Kinfolk

16

IN THE ANCESTRAL VILLAGE the four sat talking. James, Chen, and Peter had three rooms leading one into the other and facing south upon a small barren court. James kept for his own the central and slightly larger room which, having no windows, had a wide door that was now open to the winter sun. Here they were gathered. There was no other heat than the sunshine, and they were all clothed in padded Chinese garments and Mary sat with her feet on a small brass footstove within which were coals imbedded in ash. All of them wore half gloves which Mary had knit from gray camel’s-hair yarn.

They had been here for nearly a month and under James’s command had done nothing, apparently, except receive all who wished to come and see them. Yet within the house they had been quietly busy, except for Peter who read and studied much alone. The monotony of the country food had persuaded Mary to bid Young Wang to buy an earthen portable stove shaped like a jar with a small iron grate at the top. He put it in a sheltered corner of the barren court, and buying small pond fish and white cabbage and soy bean vermicelli with an occasional scrawny chicken, he set before them private and pleasant dishes. Other members of the family did the same in their part of the rambling earthen house and it was not taken amiss.

No one had expected Young Wang to remain in the village since he so enjoyed city life, but he had surprised all of them by falling in love with the daughter of the village innkeeper. Chen had first suspected it in the careless service and generally absent-minded behavior which Young Wang began to show soon after their arrival. Upon inquiry Young Wang confessed that he felt it was time for him to start a family for himself, and that it would be convenient if he settled here. He reminded himself and James that he had always dreamed of returning to the sea to be a ship’s cook, but now that he had seen the innkeeper’s daughter, he preferred to be a land cook. The inn was a good business, he further explained, and it was his luck that the innkeeper’s two sons had died, one as a child and the other last year of smallpox, leaving the daughter the only offspring. This meant that her husband would be accepted in place of a son, and he could step into the business as heir.

“I suppose you care nothing about the girl herself,” Chen had said teasingly.

Young Wang had grinned. “I have seen her once or twice,” he admitted. “She is not too ugly.”

Anybody could see the innkeeper’s daughter any day as she served at the tables and Chen had laughed loudly. “You need a marriage broker,” he told Young Wang. “Allow me to offer myself. I will ask no fee except a good meal cooked by your own hands and served by your wife after the wedding.”

Young Wang was much pleased, and Chen had gone to the innkeeper and had made so handsome a picture of Young Wang that both parents had soon agreed to accept him.

“Shall we not also ask the young woman if she will consider him as a husband?” Chen had suggested daringly.

“No,” the innkeeper said with decision. “It is none of her business. The inn is mine.”

Nevertheless Chen took care one day before the betrothal papers were written to eat a meal at the inn and to ask for wine, which the girl always served. The hour was early and he sat alone at a table. When she poured the wine from the long slender spout of the pewter winepot, he leaned toward her and without looking at her he said these words in a low voice. “If there is any reason why you do not wish to proceed with the papers which bind you to Young Wang, remove the lid of the winepot as a sign.”

He did this in order to spare the feelings of a young girl. But she was no shy and modest creature. All her life had been spent in the inn and she saw new men every day. Therefore she answered smartly though not loudly, “A woman has to marry some man or other, and if he has his two eyes and his two arms and two legs, he is as good as any.”

Thus did she say that her heart was pleased with Young Wang, and so the wedding was set for the first lucky day after the opening of spring. Chen felt proud at this first achievement in the village and word went around that he had been a go-between and people praised him for his good common ways. He himself foresaw that his function in the years to come, if these two young Liangs persisted in staying here as they now swore themselves to do, would be to stand as bridge between the old and the new. With all the good intent in the world, James was too cautious and Mary too quick. James could not easily understand these country people in the very excess of his sensitive wish to do so, and Mary did not wait on understanding. If a child’s face was dirty she wiped it clean without perceiving that the jealous mother was wounded thereby.

Yet Mary was more fortunate than James. She paid little heed to the elders but she had witchery over children. She was full of stories and songs and games, and following James’s command she did not try to teach anything for a full month. The two dozen and more Liang children allowed her to wash them and to tend their scratches and cuts and soon they followed her everywhere, so that she had not one moment to herself.

Her danger was that she was impatient with Uncle Tao. She refused to respect him. She told him boldly that he would feel better if he washed himself all over with hot water and soap even though it was winter, and while he was washing she would put a powder into his clothes that would kill the lice.

