“How can you bear that?” he demanded.
“I understand him,” she said simply.
She was looking at the fire and her hair was hanging over her face again. He saw only the lovely profile. Until now he had not truly examined it, but now he noticed each detail, not because it was her profile but because it was lovely. An awareness had awakened in him since he had been in this house. An awareness of beauty. There was more to know than knowledge. There was beauty. The awareness swelled again into a yearning to create beauty of his own. Again how? And what?
Out of the sheer need, he spoke. “Stephanie!”
She did not look up. “Yes?”
“Do you think you know me? Even a little!”
She shook the long dark hair. “No.”
“Why not?” he pleaded.
“Because I have never known anyone like you,” she said, lifting her head and looking at him straightly.
“Am I so—difficult?”
“Yes—because you know everything already.”
“Except myself.”
“You don’t know what you want to do?”
“Do you?”
“Of course. I want to help my father in his business, but above all I want to learn how to be independent.”
“Surely you’ll marry!”
“I’ve never seen anyone I want to marry.”
“There’s time—you’re only as old as I am!”
“Do you want to marry?”
“No!”
“Then there’s the two of us. And now I can tell you safely what my father wants and why he won’t let you go when you talk of leaving. I suppose you’ve noticed that?”
“Yes, but I haven’t wanted to go—not really! I learn so much from him—and there are all these books! I haven’t needed much persuasion to stay. Haven’t you noticed?”
“My father has his own way of getting people to do what he wants—gentle but relentless.”
“So what does he want?”
“He wants us to marry each other, of course.”
He was shocked. “But why?”
“So that he’ll have a son, stupid!”
“But I thought he didn’t like Americans!”
“He likes you.”
“Wouldn’t he rather have a Chinese?”
“He knows I won’t marry a Chinese—ever!”
“No?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s too much in me that’s not Chinese. And yet there’s too much Chinese in me to marry a Frenchman—or any white man. So—I won’t marry.”
“Does he know that?”
“No, and it’s not necessary for him to know it. It would be to refuse him a son forever. He wants me to marry a man who will take our family name and carry it on. It’s the legal way—the custom—in the China he knew. For him there’s no other China.”
He was silent, trying to sort out his feelings. Shocked, vaguely alarmed and then reassured because neither of them wanted marriage, and yet somehow fascinated—no, that was too strong a word—somehow stirred, in ways that were a result of what Lady Mary had taught him.…
“Well,” he exclaimed abruptly and, recognizing Lady Mary symptoms in himself, he rose to his feet. “At least we understand each other, but we’ll be friends, eh? I like you enormously, of course—more than any other girl I’ve ever known, though in a way you’re the only girl I’ve ever known.”
“You’re the only man—young, that is—I’ve ever known. Someone living in the house, that is—”
“So we’ll just go on being friends,” he decided.
Then he remembered his own previous confession and sat down again.
“Since you don’t really know me,” he said, “but you do know others and you are wise for your years with your father, what do you see me as—tentatively, I mean, and perhaps far in the future… very far?”
She looked at him again, for she had kept subsiding into gazing into the dying fire. Now, looking at him with a peculiar clairvoyance, she answered with astonishing assurance.
“Oh, a writer, of course. Yes, indeed, from our very first meeting. In fact, you know, I thought that’s what you were, sitting at the little table staring at everyone as though you’d never seen people before.”
“A writer!” he repeated, his voice a whisper. “I’ve been told this before and of course I’ve thought of it a great deal myself but I’ve never reached a concrete decision. And you’ve known all along!”
“Oh, yes, definitely!”
He was sobered by a stab of doubt. “You might be wrong!”
“I am right. You’ll see.”
But he could not be sure all at once like that. “Well,” he said slowly. “I’ll have to think. It will take a deal of thinking—a great, great deal. Of course I’ve thought of it, as I said, but only among many other possibilities. But to have you so sure—well, it’s upsetting in a way. Almost compulsive—”
“You asked me!”
“And I’m not blaming you—but to have you come at me like that!”
“I’m always straight-out. I suppose that’s the American in me.”
“You’re much more American than you know. There’s a world of difference between you and your father.”
“I do know—sometimes too well! He doesn’t.”
“That’s because he’s all Chinese.”
They were silent then and for so long that he rose. “You’ve given me too much to think about. I’ll say good night, Stephanie.”
“Good night, Rann.”
He stooped and upon a sudden impulse he kissed the crown of her dark hair. He had never done such a thing before. But she did not move. Perhaps she did not even know what he had done.
IT WAS, HOWEVER, A GERMINAL MEANING. In his bed he lay sleepless, thinking first of what Mr. Kung might be planning for him and then for hours thinking with excitement that perhaps indeed he would be a writer. He had written many short pieces, verse and prose, but usually questions he was asking himself. He thought of these as questions, not writing, and merely putting them down clarified the possible answers in his mind if he was unable to find answers in books or from people. The trouble was that people, even the best of them, really knew so little and of books there were so many that he wasted time in searching and scanning. And when he was alone the questions often came in rhythm, especially if he were alone outdoors. He remembered that dewy autumn morning at the castle when, unable to sleep and excited from the night before, he had risen at dawn and gone out into the garden at sunrise. There, caught among the blooming roses in the rose garden he had seen an elaborate cobweb, glittering with dew drops, every drop a diamond in the sunshine and in the center of it the creator, a small black spider, and questions came rhyming out of his mind:
And at this moment he had been interrupted by Lady Mary. She was in her morning mood, distant and even cold. It had been bewildering at first, the frightening heat of her physical passion, and when that was satisfied to exhaustion, her chill reserve. No one but he knew that within her slender, erect frame there lived two such diverse beings. He had learned to accept both, the one who fell upon him with total abandon and the other distant and dignified in the conventional, almost traditional English manner. He had learned a great deal from Lady Mary. It all seemed useless now in the light of what Stephanie had declared last night. He thought of it again with a sense of illuminating capacity. Yes, he could do it. He could be a writer, devoting himself to the art of writing. “A man’s life begins with his work,” Mr. Kung had said. Then that was why he had not felt his own life begin—had not chosen his work until now. Had he really chosen even now? Could one choose one’s life so quickly?