“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
