Kinfolk

14

THE HOUSE FELT EMPTY after Louise had left it. While she was there each separate member of the family had felt her discontented presence and each had tried to please her in some small way, to make her smile at least for the moment. Now there was no more need for such effort. When the four came home at their various times, they could go their own ways, give greeting or not, and they had no duty to a lonely little sister.

Yet they missed her. Because of her very loneliness Louise had compelled them all, James and Mary, Peter and Chen, to come out of themselves and to enter into her being. And there were times when she was not sulky, times when she played with the kittens and laughed, times when she found a fledgling bird, or a new flower growing in the ancient court. She was so pretty, her little face so pleasant to see when she was happy, that they remembered her tenderly now that she was gone. Only Peter seemed careless, and when the others spoke of her he put his mind elsewhere and sat silent.

That Louise was gone made only one of the reasons for restlessness through the winter that now came upon the city. The old landlord, who had during those months kept prudently to his promise not to ask for the rent in advance, forgot himself in his need and became troublesome to them. The manservant had come to Young Wang and had put to him the matter of money.

“My old lord and mistress are very poor,” he told Young Wang. “It would be a good deed if your master were to forget the signed paper and give him the month’s rent in advance.”

At first Young Wang refused but the man came back again with a present in his hand of two pieces of jade which he gave to Young Wang, saying, “My mistress gives these to you as a present that you may sell. Only plead with your master for a month’s rent.”

The jade was a worthless pair of ornaments such as in old times were once sewn on the sides of a woman’s crownless cap. They were thin as paper. When the man was gone Young Wang took them to James. He opened his hand and there were the jade bits on his palm. “These things were given me by the landlord as a bribe to ask you to advance the rent,” he told James. “I could not give them back because it would cause offense. Here they are.”

“What can I do with them?” James replied. “Give them away or sell them. As for the request, I will think of it.”

So he saved Young Wang, who when the man came back again was able to say, “My master considers it.”

When Chen came home, and it was a cold bitter dry night at the end of the year, James told him what the landlord asked, and Chen grew angry. “We had better move away,” he said. “Once these old opium lovers swallow down their shame and begin to beg we shall have no peace.”

But James was more tender, and he decided that he would go to see the old pair and persuade them if possible to go into the hospital to be cured. So a few days after that when he had an hour he came house earlier than usual and he knocked at the landlord’s gate and was admitted by the manservant who was all smiles at the sight of him.

“Is your master at home?” James asked.

“My master is always at home,” the man replied smartly. “Where has he to go?”

James did not answer this impudence and he followed the man into the middle room of the house. It was a dreary room. Everything of worth was gone from it, and a few cheap benches and a broken bamboo table were all that remained. The manservant left him there and after a long while he came back, bringing his master. The old landlord tottered into the room, the manservant supporting him from behind, his hands under his arms like crutches. He was a pitiable figure. His padded winter robes were torn and the cotton was hanging out in a dozen places. On his feet he wore farmer’s shoes of woven reeds, the woolly tassels twisted inside for warmth. On his head was a felt cap, once black but now rusty brown, and it had a hole at the side whence a tuft of gray hair came out. So wasted was the old man, so yellow, so withered, that he was all but dead. He tried to give greeting to James and was in such distress that he could not speak.

“I had to wake him,” the manservant declared. “He was deep in dream.”

“Eh — eh—” the old landlord stammered.

James leaned toward him. “Sir, you look very ill,” he said gently.

These words and the kind tone in which they were spoken reached the old man’s dimmed mind.

“I am very ill,” he moaned.

“Then you ought to go to the hospital,” James said in the same gentle voice. “Let me entreat you. Come with me. I will see that you are put into a warm room and a good bed. We will give you food and we will help your illness. We can cure you so that you will crave no more for the thing that makes you ill.”

The old man slowly came to his senses while James was thus speaking. He fastened his dead black eyes on James’s face and listened.

