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. Candles 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.