Uncle Tao listened to her with astonishment. He was not quite angry for his real anger he never wasted on women. But he pursed his lips and rolled his eyes around and refused to wash himself. “I have never washed in the winter,” he declared. His sleeves were wide and he withdrew his arms from them the better to scratch remote parts of his body. “As for lice, they are a sign of good health.”

“They are a proof of dirt,” Mary said severely.

Uncle Tao rolled his head round and round on his short neck to signify rage. “You know nothing about lice! I tell you, they will not stay on a sickly person or on any person about to die. I am healthy and I have many lice.”

Mary walked away, her cheeks flaming and her head high. When Chen begged her to remember that this was China and not America, that it was country and not city, Mary flouted him. She said, “Uncle Tao is just a fat dirty old man.”

Had she been a boy she might have suffered. But it was accepted in this household as in all others that women were like children and must be allowed a license which a man as a superior being could not have. Therefore although no other woman dared to quarrel with Uncle Tao, it became a matter for family respect that Mary was not afraid of him and that he, although he roared at her, did not demand that she be beaten.

Peter remained unknown and aloof. It was plain to all that something secret weighed upon the boy’s mind. James, probing him, could not find what it was, for Peter would not tell him anything.

“I think you should go back to America, Peter,” James said one day.

“I don’t want to go,” Peter replied.

“Then what do you want to do?” James asked with something as near impatience as he allowed himself.

Peter had shrugged his shoulders. “Leave me alone,” he said.

So this day, too, he sat in silence while the others talked together. The first small sign of the northern spring had shown itself. Young Wang had found in the village market some lily bulbs and he had brought them home and had shown Mary how by keeping the water tepid about their roots they could be forced, though the room was cold. Now the flowers hung in rich golden-hearted clusters and their fragrance filled the room. In the court, too, a small bare lamay bush had begun to show buds of waxen yellow even before there was a leaf, and the brown buds on the plum tree were beginning to swell. “I must begin to do something,” Mary declared. As usual when they were together they spoke in English and as usual James reproved them.

“Please,” he said, “there is nothing we need hide, and if they hear us speaking a foreign language it makes them think us foreign.”

“You are overcareful,” Chen said lazily. He sat in the sun and the warmth was creeping into his heart. “They know we speak English.”

“I shall begin by teaching a few of our own Liang children how to read,” Mary said. “Then others will join us. And I shan’t ask Uncle Tao.”

“I think I shall not begin on our own family,” James said thoughtfully. “And I will ask Uncle Tao.”

Chen laughed. “We will see how far each of you goes,” he said.

Peter had been listening and now he suddenly broke forth as though he could not contain what was in his thought. “You are all foolish — as if it matters what you do in one little village to a handful of people among so many millions!”

His angry young voice stilled them in the midst of their pleasure in the coming spring and in each other.

“What do you suggest?” Mary asked. She put the bitter question in English for Peter had cried out in that tongue.

“It’s all rotten,” Peter cried. “Nothing will be any use except a clean sweep from top to bottom.” He got up and walked about the room and sat down again but this time out of the sunshine and beside the table.

“Go on,” James said, “tell us what you think. None of us know.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Peter said. “I have been trying to find out. The dirt — the disease — the stupidity!” He stared at them all in a sort of rage. “I shall never forgive Pa as long as I live — letting us believe that everything was wonderful, hiding it all under a Confucian mist! No wonder he doesn’t come back!”

“I suppose you wish you hadn’t come back,” Mary flung at him.

But Peter would not accept this. “I don’t wish that. I am glad I came back. If this is the way things are in my country I’d rather know it.”

“Still you wish they weren’t,” Mary argued.

“Of course I wish they weren’t!” Peter reared his head like a young stallion and glared at them. “I wish the president of my college weren’t a pussy-footing old fool! I wish he didn’t love tea parties and flattering sycophantic professors — and women! I wish we had a decent government! I wish we needn’t be afraid of secret police sneaking everywhere like rats in sewers! I wish I didn’t have to see my college mates jailed — tortured — killed! I wish we even had the guts to rebel — and stand together — which we haven’t — because we’re all rotten through and through—” His voice broke, tears rushed to his eyes, and he turned away his head.

James had listened, his eyes steadily on his young brother’s flushed face. Now he spoke. “We all wish that some things were different. It is like coming home from college and discovering that your parents can’t read and write. But they are still your parents. We have to take our people as they are and change them as we can.”

“They won’t change,” Peter muttered.

“I suppose we have to prove to them that change would be better,” James said reasonably.

“How can you prove anything to a lot of village dolts?” Peter demanded.

