A House Divided Page 18

  But Yuan could not always be thus closely and alone with Sheng. Sheng knew many in this city, and he went dancing many a night with any maid he could, and Yuan was alone even though he went with Sheng. At first he sat on the edge of all the merriment, wondering and half envious of Sheng’s beauty and his friendly manner, and his boldness with a woman. Sometimes he wondered if he might follow and then after a while he saw something which made him walk away and swear he would not speak to any woman.

  And here was the reason. The women Sheng made friends with in this fashion were women not often of his own race. They were white women or they were mixed in blood, and partly dark and partly white. Now Yuan had never touched one of these women. He could not for some strange reason of the flesh. He had seen them often in the evenings when he had gone with Ai-lan, for in the coastal city people of every hue and shade mingled freely. But he had never taken one to him to dance with her. For one thing, they dressed in such a way as to him seemed shameless, for their backs were bare, and so bare that a man in dancing must place his hand on bare white flesh and this he could not do, because it made a sickness rise in his blood.

  Yet now there was another reason why he would not. For as he watched Sheng and all the women who smiled and nodded when he came near them, it seemed to Yuan that only certain women smiled, and that the best, less shameless ones looked side-wise or away from Sheng when he came near and gave themselves only to the men of their own kind. The more Yuan looked, the more true this seemed, and it even seemed to him that Sheng knew this, too, and that he only took the ones whose smiles were sure and easy. And Yuan grew deeply angry for his cousin’s sake, and somehow for his own sake and for his country’s sake, although he did not understand fully why the women so behaved, and he was too shy and fearful of hurting Sheng to mention it, and he muttered in his own heart, “I wish Sheng were proud and would not dance with them at all. If he is not held good enough for the best of them, I wish he would scorn them all.”

  And then Yuan was in an agony of hurt because Sheng was not proud enough and took his pleasure anyhow. Here was a strange thing, that all Meng’s angers against foreigners had not moved Yuan to hatred. But now seeing these proud women who looked sidewise when Sheng came near, Yuan felt that he could hate them and then that he did, and that because of these few he could hate all their kind. Then Yuan often went away and would not stay to see Sheng scorned and he spent his nights alone, at books, or staring into sky or into city streets and into the questions and confusions of his heart.

  Patiently through these summers Yuan followed Sheng hither and thither in his life in that city. Sheng’s friends were many. He could not go into the restaurant where commonly he bought his food without some man or maid calling out most heartily, “Hello, Johnnie!” For this was what they called him. The first time Yuan heard it he was shocked at such freedom. He murmured to Sheng, “How do you bear this common name?” But Sheng only laughed and answered, “You should hear what they call each other! I am only glad they call me by so mild a name as this. Besides, they do it in friendship, Yuan. The ones they like best they speak of with the greatest freedom.”

  And indeed it could be seen that Sheng had many friends. Into his room at night they came, twos and threes of friends, and sometimes twice as many. Piled together on Sheng’s bed or on the floor, smoking and talking, these young men strove each with the other to see who could think the wildest quickest thoughts and who could first confound what another had just said. Yuan never had heard such motley talk. Sometimes he thought them rebels against the government and feared for Sheng, until by some new wind the whole several hours’ talk might veer away from this and end in the cheerfulest acceptance of what was and in great scorn of any newness, and then these young men, reeking of their smoke and of the stuff they brought to drink, would shout their partings, grinning and content and with the mightiest relish for themselves and all the world. Sometimes they talked of women boldly, and Yuan, silent on a theme he knew so little of,—for what did he know except the touch of one maid’s hand?—sat listening, sick at what he heard. When they were gone he said to Sheng most gravely, “Can all we hear be true, and are there such evil, forward women as they say? Are all the women of this nation so—no chaste maids, no virtuous wives, no woman unassailable?” Then Sheng laughed teasingly and answered, “They are very young, these men—only students like you and me. And what do you know of women, Yuan?”

