Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

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 or 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.