“What else can you do?” Mary demanded in return.

Peter gave her a strange dark look. “There are other ways,” he said.

They gazed at him with blank looks and he rose to his feet impetuously. “Oh, I don’t belong here and we all know it. The sooner I go back to the city the better it will be for us all. I can board at the college.”

He went into his own room and shut the door. They were silent for a moment after this. Chen looked very grave. He sat on the high wooden threshold of the door, his hands clasped about his knees, and he gazed out into the barren court surrounded by the low earthen wall. “The innocents!” he murmured. “We must pity them. But they are terrible in their innocence — and dangerous.”

“What do you mean?” Mary asked.

“Peter is American,” Chen said. “He has been brought up innocent. He believes that anything can be done and done quickly. You do it by force, either of money or arms. What can the innocent understand of the long slow years, the thousands of years? What can they know of the incorruptible people?”

“Are the people incorruptible?” Mary asked. Her voice was troubled and wondering and not at all like Mary’s voice, usually brisk and firm.

“There are corruptible men but no corruptible people,” Chen said.

“You give me hope,” James said.

They talked long together that day without Peter. They planned how they would begin, in what small ways, with what few people. They would begin at once, tomorrow, Mary gathering the children together, James setting up his small clinic. They would let the people of the ancestral village lead them, and as they themselves were led, they would lead again.

“And Peter?” Mary asked.

“Peter must decide for himself,” James said.

Young Wang was much troubled. He had been told to go with Peter to the city and see him settled in his room at the college and then come back again. This he would do. But should he first tell his master about the marble bridge? So long as Peter was safe in the village he had felt no need to tell. Yet were Peter to be alone in the city should there not be warning to the elder brother?

He took his chance to talk with Peter himself as they wound along the country roads northward. “Now, young master,” he argued, “I am older than you, though a serving man only, and I beg you to have nothing to do with such students as do not read their books and who instead spend their time complaining against the government. All governments are devouring beasts, and they feed upon the people. Avoid officials, I pray you. This we are taught even when we are children. And especially now, avoid our present officials, who are beside themselves with greed, since money is worthless. They will destroy all who complain. The nearer a government is to its end, the more cruel and hungry it becomes. Was it not so in the days of the old empire?”

Peter did not answer this and Young Wang, stealing a look at his sullen face, went on. “I have not told your elder brother anything about the marble bridge, and I will not if you will promise me only to read your books and not mix yourself with those who read no books.”

“I do not need to promise anything to you,” Peter said rudely. “Let me tell you this — I do not care what you say to my brother.”

Young Wang did not say any more after this. He became again only the good silent servant and he went with Peter to the college and there they found no room empty. But after some search Peter found a friend, a youth from the province of Hupeh, whose name was Chang Shan, and this friend said, “There is space in my room for another bed, and you are welcome to the space if you can find the bed.”

So Young Wang ran to the thieves’ market and found a bed and put it up in the narrow room and he spread quilts and he bought some fruits and sweets and did all he could for his young master. When there was nothing more to do, he waited until he could find the Hupeh youth alone for a few minutes and then he said, “This young master of mine is wholly ignorant, coming from America, and he does not understand anything here. I beg you to shield him and watch over him and warn him and do not let him fall into evil hands. He walks with his head high and he does not see where his feet are going.”

The Hupeh youth smiled at this and said, “Yes, yes,” and Young Wang gave him a parcel of food he had bought as a gift and then having indeed done all he could, he returned to the village. There he made no report to James beyond saying that he had seen Peter safely to the college and had bought him a bed and that he was among friends. Young Wang was a prudent man and he was loath to make trouble in the family he served. It might be that Peter would heed his warning. At least he would wait and see. Meanwhile the affairs of his own marriage began to press him. His father-in-law was a canny man who did not wish to yield up his authority in the inn too easily. The first necessity therefore, Young Wang decided, was to marry the daughter and get her with child and so establish himself secure in this family.

Young Wang’s wedding day dawned clear and calm, a good day in the midst of days of wind and sandstorm and this he took to be a favorable omen. The wedding was a common one without extra show, but Young Wang in his thriftiness considered it money soundly spent to pay for a meal at the inn for everybody. The gentry ate apart from the others, and the Liang family were put in the inner rooms. Uncle Tao let his hunger loose and he ate and drank mightily, and all admired his capacity.

