A House Divided

IV

TWO THINGS CAME ON the next day to shape Yuan’s life. The lady said to him very early in the morning, “My son, it is not fitting somehow that you live in this house for the time. Think yourself how hard it is for Mei-ling now to see you day after day knowing what is in your heart towards her.”

To this Yuan answered with anger left from his angers of the day before, “I do know very well, for so I feel also. I feel I want to be where I must not see her every day, too, and where I need not remember every time I see her or hear her voice that she will not have me.”

These words Yuan started bravely enough and in anger, but before he came to the end his voice trembled and however he tried to hold his anger and say he wanted to be where he could not see Mei-ling, yet when he thought of it he knew miserably that the truth was he had rather be where he could see her and hear her voice and this in spite of anything. But this morning the lady was her old mild self and now that she needed not to defend Mei-ling or the cause of women against men she could be gentle and comprehending, and she heard very well the tremble in Yuan’s voice and marked how he broke off speaking and fell very quickly to his bowl of food, for it was at table they met now, only Mei-ling did not come. So she said to comfort him, “This is your first love, son, and it comes hardly. I know what your nature is, and it is very much like your father’s and they all tell me he was like his mother who was a grave quiet soul, always holding too hard to those she loved. Yes, and Ai-lan is like your grandfather, and your uncle tells me she has his merry eye … Well, son, you are too young to hold so hard on anything. Go away and find a place you like and a work of some sort, and set yourself to your debt to your second uncle, and know young men and women and after a year or two—” She paused here and looked at Yuan, and Yuan waited, looking back. “After a year or two perhaps Mei-ling will be changed. Who can tell?”

But Yuan would not be hopeful. He said doggedly, “No, she is not a changing sort, mother, and I can see she cannot bear me. It came to me all in a moment that she was the one I wanted. I do not want the foreign sort of maid — I do not like them. But she is right for me. She is the kind I like — Somehow she is new and old, too—”

At this Yuan stopped again suddenly and filled his mouth with his food, and then could not swallow it because his throat was stiff with tears he was ashamed to shed, because it seemed a childish thing to weep for love, and he longed to think he did not care.

The lady knew this perfectly and she let him be awhile and at last she said peaceably, “Well, let it be now, and we will wait. You are young enough to wait, and it is true you have your debt. It is a necessity that you remember you have a son’s duty to do, and duty is duty in spite of all.”

The lady said this with a purpose to stir Yuan out of his dejection and it did, for he swallowed hard a time or two and burst out, although it was only what he had said yesterday himself, but today he could not bear it, “Yes, that is what they always say, but I swear I am tired of it I did my duty always to my father and how did he reward me? He would have tied me to an unlettered country wife and let me be tied forever and never know what he did to me. Now he has tied me again to my uncle, and I’ll do what I did before — I’ll go and join Meng and throw my life in against what old people call duty — I’ll do it again — it is no excuse that he did it innocently. It is wicked to be so innocent and injure me as he has—”

Now Yuan knew he spoke unreasonably and that if the Tiger had tried to force him, still he had freed him from the prison with all the money he could find to do it. He kept his anger high therefore and ready to meet the lady’s reminder of this. But instead of her expected words she said tranquilly, “It would be a very good thing, I think, for you to go and live with Meng in the new capital.” And in his surprise at this lack of argument from her Yuan had no words and so the matter lay and they spoke no more.

On the same day by chance a letter came again from Meng to Yuan, and when Yuan opened it he found first a rebuke from his cousin that no answering word had come and Meng said impatiently, “With difficulty I have held this position waiting for you, for in these days to every such chance a hundred men are to be found. Come quickly and this very day, for on the third day from now the great school opens and there is no time for writing back and forth like this.” And then Meng ended ardently, “It is not every man who has this opportunity to work in the new capital. There are thousands here waiting and hoping for work these days. The whole city is being made new — everything is being made which any great city has. The old winding streets are torn away and everything is to be made new. Come and do your share!”

Yuan, reading these bold words, felt his heart leap and he threw the letter down upon his table and cried aloud, “I will, then!” At that instant he began to put together his books and clothing and all his notes and writings and so he made ready for this next part of his life.

At noon he told the lady of Meng’s letter and he said, “It is the best way for me to go, since all is as it must be.” And the lady agreed mildly that it was so, and again they talked no more, only the lady was her usual self, kindly and a little remote from what was before her.

But that night when Yuan came to take his evening meal with her as usual she talked of many common things, of how Ai-lan would be home that day fortnight, for she was gone with her husband to play a month away in the old northern capital, and half the month was gone, and she told of a cough that had come into her foundling home and spread from child to child until today eight had it. Then she said calmly, “Mei-ling has been there all day, trying a sort of medicine the foreigners use against this cough by thrusting a liquid drug through a needle into the blood. But I told her you might go away very soon, and I told her to come home tonight that we might be all together this one more evening.”

Now underneath all his other thoughts and plans through this whole day Yuan had wondered many times if he would see Mei-ling again, and sometimes he hoped he would not, and yet when he felt so he thought again with a great rush of longing that he would like once more to see her when she did not know it, perhaps, and let his eyes cling to how she looked and moved, even though he did not hear her voice. But he could not ask to see her. If it happened, let it be so, but if she stayed so it could not happen, he must bear it.

For his thwarted love worked a sort of ferment in him. In his room he halted a score of times during that day and he threw himself sometimes on his bed and fell to melancholy thinking of how Mei-ling would not have him and he even wept, since he was alone, or sometimes he wandered to the window and leaned against it, staring out across the city, as careless of him as a merry woman and glittering in a shimmer of hot sunshine, and then he was angry in his heart that he loved and was not loved. He felt himself most bitterly used, until at one such time there came to him a thing he had forgotten, which was that twice a woman had loved him and he had given no love in return. When he thought of this he had a great fear and he cried in his heart, “Is it that she can never love me as I never did love them? Does she hate my flesh as I hated theirs, so that she cannot help it?” But he found this fear too great to be borne and he bethought himself very quickly, “It is not the same — they never loved me truly — not as I love her. No one has ever loved as I do.” And again he thought proudly, “I love her most purely and highly. I have not thought of touching even her hand — well, I have not thought of it but a very little, and then only if she should love me—” And it seemed to him as if she must — she must — comprehend how great and pure was the love he gave her and so he ought to see her once more and let her see how steadfast he was even though she would not have him.

Yet now when he heard the lady say these words he felt his blood fly to his face, and for an instant he hoped in a fever that she would not come and now he did not want to see her at all before he went away.

But before he could devise an escape, Mei-ling came in quietly and usually. He could not look at her fully at first He rose until she sat down and he saw the dark green silk of her robe and then he saw her lovely narrow hands take up the ivory chopsticks, which were the same hue as her flesh. He could say nothing, and the lady saw it, and so she said very usually to Mei-ling, “Did you finish all the work?”

And Mei-ling answered in the same way, “Yes, the last child. But I think with some I am too late. They are already coughing, but at least it will help it.” Then she laughed a little, very softly, and said, “You know the six-year-old they call Little Goose? She cried out when she saw me come with the needle and wept loudly and said, ‘Oh, little mother, let me cough — I’d so much rather cough — hear me, I cough already!’ And then she coughed a loud false cough.”

They laughed then, and Yuan a little, too, at the child, and in the laughter he found himself looking at Mei-ling without knowing it. And to his shame he could not leave off looking at her once he saw her. No, his eyes clung to hers, though he was speechless, and he drew his breath in hard, imploring her with his eyes. Then though he saw her pale clear cheeks grow red, yet she met his gaze very fully and clearly and she said breathlessly and quickly and as he had never heard her speak before, and as though he had asked a question of her, though he did not know himself what question it was, “But at least I will write to you, Yuan, and you may write to me.” And then as though not able to bear his look any more she turned very shy and looked at the lady, her face still burning, but her head held high and brave and she asked, “Are you willing, my mother?”

To which the lady answered, making her voice quiet and as though she spoke of any common thing, “And why not, child? It is only letters between brother and sister, and even if it were not, what of it in these days?”

“Yes,” said the maid happily, and she turned a shining look on Yuan. And Yuan smiled at her look for look, and his heart, which had been so confined all day in sorrow, found a sudden door of escape thrown open to it. He thought, “I can tell her everything!” And it was ecstasy, since not in his whole life had there been one to whom he could tell everything, and he loved her still more than he had before.

That night on the train he thought to himself, “I can do without love all my life, I think, if I can have her for a friend to whom to tell everything.” He lay in the narrow berth and felt himself full of high pure thoughts and shriven by his love and filled with stoutest courage, as swept aloft by these few words of hers as he had been cast down before.

In the early morning the train ran swiftly through a cluster of low hills green in the new sunlight and then pounded for a mile or two at the foot of a vast old echoing city wall, and stopped suddenly beside a great new building shaped of grey cement and made in a foreign fashion. Yuan at a window saw very clearly against this greyness a man whom he knew instantly to be Meng. There he stood, the sun shining full upon his sword, upon a pistol thrust in his belt, upon his brass buttons, upon his white gloves, upon his lean high-cheeked face. Behind was a guard of soldiers drawn up exactly, and each man’s hand was on the holster of his pistol.

Now until this moment Yuan had been no more than a common passenger, but when he came down out of the train and when it was seen he was greeted by so bold an officer, at once the crowd gave way for him and common ragged fellows who had been begging other passengers to let them hoist their bags and baskets on their shoulders now forsook them and ran to Yuan and besought him instead. But Meng, seeing them clamoring, shouted out in a great voice, “Begone, you dogs!” and turning to his own men he commanded them as sharply, “See to my cousin’s goods!” And then without a word more to them he took Yuan’s hand and led him through the crowd saying in his old impatient way, “I thought you would never come. Why did you not answer my letter? Never mind, you are here! I have been very busy or I should have come to meet you at your ship — Yuan, you come back at a fortunate time, a time of great need of men like you. Everywhere the country is in need of us. The people are as ignorant as sheep—”

At this instant he paused before a petty official and cried out, “When my soldiers bring my cousin’s bags, you are to let them pass!”

At this the official, who was a humble anxious man and new in his place, said, “Sir, we are commanded to open all bags for opium or for arms or for anti-revolutionary books.”

Then Meng grew furious and he shouted very terribly and made his eyes wide and drew down his black brows, “Do you know who I am? My general is the highest in the party, and I am his first captain and this is my cousin! Am I to be insulted by these petty rules made for common passengers?” And as he spoke he laid his white gloved hand upon his pistol, so that the little official said quickly, “Sir, forgive me! I did not indeed perceive who you were,” and at that moment when the soldiers came, he marked his mark upon Yuan’s box and bag, and let them go free, and all the crowd parted patiently to let them pass, staring open-mouthed. The very beggars were silent and shrank away from Meng and waited to beg until he was passed.

Thus striding through the crowd Meng led Yuan to a motor car, and a soldier leaped to open it, and Meng bade Yuan mount and then he followed and instantly the door was shut and the soldiers leaped upon the sides and the car rushed at great speed away.

Now since it was early morning, there was a great crowd in the street. Many farmers had come in with their produce of vegetables in baskets upon their poles slung across their shoulders, and there were caravans of asses carrying great bags of rice crossed upon their swaying backs, and there were wheelbarrows loaded full of water from the river near by to take into the city and sell to folk, and there were men and women going out to work, and men going to teahouses for their early meal and every sort of person on his business. But the soldier who drove the car was very able to do it, and fearless, and he sounded his horn unceasingly with a great noise, and blew his way by force among the crowd, so that people ran to either side of the street as though a mighty wind divided them, and they jerked their asses hither and thither that they might save the beasts, and women clutched their children aside, so that Yuan was afraid, and he looked at Meng to see if he would not speak to go more slowly among the frightened common people.

But Meng was used to this swiftness. He sat erect and stared ahead and pointed out to Yuan with a sort of fierce exultation all there was to see.

“You see this road, Yuan? A bare year ago it was scarcely four feet wide and a car could not pass through it. Rickshas, sedan chairs, and that was all! Even in the best wide streets the only other mode was a small carriage pulled by a single horse. Now see this road!”

Yuan answered, “I do see it,” and he stared out between the soldiers’ bodies and he saw the wide hard street, and on either side were ruins of the houses and the shops which were torn down to make way for it. Yet along the edge of these ruins were already being built new shops and new houses from the ruins, frail buildings raised too quickly, but brave in their foreign shapes, and in bright paint and big glass windows.

But across this wide new street there fell suddenly a shadow, and Yuan saw it was the high old city wall, and here was the gate, and looking he saw at the foot of the wall, and especially in a sheltered curve it made, a cluster of small huts made of mats. In them lived the very poor, and now in this morning they bestirred themselves, and the women lit small fires underneath cauldrons set on four bricks, and picked over bits of cabbage they had found on refuse heaps and made ready a meal. Children ran out naked and unwashed and men came forth, still weary, to pull at rickshas or to drag great loads.

When Meng saw where Yuan’s eyes were he said with irritation, “Next year they are not to be allowed, these huts. It is a shame to us all to have folk like that about. It is necessary that the great of foreign parts should come to our new capital — even princes come here — and such sights are shameful.”

