Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“In Peiping the day was marked by stormy protest from the students. Five thousand university students went on strike against the arrest of twenty-five of their fellows who had been in jail here since yesterday for—”

He winced and turned off the radio. He could live only it safety — that is, in peace. He had better stay where he was. A scholar must have peace. Resolutely he closed his eyes and in a slow murmuring voice began to recite the Book of Songs, written hundreds of centuries ago. It was better than a bromide and in less than a quarter of an hour he was fast asleep.

In the big parlor of the Li apartment Lili was listening to Charlie Ting talk. He had a fluent tongue which spoke an idiomatic American dialect much better than he spoke his own native Shanghai. He sat on the divan beside Lili, his arm thrown behind her. Her mother sat silent and dozing in a distant corner. At the exact moment when her head fell upon her breast he would kiss Lili. He talked on, his eyes upon the dozing figure.

“I wish we were going to Washington instead of London. But everybody says London is fun. I wish the food weren’t so scarce there, but Violet says the black market in Paris is wonderful and of course we can have things sent over. As for that, you and I aren’t diplomats and we can slip over to Paris. What say we get a little apartment there and spend a lot of time in it? Officially of course, we’ll be with the old people, like nice dutiful children, but actually we’ll be on our own. That’ll give them face and give us what we want.”

Mrs. Li’s head fell upon her breast and Charlie pressed his lips to Lili’s soft red mouth. She yielded with entire abandon, throwing back her head and closing her eyes exactly as she had seen movie stars do. She always watched the screen kiss closely in order to learn the American way. Charlie’s head swam a little. He also learned from the movies. It was really the only place to learn modern ways of making love, or perhaps it had better be said, ways of making modern love. There was nothing in China to teach him. He had seen a few motion pictures made in Shanghai and they seldom showed even a kiss. Chinese lovers still only talked, or at most touched hands. He had once read an English translation of an old Chinese book which had been recommended to him as spicy, and it had seemed dull indeed, full of references to flowers and dew, clouds and valleys and wooded mountain-tops, which he had not understood, and where the little feet of women were supposed to be something wonderful.

“Sure you’ve never loved anybody but me?” he inquired jealously of Lili.

She looked at him with large thoughtful eyes and kept silent. She spoke very little, and he was not always sure she understood his English. She did not speak very well herself — cute, of course, the way she talked, but certainly not good American.

“Tell me, darling,” he urged.

“Only once I thought I maybe love a little,” she confessed.

He felt a punch in his chest, where his heart beat against his ribs. “You never told me that,” he said solemnly. “Who was he?”

“Never mind now,” she said softly and laid her head against his shoulder.

“But I do mind,” he insisted. “I can’t be happy till you’ve spilled the whole thing.”

“S-pilled?” she inquired in two syllables.

“Told me,” he translated.

She smiled. “Is nothing at all, truly. When I first came here, I didn’t have experience.” She spoke the long word syllable by syllable. “At that time James Liang fell into love of me — I didn’t understand. I only saw how it is in the movies and I was excited. I let him love only a little.”

“Where is he now?” Charlie demanded.

“Oh, very far away in Peking!”

“What is he doing there?”

“He is doctor in a big hospital.”

“Does he write to you?” Charlie asked.

“Oh, no!” Lili replied in a soft scream, “only once he wrote a long letter asking me to come there. But I don’t answer.”

“That’s all?”

“All,” she sighed.

There was silence for a moment. “Did he kiss you?” Charlie asked in a tight voice.

“Sometimes he did.”

Charlie drew his arm away and sat apart from her. She stole a long look at him. Enough jealousy was good but too much was dangerous.

“I didn’t like it,” she said sweetly. “When he kiss me, I feel it is not nice. And I do not want to live in China any more now when it is so nice here and I think it will be nice in Paris and maybe London, too.”

She leaned toward him and pressed the fragrant palm of her hand against his cheek. “Now I am sorry I s-pill,” she whispered, “but I think I must because I must s-pill everything for you.”

He resisted her for a brief moment and then he turned to her and kissed her again, long and hard. In the corner Mrs. Li began to snore slightly.

Still later did Ranald Grahame sit up talking to Violet. They did not so much share one apartment as live in connecting ones. He had, of course, to seem to live alone, and so for that matter did she. He was not the sort of man who wanted domesticity, and certainly she was not the woman to provide it. He had never married and he never intended to marry. He had explained to Violet so there would be no misunderstanding. He believed in being as honest with women as he was with men.

This honesty compelled him now to demand an explanation of her behavior. He had left the party early because he would not allow himself to make a spectacle before others. After his dance with Lili had been interrupted he had taken a whisky and soda at the bar and then he had gone to pay his respects to Mr. and Mrs. Li. They had looked at him rather vacantly as though they did not remember who he was and this had not made him feel better. He knew Chinese well enough to believe they were only pretending when they seemed hot to know one. They knew everything, actually. They were much more difficult to deal with than the mercurial people of India, who were always bursting with talk and feelings, so that you knew what they were about and could circumvent them easily. Chinese contained their feelings so thoroughly that any more containment was self-immolation.

For this reason he did not believe for one moment that Violet did not know what she had done. He had waited two hours for her in a state of cold rage mounting to absolute frigidity by the time she came in, beautiful in her pallor.

He was waiting in her sitting room, and she lifted her eyes in surprise at him. “You still here, Ranald!” she said in her lovely modulated voice. She threw off the short sable coat. “Shall I make you a drink?”

He had risen meticulously when she came in and now he sat down again. “No thanks — I shan’t stay but a moment. You must be tired.”

She sat down gracefully weary and pushed back her hair. “I am, rather. Pierre wanted to show me a new nightclub — a French one. A lot of his friends were there. It was fun — or would have been if I had not been already tired. That was a stupid big party, wasn’t it? But curiously distinguished, too — frightfully Chinese, I thought. It looked as though everybody were there, but when one examined the crowd, there was really not one person who was wrong, you know.” She had the trick of speaking English in various ways, to an American as an American, to an Englishman as an English woman. She spoke five other languages as easily, one of them Russian.

But she was not a spy, nor anything indeed except what she seemed to be, a rootless beautiful woman, floating on any surface, and without depths of her own into which to retire. Frequently she did not like her life, but she did not know how to make another. Her father had been an old-fashioned Chinese, whose origins even she did not know, and she had never known her French mother. She might have become a famous model for artists, but to her they seemed dingy men, and she had continued to live strictly as a nun in her father’s great dark Paris house, which was filled with Chinese furniture and rugs and paintings. What he did not want he sold and what he liked he kept. Such goods reached him in secret ways from China, and imperial treasures passed through his hands or stayed in his house.