Chen, delicately perceiving what was his proper place, did not sit down long with the Liangs and yet he did not sit anywhere else. He wandered about among the guests making jokes and teasing the bride, who ran here and there with the feast dishes as though it were any wedding except her own. James sat near to Uncle Tao but at the outer edge of the tables, and from here he looked at the villagers and country folk. They were hearty people and good, ignorant of letters and yet wise in the ways of human life. They were not innocents. They did not expect much and they were happy with what they had. Yet they would gladly be more happy if it were possible. They liked Uncle Tao and they despised him, too. They bore with such gentry; they did not wish them dead, but they watched their own scales when they measured seed rice and harvested grain. No, they were not innocents. They granted to every man his own right to the life he liked best, or the life that he had been given by Heaven.

From this wedding feast James returned to his own room late that night and he sat thinking and alone for a long time. He was not here, he perceived, only to do what good he could. Perhaps he was not here to do good at all. He was here to release some force of life now hidden in his people. To heal their bodies was to release force, to teach them to read and to write was to release yet more of such force. What was this force? It was good sense and strong wisdom, and it was an inheritance. It was also his inheritance. While he gave his people the tools of health and letters, he gave himself the means of learning what their wisdom was, and when he knew them he could enter into his inheritance, from which he had been cut off. Thus would he find his own roots.

In this humility he began his new life.

Spring delayed that year, and week after week the cold winter nights covered the city. On one such night the sky clouded soon after sunset and snow began to fall. Many poets of ancient times had written poems about snow falling upon the roofs of the palaces, but Peter could not read these poems and he did not even know of their existence. And the peaceful times in which they had been written were gone. It was one thing to look out from a snug and comfortable house set in a prosperous nation and see the snowflakes drifting upon imperial roofs. Today the palaces were empty and poet and emperor alike were dust. The city was desolate, the people without good rulers and the enemy only newly driven away. The past was no more, and the future could not be seen.

Peter, pressing his face against the small dirty windowpane of his friend’s room, saw the lamplight reflected only upon large wet snowflakes that tomorrow would make the day’s work harder, the classrooms more chill and damp, the streets slippery. Here inside this heatless room the temperature was already freezing. Like most students, his friend Chang Shan had contrived a small stove upon which to boil hot water to drink, or at best for making a little tea. The stove was only an oil can bought from someone who had followed the American army and had salvaged all tin cans. But Chang Shan, being inventive, had lined the tin with clay and had made a frame of heavy wire to support a small copper kettle. The hot water, poured into cheap pottery bowls, kept their hands from being too chilblained for writing, and the same hot water in their stomachs gave them momentary warmth within.

Peter looked at Chang Shan. He was a tall very thin young man of twenty-two. Anyone could see that he had tuberculosis, as most of the students had. His head was large and the bones of his skull protruded. A big slightly arched nose, full pale lips and solid white teeth were nothing uncommon in his looks, but these, combined as they were with fiery eyes, gave his head nobility. Everybody secretly admired Chang Shan, but few dared to be his friends. In these times when life depended upon many things besides food, friends could be more dangerous than enemies. Peter and Chang Shan were friends.

“You will not believe me when I tell you that the place where my father lives is warmed in every corner by pipes carrying hot water,” Peter said.

“It is a pity you do not return to your father,” Chang Shan said. He was reading a badly printed book and he did not look up.

“I do not know why I cannot return,” Peter replied. They spoke in Chinese because Chang did not speak English. Peter had learned to speak the Peking Mandarin, partly that he might talk with Chang Shan. Yet he had never taken Chang Shan to the city house. James and Mary, he had felt, would not like this friend. Chang Shan was an absolutist. When anything was not good, he believed in its total destruction. Thus he believed now in the destruction of the old family system, of the president of the university, of all capitalists, of the Chinese written language, of inflation, of the high cost of living, of the gold standard, of Confucianism, the classics, and the government. It was only a matter of time until Chang Shan would be caught by the secret police and killed. He knew it and for this reason he did not allow himself to fall in love with a girl who loved him. He refused even to see her and the only way she could comfort herself was to come to the room when he was away and leave small packages of food. Chang Shan tried not to eat these but sometimes his hunger compelled him to do so. The girl, Fengying, was a plain ugly female student, and she waylaid Peter as often as she could to ask if Chang Shan had eaten the food and to beg Peter to persuade him to do so. She did not hide her adoration. She declared to Peter, “Chang Shan will be a great revolutionary leader. It is our duty to keep him alive.” In her heart she hoped Peter did not consume her gifts, but she did not say so, fearing he might be angry and so refuse to answer her questions about Chang Shan.

