Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“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.

“A little money,” she said scornfully. “How much? Maybe in one month what I paid yesterday for my necklace. Baba is right.”

His arms grew cold around her. “Do you mean you don’t want to marry me?”

She wept again loudly and she threw her arms about his neck. “I do — I do — but please, here, in New York, I like it so much!”

He said gravely, “I must go.”

His arms dropped and she put them back again. “No, you must love me, please!”

In her distraction she was so beautiful, so helpless that he held her again, while his heart broke. So they sat a long time, and he did not know what thoughts went on in her mind.

It was she who spoke first after a while. She wiped her eyes and swallowed her sobs and said in her soft voice, “There is only one way, James. You must go first, without me. When Baba lets me, I will come.”

“You mean — go without being married?”

She nodded. “It is the only way,” she said. “Baba will not make me marry another man right away now if I cry every day. Maybe he won’t die. Then — after you make money — buy a house maybe — or just even rent a nice house—”

He sat staring at her and she did not look at him. She twisted her little wet handkerchief into knots and then untwisted it and spread it on her knee, pulling the lace edge, doing everything, he thought, to avoid his eyes.

“This is what you want me to do, is it, Lili?” he asked at last.

She lifted her eyes to his. “Not what I want—” she whispered.

He was very gentle, very tender. “Then, dear, couldn’t you come with me — run away, maybe?”

She shook her head positively. “I — can’t,” she said in a small sweet voice. “Oh, no!”

“You really are sending me away — alone?”

She began to cry. “It is you who want to go alone — if you stay here everything is all right. I am not troubling — it is you — you—”

He did not try to comfort her. He sat listening; he saw the tears on her cheeks and felt her little hands pressing his. The palms were hot. When her sobbing died and she fell silent he saw her peeping at him from under her wet lashes. She even tried to smile. But he would not allow himself either love or pity.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “It is I who want to go — even alone.”

And he rose and went away, refusing at the door, in his one backward look, the appeal of her startled eyes, her hands suddenly outstretched.

THE OCEAN WAS NOT THE RIVER. No bridge could cross it. James stood for hours every day, staring down into the clear green water that foamed into white waves where the prow of the ship clove its way westward. He was lonely and still he wanted to be alone. There were few passengers — two solitary old Chinese who he suspected were Cantonese going home to die, a hard-bitten American businessman, a Standard Oil executive, a journalist, two or three missionaries and their wives. Only the missionaries spoke to him every morning when they passed, and he did not encourage them.

The ocean was not the river. It changed from day to day, from hour to hour. Under a gray sky it was green. Under rain it was gray. In sunshine it was pure royal blue, and under the moon it was a tender silver. The moon was what he could not endure. The moon made him think of Lili. Long ago he had forgiven her. She was mild and sweet, an affectionate child, sad with fear that her father would die while she was away. It had ended like that by the time he left New York. She was afraid her father would die, and she had begged him to wait until the operation was over. He had not waited because he was afraid old Mr. Li might die indeed, and then he would not have the heart to leave Lili.

“It is better for me to go,” he had told her. “If he dies, then you will have the courage to come to me.”

He stretched out in his steamer chair, lying very still, his eyes closed. He was in mid-ocean, days lay behind him, days waited ahead. His body ached with loneliness, defrauded of marriage. It seemed to him now that he had left his father’s house in a confusion of suffering. He had not tried to persuade Lili again and he had seen her only once more, the last night before he went away. It was too late then to change anything, even had there been a change in her. He had already sent cables accepting the job at the hospital in Peking, announcing that he would come alone and therefore would not need one of the resident doctor’s houses, would gladly accept two rooms in the men’s dormitory, and that he was leaving at once. Passports and visas were rushed through with the help of governments. It suddenly became important for Dr. James Liang to reach China. He was to bring with him supplies of drugs, especially the new streptomycin samples for use in tuberculosis. Three-fourths of the students in government universities had tuberculosis from bad food and poor housing after the war.