  And Yuan answered humbly, “It is true, I do know nothing of them—”

  Yet thereafter Yuan looked more often at these women whom he saw so freely on the streets. They, too, were part of these people. But he could make nothing of them. They walked quickly, were gay in garb and their faces were painted as gaily. Yet when their sweet bold eyes fell on Yuan’s face, the look was empty. They stared at him a second and passed on. To them he was not a man—only a stranger passing by, not worth the effort that a man was worth, their eyes said. And Yuan, not understanding this fully, yet felt the coldness and the emptiness and was shy to his soul. They moved so arrogantly, he thought, so coldly sure of their own worth, that he feared them greatly. Even in passing he took care not to touch one of them heedlessly in any way, lest anger come forth from the casual moment. For there was a shape to their reddened lips, a boldness in the way they held their shining heads, a swing their bodies had, which made him shrink away. He felt no lure of woman in them. Yet they did add their magic of living color to this city. For after days and nights Yuan could see why Sheng said these people were not in their books. One could not, Yuan perceived, his face upturned to the distant golden peak of one great building, put such a thing as that in books.

  At first Yuan had seen no beauty in their buildings, his eye being trained to quiet latitudes of low tiled roofs and gentle slopes of houses. But now he saw beauty,—foreign beauty, it was true, yet beauty. And for the first time since he had come to this land, he felt a need to write a verse. One night in his bed, while Sheng slept, he struggled to shape his thought. Rhymes would not do, not usual, quiet rhymes, the rhymes he once had made of fields and clouds. He needed sharp words, rough-edged and cleanly pointed. The words of his own tongue he could not use, they were so round and smooth with long polished use. No, he must search out other words in this newer, foreign tongue. And yet they were like new tools to him, too heavy for his own wielding, and he was not accustomed to their form and sound. And so at last he gave it up. He could not shape the verse and there it lay unshaped in his mind to make him a little restless for a day or two, and longer, because at last he came to feel that if he could but shape it out of him, he could have caught between his hands the meaning of these people. But he could not. They kept their souls away from him and he moved only here and there among their swift bodies.

  Now Sheng and Yuan were two very different souls. Sheng’s soul was like the rhymes which flowed so easily out from it. He showed these rhymes to Yuan one day, beautifully written on thick paper edged with gold, and said with pretended carelessness, “They are nothing, of course—not my best work. That I shall do some later day. These are only fragments of this country put down as they came to me. But my teachers give me praise for them.”

  Yuan read them carefully, one by one, in silence and reverence. To him they seemed beautiful, each word well chosen fitted to its place as neatly as a stone set in a ring of gold embossed with gold. There were some of these verses, Sheng said lightly, which had even been set to music by a certain woman whom he knew. One day after he had spoken a time or two of this woman he took Yuan to her home to hear the music she had made of Sheng’s verses, and here Yuan saw another sort of woman still, and still another life of Sheng’s.

  She was a singer in some hall, not quite a common singer, but still not so great by far as she conceived herself to be. She lived alone in a house where many others lived, each in his own little home in the great house. The room which she had made for herself to live in was dark and still. Although outside the sun shone brightly no sun came here. Candl
es burned in tall bronze stands. A scent of incense hung heavily upon the thick air. There was no seat hard or uncushioned, and at one end a great divan stretched. Here on this bed the woman lay, a long, fair woman, whose age was inscrutable to Yuan. She cried out when she saw Sheng, waving a holder that she held to smoke by, and she said, “Sheng, darling, I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  When Sheng sat easily beside her, as though he had sat there many times before, she cried again, and her voice was deep and strange and not like a woman’s voice, “That lovely thing of yours—‘Temple Bells’—I’ve finished it! I was just going to call you up—”

  When Sheng said, “This is my cousin Yuan,” she scarcely looked at Yuan. She was rising as Sheng spoke, her long legs careless as a child’s, and with the holder in her mouth she flung a twisted word or two, “Oh, hello, Yuan!” and seeming not to see him, went to the instrument she had and laying down the thing from out her mouth, began to slide her fingers slowly from one handful of notes to another—deep, slow notes such as Yuan did not know. Soon she began to sing, her voice deep as the music her hands made, shaking a little, very passionately.

