The Eternal Wonder (21 page)

“Am I never to spend more time in the Louvre?” he inquired.

They were exactly the same as they had been before the conversation late that night, now four nights ago, in the library. He had not forgotten for a waking moment, however, what she had said, but neither had referred to it again. And subtly he had changed his manner toward Mr. Kung. He did not so obviously sit at his feet, metaphorically speaking. Instead he took books to his room to read or he went on walks. Yesterday, Mr. Kung had seen him on one of these walks and this morning before he left the house, he had summoned Stephanie.

“My child,” he said reprovingly. “Why do you allow our young friend to prowl about the streets alone? Accompany him today!”

“I would like that, Papa,” Stephanie said. “And you, Rann?”

They had exchanged knowing smiles. “I’d love it,” he said with true enthusiasm.

“Then it is arranged,” Mr. Kung said with satisfaction, and so departed.

“Never the Louvre with me!” Stephanie was saying now.

“And why not?” he demanded. “I’ve spent weeks there and have only scratched the surface of all there is to see.”

“That’s just it,” Stephanie replied, “it is too, too big.”

He was inclined to argue, for he felt he had not spent enough time in the Louvre and besides bigness did not frighten him. In many ways Stephanie was very French. She had a delicacy of approach. Or perhaps that was Chinese? He did not know. At any rate, she was delicate in her tastes. She did not like too much of anything at once.

“So,” he continued, “how am I to see the treasures of Paris?”

“One by one, shall we not?” Stephanie said, coaxing. And then she ticked off the fingers of her left hand with her right forefinger. “I will take you to the Cluny medieval treasures; to Arts et Métiers because you are interested in science; to the Carnavalet for everything about Paris herself. As for art, I will take you first to Jeu de Paume. That’s impressionist, of course. And I don’t know anything more satisfying for Oriental art than my father’s collections. But no! I will be generous, I will take you to the Guimet.”

“And Versailles,” he hinted.

She put both delicate hands over her face. “Oh, please! Let us choose Chartres—so much lovelier—and then Rouen! But I want to take you too to the Mouffe.”

“What is the Mouffe?” he demanded, never having heard of it.

“A wonderful old market, hundreds of years old, with such people, such faces, all quarreling over prices at the top of their voices—such fun! We could buy some bread and cheese and go to the Jardin des Plantes and see the fountain.”

They set off with the joy of sunshine and morning and their own youth. He felt free with her, at ease and happier than he had been in his life before. Ever since the night in the library when she had told him she did not want to marry he had been at ease with her. Her independence, her wish to be completely free of marriage and men freed him, too. The months with Lady Mary, a bondage exciting at first and ending in repulsion, had put a shadow upon him, a burden of secret knowledge that faded on this bright summer’s day and the days to follow.

HE KNEW, OF COURSE,
THAT
this life could not be endless. That a day slipped so easily into another day was only because he was learning so much every day. Stephanie knew many places, many people of many sorts, people among whom she moved without intimacy and yet with knowledge of their personal histories and peculiarities, all of which she recounted to him in such vivid detail that he felt he knew each one, and this though she seldom introduced any by name. He absorbed facts complete with colorful detail.

“Monsieur Lelong,” she announced, “is an excellent teacher in the school I attended as a small child. Unfortunately, he has severe halitosis due to a deranged liver, but he is the soul of goodness.”

They were about to pass at this moment a tall, excessively thin, yellow-faced man in a shabby black suit. She hailed him with the utmost friendliness.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Lelong! Comment allez-vous?”

A few minutes of rapid exchange, and this done, she allowed him to proceed while she described the aging Frenchman’s history in detail, his unrequited love for a much younger teacher who had married another man, and—

He laughed. “It’s you who should write the books, Stephanie—not I!”

“Ah, I could never have the patience,” she told him. “But you—you must know people. You must know all kinds of people, not only what has happened to them but why they are as they are.”