Now Yuan very well saw this, and he felt with Meng that these huts ought not to be there, and it was true these men and women were very low to see, and something should be done to put them out of sight. He pondered on this for a while and at last he said, “I suppose they could be put to work,” and Meng said gustily, “Of course they can be put to work, and sent home to their fields, and so they shall be—”

And then Meng’s look changed as though at some old remembered grievance and he cried very passionately, “Oh, it is these people who hold back our country! I wish we could sweep the country clean and build it only of the young! I want to tear this whole city down — this old foolish wall which is no use now when we make war with cannon instead of arrows! What wall can guard against an airplane dropping bombs? Away with it, and let us use the bricks to make factories and schools and places for the young to work and learn! But these people, they understand nothing — they will not let the wall be torn away — they threaten—”

Now Yuan, hearing Meng so speak, asked, “But I thought you used to grieve for the poor, Meng? It seems to me I remember you used to be angry when the poor were oppressed and you were always angry when a man was struck by a foreigner or by an official of the police.”

“So I am still,” said Meng quickly, turning to look at Yuan, so that Yuan saw how black and burning was his gaze. “If I saw a foreigner lay his hand even on the poorest beggar here I would be as angry as I ever was and more, because I fear no foreigner and I would draw my weapon on him. But I know more than I used to know. I know that the chief hindrance against all we do is these very poor for whom we do it. There are too many — Who can teach them anything? There is no hope for them. So I say, let famine take them and flood and war. Let us keep only their children and shape them in the ways of revolution.”

So Meng spoke in his loud, lordly way, and to Yuan, listening and considering in his slower fashion, there was truth in what he said. He remembered suddenly that foreign priest who stood before the curious crowd and showed them those vile sights. Yes, even here in this new great city, upon this wide street, among the brave new shops and houses, Yuan saw some of the things the priest showed — a beggar with his eyes sightless and eaten by disease, these hovels, running filthy cesspools at their doors so that there was a stench already upon the freshness of the morning air. Then his angry shame against that foreign priest rose up in Yuan again, an anger stabbed through with pain, too, and he cried in his heart passionately as Meng had cried aloud, “It is true we must somehow sweep all this filth away!” and Yuan thought to himself resolutely that Meng was right. In this new day what use were all these hopeless, ignorant poor? He had been too soft always. Let him learn now to be hard as Meng was hard, and not waste himself on feeling for the useless poor.

So they came at last to Meng’s quarters. Yuan, not being of the soldiers’ company, could not live there, but Meng had hired a room in an inn near by, and he made apology somewhat when Yuan seemed doubtful because it was small and dark and not clean, and he said, “The city is so crowded in these days I cannot find a room easily at any price. Houses are not built quickly enough — the city grows beyond all power of keeping up with it.” This Meng said in pride, and then he said proudly, “It is for the good cause, cousin, — we can bear anything for this time of building the new capital!” And Yuan took heart and said he could willingly, and that the room did very well.

The same night alone he sat before the small writing table beneath the one window in the room where he was now to live, and there he began his first letter to Mei-ling. He pondered long what to say at the beginning, and wondered if he should begin with all the old courteous words of greeting. But there was something reckless in him at the end of this day. The old houses lying in ruins, the little bold new shops, the wide unfinished street tearing its ruthless way through the old city, and all Meng’s ardent, fearless, angry talk made him reckless, too. He thought a moment more and then began in the sharp foreign fashion, “Dear Mei-ling—” And when the words were set down black and bold, he sat and pondered on them before he wrote more and stared at them and filled them full of tenderness. “Dear”—what was that but beloved? — and Mei-ling — that was herself — she was there. …Then he took up his pen again and in quick sentences he told of what he had seen that day — a new city rising out of ruins, the city of the young.

This new city now caught Yuan up into its life. He had never been so busy or so happy, or so he thought. There was everywhere work to be done, and here was the pleasure in the work, that every hour of it was full of meaning for the future of many people. Among all those to whom Meng led him, Yuan felt this great same urgency of work and life. Everywhere in this city, which was the newly beating heart of the country, there were men, none much older than Yuan himself, who were writing plans and shaping ways of life not for themselves but for the people. There were those who planned the city, and the chief of these was a small fiery southerner, impatient in speech and quick in every step he took and in the movement of his small, beautiful, childlike hands. He, too, was a friend of Meng’s, and when Meng said to him of Yuan, “This is my cousin,” it was enough and he poured out to Yuan his plans of the city, and how he would tear down the old foolish city wall and use the ancient bricks, which after hundreds of years were still beautiful and whole as blocks of stone, and better than those which could be made nowadays. These bricks, he said, his little eyes kindling to points of light, should be made into new great halls for the new seat of government, worthy halls built in a new fashion. And one day he took Yuan to his offices, which were in an old sagging house and full of dust and flying cobwebs. He said, “It is not worth while to do anything to these old rooms. We let them go until the new ones are ready, and then these will be torn down and the land used for other new houses.”

The dusty rooms were full of tables and at these tables were many young men drawing plans and measuring lines upon paper and some were coloring very brightly the roofs and cornices they drew, and even though the rooms were so old and ruined, they were full of life from these young men and their plans.

Then their chief called aloud and one came running, and he said in a lordly way, “Bring the plans for the new seat of government!” When these were brought he unrolled them before Yuan, and there were pictured very high noble buildings indeed, built of the old bricks, and set in large new lines, and from every roof flew the new flag of the revolution. There were the streets pictured forth, too, the trees green on either side, the people, very richly dressed, men and women together, walking by the sides of the streets, and in the streets there were no caravans of asses or wheelbarrows or rickshas, or any such humble vehicles as were to be seen now, but only great motor cars colored brightly in red and blue and green and filled with rich folk. Nor was there any beggar pictured.

Yuan, looking at the plans, could not but find them very beautiful. He said, entranced, “When can it be finished?”

The young chief answered certainly, “Within five years! Everything is moving quickly now.”

Five years! It was nothing. Yuan in his dingy room again, musing, looked about upon the streets where as yet there was no such building as he had seen planned. No, and there were no trees and no rich people, and the poor still were brawling and struggling. But he thought to himself that five years were nothing. It was as good as done. That night he wrote to Mei-ling what was planned, and when he set it down and told in all detail what the picture of the new city was to be, more than ever it seemed as good as done, since all the plans were clearly made, so that the very colors of the roofs were planned in tiles of bright blue, and the trees planned and painted full of leaf, and he remembered there was even a fountain running before a statue of a certain hero in the revolution. Without knowing it he wrote thus to Mei-ling, as if all were finished, “There is a noble hall — there is a great gate — there are trees beside a wide street—”

It was the same in many other things also. Young men who were physicians learned in the foreign ways of cutting diseases out of people’s bodies and who scorned the old doctoring of their fathers, planned great hospitals, and others planned great schools where all the children of the country folk even might be taught, so that in the whole land there would be no one who could not read and write, and some sat and planned new laws to govern other people, and these laws were written down in every detail, and prisons were planned for those who disobeyed them. And there were yet others who planned new books to be written in a free new way of writing, and full of the new free sort of love between men and women everywhere.

Among all the planning there was a new sort of lord of war who planned new armies and new ships of war and new ways of warfare and some day he planned a great new war to show the world his nation was now mighty as any, and this one was Yuan’s old tutor, who was afterward his captain, and now general over Meng, to whose army Meng had escaped secretly when Yuan was betrayed to prison.

Now Yuan was uneasy when he knew Meng’s general was this man, and he wished it could have been another, for he did not know how much the general would remember against him. Yet he did not dare to refuse him either when he commanded Meng to bring his cousin to him.

So on a certain day Yuan went with Meng, and though he kept his face straight and calm, his heart was doubtful.

Yet when he had walked through a gate at which guards stood, very cleanly and bravely dressed, their guns shining and ready in their hands and through courts cleaned and ordered, and when he went into a room and saw the general there, sitting at a table, he need not have been afraid. In a moment Yuan saw this old tutor of his would not call to speech any old grievance against him. He was older than when Yuan saw him last, and now a known and famous leader of the armies, and although his face was not smiling or easy or lenient, yet it was not an angry face. When Yuan came in he did not rise but nodded his head towards a seat, and when Yuan sat edgewise on it, for he had once been this man’s pupil, he saw the two sharp eyes he remembered gazing from behind the foreign spectacles, and the harsh voice he remembered, which was not unkind nevertheless, asked him abruptly, “So now you have joined us, after all?”

Yuan nodded and as simply as he used to speak when he was a child he said, “My father pushed me to it,” and he told his story.

Then the general asked again, looking at him very keenly, “But still you do not love the army? With all I taught you, you are not a soldier?”

Yuan in a little of his old confusion hesitated and then decided willfully he would be bold and not fear this man and he said, “I hate war still, but I can do my share in other ways.”

“What?” the general asked, and Yuan replied, “I shall teach in the new great school here for the present, for I have need to earn, and then I shall see how the road opens.”

But now the general grew restless, and he looked at a foreign clock that was on his desk, as though his interest was no more in Yuan if he were not a soldier, and so Yuan rose, and waited while the general said to Meng, “Have you the plans made for the new encampment? The new military law calls for an increase of men levied from each province, and the new contingents come in a month from today.”

At this Meng struck his heels together, for he had not sat in his general’s presence, and he saluted sharply and he said in a very clear proud voice, “The plans are made, my general, and await your seal, and then they will be carried out.”

So was the brief meeting over and Yuan, for all his old distaste which rose up in him strongly as he passed between many soldiers who now filed in from grounds where they had been practicing their ways of war, yet could not but see these men were different from his father’s lounging, laughing followers. These were all young, so young that half at least were less than twenty. And they did not laugh. The Tiger’s men were always full of brawling and of laughter, and when they straggled home to rest after practice they pushed each other in rude trickery and shouted and made jokes, so that the courts were full of rough merriment. Daily in his youth Yuan knew the hours for meals because he heard guffaws and curses and loud laughter outside his inner court where he lived with his father. But these young men came back silently, and their footsteps were in such solemn unison the sound was like a great single footstep. There was no laughter. Yuan walked past them, soldier after soldier, and he saw their faces, all young, all simple and all grave. These were the new armies.

That night he wrote to Mei-ling, “They looked too young to be soldiers and their faces were the faces of country boys.” Then he thought awhile, remembering their faces, and he wrote again, “Yet they had a certain soldier’s look. You do not know it, for you have not lived as I have. I mean their faces were simple, so simple that I knew, looking at them, they can kill as simply as they eat their food, — a simplicity fearful as death.”

In this new city Yuan now found his own life and share. He opened at last his box of books and placed them in some shelves he bought. There were also the foreign seeds he had grown to fruition in the foreign country. He looked at them doubtfully, each kind still sealed in its packet, questioning himself how they would grow if he planted them in this darker heavier earth. Then he tore one packet open and shook the seeds into his palm. They lay in his hand, large, golden, waiting grains of wheat. He must find a bit of land in which to try them.

Now he was caught in a wheel of days and weeks and months, each following swiftly after the last. His days were spent in the school. In the morning he went to the buildings, some new, some old. The new buildings were gaunt grey halls, foreign-shaped, built too quickly of cement and slender iron rods, and already flaking into pieces, but Yuan had his classrooms in an old building, and since the building was old the leaders of that school would not so much as mend a broken window. The autumn drew out long and warm and golden, and at first Yuan said nothing when a door hung cracked with age and would not close. But autumn became sharp with winter and the eleventh month howled in on the wings of a mighty wind from the northwest deserts, and fine yellow sands sifted through every break. Yuan, wrapped in his greatcoat, stood before his shivering pupils and corrected their ill-written essays and with the sandy wind blowing through his hair he set upon the blackboard rules for them on writing poetry. But it was nearly useless, for all their minds were bent on huddling in their clothes, which were for many too scanty in spite of their huddling.

First Yuan made report of it by letter to his head, an official who spent five weeks out of seven in the great coastal city, but to such letters the man paid no heed, for he had many offices and his chief work was to collect all his salaries. Then Yuan grew angry and he went himself to the high head of the school and he told the plight of his students, how the glass was broken in the windows, and how there were boards so cracked in the wooden floors the fierce wind came up between their feet, and how doors would not close.

But the high head, who had many dudes, said impatiently, “Bear it awhile — bear it awhile! Such money as we have must go to making new — not patching up the useless old!” These were the same words to be heard everywhere in that city.

Now Yuan thought the words rightly enough said, and he could dream of a new hall and fine warm rooms sealed against the cold, yet here were these days, and every day colder than the last as the winter deepened. If Yuan could have done it he would have taken his own wage and hired a carpenter and made the one room closed against the winter. For after a while he came to like this work he did and he felt a sort of love for these young boys he taught. They were not often rich, for the rich sent their sons to private colleges where they had foreign teachers everywhere and fires in the school houses to keep them warm and good food every day. But to this school, which was public and opened by the new state, there were no fees, and here sons of little merchants came, and sons of ill-paid teachers of the old classics and a few bright village boys who hoped to be more than their fathers were upon the land. They were all young and poorly clad and not well fed, and Yuan loved them for they were eager and strained to understand what he taught them, though very often they did not, for although some knew more and some less, still all knew too little. Yes, looking at their pale faces and eager watching eyes, Yuan wished he had the money to mend their schoolroom.