“Yes, yes—” Peter had agreed. She was so ugly, her bulging eyes so pathetic behind her steel-rimmed spectacles, that he escaped from her as soon as he could.

“I do not know why I do not return to my father,” Peter said now to Chang Shan. He, too, was trying to study but he had found it impossible to read the assignment for the next day. It mattered little enough whether he read it or not. The professor would doubtless not come to his class through the snow. His shoes, like those of his students, were only of cotton cloth, and the snow would soon wet them and he had not another pair. He had long ago sold his leather shoes for money to buy rice and so could buy no more leather shoes.

“You are weakening again,” Chang Shan said scornfully. “You have been wet-nursed on Confucianism. You are, I suppose, the superior man.”

“You are very unjust,” Peter said bitterly.

“I am not unjust, then, to myself,” Chang Shan said gravely. All this time he had not lifted his eyes from the book. Now suddenly he looked at the window. When he saw the reflection of the light upon the falling snowflakes, he got up quickly and went out.

Peter did not ask where he went. Chang Shan might have gone out for any reason. Since there were no indoor toilets, he might merely have stepped outside in the street to relieve himself. Or he might have decided that this was a good night to go to the marble bridge.

He came back in a few minutes. “The night is dark and even the police will not be out in the snow,” he announced. “I am going to the bridge.”

Chang Shan never asked anyone to go with him to the bridge. He merely told a few other students that he was going. Then he went off alone. Usually before he reached the bridge two or three others would follow him. At the bridge they would work in silence, digging into the yellow clay, making a hole big enough for dynamite. Did they have the pure dynamite that Americans used it would not have taken them so long. But they had only the poor stuff left by the Japanese in a warehouse — lucky at that, for the students had found it first. The bridge was huge. Built centuries ago of marble with granite foundations, it was as strong as the day it had been finished. The only signs of time were the hollows worn by the feet of generations upon its surface. Since these were even now only an inch or so deep, the bridge could exist for thousands of years longer. But the students were planning to blow it up for the very reason that it was so old and huge and because its size and permanence made them angry. It signified the glory of an age that was gone, and it was a bridge not only over the water beneath it, but also from the present into the past. The past was what the students wanted to forget because they could not share its glory, and dead glory did them no good now. It was the present which they wanted to build, and they craved hope for the future. Yet the people, those who lived in villages and upon the land, remained on the other side of the bridge, separated from the students in the university. These people still lived in the past, they were content with themselves, they trusted the land, which is eternal. Therefore the students wanted to destroy the bridge in protest.

In protest against what? They said, against the government. But actually it was in protest against their tuberculosis and their poverty and the miserable teaching they were given when they were hungry for true knowledge; in protest, too, against their wretched childhoods and against their own ambitions, never to be fulfilled, and most of all in protest against their broken pride and the hopelessness of their future. But the students did not know all this. They blamed only their rulers, who they insisted, had sold the country to Western imperialists.

Alone now in Chang Shan’s room Peter determined that he would not follow his friend. Yet he felt so lonely that he was terrified. He knew that he could never return to his father. If he went home he would quarrel with his father. Sooner or later he would tell his father that he was a liar and had cheated his own children. His mother had become a fool in Peter’s eyes. He did not want to see his parents again as long as he lived. Neither did he want to see his American friends. He could not tell them about China. There were no more dreams to be made, now that he knew the truth. Yet he was more impatient with James and Mary than with any of them. The paltriness of what they planned, the folly of finding satisfaction in it! There was something splendid in Chang Shan’s determination to destroy. Chang Shan was not a Communist. He did not believe that the Communists were any better than others. They, too, Chang Shan said, should be destroyed. A clean country, the old gone, the selfish swept away by the storm — this was the only hope. “Even if I destroy myself in the storm,” Chang Shan argued, “I leave cleanness behind me.”

For sheer need to have something clear and definite Peter sat down at the table and began to write on a piece of paper. It was only a small piece for even paper was too dear to waste.

“Our country is foul,” so he began to write in English. “We must make it clean. Our country is rotten. We must ruthlessly cut away what is rotten and burn it up. A prairie wind, a prairie fire, that is what I see. After the fire the ashes, the clean ashes. Who will light this fire? It can be lit by a single match held in a human hand.”

He sat a long time in thought and he kept seeing the match struck against the substance, and then the flame blazing into a fire as wide as the world. Chang Shan was right. He rose, and catching up his padded coat from the bed as he went, he wrapped it about him and went out. He was better off than Chang Shan who had no padded coat.