“It is cold here,” James went on. “You have not even a brazier of coals.”

“He sleeps on the k’ang,” the manservant broke in. “When we have any food to cook, the smoke from the stove creeps under the k’ang and warms him.”

“But only for a little while — unless you use charcoal,” James remonstrated.

“Who can pay for charcoal?” the man said rudely.

The old man sighed. “I have no money.”

“If you were well,” James said, “you could perhaps earn some money. Were you not once a scholar? A scholar can write letters for other people. You could even teach children again. Or I might be able to find a desk in the hospital office for you where you could copy records.”

The old man listened to this and he thought a while. Then he shook his head. “I have nothing to live for,” he said at last. “My sons are gone. There are no grandsons here. Why should I work?”

“You see what he is,” the manservant put in.

James spoke again and yet again, but each time the old landlord said again that he had nothing for which to live and why should he come out of his sleep? “I sleep and I return to that place from which I came before I was conceived in my mother’s womb,” the old man said. “There I am at peace.”

Beyond this James could not go. It was the end of persuasion. When he saw that all was useless, he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bundle of money. The servant stretched out his hands at once to receive it, but James would not see this hand. He took the landlord’s hands and into those thin yellow shells he put the money. “This is a month’s rent,” he said. “Try to keep it for food and a little charcoal.”

He knew even as he said the words that the hope was idle. At the gate he looked back and the manservant had taken the money from the old man and was helping him out of the room again.

He told the story that night when they were together at the evening meal and Chen rebuked him for what he had done. “You have made it impossible for us to stay here,” he said. “Now every few days this manservant will be after us.”

“I think James did right,” Mary declared. “Only I think he should have insisted that the old man come to the hospital.”

“When the Japs were here opium was cheap,” Peter said.

“And how do you know that?” Chen asked.

“Fellows at the college use the stuff too,” Peter said. “Not the crude opium, of course, but heroin pills. It makes me sick to see them. They can’t get it now. One fellow is always after me.” He closed his lips firmly as though he could not tell more.

James, listening to all this, now decided to speak what was in his mind. He looked around at them all. They had put on padded Chinese garments. Only thus could the intense cold of the house be borne. Here in the middle room which they all shared, there was the foreign stove which they had found at the thieves’ market, not the large stove they had hoped to have but a little one which blazed red when coal was put into it, and turned cold soon after. Yet it was far better than nothing. This room was the only place which held any heat except the kitchen, and there the grass and reed fuel gave but a quick warmth that passed as soon as the flames died down. Padded cotton garments on their bodies and padded cotton shoes on their feet kept them from frostbite. They looked no whit different from the people on the streets.

“The time has come, I think, for us to move to the village,” James said. “I know we thought of spring. But we cannot be colder there than here. And the cost of food and fuel will soon be beyond us. We cannot be worse off there.”

Money was indeed becoming worthless. There was no true money. What the people used were baskets full of paper printed in America with Chinese letters and figures, signifying gold and silver that did not exist. All that James and Mary and Chen could earn barely paid for their food and rent and fuel, besides wages to the ones who cared for them. There was nothing left for clothing or pleasure. And soon, as the paper stuff grew more abundant and the figures were printed higher, even this would not be enough.

“Why should we wait for spring?” Mary exclaimed. “There is food in the village, and there is plenty of room. I want to go now.”

James turned to Peter. “What do you say, brother?” he asked. He dreaded the answer, for what would Peter do in the village? There would be no students there and he would be lonely and unhappy. He would refuse to go. To his surprise Peter said no such thing. He lifted his head which so often he held down as though he were thinking of something secret and far from them all. “I am ready to go,” he said. “I shall be glad to get away from here, at least.”

Chen slapped his two hands on the table. “It is all folly,” he declared, “but I will follow you three fools.” They laughed and the thing was decided.