But he had not. Even his wage was not paid to him regularly, for those above him were given their pay first, and if the moneys were not enough that month, or if some had been stopped for another cause, for army or for a new house for some official, or if some stuck in a private pocket, then Yuan and the newer teachers must wait in what patience they could. And Yuan was not patient, for he longed to be free of his debt to his uncle. At least he could be free of one debt. He wrote and told Wang the Merchant, “As for your sons, I can do nothing for them. I have no power here. It is all I can do to hold my own place. But I will send you half of what I earn until all is paid my father borrowed. Only I will not be responsible for your sons.” So he cast off in these new times at least so much of the bondage of blood kin.

Therefore he dared not use his money for his pupils. To Mei-ling he wrote of it, and how he wished he could mend the room, and how cold the winter drew down, but he did not know what to do. She answered quickly that one time, “Why do you not take them out of that old useless house into some warm court? If it does not rain or snow, take them out into the sun.”

Yuan, holding her letter in his hand, wondered he had not thought of this, for the winters were dry and there were many sunny days, and after that for many days he taught his pupils in a sunny place he found, where two walls met into a corner between two buildings. If some laughed in passing he let them laugh, for the sun was warm. He could not but love Mei-ling the more because so swiftly she had thought of a small simple thing to do before the new building was made. Then this swiftness taught him something. She always answered him more quickly when he put a question to her of a thing he did not know what to do about, and he grew cunning and poured out all his perplexities. She would not answer if he spoke of love, but she answered eagerly if he spoke of trouble, and soon letters flew back and forth between these two as thick as leaves blown by the autumn winds.

There was another way Yuan found to make blood warm these cold days of coming winter, and it was by labor on the land and by planting the foreign seeds in the land. He must in this school teach many things, for the teachers were not enough for all those young who wanted to learn. Everywhere great new schools were opened to teach every new foreign thing which had not been taught before, and the young crowded into the schools to learn, and there were not to be found teachers enough to teach them all they craved to know in these new days. Since Yuan, therefore, had been to foreign parts, he was given some honor and urged to teach everything he knew, and among the things he taught was the new way of planting and tending of seeds. A piece of land was given him outside the city wall, and near a little hamlet, and thither he led his pupils, forming them like a small army into fours, and he marched through the city streets at their head, but instead of guns he bought hoes for them, and these they carried over their shoulders. The people who passed stared to see them, and many paused in their business to stare and call out in wonder, “What sort of a new thing is this?” And Yuan heard one man shout, a very honest dull fellow who pulled a ricksha, “Well, I see a new thing every day in this city now, but this is the newest thing I ever did see, to go to war with hoes!”

Then Yuan grinned to hear this and he answered, “It is the newest army of the revolution!”

The conceit pleased him, too, as he swung along in the winter sunshine. This was truly a sort of army, the only sort of army he would ever lead, an army of young men who went out to sow seed on the land. As he walked he set his feet down in the old rhythm he learned in his childhood from his father’s armies, although he did not know he did it, and his footsteps rang so loudly and clearly that the ragged marching of his followers began to shape evenly and to his pace. Soon the rhythm of their marching set a rhythm moving in his blood, and when they had passed through the dark old city gate, where the mossy bricks gave echo to their steps, and were come into the country, this rhythm began in Yuan’s mind to shape into short sharp words. For very long this had not happened to him. It was as though he had gone through a confusion and now work made him tranquil again and made his soul come clear and distil itself into a verse. Breathless he waited for the words and as they came he caught them in the old remembered delight of the few days in the earthen house. And they came clear, three living lines, but he lacked the fourth. In sudden uneasy haste, for the road was nearly ended and the land in sight, he tried to force it and then it would not come at all.

Then he had to let it all drop from his mind, for now murmurings and complainings began to break from his followers, and they caught their breath and cried out that he led them too quickly and they could not walk so fast and the hoes were heavy, and they were not used to such labor.

So Yuan must forget his verse and he called heartily to console them, “We are here; there is the land! Rest a little before we begin to hoe.”

And the young men threw themselves down upon a bank by the edge of the field, and it was true the sweat poured down their pale faces and their bodies heaved with their panting. Only the two or three country lads among them were not in such a plight.

Then while they rested Yuan opened up his good foreign seed, and each youth held his two hands cupped and into their hands Yuan poured the full golden grains. This seed seemed very precious to him now. He remembered how he had grown it ten thousand miles away on foreign soil, and he remembered the old white-haired man. He could not but remember also the foreign woman who had put her lips to his. Pouring the grain out steadfastly, that moment came again into his mind. He wished she had not! Yet that moment after all had saved him and sent him on alone until he found Mei-ling. He took up his hoe swiftly and began to swing it up and down into the earth. “See,” he cried to the watching pupils, “so the hoe must be swung! At first it is possible to waste much strength because one does not wield the hoe like this—”

Up and down his hoe swung in the way that old farmer had taught him, its point flashing in the sunlight. One by one the young men rose and tried to swing as he did. But the last and slowest to rise were the two country lads, and they, although they very well knew how to swing their hoes, moved slowly and reluctantly. Then Yuan saw it and he called out sharply, “How is it you will not work?”

At first the lads would not answer, but then one muttered sullenly, “I did not come to school to learn what I have done all my life at home. I came to learn a better way to earn my living.”

Now Yuan grew angry when he heard this, and he answered swiftly, “Yes, and if you know how to do it better you would not need to leave home to find a way to earn more. Better seed and better ways to plant it and greater harvests would have made your life better, too.”

Now there had gathered about Yuan and these pupils of his a handful of farmers from the village, and they stood staring in great wonder to see these young students come out with hoes and seed. At first they were afraid and silent, but soon they began to laugh to see how the young men could not strike their hoes into the soil. When Yuan said these words, they felt at ease and one shouted out, “You are wrong, teacher! However man works himself and whatever seed he sows, the harvests rest with heaven!”

But Yuan somehow could not bear to be contradicted so before his pupils, and so he would not answer this ignorant man. Without seeming to have heard the foolish speech, he showed his pupils how to scatter the seed into the rows, and then how deep to press the soil above the seed, and how to put a sign at the end of each row to show the name of the kind of seed, and when it was planted and by whom.

All these things the farmers watched agape, making merry over such great care, and they laughed freely and cried out, “Did you count each seed, brother?” And they cried, “Have you given each little seed its name, brother, and marked the color of its skin?” And another cried, “My mother! And if we took such care of every little seed, we would not have time to reap more than one harvest in ten years!”

But the young men who followed Yuan were disdainful of these coarse jests, and the two country lads were angriest of all and cried out, “These are foreign seeds and not such common stuff as you plant in your fields!” And the jokes of the farmers made them work with more zeal than their teacher could.

But after a while the merriment died out of the watching men, and their looks grew sullen and they fell silent. One by one they pat as if by chance, and turned and went back to their hamlet.

But Yuan was very happy. It was good to sow seed again and to feel the earth in his hands. It was thick and rich and fertile, black against the yellow foreign grain. … So the day’s work was done. Yuan felt his body fresh with good weariness, and when he looked he saw the young men, even the palest one, had a new healthy look, and all were warmed, although a sharp wind blew against them from the west.

“It is a good way to be warmed,” Yuan said, smiling at them. “Better than any other fire.” The young men laughed to please Yuan, for they liked him. But the village lads stayed sullen in spite of their reddened cheeks.

That night in his room alone Yuan wrote it all down to Mei-ling, for it had come to be a thing as necessary as food and drink to him to end his day by telling her what it held. When he was finished he rose and went to the window and looked out over the city. The dark tiled roofs of the old houses huddled here and there, black in the moonlight. But thrusting up everywhere among them sharply were the tall new houses, red roofed — angular and foreign, their many windows shining with inner light. Across the city the few great new streets flung out wide pathways of light and glitter and dimmed the moon.

Looking at this changing city, seeing it and yet not seeing it much either, because he saw most clearly Mei-ling’s face, very clear and young before his mind, the city only a background for her face, suddenly the fourth line of his verse came to his mind as finished as though he saw it printed down. He ran to the table and seized the letter he had just sealed, and tearing it open he added to it these words, “These four lines came to me today, the first three on the land, but I could not find the last perfecting line until I came back to the city and I thought of you. Then it came as simply as though you had spoken it to me.”

So Yuan lived in this city, his days full of his work, and his nights full of his letters to Mei-ling. She did not write so often to him. Her letters were sedately put, the words few and exact But they were not dull, because her words, since they were so few, were full of her meaning. She told him Ai-lan had come back after her months away, for those two had stayed their month of play over several times and were only now come home, and Mei-ling said, “Ai-lan is more beautiful than ever, but some warmth has gone out of her. Perhaps her child will bring this back. It will be born in less than a month. She comes home often because she says she sleeps better in her old bed.” And she told him, “Today I did my first real operation. It was to cut off the foot of a woman which had been bound in childhood until it was gangrened. I was not frightened.” And she said, “I ever love to go and play with the foundling babes, of whom I am one. They are my sisters.” And she told often of some merry childish thing they said.

Once she wrote, “Your uncle and his eldest son have sent a command for Sheng to come home. He spends too much silver, they say, since they can collect no rents these days from the old lands, and the eldest son’s wife is not willing for her husband’s wage to be sent abroad and there is no great sum to be found otherwise. Therefore Sheng must come, because he is to have no more money.”

This Yuan read thoughtfully, remembering Sheng as he had last seen him, excellently clothed in new garments, swinging a small shining cane as he walked along a sunny street in that great foreign city. It was true he spent much money since he was careful of his beauty. Doubtless he must come home — doubtless it was the only way to make him come home. Then Yuan thought, remembering the fawning woman, “It is better for him to come home. I am glad he must leave her at last.”

Always Mei-ling answered very carefully every question Yuan wrote to her. As the winter deepened she cautioned him to wear a thicker coat and to eat well, and he must sleep long and not work too hard. Many times she bade him take care against the winds in the old schoolroom. But there was one thing she never answered in his letters. He said in every letter, “I am not changed. I love you — and I wait.” This she did not answer.

Nevertheless Yuan thought her letters very perfect ones. Four times a month, as certain as the day came, he knew he could expect to find upon his table when he went to his room at night the long shape of her letter and her writing on it, clear and somewhat small in shape. These four days in each month came to be his feast days, and for sheer pleasure in his certainty he bought a little calendar and marked ahead the days he would have her letters. He marked them in red, and there were twelve in all until the New Year, when there was holiday and then he might go home to her and see her face. Beyond that he would not mark because he had his secret hope.

Thus Yuan lived from seventh day to seventh day, scarcely caring to go elsewhere than to his work, and needing no friends because his heart was fed.

Yet Meng would come sometimes and force him forth and then Yuan sat in a teahouse somewhere for an evening and listened to Meng and his friends cry out their impatience. For Meng was not so triumphant as he seemed at first. Yuan listened and he heard Meng angry still, and still he cried out against the times, even these new times. On one such night in a teahouse newly opened in the new street Yuan sat at dinner with him and four young fellow captains, and these were all dissatisfied with everything. The lights above the table were first too bright and men not bright enough, and the food was not brought fast enough to please them, and they wanted a certain white foreign wine that was not to be had. Between Meng and the other four the serving man was in a sweat, and he mopped his shaven head and panted and ran to and fro, afraid not to please these young captains who carried shining weapons at their belts. Even when the singing girls came in and after the new foreign fashion danced and threw their limbs about, the young men would not be satisfied, but spoke loudly of how this one’s eyes were small as any pig’s eyes, and that one had a nose like a leek, and one was too fat and one too old, until the girls’ eyes were full of tears and anger. And Yuan, though he did not think them beautiful, could not but pity them and so he said at last, “Let be. They have their rice to earn somehow.”

At this one young captain said loudly, “Better they starve, I say,” and laughing their loud bitter young laughter they rose at last with a great clatter of their swords and parted.

But that night Meng went on foot with Yuan to his room and as they walked along the streets together, he spoke his discontent and he said, “The truth is we are all angry because our leaders are not just to us. In the revolution it is a principle that we shall all be equal and all have equal opportunity. Yet even now our leaders are oppressing us. That general of mine — you know him, Yuan! You saw him. Well, and there he sits like any old war lord, drawing a great pay each month as head of the armies of this region, and we younger ones are kept always in one place. I rose quickly to be a captain, and so quickly I was full of hope and ready to do anything in our good cause, expecting to rise yet higher. Yet though I work and spend myself I stick here, a captain. We all can rise no higher than being captains. Do you know why? It is because that general fears us. He is afraid we will be greater than he is some day. We are younger and more able, and so he keeps us down. Is this the spirit of the revolution?” And Meng stopped beneath a light and poured out his hot questions at Yuan, and Yuan saw Meng’s face as angry as it used to be in his sullen boyhood. By now the few passers-by were staring side-wise curiously and Meng saw them and he dropped his voice and went on again and at last he said very sullenly, “Yuan, this is not the true revolution. There must be another. These are not our true leaders — they are as selfish as the old lords of war. Yuan, we young ones, we must start again — the common people are as oppressed as they ever were — we must strike again for their sakes — these leaders we have now have forgotten wholly that the common people—”

Now even as Meng said this he paused and stared, for just ahead at a certain gateway to a very famous pleasure house there was a brawl arising. The lights from that pleasure house shone down as red and bright as blood, and in the light they saw a very hateful sight. A foreign sailor from some foreign ship, such as Yuan had seen upon the great river which flowed past the city, in half drunkenness was beating with his coarse clenched fists the man who had pulled him to that pleasure house in his vehicle. He was shouting in his drunkenness and anger and staggering stupidly upon his clumsy feet. Now Meng when he saw how the white man struck the other, started forward and he began to run swiftly and Yuan ran after him. As they came near they heard the white man cursing foully the ricksha puller because he dared to ask for more coin than the white man wished to give and under his blows the man cowered, shielding himself with his upraised arms, for the white man was large and rude in body, and his drunken blows were cruel when they fell.

