“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.
Among ivory statues of Kwanyin Violet had grown up to look like one herself, consciously modeling herself upon the goddess. When her father died, leaving no will and no other family, she had continued in the house, except when she traveled with her servants, a married French couple who made her home wherever she was, hiring transient help in whatever country they were. Until she met the Englishman, she had had only one lover, an impetuous, jealous White Russian who had made her wretched and yet who had made it impossible for her to live alone. She had fled from him, and then she had really fallen in love with Ranald in her quiet peculiar way. She liked his subdued heat and his tenacious strength, and she liked his complete self-control. He was restful and he gave her a sense of security. She hoped that she need never have another lover, and that they could keep their relationship steadfast until they grew beyond the need of such things. By that time she hoped she could find something she really enjoyed doing.
This steadfastness she wanted above all else, and she had felt it threatened tonight by the passionate and handsome young Pierre du Bois, whom she had met for the first time. He had immediately told her that he was nobody, only a third secretary to somebody, but he thought she was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. She had missed something of the Russian in the quiet Englishman and his quiet rather selfish way of making love.
“I quite realize that you and I have no claim on one another,” Ranald was saying, “and I make no claim now.” He was very straight and tall and his pale firm face was distinguished looking. “Nevertheless, I cannot have it said that you allow yourself to be exhibited by a Frenchman or any other man. I demand of my mistress the same good taste I might demand of my wife.”
She leaned forward when he said this and she looked at him earnestly. Her face was molded in soft curves and flat bones, and her body was slender at the waist and more full-breasted than it would have been had her blood been purely Chinese. She smiled somewhat wistfully.
“You needn’t say that to me, Ranald. All my Chinese common sense tells me I shall never find as good a man as you. There are times when you seem a little dull to me, you know, and then Pierre or somebody like him is fun — just for an hour or so. But if you don’t like it, I can easily do without fun. I’d much rather be able to count on you and have you count on me.”