Pearl Buck: Kinfolk

“Mah-lee,” Mrs. Li shouted in English, “more watah, velly hot! Teapot!”

A maid with a scared white face hastened in, fetched the teapot and hurried out again. Mrs. Li looked after her with kindly contempt. “These foreigners,” she said confidentially to James, “they are not good servants. They do not understand proper relations. This Mah-lee, she does not ask me how I feel in the morning. She gives me no small attentions. Naturally, I give her no wine money — only her wages. She is discontented, I can see, but why should I pay for what I do not get?”

She looked about and laughed. Then she patted the chair next her. “Sit down,” she told James. “How is your mother? And your learned father, is he working? He works too hard!”

James bowed first to Mr. Li and then to Mrs. Li. “Both my parents are well, and you, sir? And you, madame?”

“He,” Mrs. Li pointed her chin at Mr. Li, “he coughs a great deal. It is this damp river air.”

“I coughed in Shanghai, too,” Mr. Li said.

“So you did,” Mrs. Li agreed. “It was the damp river air there, also. All rivers are alike, full of water, which is damp.”

No one could deny this. The maid brought in the teapot and Lili poured the tea in silence and handed bowls to everybody prettily with both hands.

It was ill luck indeed, James told himself, that he had found Mr. and Mrs. Li both here. It would not occur to them, he knew, to leave him alone with Lili. Why, they would ask themselves, should anyone wish them gone? However long he stayed they would continue to sit in amiable conversation. Nor would Lili move to leave them or to suggest their leaving. She sat gracefully leaning against the back of a green satin chair and looking completely beautiful.

“It is such a nice day,” James said helplessly. “I came to see if Lili would take a little walk with me.”

Lili looked at her mother and Mrs. Li nodded. “It is bright daylight,” she observed. “I see no reason against it. The sunshine will be healthy for you but do not let it burn your face. If you sit down, let it be in the shade.”

“I cannot understand these Americans,” Mr. Li said in his husky rumbling voice. “They dislike their black people yet they let the sun burn them all as black as white people can get.”

“Everybody likes darker people best,” Mrs. Li said briskly. “It is only that the white people are rough and like to order others here and there.”

“Shall we go?” James asked Lili.

She rose and went to a closet and brought out a pink silk parasol and a black patent-leather handbag.

“Have you money in your purse?” Mr. Li inquired.

“Only about twenty dollars,” Lili replied.

“Give her a little more,” Mrs. Li coaxed. “She might see a bit of jewelry.”

Mr. Li reached into the depths of his loose Chinese robe and pulled out a bulging wallet and peeled off eight ten-dollar notes. “Anything over one hundred American dollars you had better let me look at, lest the foreigners cheat you,” he told his daughter in Shanghai dialect.

She took the money, pouting a little. James bowed his farewells and Mrs. Li demanded that he return to eat his midday meal with them.

“Eat with us and I will make a dish myself — say shrimps and cabbage,” she said.

“Another day,” James replied courteously. “Today I am not very hungry.”

He went out with Lili, conscious of her beauty, and they stood side by side as they went down in the elevator, their shoulders barely touching. In the street he scarcely knew how to begin. He was sure that Lili would not speak until he introduced some subject, and whether he should begin to speak at once about going to China he did not know. He looked at her and she turned her head and smiled at him slightly. She wore her hair long on her shoulders in the American fashion, and a fringe curled over her forehead. Under this fringe her eyes, set shallowly beneath her penciled brows, were large and wide open and very black. This pretty face, so flowerlike, comforted James with its calm. In spite of the quiet surface of his own family there were sharp tensions between them all, and the sharper because they were so earnestly hidden until they burst forth in some uncontrollable crisis. Mary, he often felt, for all her helpfulness and adoration for him, was too strong natured and stubborn for a girl. Her smallness was entirely deceiving, for when her will was set she was overpowering. Even their father sometimes shrugged his shoulders and yielded to her tearless determination. She never cried, however angry or hurt she was.

Lili, James felt, was entirely different and therefore adorable. She was soft and yielding and she cried easily. He had seen tears swim into her great eyes when Mr. Li was impatient with her over some trifle. This made him angry and he promised himself that he would always be a patient and kind husband. How could he be otherwise? He longed to take her hand, but she was impeded by the parasol and her handbag.

“Let me hold the parasol,” he urged.

She gave it to him, and he reached for her hand and placed it in his arm. “Not in the street!” she exclaimed.

“Here it is quite proper,” he assured her. “Where shall we go?”

“To Radio City, please,” she replied.

“But I thought you and Mary went there only yesterday?”

“Please, I want to go again today,” she pleaded.

He had not the heart to refuse her, and yet it would be impossible to talk if they were watching a picture. She would sit completely absorbed, oblivious to all except the wonder of the story upon the screen, of which, he often discovered, she had comprehended only the more spectacular effects.

“It is either too late or too early,” he said playfully. “If we go now we cannot return in time for the midday meal. It is too early for the afternoon picture. Let us just walk along the streets and sit down perhaps on a bench and watch the river. Besides, I want to talk to you, Lili, very seriously.”

She did not protest this decision, and he led her to a bench on the river front, and they sat down. He leaned the open parasol on the back of the bench and it shielded them pleasantly from the street. Before them the river spread a sheet of tumbled silver. She looked at the river but he looked at her. He had never kissed her, to his own surprise. It was simply because he did not know what she would think of it. Yet she had seen kisses between men and women on the screen.

“Lili,” he said gently.

She turned her long-lashed eyes toward him. The lashes were straight, not curled as were the lashes of American girls, and they were very thick. Her lips did not move.

“Will you let me kiss you?” he asked in the same gentle voice.

She looked to the right and left. No one was near. She opened her bag, took out a paper tissue, wiped the red from her lips, and with an air of patience she put up her face to be kissed. He hesitated, confounded by her performance. Then he could not resist the ready lips and he bent his head and kissed her. Her head pressed against his arm on the back of the bench and she closed her eyes. Her lips were cool and she did not open them. He smelled the gardenia scent of her skin. Then he lifted his swimming head.

“You don’t find it strange — to kiss?”

Now that the kiss was over she took a small mirror and a lipstick from her handbag and reddened her lips carefully and examined her hair. Then she shook her head. “Oh, no, James,” she said.

Cold horror fell upon him. “You have kissed other men?”

“Only Americans!” she said.

“Americans!” he cried. “But where?”

“In Shanghai,” she replied. “Some soldiers and two officers.”

“Did they all kiss you?”

“Of course I only allowed the officers more than one time,” she said. She was gazing at the river again and he could look at her pure and perfect profile.