XXII

Mimi and Jimmie dutifully made their way to the Crosby home. As their car worked its way up the Avenue through the throngs of Jewish clothing workers that poured from the cross streets south of Madison Square, Jimmie recited, with an airy wave of his hand at the homegoing toilers:

“How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews.”

He looked at Mimi, expecting the hoped-for smile at his cleverness, but she continued to gaze at the throngs of work-deadened, stoop-shouldered men and women, the chattering groups of younger people dressed in brave but unsuccessful imitations of their sisters who were strolling the same avenue a mile or two northward. She watched the swirling eddies of humans, swept this way and that from curb to building line, rushing to subway kiosk or surface car, going homeward to close-packed apartments to sleep until time to begin another day of work. Mimi did not breathe freely until the car had swept on past the Waldorf and east to Park Avenue. But the sad, weary faces remained with her.

They were not surprised to find that Mrs. Crosby had run true to form when she had written: “We’re having only a few people to meet Wu Hseh-Chuan.” As was her custom, the word “few” meant the same thing as a “crowd” to most people. And Mimi, with a smile at Jimmie, noticed that Mrs. Crosby had shown her usual lack of tact in selecting her guests. It was a heterogeneous assemblage⁠—“she must have written the names of every person she ever met, put them in a hat, and then pulled out the first forty,” was Jimmie’s whispered comment. Mimi saw seven or eight of Mr. Crosby’s business associates whom Mimi had met. There were two elderly couples, dressed properly, but obviously ill at ease and uncomfortable, who Mimi learned were relatives from Iowa of Mrs. Crosby.

At the other extreme from these unsophisticated folks were several representatives of the stage, at the moment “at leisure.” Mimi had heard from Jimmie of Mr. Crosby’s recently acquired interest in the theatre. Jimmie had told the story with much archness and numerous elaborately meaningful winks⁠—“Horace hints he may put some money into a show or two, said a man ‘ought to have other interests besides his business.’ I’d like to know what her name is and what she looks like,” Jimmie had ended his story. Between the guests from Iowa and those from Broadway ranged representatives of various groups such as can be gathered only in a city like New York. And off in one corner, surveying with wise, calm and inscrutable eyes the throng of vivaciously chatting individuals, stood the man Mimi rightly guessed to be the guest of honour, listening to Horace Crosby, who was talking with unusual volubleness.

“So glad you came, Mimi dear,” Mrs. Crosby came up and whispered, patting Mimi’s arm quickly. “I told Horace he oughtn’t expect me to entertain this Chinaman⁠—Chinks always give me the creeps⁠—but he would have me do it. Said it’d mean money to him⁠—it’s about some big deal he’s trying to put over. I did the best I could⁠—even went down to an employment agency on Madison Avenue and hired special Japanese waiters to serve the dinner⁠—wanted to make him feel right at home. But I’ve had all sorts of trouble today trying to keep Maggie from hitting one of the Japs with a skillet.⁠ ⁠…”

Mimi smiled sympathetically at the fat, nervous old woman. She smiled briefly and pityingly when Mrs. Crosby had ambled off to greet some incoming guests. Japanese waiters to make a Chinese feel at home, she amusedly thought. Poor old dear, she does mean well. The phrase brought back to her mind the washerwoman they had had years ago in Atlanta, whose most damning verdict ran: “He means well but he do so po’.” That was Mrs. Crosby, the Holy Behemoth, all over.

“Mimi, my dear, those orchids look, compared to their wearer, like scrub cabbages!” a voice said softly as she stood waiting for Jimmie to finish talking with a friend. Without turning, she knew it was Bert Bellamy.

“That sounds nice⁠—even if it is a bit silly,” she smiled. Bellamy smiled in return. He was used to such receptions from Mimi of his phrases, which ordinarily gained at least gratitude from others to whom he made them. Bellamy was short and rotund, his face cherubic and ruddy like that of a healthy child. Always faultlessly dressed, one somehow felt that he kept at his bachelor apartments a barber, a tailor, a manicurist and a haberdasher, all constantly busy. Bellamy, Senior, had made untold amounts through the stockyards he owned in Chicago and Kansas City, but Bellamy, Junior, shuddered when some uncouth person tactlessly brought up the subject of the origin of the Bellamy millions.

He ostensibly was a writer, but beyond certain vague and delightfully cryptic hints that someday his major opus would make the world sit up and take notice, no one could definitely tell what he did beyond assiduous application to his beloved avocation of being a bon-vivant, a Chesterfieldian and immaculate man of the world. Once he had confided to Mimi that he was “the modern Mr. Pepys” but he had mentioned that self-bestowed title no more when she had, with gentle mockery, assured him that if the possession of all the latest gossip was the most valuable asset towards that role, then he was undoubtedly the man for it.

