Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“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.”

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.