Yet so large a move could not be done in a day. First Uncle Tao must be written to, and this James did, telling him of his father’s permission to receive the rents. Then the hospital must be told of their decision to leave. Never did James know that he had so many friends among the doctors and the nurses. Dr. Kang gathered together all the other doctors and they gave a small feast, not for farewell, Dr. Kang declared, but for advice. It was given in Dr. Su’s house and Mrs. Su herself supervised the dishes. Since only men were present Mary was invited to come and help Mrs. Su, and these two young women busied themselves in the kitchen and ate in Dr. Su’s study, while the doctors kept to themselves in the dining room. In the kitchen Mrs. Su apologized for everything before Mary, although secretly she was proud of her small clean foreign-style house. “Before the Japanese came,” she said, stirring long strands of flour noodles into a pot of chicken broth, “I would not have thought it possible to keep a house without five servants at least. Now I am lucky to have this one Lao Po.”

Lao Po was an old woman who kept perfectly silent and did nothing but wash the dishes which Mrs. Su dirtied and sweep the floor upon which were dropped flour and bits of grease and bone. She understood only a country dialect, for she did not come from the city.

Mrs. Su spoke to Mary in English. “Now of course money is nothing. I pay Lao Po food and room and bedding and some clothes beside her cash. She is not clean, but what can I do? Su will not look at her because he says she is so unclean. I say, ‘Su, it is true Lao Po is dirty, but find me someone clean.’ He cannot for no poor people can be clean. Let us tell the truth about ourselves. Our poor people are very dirty. After all, we are not Americans here today. We need not be ashamed before each other.”

“Everything is nice,” Mary said politely. Indeed the little house with curtains at its windows and wicker chairs with cushions in the living room seemed a palace of comfort to her.

Mrs. Su moved her chopsticks to a pot of pork bits simmering with chestnuts. “Louise is really very lucky,” she said next. She did not know whether Mary knew that Louise had met the American here, and she could not be easy until she found out. “Of course it is better to marry a Chinese — we all agree to that. But Alec is a good American — not roughly chewing gum and swearing words all the time. He is nice family, I am sure. And I think Louise can never be happy here. She is really quite American herself.”

Mary, slicing big white winter pears for a dessert before the meal, did not answer this.

Mrs. Su felt that by her silence she assuredly knew. Therefore she plunged into a half confession. She laughed first to show that she thought it nothing. Then she said, “You know Louise begged me so hard to come here and see Alec sometimes — of course always I was here with them. I felt very unhappy. I should have come and told you first. But I did not know how to say it to Louise. And they are so modern — we are all modern, of course. But I must ask you to excuse me if I did wrong.”

Mary looked up with her large too truthful eyes. “I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Louise didn’t tell me.”

Mrs. Su regretted her queasy conscience and she made haste to talk about something else. “It does not matter now, with such happy ending,” she said quickly. “Of course I knew Alec would be good husband and not just fooling. Now tell me, do you really leave our city?”

“We want to go to our ancestral home,” Mary said. She began piling the thin slices neatly in a pyramid on a flowered dish.

“I am sorry,” Mrs. Su said. She covered the pork and uncovered a skillet of shrimp and bamboo shoots. “And I think you will be sorry, too. For people like us, well educated, village is very hard. I never was in some village. That is, not for sleeping. Sometimes in spring and summer we go outside the city for picnic and of course we stop at village to rest. Even then it is too dirty for us. Su will not eat food there. The people are very wild and dirty and all the children are sick with something.”

Mary did not reply to this. “Shall I take the pears in now?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Mrs. Su said briskly. “Just ask them to eat with watermelon seed and small things and in few minutes dinner is there.” She began to spoon the shrimps into a bowl and Lao Po, seeing that the moment had arrived, brought bowls for other food.

“Lao Po!” Mrs. Su said loudly in Chinese. “I told you, put on a clean coat and wash your face and brush your hair!”

