day was long and hideous, the night was less so only because from exhaustion he fell into a daze of unconsciousness which was not sleep. He dreamed that he was held in some prison full of writhing people who had nothing to do with him and yet he was one of them. He woke to gaze out of the dusty windows at a dull landscape whose colors he did not see.
On the morning of the second day Young Wang broke a window pane. Fresh cool air rushed in and James felt his brain cleared suddenly. He had been sitting in deep depression, unwashed, for there was no water on the train. When he had struggled to the lavatory he had found it occupied by two women, their bedding, and three children, and he had retreated again. When the train stopped Young Wang had allowed him out only with great anxiety, and had begged him not to leave the side of the train, because no one knew how quickly the train might go. Then Young Wang, rearranging his possessions to allow him to lie on top of them, had thrust a heavy oiled paper umbrella he had bought from a vendor through the cracked glass of the window.
Now James leaned toward the hole and breathed in the air. He had been poisoned by the fetid atmosphere within the car. He drank in the freshness of the morning and saw to his surprise that the land was not dim and colorless. Instead it was brilliantly green and against the vivid hue men and women in blue garments worked in the fields. Small brick-walled villages studded the level plains and on the horizon were violet-colored hills.
“Forgive, forgive!” a gentle trembling voice said. An old gentleman in a crumpled silk robe pushed past him, put his head through the opened window and was violently sick in a deprecating courteous fashion.
James waited, pinned beneath him, and at last the man stepped back, smiling with desperate calm. “I am too coarse,” he said. “But I have been trying for hours not to soil the train.”
“Do you have pain in you?” James asked.
“No pain, thank you,” he replied. “The train rolls me inside. It is a pity we must travel in such ways. A sedan chair is more healthy. The speed is too much nowadays.” He sighed and returned to his place on the floor. It was impossible not to like this old man. He had spread a quilt neatly under him and he drew it about him so that he need not touch the persons on either side of him. One was a soldier who slept with his mouth open and smelled of garlic and wine and the other was a young woman who suckled two children, an infant and a boy of three.
James turned his face again to the landscape. The old gentleman had been very careful and neat and there was no vomit on the window.
The train was many hours late. Long ago they should have reached Nanking, and only now were the purple hills looming into view. Young Wang sat up when he saw them, and began to fasten bundles together again. Somehow or other he had accumulated several more than he had brought on the train. At various places when the train stopped he had bought packages of tea, of dried fish, of fried brown bean curd, or larded cakes. Each town had its specialty and vendors brought them to the train. Since there was no food served, anything to eat was valuable and Young Wang had stored up enough for himself and James, and what was left he would give to his family as presents at some distant day. He prudently bought nothing that was fresh except at midnight two large bowls of hot soup, one of which he had given to his master. At Nanking the train stopped, and they must take a ferry and cross the river to take a north-bound train again on the other side.
“You get ready, please,” he bade James with authority. “Here is one big fight for the ferry first.”
When the train slid loudly into the station the baggage was slung about his person like armor and he plunged relentlessly into the crowd, creating a space in which James followed him with a doggedness that was almost ruthless. By this means they reached the ferry in time to find a place that was not on the edge of the boat.
“Too many people drown,” Young Wang told James over his shoulder. “Push, push, splash!”
So it happened that when they were on the ferry James saw the unlucky old gentleman, clawing his way on at the last moment, gain a tiny space as the ferry left the banks. In mid-river there was indeed a splash. A few voices cried out that the old man had fallen in the water. The ferry continued on its way, but with a shout James leaped through the crowd. He fell heavily. Young Wang had clutched his ankles and would not be shaken off.
“Let go, you fool!” James shouted. But nothing would loose the hands locked at his feet. Scores of hands reached out to prevent him when he tried to drag himself to the edge of the ferry. “Too late, too late!” they cried. “It is destiny! The current has taken that old head far away.”
It was indeed too late. The river swirled with a hundred wicked crosscurrents and had James plunged it would have been to search in vain for the quiet old man. He stood dazed for a moment, speechless with a terrible silent anger. Then he turned on Young Wang.