Now Meng had reached them and he shouted at the foreigner, “You dare — you dare—!” and he leaped at the man and caught his arms and pinioned them behind his back. But the sailor would not submit so easily, and he did not care that Meng was a captain or what he was. To him all men not of his kind were the same and all to be despised and he turned his curses on to Meng, and the two would have jumped upon each other then and there in mutual hatred, except that Yuan and the ricksha puller sprang between them and fended off the blows, and Yuan besought Meng, saying in an agony, “He is drunk — this fellow — a common fellow — you forget yourself,” and while he cried he made haste to push the drunken sailor through the gate to the pleasure house, where he forgot the quarrel and went on his way.

Then Yuan put his hand to his pocket and brought forth some scattered copper coin and gave them to the ricksha man, and so settled the quarrel, and the man, who was a small old weazened fellow, never fed well enough in a day, was pleased to have the thing end thus, and in his gratitude he cackled out a little laughter, and he said, “You understand the doctrines, sir! It is true enough one ought not to blame a child, nor a woman, nor a man drunk!”

Now Meng had stood there panting and very hot with anger all this time, and since he had not freed his anger fully on the sailor it was more than half in him still, and he was beside himself. When he saw how easily the beaten man was assuaged with a few copper coins and when he heard the poor laughter and the old adage he put into words again, Meng could not bear it. No, in some strange way his clean right anger against the foreigner’s insult to his own kind soured and without a word his eyes blazed out anew now upon the ricksha puller, and he leaned and gave the man’s face a blow across the mouth. Yuan saw Meng do this thing, and he cried out, “Meng, what is it you do!” And he made haste to find a coin again to give the man for such a cruel blow.

But the man did not take the money. He stood in a daze. The blow came so swiftly and without any expectation, that he stood with his jaw hanging, and a little blood began to stream out from the corner of his mouth. Suddenly he bent and picked up the shafts of the ricksha, and he said to Yuan simply, “It was a harder blow than any the foreigner gave me.” And so he went away.

But Meng had not stayed a moment after he gave the blow He strode off and Yuan ran after him. When he came up to Meng he was about to ask him why he gave the blow, but first he looked at Meng’s face, and then he kept silent for to his astonishment he saw in the bright light of the streets that tears were running down Meng’s cheeks. Through these tears Meng stared ahead, until at last he muttered furiously, “What is the use of fighting in any cause for people like these, who will not even hate the ones who oppress them, — a little money sets everything right for such as these—” And he left Yuan at that instant and turned without another word into a dark side street.

Then Yuan stood irresolute a moment, questioning if perhaps he should not follow Meng to see he did not do some further angry deed. But he was eager to reach his room, for it was the night of a seventh day, and he could see before him the shape of the letter waiting for him, and so once more he let Meng go his angry way alone.

At last the days drew near to the end of the year, and it came within a handful of days to the holidays when Yuan could see Mei-ling again. In those days whatever he did seemed only a means of waiting until the one day when he would be freed. His work he did as well as he was able, but even his pupils ceased for him to have any life or meaning and he could not greatly care if they did well or ill, or what they did. He went to bed early to hasten the night, and he rose early to begin the day and pass it over, and yet in spite of all he did, the time went as slowly as though a clock were stopped.

Once he went to see Meng and made a plan to take the same train homewards, for this time Meng was free for holiday, too, and though he always said he was a revolutionist and he cared nothing if he never saw his home again, yet he was very restless in these days, and eager for some change or other he could not make, and he was willing to go home, having nothing better then to do. He never spoke to Yuan again of that night he had struck the common fellow. It seemed he had forgotten the thing, for now he was full of a new anger, and here it was, that the common people were so willful they would not make the great feast day for the New Year on the day the new government had said it must be. The truth was the people were used to a year timed by the moon, and now these new young men would have it timed by the sun as it was in foreign countries, and the people were doubtful, and on the streets where there were placards put commanding all to make merry at the foreign new year, the people gathered to look or to listen, if they could not read, to some scholar in their midst, who read out the commands. Thus the people muttered everywhere, “How can the year be put anyhow like this? If we send up the kitchen god a month too soon, what will heaven think? Heaven does not count by any foreign sun, we swear!” And so they stayed willful and women would not make their cakes and meats and men would not buy the mottoes of red paper to paste upon their doors for good fortune.

Then the new young rulers grew very angry at such willfulness, and they made mottoes of their own, not of old foolish sayings of the gods, but of the sayings of the revolution and they sent their own hirelings and pasted these mottoes on the doors by force.

Of this Meng was full on the day when Yuan went to see him, and he ended all the story triumphantly, “So whether they will or not the people must be taught and forced out of old superstitious ways!”

But Yuan answered nothing, not knowing indeed what to say, since he could see the two sides of the thing.

In those next two days left, Yuan looked and it was true he saw everywhere the new mottoes being pasted upon doors. There was no word said against it. Everywhere men and women watched the new red papers put upon their doors and they stayed silent. A man here and there might laugh a little, or he spat into the dust, and went his way as though he were full of something he would not tell, but men and women worked as usual everywhere and as though there was no feast day for them in that whole year anywhere. Though all the doors were gay and newly red, the common people seemed not to see anything at all, but went with ostentatious usualness to their usual work. And Yuan could not but smile a little secretly, although he knew Meng’s anger had a cause, and although if he had been asked he would have acknowledged the people ought to obey.

But then Yuan smiled more easily these days about any small thing because somehow he felt Mei-ling must be changed and warmer. Though she had not answered any word of love he wrote, at least she read the words and he could not believe she forgot them all. For him at least it was the happiest gayest year he ever had begun in his life, because he hoped much from it.

In such expectation Yuan began his holidays that Meng’s angers even could not throw a cloud upon him, although Meng came as near to a quarrel with Yuan upon that day’s journey as Yuan would let him. The truth was that Meng was in some such fierce secret inner discontent that nothing pleased him and in the train he was inflamed immediately against a rich man who spread his fur robes to take twice the space he should upon a seat, so that a lesser-seeming man must stand, and then he was inflamed as much against the lesser man because he bore it. At last Yuan could not forbear smiling and he made a little thrust at Meng half merrily and said, “Nothing will please you, Meng, not rich because they are rich, nor poor because they are poor!”

But Meng was too sore secretly to hear any merriment at all about himself. He turned furiously on Yuan then and said in a fierce low tone, “Yes, and you are the same — you bear anything — you are the lukewarmest soul I ever knew — never fit to be a true revolutionist!”

At Meng’s fierceness Yuan could not but grow grave. He answered nothing, for all the people stared at Meng, and though he made his voice too low to let them hear what he said, still his face was so angry and his eyes so blazing under his black brows drawn down that they were afraid of such a one, who had a pistol thrust into his belt besides. … Therefore Yuan sat silent. But in his silence he could not but acknowledge Meng spoke the truth and he was wounded a little, although he knew Meng was angry at some hidden thing and not at him. So Yuan sat in soberness for a while as the train wound its way through the valleys, hills and fields, and he fell to thinking and to asking himself what he was and what he wanted most. It was true he was no great revolutionist, and never would be, because he could not hold his hates long, as Meng could. No, he could be angry for a while and hate for a moment, but not for long. The thing he truly wanted was a peace in which to do his work. And the work he loved best was what he did now. The best hours he had spent were those he used to teach his pupils — except his hours of writing to his love …

Across his dreaming Meng’s voice broke scornfully, saying, “What are you thinking of, Yuan? You sit there smiling as silly as a boy who has had barley sugar thrust unawares into his mouth!”

Then Yuan could not but laugh shamefacedly, and curse the heat he felt rush into his face, for Meng was not one to whom he could tell such thoughts as now were his.

Yet what meeting can ever be so sweet as it is dreamed? When Yuan reached his home on the evening of that day he leaped up the steps and into the house. But again there was only silence, and after a moment a serving woman came and gave him greeting and said, “My mistress says you are to go at once to your eldest cousin’s house, where there is a family feast made for the homecoming of the young lord who has been in foreign countries. She awaits you there.”

Now above his interest in this news of Sheng’s coming home was Yuan’s eagerness to know if Mei-ling was gone with the lady or not. Yet however he longed to know he would not ask a servant of her, for there is no mind so quick as a servant’s mind to put a man and a maid together. Therefore he must make his heart wait until he could get to his uncle’s house and see for himself if Mei-ling were there.

All during these many days Yuan had dreamed of how he would first see Mei-ling, and always he dreamed it that he saw her alone. They met, magically alone, inside the door as he stepped into the house. Somehow she would be there. But she was not there, and even if she were at his cousin’s house, he could not hope to see her alone, and he dare not seem other to her than cool and courteous before the eyes of his family.

And so it was. He went to his cousin’s house and into the large room which was full of rich foreign ornaments and chairs and there were they all gathered. Meng was before Yuan, and they had only finished making welcome for him when Yuan came in and fresh welcome must begin for him. He must go and bow before his old uncle, now wakeful and very merry with all his sons about him except the one he gave the Tiger and the one who was hunchback and a priest, but these neither he nor his lady counted any more as sons. There the old pair sat in their best holiday robes, and the lady was full of her place and dignity and she smoked very gravely a water pipe a maid stood and filled for her every puff or two, and in her hand she held a rosary, whose brown beads she passed constantly between her fingers, and still she took it on herself to say a balancing moral word to every jest the old man made. When he had given reply to Yuan he shouted, his old loose face in a thousand wrinkles, “Well, Yuan, here is this son of mine home again as pretty as a girl, and all our fears of a foreign wife were needless — he is still unwed!”

At this the aged lady said very sedately, “My lord, Sheng was ever much too wise to think of such wickedness. I pray you do not speak foolishly in your age!”

But for once the old man would not be afraid of the lady’s tongue. He felt himself the head of this house, and head of all these goodly young men and women in this rich house and he grew waggish and he was made bold by the presence of others and he cried, “It is nothing untoward to speak of marriage for a son, I suppose? I suppose Sheng will be wed?” To which the lady answered with majesty, “I know what is the proper way in these new days, and my son need not complain that his mother forced him against his will.”

Then Yuan, who had listened half smiling to this bickering between the old pair, saw a strange thing. He saw Sheng smile a little cold sad smile and he said, “No, mother, I am not so new after all. Wed me as you like — I do not care — women are the same to me anywhere, I think.”

At this Ai-lan laughed and said, “It is only because you are too young, Sheng—” And in her laughter the others joined and the moment passed, except Yuan did not forget Sheng’s look, the look in his eyes while he steadily smiled and while the others laughed. It was the look of one who greatly cares for nothing, not even for what woman he is to wed.

Yet how could Yuan think deeply on this night of Sheng? Before even he had bowed to the old pair, his eyes sought and found Mei-ling. He saw her first of all, standing very still and quiet beside the lady, her foster mother, and for one flying second their eyes met, although they did not smile. But there she was, and Yuan could not be wholly disappointed even though it was not as he dreamed. It was now enough that she was here in this room, even though he did not say a word to her. Then he thought he would not say a word to her — not now, not in this crowded room. Let their true meeting be afterwards and in some other place. Yet though Yuan looked at her very often, he never caught her eyes after that one first time. But the lady his mother gave him very warm greeting, and when he went to her she caught his hand and patted it a little before she dropped it, and Yuan stayed by her a moment, although when he did Mei-ling made excuse to slip away to fetch some small thing she wanted. Nevertheless, although he gave himself to all these others, there was the warmth of knowing her presence, and when he could do it he let his eyes find her again and again as she moved to pour tea into some bowl or to give a sweetmeat to a child.

All the talk and greetings were mostly for Sheng this night, and Meng and Yuan were soon only part of the others. Sheng was more beautiful than ever and so beautiful and seeming so to know everything and be at ease in all he said and did, that Yuan was shy before him as he always used to be and he felt himself a youth again before this finished man. But Sheng would not have it so. He took Yuan’s hand in his old friendly way and held it, and Yuan felt the touch of Sheng’s smooth graceful fingers, shaped so like a woman’s hands, and the touch was pleasant and yet somehow distasteful, and so was the look Sheng had now in his eyes. For all its sweet seeming frankness there was in these days something near to evil in Sheng’s face and way, as there is in a flower too fully blown and whose scent is heavy with something more than fragrance, but why this was Yuan did not know. Sometimes he felt he imagined it, and yet again he knew he did not. For Sheng, although he laughed and talked and his laughter was always nicely, rightly made, and his voice even as a bell, not high nor low, but very softly toned, and although he seemed to enter into all the family gossip with readiness and pleasure, yet Yuan felt Sheng himself was not there at all but somewhere very far away. He could not but wonder if Sheng were sorry to be home again, and once he seized a chance when he was near to ask him quietly, “Sheng, were you sorry to leave that foreign city?”

He watched Sheng’s face for answer, but the face was smooth and golden and untroubled, and his eyes as smooth as dark jade, and telling nothing more, and Sheng smiled his lovely ready smile and answered, “Oh, no, I was ready to come home. It makes no difference to me where I am.”