For Bert Bellamy went everywhere, knew everybody and, to him most fascinating, he knew everything about everybody. He had with admirably masked intentions sought to suggest to Mimi that he would enjoy taking her to dine some evening when Jimmie made infrequent business trips. When Mimi, seeing his hidden meaning, had only laughed gently and told him she did not make a practice of dining out when her husband was away, he had recognized at once that his efforts there were futile ones. So he had returned her laugh, called her a “little mid-Victorian,” and let the subject drop, never to be brought up again. Thereafter they had been friends of a sort. For he was amusing and often relieved the boredom of stupid dinners and parties by his scandalous dissection of the lives of the others present.

“Tell me, Bert, who are all these people?” she asked him.

“The Holy Behemoth alone knows and I doubt if she knows them all! She’s certainly outdone herself tonight!” he exclaimed as they stood looking over the crowd.

“There’s Miss Gloria Russell acting literary⁠—no, not that one⁠—the girl in the pink dress with the teeth sticking out like a circular awning over a window. She reads the Times Book Review every Sunday⁠—and if you haven’t read the books yourself, you’ll believe she’s read every book that’s ever been published. My, how that gal can quote Dante and Homer and Housman⁠—she must have a bookshelf of Bartletts! She’s hoping some man will seduce her but she’s had no luck yet⁠—”

Mimi laughed.

“Why so bitter? She rebuff you, Bert?” she inquired, mockingly.

“Lord, no! I’m no saint but I have got taste.⁠ ⁠… There’s old Mrs. Crane that Bob Carroll married for her money, looking miserable as usual when Bob talks to that Scott flapper⁠—if he doesn’t watch out he’ll be out of a home and back at work again. The old lady’s nobody’s fool⁠—but, gosh, what’d she expect when she went cradle-snatching?”

“Mr. Pepys, who’s the stunning-looking girl dressed in red who’s just come in?” Mimi inquired. The Carroll-Scott affair was of long standing and she knew all about it. Bert is forgetful, she thought, he’s made the same statement about Mrs. Carroll a dozen times. And the girl who had just entered was a beauty.

“Whew!” Bert exclaimed when he saw the girl Mimi asked about. “Fat Horace has got more nerve than I thought. She is the reason Horace developed so suddenly a keen interest in the dram-mer. Peach, isn’t she?” he asked admiringly, as the newcomer sauntered gracefully across the room and greeted Mrs. Crosby. “Her name’s Dolores d’Aubigny⁠—though I’ve heard she was christened Mary Mason. She’s going to be in the Broadway Futilities next season⁠—and you know what that means.”

Mimi looked at Bert Bellamy inquiringly but he was watching the girl, who apparently was remaining near Mrs. Crosby much longer than was absolutely necessary. Mimi looked at Mr. Crosby, who had stopped talking to his guest. She fancied there was a shrewd appraisal of the relative merits of his wife, fat and ungainly and too heavily rouged and powdered, and of her who called herself Dolores d’Aubigny, slim and graceful and beautiful. As she looked, the girl with marked casualness glanced briefly at Horace and then slowly walked away from Mrs. Crosby. A flood of pity for the bungling, ludicrous old woman welled in Mimi’s heart. But the object of her pity was wholly unaware of the little drama being enacted of which she was one of the principals.

“… and she’ll cost Horace a pretty penny before she’s through with him,” Bert was saying to her.

“What did you mean just now when you said she was going to be in the Futilities⁠—that I knew what that meant? I’m probably frightfully dense and way behind the times but I don’t keep up with the latest news like you, Bert.”

“I thought everybody knew that Thorne won’t allow a girl in his show unless she’s got a gentleman friend who’s loaded with money,” he told her, incredulous that she could be so lacking in information. “That’s because these boys will buy boxes for opening night and come back to see the show all during its run. If he’s got real money, maybe he can be loosened up enough to finance a separate show, starring, of course, the girl he’s interested in. Mimi dear, you really must brush up on these things you don’t want people going around saying: ‘She’s pretty but so naive!’ Get yourself a teacher⁠—as a matter of fact, I might be able to squeeze you into my private class,” Bert ended, with a chuckle that agitated his rotund little body like a red rubber ball that’s been bounced on the floor, Mimi thought. “Thank goodness, there’s dinner. I hope Horace trots out some of that Moet et Chandon⁠—I could drink a gallon,” Bert added cheerfully as dinner was announced.

At Mimi’s right sat a banker from a town in Iowa the name of which she had never heard who talked, when he did cease momentarily giving his attention to his food, of mortgages and balances and the Follies which he had attended the night before. “And just to think that ’Lalie Hoskins’d marry a man with all the money Crosby’s got. Why, I used to pull her hair in school⁠—she sat right in front of me,” he volunteered admiringly when Mimi did not join in his enthusiastic praises of the current number of the Follies.

“So you know Mrs. Crosby well, then?” Mimi asked, not so much to gain further information as to keep the fast-dying conversation going.

“Know her? I should say I do! Why, she and I used to be sweethearts when we was little⁠—I used to carry her books home from school.”