Each day was indeed new learning and he might have accepted this without planning its end, except that one evening Mr. Kung asked him to come the next morning to his shop. There in his office he had a matter to discuss with him. He had of course been many times in Mr. Kung’s vast shop, a museum indeed of every variety of art object. Stephanie had led him thither whenever a new shipment came in from an Asian country, and he had learned the history of one country and another and one century and another. He learned the many qualities of jade and topaz, ivory and rubies and emeralds. He had never, however, seen Mr. Kung’s private office, far in the back of the treasure-filled rooms.

“Shall I come too, Father?” Stephanie asked.

“No, it is not necessary,” Mr. Kung replied.

It was the end of an evening. Winter was over, the city was crowded again, and the spring season had begun. He and Stephanie had been to the opening of a new play and, returning, had found Mr. Kung waiting for them in the library, where, magnifying glass in his hand, he had been examining a long hand scroll of Chinese landscape. When they came in he had put scroll and glass aside and, having made his invitation to the shop, he was mounting the stairs to his own rooms.

They watched him from the foot of these stairs, and Stephanie’s face grew sad.

“Do you see how feebly he walks now?” she whispered. “He has been failing all winter. Yes, he never complains. What has he to say to you tomorrow, I wonder?”

“I wonder too,” he said. “But I think we know.”

She looked at him with sorrowful eyes, but she spoke resolutely. “Whatever he asks of you, Rann, you must not do it unless it suits your life. You have your own genius!”

“PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF,”
MR. KUNG
said affably.

He sat down in the chair Mr. Kung indicated with a wave of his long, thin hand. It was a Chinese chair, armless and straight-backed, of polished dark wood. The back was decorated with an inset of landscape marble. Mr. Kung explained the marble inset in the chair, a special marble from the province of Yunnan in South China, which, when cut crosswise in thin slabs, was so veined that the dark streaks seemed to compose a landscape and sometimes even a seascape. The room was entirely Chinese. Scrolls hung on the walls and tall potted plants stood in the corners.

The chair Mr. Kung had assigned to him was on the left of the square table that stood in the center of the inner back wall of the room. Mr. Kung, as the elder, sat in the opposite chair on the right of the table. A Chinese manservant in a long blue Chinese robe entered silently with a teapot and two covered tea bowls. He set the tray on a side table, removed the covers from the bowls, filled the bowls with tea, covered them again, and with both hands placed one bowl before Mr. Kung and the other before the guest. Then silently he left the room.

“Drink,” Mr. Kung said, and lifting his bowl he put aside the cover, sipped the hot tea, and set the bowl down again.

“My daughter tells me she has shown you many sights,” Mr. Kung said.

“We’ve had a wonderful time together,” he replied, and waited.

Mr. Kung was
silent for a few minutes, as though in meditation, then abruptly began to speak.

“I am Chinese. My family in China is very ancient and honorable. We are Mandarins. I do not know how many of my brothers are still living. Nor do I know where, except for my youngest brother who escaped to Hong Kong. He lives there under another name and he does business for me there. I came to Paris many years ago, but before I could complete my studies the government in my country changed. At that I might even have returned had it not been that my honored parents were among the first to be killed. We were landowners and my parents were killed by our own farm tenants, who were land-hungry peasants. Without parents, I was compelled to arrange my own life. It was not possible for me to return to my country to marry the woman to whom I had been betrothed by my parents when we were both children. Her parents too, and she herself, probably, were also killed. Therefore I arranged my life. I had an American—what do you call it—an ‘amie.’ You understand?”

He nodded in reply, and Mr. Kung continued.

“I should have known better—but she wished me to marry her because she was pregnant and I did so. I wanted a family. I had a duty to carry on my family. A son would have been Chinese, though he had foreign blood. He would have borne my name. Therefore I married. As it turned out, she had been pregnant but she lost the first child through a miscarriage. I’ve always thought she caused it deliberately and at the time I was very angry. When she became pregnant the second time, a year later, I myself saw to the details of her care. My daughter was that child. Then later, the mother—the woman—became enamored of an American, an artist, not even a good artist, either. She left me when the child was only six years old. But she has been a good child, very intelligent. Yet she is a daughter. You also find her intelligent?”