Again Yuan asked, “Have you written more verse?” And Sheng answered carelessly, “Yes, I have a little book printed now of my verses, a few of them you saw, but nearly all new since you left — If you like, I will give you a copy before you go tonight.” And he only smiled when Yuan said simply he would like to have them. … Once more Yuan asked a question and he asked, “Shall you stay here to live or come to the new capital?”

Then only did Sheng answer quickly and as though here were one thing which mattered to him, and he said, “Oh, I stay here, of course. I have been so long away I am used to modern life. I could not, of course, live in so raw a city as that is. Meng has told me something, and though he is so proud of the new streets and houses, still he had to tell me when I asked him, that there is no modern way to bathe one’s self, no amusement houses worth the name, no good theatres — nothing in fact for a cultivated man to enjoy. I said, ‘My dear Meng, what is there, pray, in this city of which you are so proud?’ And then he went into one of his glowering silences! How little Meng has changed!” And all this Sheng said in the foreign tongue he now spoke so easily and well that it came more quickly to his tongue than his own native one.

But his elder brother’s wife found Sheng very perfect, and so did Ai-lan and her husband. These three could not look at him enough, and Ai-lan, though she was then big with child, laughed more in her old merry way than she did usually, nowadays, and made free with Sheng and took great delight in him. And Sheng answered all her wit and paid her praise, and Ai-lan took it willingly, and it was true she was still as pretty as she ever was in spite of her burden. Yes, when other women grow thick and dark in the face and sluggish in their blood, Ai-lan was only like a lovely flower at its height, a rose wide in the sun. To Yuan she cried a lively greeting as her brother, but to Sheng she gave her smiles and wit, and her handsome husband watched her carelessly and lazily and without jealousy, for however beautiful Sheng might be, he still thought himself more beautiful and more to be preferred by any woman and most of all by the one whom he had chosen. He loved himself too well for jealousy.

So in the talk and laughter the feast began and they all sat together, not as in ancient times divided into old and young. No, in these days there was not such division. It is true the old lord and his lady sat in the highest seats, but their voices were not heard in the laughing back and forth of Ai-lan and Sheng and of the others who took part sometimes. It was a very merry hour, and Yuan could not but be proud of all these his blood kin, these rich well-clad folk, every woman in the finest gayest hue of satin robe cut to the hour’s fashion, and the men, except the old uncle, in their foreign garb, and Meng haughty in his captain’s uniform, and even the children gay in silks and foreign ribbons, and the table covered with dishes of every foreign sort and foreign sweets and foreign wines.

Then Yuan thought of something and here it was. These were not all his family. No, many miles in from the sea the Tiger, his own father, lived as he ever did, and so did Wang the Merchant and all his sons and daughters. They spoke no foreign tongue. They ate no foreign thing, and they lived as their own forefathers did. If they were brought into this room, Yuan thought, half troubled, they would be very ill at ease. The old Tiger would soon be pettish because he could not spit as freely as he was used, for on this floor was spread a flowered silken carpet, and though he was not a poor man, he was used at best to brick or tile. And the merchant would be in a misery at all this money spent on pictures and on satin-covered seats and little foreign toys, and all those foreign rings and trinkets which the women wore. Nor could this half of Wang Lung’s house have borne the life the Tiger lived, nor even the life in the home where Wang the Merchant lived, which Wang Lung had left for his sons in that old town. These grandchildren and great-grandchildren would hold it too mean to live in, cold in winter except where the southern sun struck in, and unceiled and not modern anywhere, and not a fit house for them. As for the earthen house, it was no more than a hovel, and they had forgot it was, even.

But Yuan did not forget. In the strangest flash of memory, sitting at this feast and looking all about the table, white-clothed in the new foreign fashion, he suddenly remembered that earthen house and when he remembered it, he liked it, somehow, still. … He was not wholly one of them, he thought slowly — not with Ai-lan, not with Sheng. … Their foreign looks and ways made him wish to be less foreign even than he was. Yet he could not live in that earthen house, either, — no, though he liked something about it very deeply, he knew now he could not live there as his grandfather once had lived in content, and feel it home. He was between, somehow, and it was a lonely place — between, as he was, this foreign house and the house of earth. He had no real home, and his was a very lonely heart which could not be wholly here nor there.

His eyes rested on Sheng a moment. Except for his gold skin, and for his dark, pointed eyes, Sheng might be completely foreign. The very movements of his body now were foreign, and he spoke as a man from the west does. Yes, and Ai-lan liked it, and so did the cousin’s wife, and even the eldest cousin felt Sheng very new and full of something modish, and he was silent and abashed and somewhat envious and for solace he ate heavily in silence.

Then quickly and secretly Yuan looked at Mei-ling, jealous because he had thought of a thing when he saw the praise of Sheng in Ai-lan’s eyes. Did Mei-ling also watch Sheng as the other younger women did and laugh at all he said to make them laugh, and admire him with her eyes, too? He saw her look at Sheng calmly, and turn her gaze away again tranquilly. His heart eased itself. Why, she was like himself! She was between, too, not wholly new, and yet different from the old. He looked at her once more, hot and longing, and he let the waves of talk and laughter break over him and for a moment took his fill of her through his eyes. There she sat beside the lady, and now she leaned and with her chopsticks picked a bit of white meat daintily from a central dish and put it on the lady’s dish, and smiled at her. She was, Yuan said most passionately within himself, as far from Ai-lan and her kind as a lily growing wild beneath bamboos is different from a forced camellia. Yes, she was between, too, — well, then he was not lonely!

Suddenly, Yuan’s heart was so warm and ready that he could not believe Mei-ling would not be ready, too. In this one love of his his heart flowed out and all his many feelings fused most ardently into this one swift course.

That night he went to bed and lay sleepless, planning how he would talk with Mei-ling alone the next day and feel how her heart was to him now, for surely, or so he thought, the many letters he had written must mean some change in her to warmth. He planned how they would sit and talk, or perhaps he might persuade her to a walk with him, even, since many maids walked alone these days with young men whom they knew and trusted. And he bethought himself how he might say he was a sort of brother to her if she hesitated, and then quickly he rejected this excuse and he said stoutly in himself, “No, I am not her brother, whatever else I may not be.” Only at last could he fall asleep and then to dream awry and without completion of any dream.

But who could foretell that this was the night when Ai-lan would give birth to her child? Yet so it was. When Yuan woke in the morning it was to hear confusion through all the house, and the noise of servants running here and there, and when he rose and washed and clothed himself and went to the dining room, there was the table only half set for the meal, and a sleepy maidservant moved to and fro languidly, and the only other in the room was Ai-lan’s husband, who sat there dressed as he had been the night before. When Yuan came in he said gaily, “Never be a father, Yuan, if one’s wife is the new sort of woman! I have had as hard a time as though I bore the child — sleepless, and Ai-lan crying out and making such a wailing I thought her near her end, except the doctor and Mei-ling promised me she did very well. These women nowadays bear their children very hardly. Lucky it is a boy, I say, because Ai-lan has already called me to her bed this morning to swear me there will never be another child from her!” He laughed again, and passed his beautiful smooth hand across his laughing, half-rueful face, and then he sat down to eat with great appetite the food the serving maid set there for he had been father several times before this, and so it was no great thing to him now.

Thus was Ai-lan’s child born in this house, and all the household was absorbed and busied in it, and Yuan caught no glance at Mei-ling scarcely beyond a passing moment here and there. Three times a day the physician came, and nothing would please Ai-lan except a foreign one, and so he came, a tall red-haired Englishman, and he saw her and talked with Mei-ling and the lady and told them what Ai-lan must eat and how many days she must rest. There was the child, too, to be cared for, and Ai-lan would have it that Mei-ling must do this herself, and so Mei-ling did, and the child wept much, because the milk of the nurse they hired at first was not suited to its needs, and so this one and that must be found and tried.

For Ai-lan, like many of her kind these days, would not feed her son from her own breasts, lest they grow too large and full and spoil her slender looks. This was the only great quarrel Mei-ling ever made with her. She cried accusingly to Ai-lan, “You are not fit to have this good sweet son! Here he is born strong and lusty and starving, and your two breasts running full, and you will not feed him! Shame, shame, Ai-lan!”

Then Ai-lan wept with anger, and she pitied herself, too, and she cried back at Mei-ling, “You know nothing of it — how can you know who are a virgin? You don’t know how hard it has been to have a child in me for months and months and my clothes hideous on me, and now after all my pain am I to go hideous another year or two? No, let such coarse work be done by serving women! I will not — I will not!”

Yet though Ai-lan wept, her pretty face all flushed and distraught, Mei-ling would not give in so lightly, and this was how Yuan heard of the quarrel, for Mei-ling carried it to Ai-lan’s husband and Yuan was in the room. While she besought the father Yuan listened in enchantment, for it seemed to him he never had seen how true and lovely Mei-ling was. She came in swiftly, full of her anger and without seeing Yuan she began to speak earnestly to the father, “Will you let this be? Will you let Ai-lan hold back her own milk from the child? The child is hungry, and she will not feed it!”

But the man only laughed and shrugged himself and said, “Has anyone ever made Ai-lan do what she would not? At least I have never tried, and could not dare it, now, most certainly. Ai-lan is a modern woman, you know!”

He laughed and glanced at Yuan. But Yuan was watching Mei-ling. Her grave eyes grew large as she held them to the man’s smiling face, and her clear pale face went paler and she said quickly beneath her breath, “Oh, wicked — wicked — wicked!” and turned and went away again.

When she was gone the husband said affably to Yuan, as men may speak when no women are by, “After all, I cannot blame Ai-lan, — it is a very binding thing to nurse a brat, and force one’s self to be home every hour or two, and I could not ask her to give up her pleasure, and the truth is, I like to have her keep her beauty, too. Besides, the child will do as well on some servant’s milk as hers.”

But when he heard this, Yuan felt a passionate defense of Mei-ling. She was right in all she said and did! He rose abruptly to leave this man whom somehow now he did not like. “As for me,” he said coldly, “I think a woman may be too modern, sometimes. I think Ai-lan is wrong here.” And he went slowly to his room, hoping on the way to meet Mei-ling, but he did not.

Thus one by one the few days of his holidays crept past, and not on any one day did he see Mei-ling above ten minutes or so, and never then alone, for she and the lady were always bent together over the newborn babe, the lady in a sort of ecstasy, because here was the son at last she had so longed for once. Though she was so used to new ways, yet now she took a sweet half-shamed pleasure in a few old ways, too, and she dyed some eggs red and bought some silver trinkets and made ready for his month-old birthday feast although the time was still far off. And in every plan she made she must talk with Mei-ling, and almost she seemed to forget Ai-lan was the child’s mother, she depended so on the foster daughter.

But long before this birthday was come Yuan must go back to the new city to do his work. Now as the days passed, they passed very empty for him, and after a while he grew sullen and then he told himself that Mei-ling need not be so busy and that she could make time for him if she would, and when he had so thought for a day or two, while the last day drew very near, he grew sure he felt rightly and that Mei-ling did what she did on purpose not to see him any time alone. And in her new pleasure in the child even the lady seemed to forget him and that he loved Mei-ling.

So it was even until the day he must go back. On that day Sheng came in very gaily and he said to Yuan and to Ai-lan’s husband, “I am bid to a great merry-making tonight at a certain house, and they lack a youth or two in number, and will you two forget your age for once and pretend you are young again and be partners to some pretty ladies?”

Ai-lan’s husband answered with ready laughter that he would very willingly, and that he had been so tied to Ai-lan these fourteen days he had forgot what pleasure was. But Yuan drew back somewhat, for he had gone to no such merry-making for years now, and not since he used to go with Ai-lan, and he felt the old shyness on him when he thought of strange women. But Sheng would have him and the two pressed him, and though at first Yuan would not go, then he thought recklessly, “Why should I not? It is a stupid thing to sit in this house and wait for the hour that never comes. What does Mei-ling care how I make merry?” So forced by this thought he said aloud, “Well, then, I will go.”

Now all these days Mei-ling had not seemed to see Yuan, so busy had she been, but that one night when he came out of his room dressed in his black foreign clothes which he had been used to wear at evening, she happened to pass him, holding in her arms the little new boy who was asleep. She asked wonderingly, “Where are you going, Yuan?” He answered, “To an evening’s merry-making with Sheng and Ai-lan’s husband.”

He fancied at that moment he saw a look change in Mei-ling’s face. But he was not sure, and then he thought he must be wrong, for she only held the sleeping child more closely to her and said quietly, “I hope you have a merry time, then,” and so she went on.

As for Yuan, he went his way hardened against her, and to himself he thought, “Well, then, I will be merry. This is my last evening and I will see how to make it very merry.”

And so he did. That night Yuan did what he had never done before. He drank wine freely and whenever anyone called out to him to drink, and he drank until he did not see clearly the face of any maid he danced with, but he only knew he had some maid or other in his arms. He drank so much of foreign wines to which he was not used, that all the great flower-decked pleasure hall grew before his eyes into a sort of swimming glittering moving maze of brightness. Yet for all this he held his drunkenness inside him very well, so that none knew except himself how drunken he truly was. Even Sheng cried out in praise of him, and said, “Yuan, you are a lucky fellow! You are one of those who grow paler as he drinks instead of red as we lesser fellows do! I swear it is only your eyes that betray you, but they burn as hot as coals!”