  The thing she sang was short, a little verse of Sheng’s he had once written in his own country, but the music changed it, somehow. For Sheng had shaped the words wistfully and slightly, as slightly as bamboos shadowed in the moonlight on a temple walk But this foreign woman singing these pretty little words made them passionate, the shadows black and hard, the moonlight hot. And Yuan was troubled, feeling the frame of music was too heavy for the picture the words made. But so the woman was. Every movement she made was full of troubled meaning—every word and every look not simple.

  Suddenly Yuan did not like her. He did not like the room she lived in. He did not like her eyes too dark for the fairness of her hair. He did not like her looks at Sheng, nor how she called him by the name of “darling” many times, nor how when she had made the music she walked about and touched Sheng often as she passed him, nor how she brought the music to him written down and leaned over him and once even laid her cheek against his hair and murmured in her casual negligent fashion, “Your hair’s not painted on, is it, darling? It shines so smoothly always—”

  And Yuan sitting in completest silence felt some gorge in him rise against this woman, some healthy gorge his old grandfather had given him, and his father, too, a simple knowledge that what this woman did and said and how she looked were not seemly. He looked to Sheng to repulse her, even gently to repulse her. But Sheng did not. He did not touch her, it is true, or answer her words with like words, or in any way put out his hand to meet her hand. But he accepted what she did and said. When her hand lay upon his for an instant, he let it lie, and did not draw away from her as Yuan wished he would. When she sent her gaze into his eyes, he looked back, half laughing but accepting all her boldness and her flattery until Yuan could scarcely stomach what he saw. He sat as large and stolid as an image, seeming to see nothing and hear nothing, until Sheng rose. Even then the woman clung to his arm with her two hands, coaxing Sheng to come to some dinner that she gave, saying, “Darling, I want to show you off, you know—your verses are something new—you’re something new yourself—I love the Orient—the music’s rather nice, too, isn’t it? I want the crowd to hear it—not too many, you know—only a few poets and that Russian dancer—darling, here’s an idea—she could do a dance to the music—a sort of Oriental thing—your verses would be divine to dance to—let’s try it—” So she continued coaxing until Sheng took her two hands in his own and put them down and promised what she wished, seeming reluctant, yet as Yuan could see, only seeming.

  When they were out away from her at last Yuan breathed in a time or two and out again and looked about him gladly at the honest sunshine. They two were silent for a while, Yuan fearing to speak lest he offend Sheng in what he thought, and Sheng absorbed in some thinking of his own, a little smile upon his face. At last Yuan said, half trying Sheng, “I never heard such words upon a woman’s tongue before. I scarcely know such words. Does she then love you so well?”

  But Sheng laughed at this and answered, “Those words mean nothing. She uses them to any man—it is a way such women have. The music is not bad, though. She gets my mood.” And Yuan, looking now at Sheng, saw on his face a look Sheng did not know was there. It was a look which plainly said that Sheng somehow liked those sweet and idle words the woman had said, and he liked her praise of him and liked the flattery of his verses which her music made. Yuan said no more then. But to himself he said that Sheng’s way was not his, nor Sheng’s life his, and his own way for him was best, though what his way was, he scarcely knew, except it was not this way.

  Therefore, though Yuan stayed on awhile in that city and its sights to please his cousin, and saw its subterranean trains and all the streets of show, he knew that in spite of what Sheng said, not all of life was here. His own life was not here. He was lonely. There was nothing here that he knew or understood, or so he thought.