The old woman put down the bowls on the table and went away. By the time Mrs. Su had the bowls full of food, Lao Po came back looking quite clean. “Lao Po, you take the bowls, and put them on the table. I will put the rice in the bowls. Then you can serve us all.”

Mrs. Su was a busy little figure in all the pride of her kitchen. Over her neat Chinese dress of rose-red silk she wore a white apron and her plump and creamy arms were bare.

Mary came back from the dining room. The men had greeted her pleasantly but with reserve. There was much gossip in the hospital that Mary was more willful than James and not so easy in temper, and that she, rather than he, guided the family destiny. It was for this reason that Dr. Su had invited only men to the feast.

“Shall I take in these dishes, too?” she asked Mrs. Su. “No, Lao Po will do everything now,” Mrs. Su said, taking off her apron. “I don’t mind to cook, but I don’t like to appear servant.”

She led the way to the study and they sat down. Mrs. Su enjoyed a friend with whom to talk. Mary was not so pliable a friend as Louise had been, but she was a woman and a listener. “Sit down, please,” Mrs. Su said. “Have some tea. Then our stomachs will be ready for the food. Lao Po will bring us the dishes when the men finish.”

So sipping the fragrant tea, Mary sat and listened. Long ago she knew that women like Mrs. Su were of a kind to which she did not belong.

“Now, really,” Mrs. Su began. Her round little face was not so pretty as it had been in the days before her marriage. It was less delicate and her eyes were no longer shy. “What shall we talk?” she asked in a bright voice.

“You talk,” Mary said, smiling, “and I will listen.”

Mrs. Su smoothed down her short skirt. “Shall I tell you how I marry Su?” Her voice was at once demure and cozy.

“If you like.”

“It all begins like this,” Mrs. Su said. “I was teaching English in Kunlun girls’ school. Naturally I don’t have to teach since my father is head of the bank, but still I cannot do nothing. One day my father say to me, ‘Someone say Dr. Su, very famous and rich doctor, is going to divorce. Of course he cannot live always divorcing. He must have wife and how would you like to be that one?’ At first I didn’t like. I told him, ‘Baba, suppose he has divorcing habit how I feel if then some day he also divorcing me?’ But Baba say, ‘No! All his other wives have been too stupid. They think only he is husband, they don’t think also I am wife. Now you are not so stupid. When you marry, you think of him first.’ So I say all right. Then my father asking Su’s friend Dr. Kang to suggest Su I am rather nice. Of course my father gives something. Then at a party Dr. Kang introduces me and I look rather nice, I must say. Su is very handsome. There are two sons, but they are nice and they don’t live here.”

The cheerful little voice chirped along like a cricket at the door.

In the dining room, crowded with the doctors, James and Chen were listening to a steady chorus of disapproval and dissuasion. The food was excellent. Mrs. Su was a good cook, and Lao Po faithfully watched for an empty bowl.

“You will waste yourselves in a village,” Dr. Su declared loudly. His last marriage was turning out well and he was beginning to put on weight. His handsome oval face was no longer thin and intellectual looking. He had a prosperous air, he smiled often and his voice carried the dominating note of the well-satisfied man. He heaped shrimp upon James’s bowl as he went on talking. “Now, you know, Liang, the Generalissimo was very wise when in the recent war with Japan he decreed that our educated men were to stay in the colleges and not to go to the front. The youths from the villages were made into soldiers. We have too few educated men. We should conserve ourselves. We must live long. We must breed children.”

“Eh, Liang!” Dr. Peng called jovially across the table. “You are not even married yet!”

“Liu Chen is not married, either,” Kang retorted. “Two bachelors! We must penalize them! They must get drunk!”

“Of course they do not live in continence,” Peng said with some malice. “Look at Liang — see, he is blushing! Eh — eh — everybody look at Liang!”

Dr. Su as host took pity. “Now, now, Peng — because you make love to every pretty nurse does not mean that all men are like you. Come, Liang — come, Liu Chen — you two fellows — tell us what you think you can do in this village!”