Now in this night’s drinking he met one whom he had seen somewhere before. She was a woman whom Sheng brought to him, saying, “Here is a new friend of mine, Yuan! I’ll lend her to you for a dance, and then you must tell me if you have found one who does so well!” So Yuan found himself with her in his arms, a strange little slender creature in a long foreign dress of white glittering stuff, and when he looked down at her face he thought he knew it, for it was not a face easily forgotten, very round and dark, and the lips thick and passionate, a face not beautiful, but strange and to be looked at more than once. Then she said herself, half wondering, “Why, I know you — we were on the same boat, do you remember?” Then Yuan forced his hot brain and he did remember and he said, smiling, “You are the girl who cried you would be free always.”

At this her great black eyes grew grave and her full lips, which were painted thick and very red, pouted and she answered, “It is not easy being free here. Oh, I suppose I am free enough — but horribly lonely—” And suddenly she stopped dancing and pulled Yuan’s sleeve and cried, “Come and sit down somewhere and talk with me. Have you been as miserable as I? … Look, I am the youngest child of my mother who is dead, and my father is next to the chief governor of the city. … He has four concubines — all nothing but singsong girls — you can imagine the life I lead! I know your sister. She is pretty, but she is like all the others. Do you know what their life is? It is gamble all day, gossip, dance all night! I can’t live it — I want to do something — What are you doing?”

These earnest words came so strangely from her painted lips that Yuan could not but heed them. She listened restlessly after a while when Yuan told her of the new city and his work there, and how he had found a little place of his own and, he thought, a small work to do. When Sheng came and took her hand to bring her back into the dance, she thrust him pettishly away, and pouted her too full lips at him, and she cried earnestly, “Leave me alone! I want to talk seriously with him—”

At this Sheng laughed, and said teasingly, “Yuan, you would make me jealous if I thought she could be serious about anything!”

But the girl had turned already again to Yuan and she began to pour out her passionate heart to him, and all her body spoke, too, the little round bare shoulders shrugging, and her pretty plump hands moving in her earnestness, “Oh, I hate it all so — don’t you? I can’t go abroad again — my father won’t give me the money — he says he can’t waste any more on me — and all those wives gambling from morning to night! I hate it here! The concubines all say nasty things about me because I go places with men!”

Now Yuan did not like this girl at all, for he was repelled by her naked bosom and by her foreign garb and by her too red lips, but still he could feel her earnestness and be sorry for her plight and so he said, “Why do you not find something to do?”

“What can I do?” she asked. “Do you know what I specialized in in college? Interior decoration for western homes! I’ve done my own room over. I’ve done a little in a friend’s house, but not for pay. Who here wants what I have? I want to belong here, it’s my country, but I’ve been away too long. I have no place anywhere — no country—”

By now Yuan had forgotten this was an evening meant for pleasure, he was so moved by the poor creature’s plight. There she sat before his pitying gaze, gay in her silly shining clothes, and her painted eyes full of tears.

But before he could think of a thing to say for her comfort Sheng was back again. And now he would not have refusal. He did not see her tears. He put his arm about her waist and laughing at her he swept her off with him into the whirling music, and Yuan was left alone.

Somehow he had no heart to dance more, and all the gaiety was gone from the noisy hall. Once the girl came by in Sheng’s arms, and now her face was turned up to his, and it was bright and empty again and as though she had never spoken the words she had to Yuan. … He sat thoughtfully awhile, and let a servant fill his glass again and again, while he sat on alone.

At the end of that night of pleasure, when they went home again, Yuan was steady still, though it was true the wine burned inside him like a fever. Yet he could be strong enough to let Ai-lan’s husband lean on him, for that one could not walk alone any more, he was so drunken, and his whole face was crimson and he babbled like a foolish child.

Now when Yuan struck at the door to be let in that night it opened suddenly and there by the manservant who had opened it was Mei-ling herself, and when the drunken man saw her he seemed to think of something he remembered between Yuan and Mei-ling, and he cried, “You — you — should have gone — there was a — a pretty rival — she wouldn’t — leave Yuan — dangerous, eh?” And he fell to laughing foolishly.

Mei-ling answered nothing. When she saw the two she said to the servant coldly, “Take my sister’s lord to his bed, since he is so drunken!”

But when he was gone she held Yuan there with a sudden blazing gaze. Thus were these two alone at last, and when Yuan felt Mei-ling’s great angry eyes on him, it was like a sobering blast of cold north wind upon him. He felt the heat within him die down quickly, and for an instant he almost feared her, she was so tall and straight and angry, and he was speechless.

But she was not. No, all these days she had scarcely spoken to him, but now she did, and her words leaped from her, and she said, “You are like all the others, Yuan, — like all the other foolish idle Wangs! I have made myself a fool. I thought, ‘Yuan is different — he is not a half-foreign fop, drinking and dancing all his good years away!’ But you are — you are! Look at you! Look at your silly foreign clothes — you reek of wine — you are drunk, too!”

But Yuan grew angry at this and sulky as a boy and he muttered, “You would not give me anything — you know how I have waited for you — and you have made excuses and excuses—”

“I did not!” she cried, and then beside herself this maid stamped her foot and she leaned forward and gave Yuan’s face a swift sharp slap, as though he were indeed a naughty child. “You know how busy I have been — who was that woman he told of? — and this was your last evening — and I had planned — Oh, I hate you!”

And she burst into weeping and ran quickly away, and Yuan stood in an agony, not comprehending anything except she said she hated him. So ended his poor holiday.

The next day Yuan returned to his work, and alone, for Meng had shorter holiday and was already gone. The rains of late winter were begun, and the train drove through the dark day, and the water dripped down the window pane, so that he could scarcely see the sodden fields. At every town the streets ran with, liquid filth and the stations were empty except for the shivering few men who must be there for some duty, and Yuan, remembering how he had not seen Mei-ling again, for he left in the early morning and she was not there to bid him good-bye, said to himself this was the dreariest hour of his life …

At last weary of watching the rain and in restless dreariness he took from his bag the book of verses Sheng had given him the first night, and which he had not read yet, and he began to turn the thick ivory paper, not caring much if he read or not. On each page were printed clear and black a few lines or words, a little group of strung phrases, seeming exquisite, Yuan thought, until he grew curious and half forgot his trouble, and read the book again more carefully, and then he saw these little poems Sheng had made were only empty shapes. They were only small lovely empty shapes, all exquisite and empty although they were so fluent in their line and sound that almost Yuan forgot their emptiness until, the shape seized, he found there was nothing there within them.

He closed the pretty silver-bound book, and put it in its cover again and laid it down. … Outside the villages slipped past, dark and huddled in the rain. At doorways men looked sullenly into the rains that beat through the thatched roofs above their heads. In sunshine these folk could live outdoors as beasts do, and thrive merrily somehow, but days of rains drove them into their hovels and too many days of rain drove them half-mad with quarrelling and cold misery, and now they looked out with hate against heaven who sent such long rains down.

… The verses were of lovely delicacies, the light of the moon upon a dead woman’s golden hair, an ice-bound fountain in a park, a faery island in a smooth green sea, narrow between pale sands …

Yuan saw the sullen beast-like faces, and he thought, very troubled, “As for me, I can write nothing. If I wrote these things Sheng does, which I can see well enough are exquisite, why, then I remember these dark faces and these hovels and all this deep under-life of which he knows nothing and will not know. And yet I cannot write of such life either. I wonder why I am so speechless and troubled?”

And so he fell to brooding and to thinking perhaps that no man can create anything who lives not wholly anywhere. He remembered how on that feast day he had thought himself between the old and the new. And then he smiled sadly, thinking how foolish he had been to think himself not alone. He was alone.

… So it rained on to his journey’s end, and he came down from the train in rain and dusk, and in the rain the old city wall stood grim and black and high. He called a ricksha and climbed in, and sat chill and lonely while the man dragged the vehicle along the slippery running streets. Once the man stumbled and fell, and while he righted himself and waited for a moment to pant and wipe the rain from his dripping face, Yuan looked out and saw the hovels still clinging against the wall. The rains had flooded them and the wretched helpless folk within sat in the flood and waited silently for heaven to change.

Thus began for Yuan the new year, which he had thought would be his best and happiest year. Instead it began in every sort of evil. For the rains held that spring beyond all bearing, and though priests in temples made many prayers, nothing came of all their prayers and sacrifices except new evil, for such superstitions stirred up ardent angers in the young rulers who believed in no gods at all except their own heroes, and they commanded the temples in those parts to be closed, and ruthlessly they sent soldiers to live in those temples and drive the priests into the smallest worst rooms. Then this in turn made angry the farmer folk, who could be wroth enough against those selfsame priests for one cause or another when they came begging, but who feared now that the gods might be angry anew, and they cried that doubtless all these evil rains were because of these new rulers, and so for once they joined the priests against the young rulers.

For a month the rains held, and still they held, and the great river began to swell and rise and flow into the lesser rivers and canals and everywhere men began to see the coming of the same ancient floods, and if flood, then famine. Now the people had believed that the new times would bring them somehow a new heaven and a new earth, and when they found this was not true, and heaven behaved as carelessly as ever it did, and the earth gave forth no more for harvest in flood or drought than ever it did, they cried out the new rulers were false and no better than the old ones, and old discontents, stilled for a while by new promises of new times, began to rise again.

And Yuan found himself divided again, too, for Meng was pent in his narrow quarters all these many days and not able to spend the vigor of his young body in his usual training of his men, and he came often to Yuan’s room and quarreled with everything Yuan said and he cursed the rains and he cursed his general and he cursed the new leaders whom every day he said grew more selfish and careless of the people’s good. He was so unjust sometimes that Yuan could not forbear saying one day, very mildly, “Yet we can hardly blame them that it rains so much, and even if there is a flood, we cannot blame them for that.”

But Meng shouted savagely, “I will blame them, nevertheless, for they are no true revolutionists!” And then he let his voice drop and he said restlessly, “Yuan, I’ll tell you something no one else knows. But I tell you because though you are so spineless and join in no cause clearly, still you are good enough in your way and faithful and always the same. Hear me — when one day I am gone, you are not to be surprised! Tell my parents not to be afraid. The truth is within this revolution there grows now another — a better, truer one, Yuan — a new revolution! And I and four of my fellows are determined to go and join it — we shall take our loyal men, and go into the west where the thing is shaping. Already thousands of young good eager men have joined secretly. I’ll have my chance yet to fight against this old general who keeps me down so low!” And Meng stood glowering for a moment until suddenly his dark face grew bright, or bright as it ever did, for it was a sullen face at best, and then he said thoughtfully and more quietly, “That true revolution, Yuan, is for the people’s good. We shall seize the country and hold it for the common people’s good, and there shall be no more rich and no more poor—”

And so Meng talked on and Yuan let him talk in half-sad silence. He had, he thought heavily, heard these words all his life somewhere, and still there were these poor, and still there were these words. He remembered how he had seen the poor even in that rich foreign country. Yes, there were always the poor. He let Meng talk, and when at last he was gone, Yuan went and stood by the window for a while and watched the few people trudging through the rain. He saw Meng come out and stride along the street, his head high even in the rain. But he was the only proud one. For the most part the only figures were the rain-soaked ricksha pullers, struggling over the slippery stones. … He remembered again what he never could wholly forget, that Mei-ling had not written to him once. Nor had he written to her, for, or so he said simply to himself, “There is no use in writing if she hates me so.” And this set the seal of sadness to the day.

There remained therefore only his work, and into this he would have poured his strength, but even here the year did him evil. For the discontent of the times spread among the schools, and the students quarreled with the laws laid down for them, and they felt too much the rights their youth gave them, and they quarreled with their rulers and their teachers and refused to work and stayed out of school, so that often when Yuan went to his windy classroom, it was empty and there was no one for him to teach and he must go home again and sit and read his old books he knew before, for he dared not spend money for new ones, since steadfastly he sent half of all he earned to his uncle for his debt. In these long dark nights the end of that debt seemed as hopeless to him as the dream he once had had of Mei-ling.

One day in despair at his own idleness, for seven days on end he had gone only to find his schoolroom empty, he walked through mud and drifting rain out to the land where he had planted the foreign wheat that day. But even here there was to be no harvest, for whether the foreign wheat was not used to such long rains, or whether the black and heavy clay held the water beyond what the roots could bear, or what the wrong was, the foreign wheat lay rotting on the mucky earth. It had sprung up quick and tall and every seed had been alive and swift and eager to put forth. But the earth and skies were not native to it, and it took no deep natural root, and so it lay spoiled and rotted.

Even while Yuan stood and looked sorrowfully at this hope gone, too, a farmer saw him, and ran out in all the rain to cry out with malice and pleasure, “You see the foreign wheat is not good, after all! It sprang up very tall and fair, but it has no staying strength! I said at the time, it is not in nature to have such large pale seeds — look at my wheat — too wet, to be sure, but it will not die!”

In silence Yuan looked. It was true enough; in the next field the small strong wheat stood sturdily even in all the mud, scanty and short, but not dead. … He could not answer. He could not bear the man’s common face and pleased stupid laughter. For one swift moment he saw why Meng struck the ricksha puller. But Yuan could never strike. He only turned in silence and went his own way again.