Whether any other friend of Chang Shan had followed he never knew. For that night he walked through the snow with his head down that it might not creep down his collar and chill him with wet. Thus he came near the bridge by the path he knew so well. Snow is so silent that it hides even footsteps. Therefore Peter heard no one and he did not know that he was followed until he felt his shoulder seized. He looked up and saw a fierce wet face under a ragged felt hat.

“Are you going to the bridge?” a voice hissed in his ear.

How do the secret police dress themselves when they spy upon children playing under a bridge? They dress themselves as common men, in ragged hats and dirty robes. These robes are better than smart uniforms for there is room under the skirts for pistols and knives and ropes.

But what did Peter know of secret police dressed as common men? He nodded, and the next moment he felt a round cold piece of metal at his temple. But this was only for the fraction of a second. Then upon a roar of thunder he felt himself lifted from earth into heaven and he knew no more.

“Dear Mr. Liang,” the president of the university wrote to James some weeks later. “For a number of days now your younger brother has not appeared in his classes. Neither has his roommate, Chang Shan. We do not know whether they have met with some unfortunate accident, or whether, as has been the case with a few others, these two have unwisely joined a brotherhood of some kind in the northwest. Unless you have further information, the name of your brother will be removed from the roll of the university.”

Upon receiving this letter, James forbade Mary to be frightened. He went at once to Peking. But where could he search? He called upon the proud and dignified president, who, as a great scholar and a famous man, received him with courtesy but without interest.

“It is unfortunate that your brother was the friend of Chang Shan,” the university president said in a loud clear voice. “I reproved Chang Shan many times for his daring behavior. A scholar, I told him, ought not to concern himself with outside affairs. Alas, Chang Shan never obeyed his elders.”

There was no more help than this to be had from the scholar who sat wrapped in his quilted satin robe, nursing his soft hands and long fingernails, and James went to Chang Shan’s room, which was pointed out to him by a shabby girl student, whose eyes were red, and there he found some of Peter’s clothes. The padded coat was gone, he saw, and this made him wonder whether Peter had run away with Chang Shan. On the other hand, his toothbrush was there and his hairbrush and comb and such small things as are needed for daily life — that is, for Peter’s daily life. But perhaps he had deliberately left them behind because to Chang Shan they would not seem necessary. Someone had already taken all the books, for books were precious.

But the shabby girl student who had been hanging about the door now drew a bit of paper from her pocket. “This was found,” she whispered.

James saw Peter’s handwriting and he took the paper and read it.

“Does it tell you anything?” the student asked. She could not read English.

“Nothing that I did not already know,” James replied. He put the paper in his pocket, and after a few more such fruitless days he went back to the village again with his miserable news. There, with Chen and Mary listening, he told them what he could and he showed them the paper. Young Wang, hearing that James was home again, came from the inn with a rack of steaming hot spinach dumplings. He set it down upon the table and listened, too, for a moment. Then very unwillingly he told them what the vendor had once said and of the yellow clay upon Peter’s shoes. “I believe they were plotting to destroy the marble bridge,” Young Wang said.

“But why?” Mary asked. “What good would it do?”

“Young men do not ask what good it will do,” Young Wang said. “They only wish to make a big noise.”

“But the bridge is not blown up,” James reminded them. “I passed it as I came and went. It stands there exactly as ever it did.”

Young Wang shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe they were caught before they could set the dynamite.”

This was all guess and conjecture and no one could know.

“Peter will write to us,” Mary insisted. “Wait — and we’ll hear.”

“Nevertheless, I should tell our parents,” James said gravely.

So he sat down that same day and wrote down all that he knew, how discontented Peter had been and how unhappy and yet that he would not go back to his father and mother.

“I feel myself at fault,” James wrote. “I blame myself. I should have compelled him to tell me what he was thinking about. As soon as we hear from him, I will go to him wherever he is.”

But he did not tell them of the bit of paper upon which Peter had written the words of destruction. When the letter was gone James sat reading again and again these words, and slowly he began to believe that Peter was dead. But how and by whose hand?

These questions were never to be answered. For at this moment Peter’s body was in an old well. The fall had not been hard, even had he known that he was falling, for Chang Shan had been thrown down before him, and his body lay upon others. Such old wells were deep. They had been dug in the palace gardens, long ago, so that the Empress might have ample water with which to water her peonies. Now they were foul with age and death and nobody drank their waters, and all the flowers were dead.