James had been all but silent until now. He was heartily enjoying his food. The cost of good food made this dinner a pleasure. He had not tasted pork and shrimp and sharks’ fins for a long time. Where did Su get so much money?

“Perhaps I am only going to the village to learn.” His voice was cool and quiet.

A shout of laughter answered this. “Learn what?” Su demanded. “How to eat sheets of pot bread and raw garlic?”

“How to kill lice?” Peng screamed.

“Now, now,” Dr. Kang said, spreading his fine pale hands, “we are getting too coarse. I respect Liang and Liu Chen. They wish to serve the people, I am sure. Serve the people — ah, yes — it is very fine!” His voice, his manner, carried sarcasm, mild but tinged with apology. Liu Chen was saying nothing at all. “Liu Chen, why do you not speak?” he asked smiling affably at Chen.

Chen lifted his bushy eyebrows. “Me? Why should I talk when I can eat such good food? I am not so foolish.” He held out his bowl to Lao Po. “More rice, old mother,” he commanded. “I’ve only eaten four bowls.”

They laughed again and James smiled. “Liu Chen is going to the country to eat,” Peng declared.

But after they had eaten and had drunk their wine in tiny pewter bowls these doctors became serious with the two young men. “Now seriously,” Dr. Su said, “in a sense what you are doing is to betray us all. You go to the country, you say to learn, in order that you may be more useful. But think in what light this puts the rest of us! You say, in effect, you are doing the right thing and we are doing the wrong.”

“No,” James replied. “We are only doing what we wish to do — not what is right, not what is wrong.”

Liu Chen clapped his hands. “Truth — truth—” he declared.

Yet this truth continued to make them all uncomfortable with each other. Why did anybody wish to go to live in a village? Those who did not wish to go could not understand, and those who did wish to go could not explain. When the feast ended, the separation was already made. James and Chen had cut themselves off from the others and none would oppose their going.

Uncle Tao had not written an answer to the letter James sent him, but it was not expected that he would. Doubtless years had passed since he had put brush to paper. The preparations went forward therefore. Young Wang sold the furniture at the thieves’ market and rejoiced when it brought many times the money it had cost. This was not all pure gain, since money was not worth nearly as much, but there was some gain. The stove was a cause for argument. Mary wished to sell it, so that they might live exactly as their kinfolk did, but Chen was prudent.

“You will find the village is just as cold as the city,” he declared. “It is necessary that there be one place where we can get warm.”

“We can sit on the k’ang,” Mary said.

“You will not always want to sit on the k’ang among your cousins and all their children,” he retorted.

“We cannot get coal in the village,” Mary declared.

Chen had to yield. “You will not be content until you have us plowing,” he said in mock complaint.

Little Dog and his mother made a great lamentation, since they were not to go. Where would they find so pleasant a place in which to live and to sleep and to eat? But Chen said sternly that the fewer the mouths that were brought to the village the more welcome James and Mary and Peter would be to their kinfolk. He himself was enough, and Young Wang was one more. Plenty of servants would be in the village, and so Little Dog was paid well and his mother was given a new padded coat. Nor were they turned out of the house at once. They could stay as long as the landlord allowed and it might be that a new tenant would need them.

As for the landlord, they did not go to bid him farewell. Chen’s prudence was against this. A small parting gift was made of some cakes and at the last moment James kept back an easy chair for the old gentleman, so that he might sit in the sun and sleep.

Thus on a fine cold sunny morning in February they rose early and ate their last meal in the city house and bidding farewell to the weeping Little Dog and his mother, they mounted their hired mules and the muleteers yelled and brandished their whips and they began the long day’s ride southwest to the ancestral village. The wind had died down in the night and the clouds of fine sandy dust which hung over the city for a week had settled. The air, made clean by the sandstorm, was as pure and dry as desert air, and the sun shone as though through glass. The landscape sparkled with light and distance was shortened and the rim of the earth seemed near. Under a gray sky this same land could look gray and dispirited, the people gray mites upon its surface, the villages scarcely to be seen. But on this day the houses were clear and the people no less clear in blue and gray flecks of red. The very brown of their skins was rich and lively.