  Then one day when it was very hot, and Sheng was indolent with heat and lay asleep, Yuan wandered forth alone, and riding on a public vehicle or two, he came into a region he had not dreamed was here in such a city. For he had been surfeited with its richness. To him the buildings were palaces, and every man took for matter of course that he had all he would of food and drink and garments and his needs were not for these things, for they were his due and only to be expected. Beyond these were the needs of pleasure and of better garments and food made not to live by but to take zest in. Thus were all the citizens of this city or so it seemed to Yuan.

  But upon this day he found himself in another city, a city of the poor. He stumbled on it, unknowing, and suddenly it was everywhere about him. These were the poor. He knew them. Though their faces were pale and white, though some were black-skinned as the savages are, he knew them. By their eyes, by the filth upon their bodies, by their dirty scaly hands, by the loud screams of women and the cries of too many children, he knew them. There in his memory were the other poor he knew, very far away in another city, but how like these! He said to himself, recognizing them, “Then this great city, too, is built upon a city of the poor!” Ai-lan and her friends came out at midnight into such men and women as these were.

  Yuan thought to himself, and with a sort of triumph, “These people, too, hide their poor! In this rich city, crowded secretly into these few streets, are these poor, as filthy as any to be seen in any country!”

  Here then Yuan truly found something not in books. He walked among these people in a daze, staring into narrow shadowed rooms, choosing his footsteps among the garbage of the streets, where starved children ran half naked in the heat. Lifting up his head to look at misery on misery he thought, “It does not matter that they live in lofty houses—they live in hovels still—the same hovels—”

  He went back at last, when darkness fell, and entered into the cool lit darkness of the other streets. When he came into Sheng’s room, Sheng was gay again, awake, and ready with a friend or two to sally forth into the street of theatres to make merry there.

  When he saw Yuan he cried out, “Where have you been, cousin? I nearly feared you lost.”

  And Yuan answered slowly, “I have seen some of the life you told me was not in the books. … Then all the wealth and strength of these people still cannot keep away the poor.” And he told where he had been and a little of what he saw. And one of Sheng’s friends said, careful as a judge, “Some day, of course, we will solve the problem of poverty.” And the other said, “Of course if these people were capable of more they would have more. They are defective somehow. There is always room at the top.”

  Then Yuan spoke out quickly, “The truth is you hide your poor—you are ashamed of them as a man is ashamed of some secret vile disease—”

  But Sheng said gaily, “We’ll be late if we let this cousin start us on this talk! The play begins in half an hour!”

  In those six years Yuan came near to three others who befriended him amon
g all the strangers among whom he lived. There was a certain old teacher he had, a white-haired man, whose face Yuan early liked to see because it was very kindly marked by gentle thoughts and perfect ways of life. To Yuan this old man showed himself, when time went on, as more than a teacher only. He spent willingly much time in special talk with Yuan, and he read the notes Yuan wrote in planning for a book he hoped to write, and with very mild correction he pointed out a place or two where Yuan was wrong. Whenever Yuan spoke he listened, his blue eyes so smiling and so filled with understanding that Yuan came at length to trust him greatly and at further length to tell him inward things.

  He told him, among much else, how he had seen the poor in the city, and how he wondered that in the midst of such vast riches the poor could live so desperately. And this led him on to talk of the foreign priest and how he had besmirched Yuan’s people by his vile pictures. The old man listened to it all in his mild silent way and then he said, “I think not everyone can see the whole picture. It has long been said we each see what we look for. You and I, we look at land and think of seed and harvests. A builder looks at the same land and thinks of houses, and a painter of its colors. The priest sees men only as those who need to be saved, and so naturally he sees most clearly those who need to be saved.”

  And after Yuan had thought of this awhile, unwillingly he knew it to be true, and in all fairness he could not quite hate the foreign priest as wholly as he did, or even as he wished he could, for still he thought him wrong, and still he said, “At least, he saw a very narrow part of my country.” To which the old man answered always mildly, “That might be, and must be if he were a narrow man.”