Now what would have been the end of Yuan’s despair in this dull spring he did not know. That night he lay and sobbed on his bed he was so melancholy, although he wept for no one single cause. It seemed to him as he sobbed that he grieved because the times were so hopeless, the poor still poor, the new city unfinished and drab and dreary in the rains, the wheat rotted, the revolution weakened and new wars threatening, his work delayed by the strife of the students. There was nothing not awry to Yuan that night, but deepest awry of all was this, that for forty days there was no letter from Mei-ling and her last words still were as clear in his mind as the moment she spoke them, and he had not seen her again after she had cried, “Oh, I hate you!”

Once the lady wrote him, it is true, and Yuan seized the letter eagerly to see if perhaps Mei-ling’s name was there, but it was not. The lady spoke only now of Ai-lan’s little son, and how rejoiced she was because though Ai-lan was gone home again to her husband, she left the child with her mother to be cared for, since she felt the child too much trouble for her, and the lady said gratefully, “I am weak enough almost to be glad Ai-lan so loves her freedom and her pleasures, for it leaves this child to me. I know it is wrong in her. … But I sit and hold him all day long.”

Now thinking of this letter as he lay in his dark and lonely room it added one more small sadness to him. The new little son seemed to have taken all the lady’s heart so even she needed Yuan no more. In a great rush of pity for himself he thought, “I am not needed anywhere, it seems!” And so he wept himself at last to sleep.

Soon the discontents of these times were everywhere very widespread, and much more widely spread than Yuan could know, bound as he was by his solitary life in the new city. It was true he wrote dutifully once in every month to his father, and every other month the Tiger answered his son’s letter. But Yuan had not been home again to visit him, partly because he wished to be steadfast to his work, the more because there were not many steadfast in these changing times, and partly because in the little holiday he had he longed most to see Mei-ling.

Nor could he have perceived clearly how the times were from the Tiger’s letters, for the old man wrote only the same thing again and again without knowing he did, and always he wrote bravely of how in the spring he planned a great attack against the robber chieftain in those parts, for that robber was growing too bold by half, but he, the Tiger, vowed he would put him down yet with his loyal men, and for the sake of all good people.

Such words Yuan read scarcely heeding them any more. It did not make him angry now to hear his old father boast, and if he answered anything it was only to smile somewhat sadly because such boasting had once a power to frighten him, and now he knew it was only poor empty words. Sometimes he thought to himself, “My father grows old indeed. I must go to him in the summer and see how he does.” And once he thought moodily, “I might as well have gone this holiday for all the good it did me.” And he sighed and fell to reckoning how much of his debt could be paid by the summer, at the rate he could pay it, and hoping his wage would not be delayed or held back as it now was often in these troubled times which were not wholly old or wholly new and full of many uncertainties.

So there was nothing in the Tiger’s letters to prepare his son for what befell him.

One day when Yuan had only just risen from his bed and stood half washed beside his little stove, where every morning he laid his own fire and lighted it for warmth against the cold wet air, there was at his door a knock, timorous and yet persistent. He cried out, “Enter!” and there entered the last man he would have said could stand there, and it was his country cousin, the eldest son of his uncle, Wang the Merchant.

Yuan could see at once that some evil had befallen this little careworn man, for there were black bruises on his skinny yellow throat, and deep bloody scratches on his small withered face, and he had a finger gone from his right hand, and a foul rag dark with blood was red about the stub.

All these violent marks Yuan saw, and he stood speechless, not knowing what to say or think, he was so surprised. This little man, when he saw Yuan, began to sob but he held his sobs noiseless under his breath and Yuan saw he had some terrible tale to tell. He drew his garments quickly about him, therefore, and he made his cousin sit down, and he fetched some tea leaves in a pot, and poured water from the boiling kettle in the little stove and then he said, “Speak when you can and tell me what has happened. I can see it is some very fearful thing.” And he waited.

Then the man caught his breath and he began, but in a low small voice, looking often at the closed door to see it did not move, and he said, “Nine days ago and one night the robber bands came against our town. It was your father’s fault. He came to spend a while at my father’s house and wait for the old moon year to pass and he would not be still as an old man ought to be. Time and again we besought him to be silent, but he would boast everywhere how he planned to go out to war against this robber chieftain as soon as spring was come and how he would down him as he had before. And we have enemies enough upon the land, for tenants hate their landlords always, and be sure those somehow told the robbers to incite them. At last the chieftain grew angry and he sent men out to cry everywhere in scorn that he feared no old toothless Tiger, and he would not wait for spring, but he would begin war now against the Tiger and all his house. … Even so, my cousin, we might have stayed him, for hearing this, my father and I, we made haste to send him a great sum of money and twenty head of oxen and fifty head of sheep for his men to kill and eat, and we made amends for your father’s insult, and besought the chieftain not to heed an old man’s talk. So I say it might have passed except for a trouble in our own town.”

Here the man paused and fell into a fit of trembling and Yuan steadied him and said, “Do not hurry yourself. Drink the hot tea. You need not be afraid. I will do all I can. Tell on when you are able.”

So at last the man could go on, subduing his shivering somewhat, and he said, his voice still strained low and half whispering, “Well, and the troubles in these new times I do not understand. But there is a new revolutionary school in our town nowadays, and all the young men go there and they sing songs and bow their heads before some new god whose picture they have hanging on the wall and they hate the old gods. Well, and even that would not matter much, except they enticed one who was once our cousin before he took vows — a hunchback — you never saw him, doubtless.” Here the man paused to make his question, and Yuan answered gravely, “I have seen him once, long ago,” and he remembered now that hunchbacked lad, and he remembered his father had told him he believed the boy had a soldier’s heart in him because once when the Tiger passed by the earthen house the hunchback would have his foreign gun and he took the weapon and looked at its every part as fondly as though it were his own, and the Tiger always said, musing, “If it were not for that hump of his, I would ask my brother for him.”—Yes, Yuan remembered him, and he nodded and said, “Go on — go on!”

The little man went on then, and he cried, “This priest cousin of ours was seized by this madness, too, and we heard it said he was restless and not like himself for these last two years, ever since his foster mother, who was a nun nearby, died of a cough she had for long. When she lived she used to sew his robes and bring him some sweetmeats sometimes she made which had no beast’s fat in them, and then he lived quiet. But once she died he grew rebellious in the temple and at last he ran away one day and joined a band of a new sort I do not understand, except they entice the farming folk to seize the land for their own. Well, and this band joined with the old robbers and filled our whole town and countryside with confusion beyond any we have ever had, and their talk is so vile I cannot tell you what they say except they hate their parents and their brothers, and when they kill they kill first their own households. And then such rains as never were have fallen on the lands this year, and the people knowing flood sure and famine after, and made more fearless by the weak new times, have thrown aside their decency—”

Now the man grew so long at his tale and began trembling so again that Yuan could not bear it and he grew impatient and forced him on, saying, “Yes, yes, I know — we have had the same rains — but what has happened?”

At this the little man said solemnly, “This — they all joined together, robbers old and new and farming folk, and they fell on our town and sacked it clean, and my father and my brothers and our wives and children escaped with nothing but the little we could hide about us — and we fled to my eldest brother’s house, who is a sort of governor in a city for your father — but your father would not flee — no, he still boasted like an old fool, and the most he would do was to go to the earthen house on the land which was our grandfather’s—”

Here the man paused and then shivering more violently he said breathlessly, “But they were soon there — the chieftain and his men — and they seized your father and tied him by his thumbs to a beam in the middle room where he sat, and they robbed him clean and they took especially his sword which he loved, and left not one of his soldiers except his old hare-lipped servant who saved himself by hiding in a well — and when I heard and went secretly to his aid, they came back before I knew it and they caught me, and cut my finger off, and I did not tell them who I was or they would have killed me, and they thought me a serving man and they said, ‘Go and tell his son he hangs here.’ So I am come.”

And the man began to sob very bitterly and he made haste and unwrapped from his finger the bloody rag, and showed Yuan the splintered bone and ragged flesh, and the stump began to bleed again before his eyes.

Now Yuan was beside himself indeed and he sat down and held his head, trying to think most swiftly what he must do. First he must go to his father. But if his father were already dead — well, he must have hope somehow since the trusty man was there. “Are the robbers gone?” he asked, lifting up his head suddenly.

“Yes, they went away when they had everything,” the man replied, and then he wept again and said, “But the great house — the great house — it is burned and empty! The tenants did it — they helped the robbers, the tenants, who ought to have joined to save us — they have taken it all from us — the good house our grandfather — they say they will take back the land, too, and divide it — I heard it said — but who dares go to see what the truth is?”

When Yuan heard this it smote him almost more than what his father suffered. Now would they be robbed indeed, he and his house, if they had no land left. He rose heavily, dazed by what was come about.

“I will go at once to my father,” he said — and then after further thought he said, “As for you, you are to go to the coastal city and to this house whose directions I will write for you, and there find my father’s lady and tell her I am gone ahead, and let her come if she will to her lord.”

So Yuan decided and when the man had eaten and was on his way Yuan started the same day for his father.

All the two days and nights upon the train it seemed this must be only an evil story out of some old ancient book. It was not possible, Yuan told himself, in these new times, that such an ancient evil thing had happened. He thought of the great ordered peaceful coastal city where Sheng lived out his idle pleasant days, where Ai-lan lived secure and careless and full of her pretty laughter and ignorant — yes, as ignorant of such tales as these as that white woman was who lived ten thousand miles away. … He sighed heavily and stared out of the window.

Before he left the new city he had gone and found Meng and took him aside into a teahouse corner, and told him what had happened, and this he did in some faint hope that Meng would be angry for his family’s sake and cry he would come too, and help his cousin.

But Meng did not. He listened and he lifted his black brows and he argued thus, “I suppose the truth is my uncles have oppressed the people. Well, let them suffer, then. I will not share their suffering who have not shared their sin.” And he said further, “You are foolish, to my thought. Why should you go and risk your life for an old man who may be dead already? What has your father ever done for you? I care nothing for any of them.” Then he looked at Yuan awhile, who sat silent and wistful and helpless in this new trouble, and Meng, who was not wholly hard in heart, leaned and put his hand on Yuan’s as it lay on the table and he made his voice low and said, “Come with me, Yuan! Once before you came, but not with your heart — join now and truly in our new good cause — This time it is the real revolution!”

But Yuan, though he let his hand lie, shook his head. And at this Meng took his hand off abruptly and he rose and said, “Then this is farewell. When you come back, I shall be gone. It may be we meet no more …” Sitting in the train, Yuan remembered how Meng looked, how tall and brave and impetuous he looked in his soldier’s uniform, and how quickly when he said these words, he was gone.

The train swayed on its way through the afternoon. Yuan sighed and looked about him. There were the travellers who seem always the same on any train, fat merchants wrapped in silk and fur, the soldiers, the students, mothers with their crying children. But across the aisle from his seat were two young men, brothers, who were, it could be seen, newly come home from foreign parts. Their clothes were new and cut in the newest foreign way, loose short trousers and long bright-colored stockings and leather shoes of a yellow color, and on their upper bodies they wore thick garments of knitted yarn, and on their breasts were sewed foreign letters, and their leather bags were shining and new. They laughed easily and spoke freely in the foreign tongue and one had a foreign lute he strummed, and sometimes they sang a foreign song together and all the people listened astonished at the noise. What they said Yuan understood very well, but he made no sign of understanding for he was too weary and downhearted for any talk. Once when the train stopped he heard one say to the other, “The sooner we get the factories started the better it will be, for then we can get these wretched creatures at work.” And once he heard the other rail against the serving man for the blackness of the rag he hung across his shoulder with which he wiped the tea bowls, and they both threw fiery looks at the merchant who sat next to Yuan when he coughed and spat upon the floor.

These things Yuan saw and understood, for so had he spoken and felt once, too. But now he watched the fat man cough and cough and spit at last upon the floor and he let it be. Now he could see it and feel no shame nor outrage, but only let it be. Yes, though he could not so do himself, he could let others do as they would these days. He could see the serving man’s black rag and not cry out against it, and he could bear at least in silence the filth of vendors at the stations. He was numbed and yet he did not know why he was, except it seemed without hope to change so many people. Yet he knew he could not be like Sheng and live for his pleasures only, nor like Meng and forget his old duty to his father. Better for him, if he could, doubtless, be wholly new and careless as they were each in his own way and see nothing they did not like to see, and feel no tie which was irksome. But he was as he was, and his father was his father still. He could not so lay aside his duty to that old which was his own past, too, and still somehow part of him. And so he went patiently to the long journey’s end.

The train stopped at last at the town near the earthen house, and Yuan descended and he walked through the town quickly, and though he stayed to see nothing, he could not fail to see it was a town which robbers bad possessed not long since. The people were silent and frightened, and here and there were burned houses, and only now did the owners who were left dare to come and survey ruefully the ruins. But Yuan went straight through the chief street, not stopping at all to see the great house, and he passed out of the other gate and turned across the fields towards the hamlet he remembered and so he came again to the earthen house.

Once again he stooped to enter the middle room upon whose walls he saw his young verses still as he brushed them. But he could not stay to see how they seemed to him now; he called, and two came to his call, and one was the old tenant, now withered and toothless and very near his end and alone, for his old wife was dead already, and the other was the aged trusty man. These two cried out to see Yuan, and the old trusty man seized Yuan’s hand without a word, not even bowing to him as to his young lord, he was in such haste, and he led him into the inner room where Yuan had slept before, and there on the bed the Tiger lay.