Thus as the sun rose higher the spirits of the riders rose, too. They were young; they had set forth on the adventure; they had cut themselves clean from all that had been before. None had been content with life, and what was to come must have some good in it. Only Young Wang was gloomy. He who had lived all his childhood in a village under a landlord could not think with pleasure of Uncle Tao. Nevertheless, even he allowed himself to be cheered as the day wore on, remembering that those whom he served were kinfolk to Uncle Tao, and that they would protect him in time of need.

Only Peter was less cheerful than the others. He looked doubtful when they stopped at an inn for their noon meal. It was an inn like any other, the floor of beaten earth, the tables unpainted wooden boards set on legs. The innkeeper’s wife was snaggle-toothed and unkempt, as all decent country women are lest it be thought they make themselves beautiful for men, and her hair was unbrushed for many days and the sandstorms had left it brown and dusty. Yet she was cheerful and when she asked them in a loud voice what they would eat, her breath came out hearty with garlic.

“What have you?” James asked.

“Bread and garlic,” she replied.

“What else?” Chen asked.

“We have millet and cabbage.”

“Nothing else?” Chen insisted.

“Bread and garlic,” she said again.

They laughed and she laughed and James told her to bring all she had. Nevertheless, she brought a little more, for these, she saw, were no common guests. When the meal was served she put before them homemade noodles in boiling water and dipping out the noodles she sprinkled them with sesame oil and a little vinegar and soy sauce and on top of this she put chopped green onion sprouts.

“No meat?” Peter said with some discontent.

“Come, you American,” Chen replied, “you will see little meat from now on.”

“The food is hot and good,” James said.

They ate themselves full, Young Wang sitting at some distance from them. James had motioned to him to sit with them but Young Wang, feeling what was fit, would not do this. While he ate the woman sat near him on a bench and talked. Thus he learned that this village feared greatly the coming of the Communists who were now only a short distance away.

“What are Communists?” Young Wang asked, to see what she would say.

“Who knows?” the woman retorted. “I have never seen one alive. But some were caught a month ago near here and beheaded by the soldiers of the government and I went to see them. Well, they looked just like all dead men, except they were young.”

“Why do you fear them?” Young Wang asked.

“They take away the land,” the woman replied.

“And they are all young men,” Young Wang said slyly, “and I suppose you fear them for that, too.”

The woman laughed very much at this and looked sidewise at Young Wang, and made such answer as this, “You and your mother! Eh, you son of a hare—” all of which was designed to reprove him and at the same time to signify that she took pleasure in his wit.

Later in the day, while Young Wang rode beside Peter, he told Peter what the woman had said, and Peter looked so thoughtful that Young Wang was curious, and he grew bold. “What do you think of the Communists, young master?” he asked.

“How do I know what they are?” Peter replied. “Some say they are good and some say they are bad, but I have seen none of them.”

“If some are good and some are bad then they are like all other men,” Young Wang said, and they rode on without more talk.

Ahead of them the other three rode together, side by side when the road allowed, and falling into single file when it went narrow. Mary was always between James and Chen, and both talked to her but Chen talked the more. James was deep in thought. He saw every line and accent upon the landscape, but it was not of the landscape that he thought. His mind was already in the village. He must begin small. For a month or so he would seem to do nothing. Then he would heal a sick child, and then a few more and then he would be willing to treat others, and then he would find a room for a clinic and this room could become two and three until in a simple way it was a small hospital. When the time came he would write to Rose and Marie and Kitty and among the three perhaps one would be willing to come as a nurse to aid him.