“Very intelligent,” Rann said.

“And—beautiful?” Mr. Kung asked.

“And beautiful,” he agreed.

Mr. Kung sipped his tea again and set the bowl down as before. He cleared his throat and proceeded.

“I am encouraged, then, to go on with what I am about to propose. First, let me say that of all the young men I have seen, you are the only one I would choose as my son to be born to me. You have an old soul. I am too modern to believe in reincarnation—and yet I am old enough that I believe. I wish you were my natural son. It could have been so. Your mind is pure intelligence. You speak little but you understand everything. When I tell you something—anything—I can see you already know.”

What could he say? He remained silent.

“In my country,” Mr. Kung went on, “we have an ancient custom. Where there is no heir, no son to carry on the family name, the favorite son-in-law, the husband of a favored daughter, is adopted as the true son. He assumes the family name. He becomes the son, the heir.”

Mr. Kung held up his hand to stop reply, for he had lifted his head, he had opened his mouth to speak. “Wait! I said
heir
. I am a very rich man. I am even famous. My word is trusted in this foreign country. I am an authority in the highest forms of Oriental art. I will teach you everything. You will inherit my business—when you marry my daughter.”

“Sir,” he said, “have you talked with your daughter about this?”

For a thought had crept into his mind as he listened to Mr. Kung’s mellifluous, gentle voice, that father and daughter might have planned together this proposal. Perhaps Stephanie had even prepared for it by declaring to him previously that she did not wish to marry. Perhaps in fact she did. He had learned from Lady Mary that a woman could pretend indifference when in truth her heart was set upon something—upon someone.

“I have not spoken with my daughter,” Mr. Kung now said. “It would not have been fitting until I had your word. If you are willing—if you would even consider becoming my son, then my heart rejoices. I will go to my daughter at once. But no—you are American—I must not forget that. After I have spoken to her you shall speak to her yourself. I am not old-fashioned. I will permit it. I must remember she also is partly American. It is difficult for me to remember that. And yet I never forget it either. Now I will be silent. I await your answer.”

Mr. Kung smiled at him, a warm, welcoming smile, a smile of expectant happiness. He did not know how to begin. He understood by God-given instinct all that this good man, this aging Chinese father, was feeling. He shrank from hurting him, and yet he had his own life to fulfill in ways that were only just beginning to clarify. He had not faced marriage even as a possibility. Lady Mary had made the very thought of it impossible. She had ravaged some part of him. He was damaged somewhere in his inner soul. She had forced something in him too soon. What might have developed in him with natural beauty had been torn open. True, too, true, he had yielded when he should have resisted but what had at first been a physical surprise of delight had become a repulsive demand. He had indeed been used and therefore misused. Where, even if he married, it must be so different that the past would be cleansed.

“Sir,” he began with resolution that was at the same time difficult. “I am honored. Indeed, sir, I don’t know a man whom I would be more honored to call my father. But sir, I am not ready to marry. I have a family too—a mother, a grandfather—”

Mr. Kung interrupted. “You will be able to care for both.”

“But sir,” he said with urgency, “I have myself. I must consider that for which I was born—my own destiny, my fate … my—my job, sir!”

“You mean—you mean—you
decline
?”

“I must, sir!”

He rose, and Mr. Kung rose too. He put out his right hand but the Chinese did not take it. The Chinese face grew cold and stern.

“Don’t you understand, sir?” he pleaded.

Mr. Kung glanced at his wristwatch. “Excuse me,” he said. “I see that I have another appointment.”

He bowed and left the room.

AN HOUR LATER
RANN WAS
in the beautiful rooms where he had been so happy for all these months. He was packing his bag, he was gathering together the few things he had brought with him, leaving all else behind, and Stephanie was with him. The bus left for the airport in half an hour.

“I must go home,” he kept muttering. “I want to go home. I want to get back where I began. I have to be alone there.”

He heard himself and stopped. He turned to Stephanie. She stood there, pale and silent.

“Do you understand, Stephanie?”

She nodded. Suddenly he realized he was leaving her. “Shall we ever meet again?”