He lay long and stiff and still, but not dead, for his eyes were fixed, and he kept muttering something to himself continually. When he saw Yuan he showed no surprise at all. Instead, like a piteous child, he held up his two old hands and said simply, “See my two hands!” And Yuan looked at the two old mangled hands and cried out, agonized, “Oh, my poor father!” Then the old man seemed for the first time to feel the pain and the cloudy tears gathered in his eyes and he whimpered a little and said, “They hurt me—” And Yuan soothed him and touched the old man’s swollen thumbs delicately and said over and over, “I know they do — I am sure they do—”

And he began to weep silently, and so did the old man, and so the two wept together, father and son.

Yet what could Yuan do beyond weeping? He saw the Tiger was very near his death. A dreadful yellow pallor was on his flesh, and even while he wept his breath came so short that Yuan was frightened and besought him to be tranquil, and forced himself not to weep. But the Tiger had another trouble to tell and he cried again to Yuan, “They took my good sword—” Then his lips trembled afresh, and he would have put his hand to them in the old habit he had, but the hand pained him if he moved it, and so he let it lie, and looked up at Yuan as he was.

Never in all his life had Yuan felt so tender as he now did to his father. He forgot all the years passed and he seemed to see his father always as he was now with this simple childish heart, and he soothed him over and over, saying, “I will fetch it back somehow, my father — I will send a sum of silver and buy it back.”

This Yuan knew he could not do, but he doubted if tomorrow the old man could live to think of his sword and so he promised anything to soothe him.

Yet what could be done after soothing? The old man slept at last, comforted a little, and Yuan sat beside him and the trusty man brought him a little food, stealing quietly in and out, and speechless lest he wake his master’s light sick sleeping. Silently Yuan sat there, and so he sat while his old father slept, and at last he laid his head down upon the table by him and slept a little too.

But as night drew near, Yuan awoke and he ached in every bone so that he must rise, and he did, and he went noiselessly away into the other room and there the old trusty man was, who, weeping, told him again the tale he already knew. Then the old man added this, “We must somehow leave this earthen house, because the farmers hereabouts are full of hatred, and they know how helpless my old master is and they would have fallen on us, I am sure, little general, if you had not come. Seeing you come, young and strong, they will hold off awhile perhaps—”

Then the old tenant put in his word, and he said doubtfully, looking at Yuan, “But I wish you had a garment not foreign, young lord, for the country folk hate these young new men so much these days because in spite of all their promises of better times rains are come and there will be certain floods, and if they see your foreign clothes such as the others wear—” He paused and went away and came back with his own best robe of blue cotton cloth, not patched more than once or twice, and he said coaxingly, “Wear this to save us, sir, and I have some shoes, too, and then if you are seen—”

So Yuan put on the robe, willing if it made more safety, for he knew the wounded Tiger could not be taken anywhere now, but must die where he had fallen, though he did not say so, knowing the old trusty man could never bear to hear the word death.

Two days Yuan stayed beside his father waiting, and still the old Tiger did not die, and while he waited Yuan wondered if the lady would come or not. Perhaps she would not, since she had the child to care for whom she loved so well.

But she did come. At the end of the afternoon of the second day Yuan sat beside his father, who lay now as though he slept continually unless he were forced to eat or move. The pallor had grown darker, and from his poisoned dying flesh a faint stench passed off into the air of the room. Outside, the early spring drew on, but Yuan had not once gone out to see sky or earth. He was mindful of what the old men said, that he was hated, and he would not stir that hatred now, for the Tiger’s sake, that at least he might die in peace in this old house.

So he sat beside the bed and thought of many things, and most of all how strange his life was and how confused and how there was not one known hope to which to hold. These elders, in their times, they were clear and simple — money, war, pleasure — these were good and worth giving all one’s life for. And some few gave all for gods, as his old aunt did, or as that old foreign pair across the sea did. Everywhere the old were the same, simple as children, understanding nothing. But the young, his own kind, how confused they were — how little satisfied by the old gods and gains! For a moment he remembered the woman Mary and wondered what her life was, — perhaps like his; perhaps marked for no clear great goal. … Out of all he knew there was only Mei-ling who put her hand surely to a certain thing she knew she wanted to do. If he could have married Mei-ling …

Then across this useless thinking he heard a voice and it was the lady’s. She was come! He rose quickly and went out, greatly cheered to hear her. More than he knew he had hoped for her coming. And there she was — and by her, with her, there was Mei-ling!

Now Yuan had never once thought or hoped for this and he was so astonished, he could only look at Mei-ling and stammer forth, “I thought — Who is with the child?”

And Mei-ling answered in her tranquil, sure way, “I told Ai-lan for once she must come and see to him, and the fates helped, because she has had a great quarrel with her husband over some woman she says he looked at too often, and so it suited her to come home for a few days. Where is your father?”

“Let us go to him at once,” said the lady. “Yuan, I brought Mei-ling, thinking she would know by her skill how he did.” Then Yuan made no delay, but he took them in and there they three stood beside the Tiger’s bedside.

Now whether it was the noise of talking or whether it was the sound of women’s voices to which he was not used, or what it was, the old Tiger came for a passing moment out of his stupor, and seeing his heavy eyes open on her the lady said gently, “My lord, do you remember me?” And the old Tiger answered, “Aye, I do—” and drowsed again, so they could not be sure whether he spoke the truth or not. But soon he opened his eyes once more and now he stared at Mei-ling, and he said, dreamily, “My daughter—”

At this Yuan would have spoken who she was, but Mei-ling stopped him, saying pityingly, “Let him call me daughter. He is very near the last breath now. Do not disturb him—”

So Yuan stayed silent after his father’s glance wavered again to him because even though he knew the Tiger did not know clearly what he said, it was sweet to hear him call Mei-ling by that name,

There they three stood, united somehow, waiting, but the old Tiger sank deeper into his sleep.

That night Yuan took counsel with the lady and with Mei-ling and together they planned what must be done. Mei-ling said gravely, “He will not live through this night, if I see rightly. It is a wonder he has lived these three days — he has a stout old heart, but it is not stout enough for all he has had to bear, to know himself defeated. Besides, the poison from his wounded hands has gone into his blood and made it fevered. I marked it when I washed and dressed his hands.”

For while the Tiger slept his half-dead sleep Mei-ling in the skilfulest fashion had cleansed and eased the old man’s torn flesh, and Yuan stood by humbly watching her, and all the while he watched he could not but ask himself if this gentle tender creature was that same angry woman who had cried she hated him. About the rude old house she moved as naturally as though she lived always in it, and from its poverty she found somehow the things she needed for her ministration, such things as Yuan would not have dreamed could be so used, — straw she tied into a mat and slipped under the dying man so he could lie more easily upon the boards, and a brick she took up from the edge of the small dried pool and heated in the hot ashes of the earthen oven and put to his chilling feet, and she made a millet gruel delicately and fed it to him and though he never spoke he did not moan so much as he had. Then Yuan, while he blamed himself because he had not done these things himself, knew humbly that he could not do them. Her strong narrow hands could stir about so gently that they seemed not to move the great old fleshless frame, and yet they eased it.

Now when she spoke he listened, trusting all she said, and they planned, and the lady listened when the old trusty man said they must go away as soon as the death was over, because ill-will gathered blacker every day about them. And the old tenant put his voice to a whisper and he said, “It is true, for today I went about and heard and everywhere there was muttering because they said the young lord was come back to claim the land. It is better for you to go away again, and wait until these evil times are over. I and this old harelip will stay here and we will pretend we are with them, and secretly we will be for you, young lord. For it is evil to break the law of the land. The gods will not forgive us if we use such lawless means — the gods in the earth, they know the rightful owners—”

So all was planned, and the old tenant went into the town and found a plain coffin and had it carried back by night while folk slept. When the old trusty man saw this coffin, which was such as any common man had at his death, he wept a little because his master must lie there and he laid hold of Yuan and begged him saying, “Promise me you will come back one day and dig up his bones and bury him as he should be buried in a great double coffin — the bravest man I ever knew and always kind!”

And Yuan promised, doubting, too, it ever could be done. For who could say what days lay ahead? There was no more surety in these days — not even surety of the earth in which the Tiger must soon lie beside his father.

At this moment they heard a voice cry out, and it was the Tiger’s voice, and Yuan ran in and Mei-ling after him, and the old Tiger looked at them wildly and awake, and he said clearly, “Where is my sword?”

But he did not wait for answer. Before Yuan could say his promise over, the Tiger dropped his two eyes shut and slept again and spoke no more.

In the night Yuan rose from his chair where he watched and he felt very restless. He went first and laid his hand upon his father’s throat as he did every little while. Still the faint bream came and went weakly. It was a stout old heart, indeed. The souls were gone, but still the heart beat on, and it might beat so for hours more.

And then Yuan felt so restless he must go out for a little while, shut as he had been these three days within the earthen house. He would, he thought, steal out upon the threshing floor and breathe in the good cool air for a few minutes.

So he did, and in spite of every trouble pressing on him the air was good. He looked about upon the fields. These nearest fields were his by law, this house his when his father died, for so it had been apportioned in the old times after his grandfather died. Then he thought of what the old tenant had told him, how fierce the men upon the land were grown, and he remembered how even in those earlier days they had been hostile to him and held him foreign though he did not feel it then so sharp. There was nothing sure these days. He was afraid. In these new times who could say what was his own? He had nothing surely of his own except his own two hands, his brain, his heart to love — and that one whom he loved he could not call his own.

Even while he so thought, he heard his name called softly and he looked and there stood Mei-ling in the doorway. He went near her quickly and she said, “I thought he might be worse?”

“The pulse in his throat is weaker every time I feel it. I dread the dawn,” Yuan answered.

“I will not sleep now,” she said. “We will wait together.”

When she said this Yuan’s heart beat very hard once or twice, for it seemed to him he had never heard that word “together” so sweetly used. But he found nothing he could say. Instead he leaned against the earthen wall, while Mei-ling stood in the door, and they looked gravely across the moonlit fields. It was near the middle of the month, and the moon was very clear and round. Between them while they watched the silence gathered and grew too full to bear. At last Yuan felt his heart so hot and thick and drawn to this woman that he must say something usual and hear his voice speak and hers answer, lest he be foolish and put forth his hand to touch her who hated him. So he said, half stammering, “I am glad you came — you have so eased my old father.” To which she answered calmly, “I am glad to help. I wanted to come,” and she was as quiet as before. Then Yuan must speak again and now he said, keeping his voice low to suit the night, “Do you — would you be afraid to live in a lonely place like this? I used to think I would like it — when I was a boy, I mean — Now I don’t know—”

She looked about upon the shining fields and on the silvery thatch of the little hamlet and she said, thoughtfully, “I can live anywhere, I think, but it is better for such people as we are to live in the new city. I keep thinking about that new city. I want to see it. I want to work there — perhaps I’ll make a hospital there one day — add my life to its new life. We belong there — we new ones — we—”

She stopped, tangled in her speech, and then suddenly she laughed a little and Yuan heard the laughter and looked at her. In that one look they two forgot where they were and they forgot the old dying man and that the land was no more sure and they forgot everything except the look they shared. Then Yuan whispered, his eyes still caught to hers, “You said you hated me!”

And she said breathlessly, “I did hate you, Yuan — only for that moment—”

Her lips parted while she looked at him and still their eyes sank deeper into each other’s. Indeed, Yuan could not move his eyes until he saw her little tongue slip out delicately and touch her parted lips, and then his eyes did move to those lips. Suddenly he felt his own lips burn. Once a woman’s lips had touched his and made his heart sick. … But he wanted to touch this woman’s lips! Suddenly and clearly as he had never wanted anything, he wanted this one thing. He could think of nothing else except he must do this one thing. He bent forward quickly and put his lips on hers.

She stood straight and still and let him try her lips. This flesh was his — his own kind. … He drew away at last and looked at her. She looked back at him, smiling, but even in the moonlight he could see her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining.

Then she said, striving to be usual, “You are different in that long cotton robe. I am not used to see you so.”

For a moment he could not answer. He wondered that she could speak so like herself after the touch upon her, could stand so composed, her hands still clasped behind her as she stood. He said unsteadily, “You do not like it? I look a farmer—”

“I like it,” she said simply, and then considering him thoughtfully she said, “It becomes you — it looks more natural on you than the foreign clothes.”

“If you like,” he said fervently, “I will wear robes always.”

She shook her head, smiling again, and answered, “Not always — sometimes one, sometimes the other, as the occasion is — one cannot always be the same—”

Again somehow they fell to looking at each other, speechless. They had forgotten death wholly; for them there was no more death. But now he must speak, else how could he longer bear this full united look?

“That — that which I just did — it is a foreign custom — if you disliked—” he said, still looking at her, and he would have gone on to beg her forgiveness if she disliked it, and then he wondered if she knew he meant the kiss. But he could not say the word, and there he stopped, still looking at her.

Then quietly she said, “Not all foreign things are bad!” and suddenly she would not look at him. She hung her head down and looked at the ground, and now she was as shy as any old-fashioned maid could ever be. He saw her eyelids flutter once or twice upon her cheeks and for a moment she seemed wavering and about to turn away and leave him alone again.

Then she would not. She held herself bravely and she straightened her shoulders square and sure, and she lifted up her head and looked back to him steadfastly, smiling, waiting, and Yuan saw her so.

His heart began to mount and mount until his body was full of all his beating heart. He laughed into the night. What was it he had feared a little while ago?

“We two,” he said—“we two — we need not be afraid of anything.”