“Let go!” he roared. The brown hands unlocked, but Young Wang stood between him and the water. James turned his back on him and Young Wang reached out and unseen he took hold of the end of his coat and held it until they reached the shore.
On the northern shore James turned and looked back at Nanking, the capital of his country. It lay hidden behind a high gray wall, centuries old. Beyond it he could see the double crest of Purple Mountain, where Sun Yat-sen’s tomb had been built. He knew from scores of photographs how the tomb looked. Some day when he had discovered his own country he would go there and look at the tomb of the man who had lived too long, or died too soon—he did not know which.
When the train reached Peking he was in a fever of weariness. He had been traveling for days and he realized that he had become utterly dependent on Young Wang. The sprightly young man had provided him with food and hot tea at intervals, had night and morning fetched him hot water in a tin basin wherewith to wash, had pushed soldiers and women and callous men off the seats he had pre-empted for himself and his master, had fanned away flies, had again broken a window pane, and had made life somehow endurable.
3
MARY READ ALOUD A letter from James at the noon meal. The family was still in New York, although summer had deepened and Dr. Liang was beginning to feel the heat. He sat delicately languid and listened to the letter, dated two weeks earlier and from Peking.
“I shall not crystallize my impressions of our country,” James wrote. “They are too mixed. But I have found this old city reassuring. Even the Japanese respected its ancient beauty. This is not to say that I have seen much of it. I took up my duties at the hospital the day after I arrived, and when night comes I am too weary to sight-see. My view is also somewhat biased by the fact that I see only sick people. Trachoma is frightful. So is tuberculosis. I operate on the eyes but can do nothing for the lungs. Ulcers, gangrene—”
“Spare us, Mary,” Dr. Liang said gently. “We are trying to eat—and it is very hot.”
Mary folded the letter and put it in her pocket.
“You can read it to me when we are alone,” Mrs. Liang said briskly. “Liang, eat some of the beef and peppers! You know you like this dish.”
She dipped her chopsticks into the bowl and picked out a bit of meat and laid it on his plate. He ignored it and ate some rice from his bowl, a mouthful or two. Then he began to talk gently and s
lowly, each word made clear, as he did when he lectured. “I am happy to hear that Peking is untouched. I hope to spend my old age there, in a quiet lane, in an old house with a garden. I shall be paterfamilias—let us say, grand-paterfamilias. I seem to see myself at the head of our family table and about me are my children, married and living with me under one great roof in the old style, my grandchildren running about my courts. Ah, happy old age!”
He smiled, and Mrs. Liang, who had been listening with lively interest, broke in, “Liang, I tell you, don’t count on it! Children nowadays are unreliable. Suppose they don’t want to live under one roof with us?”
Dr. Liang shook his head gently. “I am a reasonably pleasant person, I believe?” He looked at his children’s faces with a touching trust. “I am not obnoxious, am I? Not repulsive?”
“Of course not, Pa,” Louise exclaimed. She was looking very pretty today. Heat flushed her usually pale face and her eyes, set shallowly under flying brows, were dark and humid. She had a secretive reserve except toward her father. The whole family knew that Dr. Liang loved Louise better than any of the other children, and they accepted it as natural, since she was the youngest.
“You will come and live with me, Little Lou?” Dr. Liang went on, half playfully, half pathetically. “Ma, we will have at least one child with us. We must find a very nice husband for her, some nice young professor, a scholar with whom I can discuss the dreams of Chuangtse and the poetry of Li Po, the charming drunkard.”
Dr. Liang liked to tease his children affectionately with threats of finding husbands and wives for them in the old fashion of Chinese parents. Actually he had declared that while he would introduce suitable young persons to his sons and daughters he would not force his choice upon any of them. He was too modern and he loved them too well.
The mention of marriage roused Mrs. Liang’s curiosity. “Does James say anything about Lili?” she asked Mary. “Nothing,” Mary replied.
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