In the same small quiet way must Mary begin her school. Nothing must be done with noise or fanfare. They were only Liangs coming home to their kinfolk. Chen was their friend. Chen would advise and keep the accounts. He would begin from the first to ask a little money for medicine. He had brought with him a small dispensary, loaded in boxes upon the backs of two mules, and Mary had brought some schoolbooks. It was good that they were not farther from the city, for Young Wang could always ride back for new supplies. But they had enough for some months.

James repeated to himself like a song, like a ritual, like the rhythm of his heartbeat, that he must go slowly every day and win his way. The dream was a hospital, not a great foreign building standing stories high above the surrounding countryside under a great curving temple roof. He saw his hospital low, a spreading shelter for the sick, the walls of earth and the roof of common tiles, so that when the sick came in it would not frighten them. They would see only a house like their own homes, bigger, for the family of the sick was large, but under their feet would be the beaten earth, and above their heads the rafters would be beneath the tiles. This hospital would be the center but out from it everywhere would reach living hands of healing. He would teach as well as heal. Under his teaching men and women would go out everywhere to find the sick, to treat them for simple illness, and to bring back to the hospital those who were too gravely ill. And they would not only heal the sick. They would teach the young mothers who were the creators of life, and the children who loved life enough to cling to it, and the young men who took pride in their families.

So he wove his dreams that day as he rode through the countryside until he saw them reaching into every village through which they passed, and every blind man and sickly child he saw healed and strong again. What had seemed impossible in the city and in the great hospital now became plain and possible to him.

“It is well enough for you two,” Chen was grumbling to Mary, “you and Jim know what you will do. But I am here for nothing. This is all folly, I tell you. I am the son of a villager and I know that village people cannot be changed unless you catch them young and drag them away. They like their faces dirty and they do not want to bathe themselves. Dirt is their garment.”

“We will change all that,” Mary said briskly.

“Ah,” Chen said sagely, “do not think that you will do all the changing! They will also change you.”

So the day passed. They rode steadily except for stopping for the noon meal and again at sunset. The several mules went more slowly than the two had come on their first visit, and it was well onto midnight before they came near to the ancestral village. The night was as clear as the day had been and the great yellow stars hung in the sky and quivered in the cold night air.]n the darkness the villages sank back into the earth. Gates were barred and they could no longer pass through the streets. They were compelled to find paths around village walls, and only the baying of watchdogs, wakened by the sound of horses’ hooves, disturbed the silence of those who slept early and deep.

They, too, were full of sleep and their bones ached from the rough riding. Peter rode with hanging head and a slack bridle and Mary, though wakeful, was made solemn by the vastness of the land spreading in darkness about her. She was not given to meditation or imagination, being one of those creatures easily busy in many things, but even upon her did the spell of the land fall.

Chen buttoned his coat closely about him and wondered at himself. He was no dreamer of dreams, having all his life seen life hard and clear and cruel. He had not come to save anyone from death or even sickness. Often did he wish that he could live as callously as Su or Peng or Kang and their kind, and he cursed himself that he could not. It was their fault, he told himself. Had they been larger men, less selfish and trivial in their minds, he would have accepted them. But they repelled him with their smallness, even while he admired their skill. He loved no villager or poor man and yet he tended any man or woman or child with care and with respect for life. Thus unwillingly was he the bondsman of his own soul. It was soon after midnight when they saw ahead of them the low walls of the ancestral village. The square of these walls, the squat tower over the gate, were not different from those of any other village they had passed, but some homing instinct led James to know the village was his own. The gate was locked and Young Wang beat upon it with a loose brick he found and he raised such a clatter that every dog inside the walls snarled and bayed his belly out. This woke the watchman who slid back a small panel and looked out with terror shining on his face in the light of the paper lantern he held. Who but bandits and Communists would come to a village at midnight?

“We are of the Liang family!” James called to him. “Do you remember us? Look at my face!”

The watchman stared and saw him. “Eh, you bring too many with you,” he objected.