Mimi regretted at once her unwise question, for her companion went at great length into the course of the childhood love affair he had had with the to him resplendent woman who sat at the head of the long table. Oh, well, she concluded philosophically, as the story went on and on, he doesn’t expect comments from me, so I won’t have to listen. She looked about her and examined the queerly assorted lot, ignoring Bert Bellamy’s grin of amusement as he nodded towards the gentleman from Iowa who was regaling Mimi with his childhood reminiscences.

Dinner finished, the guests spoke briefly to the guest of honour and most of them left as soon as they decently could. Mimi sensed the bewilderment of the Chinese (she wasn’t sure whether the most proper word for him was “the Chinese” or “the Chinaman”). His calm dignity interested her⁠—beside the uneasy and garrulous, the sophisticated and unsophisticated, the smartly and the not so smartly dressed group in the room, he seemed to her to possess the wisdom and the dignity of a bronze Buddha. She went over to him and sat down beside him. “I was talking last night to a young professor who’s spent some time in your country, Mr. Chuan” (she wished she had asked beforehand what the proper form of his name was), “and he was telling us you of the East are beginning to look on Western civilization with considerable less enchantment than you used to.”

He looked at her fleetingly but sharply and with acute inquiry. Mimi met his eyes frankly and he seemed satisfied with what he saw in them.

“There is a change taking place in China⁠—all over the world, in fact,” he assented in precise Oxford English. “Gandhi in India, we in the Far East, in Africa, in Turkey, in the whole Near East⁠—there is a stirring going on. But it isn’t against what you call your ‘Western civilization’ nor is it primarily against white people as white people⁠—it’s a healthy movement of people who for centuries have been asleep⁠—it’s a rising, given form by the late war, of peoples who have been exploited.”

“But isn’t that the same thing?” Mimi inquired. “These peoples are rising because they have been exploited⁠—and who has done the exploiting but the white nations? I seem to remember a story of a Chinese who told a white man the Chinese could never attain to the marvellous civilization of the white man because, as he put it, ‘I can’t shoot straight enough.’ ”

He looked at her again sharply as he smiled.

“We Orientals are accused of being inscrutable impossible to understand, mysterious. But to us you of the West are just as difficult to comprehend. For example, you spend millions of dollars every year on missions in our country, you send us hundreds of missionaries to win us from our religion to yours. Do you wonder we think you inscrutable when we see unbelief spreading throughout your Christian nations, see you quarrelling and bickering among yourselves over creed and dogma, not apparently understanding just what you do believe? It seems to us that a doctor who is dying of a disease for which he has the cure does not go out and try to force a man passing in the street to take the medicine he himself needs. And you preach to us of your Jesus whose life was built on meekness and love, yet you use guns and warships to force us to accept your religion. And you have just fought a war among yourselves that was more terrible than any non-Christian nations have ever known. And yet you call us of the East inscrutable?” and he raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly in a gesture of bewilderment.

“I don’t blame you for wondering what the sense of it all is⁠—particularly of our religious inconsistencies,” she told him. “I was once a devout Catholic but I’m not any more. Such religion as I have is to seek truth but I know now I shall never find it⁠—I can only keep on seeking.”

“The search for truth in life and life in truth is, after all, the perfect religion, for in seeking truth we attain that which we can never find in formal creeds,” was his answer. “We of the East have been⁠—we are interested in Christianity not as a religion so much as the religion of the nations which have developed science and power. But now we are seeing that the very power you have created may master you and destroy you and us. Do you remember the statement of the Japanese statesman who said to the Westerner: ‘As long as we produced only men of letters, men of knowledge, and artists, you treated us as barbarians. Now that we have learned to kill, you call us civilized’?”

“What is your notion,” she asked him, tremendously moved by the clear-sighted wisdom of this quiet little man, “of the outcome of all this? Where will it end? From your distance can you see whether we of the West are headed towards greater wisdom or destruction?”

“Who can tell? The great nation or people or civilization is not that one which has the greatest brute strength but the one which can serve mankind best. The machine has been created⁠—and it in turn is mastering its creators. I have been in your country many times and I feel that only your Negroes have successfully resisted mechanization⁠—they yet can laugh and they yet can enjoy the benefits of the machine without being crushed by it.⁠ ⁠…”

As they drove homeward Jimmie, somewhat irritably, asked her: “What were you and that Chink talking about so long?”

“He was telling me about his country. It was very interesting, too,” she answered him. Remembering his reception of the night before of Meekins’ opinions, she knew it was unwise to tell him all that she and this wise little yellow man had discussed. But long after she was in her bed she lay awake, looking out across the deserted expanse of the Square. Her discontent was taking form. She felt a new confidence filling her as she realized that perhaps there was some valid basis for the vague unrest which had been troubling her. As she hovered in that indefinite land between sleep and wakefulness, she mumbled to herself: “I don’t know what I can do about it all, I’m sure, but there’s emptiness, emptiness, everywhere” From the room beyond there came the steady, rhythmic sound of Jimmie snoring.⁠ ⁠…