“My sister, who came before, my younger brother, my friend and our serving man. The rest are muleteers,” James replied.

“The inn cannot hold all these muleteers,” the man objected.

Young Wang came forward at this moment. “Elder brother, the muleteers will not sleep here if there is no room,” he said with courtesy. All this time he had been counting money inside his bosom and now his hand came out clenched about a roll of bills and he went close to the gate and somehow the money met the watchman’s hand through the small open panel and after a moment the gate swung open. Dogs were waiting inside and they sprang at the mules, but the mules, long used to them, plodded on, only breathing hard and kicking at the leaping dogs if they came too near.

Thus they went in single file down the street and so came to the gate of the ancestral house. This gate, too, was closed but the middle son of Uncle Tao had been waked by the dogs and he had risen and stood near the gate. His heart beat fast, for why should horsemen pass through the village now? When he heard a knock upon his own gate that heart stopped for a second. Did not the Communists always come to the house of the landlord first? He slid back a little panel and looked out.

“It is I, Cousin Brother,” James said.

The gate was thrown wide then, and the cousin stood holding his robes about him as he had thrown them on when he rose from his bed.

“Come in,” he said, “welcome, even at this hour. We knew you were coming one day or another, and we have been expecting you any day. Come in, come in—”

It was a pleasant welcome and they all came in while the cousin ran to wake the women. They rose, with such men cousins as waked themselves, and millet soup was heated and water was boiled for tea, while Young Wang paid the muleteers with much loud argument and anger over the wine money which was to be given above the price agreed upon.

At last all was settled, and the loads were in the house and the mules gone. In the middle room all gathered to eat and drink before they slept again, each feeling somewhat shy because of the new life ahead. Kinfolk they were, and yet they were strangers, too, now that they were to live together under the same roof. Uncle Tao had not waked and none had called him. Let that be for tomorrow.

Yet the kinswomen were kind and they pressed the newcomers to eat and drink and the kinsmen were courteous and asked how the journey had been. They looked often at the boxes which James had brought and one asked if they contained money. “Only medicines,” James said. “You know I am a doctor.”

To this none answered and he felt them afraid and bewildered by a new thing under the roof.

Peter said not a word. He ate a little and drank some tea and from under his dark eyebrows he looked at these kinfolk of his. He felt not one drop of blood in him that was like the blood in them. Yet they were all Liangs. His father, thousands of miles away, in a world as different from this as though it were upon another star, was still a Liang, with these. Mind knew, but could not comprehend, and heart rebelled. Peter only longed to sleep.

Chen was cheerful. There was nothing here too strange to him. This village was like his own, and these frowzy women and slovenly men were like those who lived in his own father’s household. He made small talk, and asked questions in courtesy and they laughed once or twice at what he said and their eyes were lively. This he did with intent. They must like him, because in days to come he must stand often between them and Mary, and even perhaps Jim. He pitied these two with all his heart for he loved them well. Peter? Peter would not stay here, that he believed. But Jim and Mary were bound by their own wills.

“Now we must sleep,” Chen, said at last. “You, Elder Brothers, are too good. Please go back to your beds.”

So saying all rose and the kinsmen took the newcomers to their rooms, and the kinswomen led Mary to her room where she had slept before. Young Wang lay down upon three chairs in the middle room and wrapped his quilt about him.

All tiptoed as they passed Uncle Tao’s room until they heard his great rumbling cough and then they paused and looked at one another.

“Can it be he has been awake this whole time?” the eldest kinswoman whispered.

For answer there came a second great rumbling cough from Uncle Tao. They waited listening, but he did not speak and neither did he come out. After a long few minutes of such waiting they crept on, each to his own bed.

Uncle Tao lay listening to their footsteps creeping away. He knew very well what had happened. The first dog had wakened him. But he did not get up. He lay slowly making up his mind and only mischief made him cough when he heard them pass his door. Let them know that he was awake and would not get up!