Kinfolk

18

THE MONEY THAT HIS FATHER SENT James used to begin the search for his brother. How does a brother make such a search? James learned soon that the ways were devious. Young Wang went with him everywhere. Leaving his bride and the inn, both of which were now equally dear to him, he followed James, and yet led him. There were no lawful ways to seek justice for what had been done without law. But Young Wang, shrewd and accustomed to getting what he wanted and using money freely since there was hunger everywhere, heard from one hungry mouth or another, and so he was led to the palace gardens, not because of one dead lad or two, but because the old wells there had been used long ago for such things as death. Did not the concubines of emperors drown themselves in the imperial wells?

Why tell of how James and this faithful manservant crept about in the dark human caverns in a great and ancient city? These caverns were human sewers, not of the filth of bodies but of the filth of souls. Men who starve for food, who starve for opium, who gamble away wives and children, men who will kill rather than work — among these James came and went in silence, and Young Wang was always there and hidden under his coat was the big butcher knife which he had brought from the inn.

James lived during these days with Su and his young wife. They were kind to him, but they were afraid of him, and so he went out of the house before dawn and entered it after dark. James was the brother of Peter who had been killed, and it was dangerous to be a friend of James, even though he was the son of Liang Wen Hua.

There came a day at the end of sixty-three days when a vendor told of a gateman who told of a beggar who told of a band of beggars who paid him to allow them to sleep in the shelter of the empty pavilion in the imperial gardens. Among these beggars one was found who told of a night when he had heard voices muttering and whispering about in ancient well. Money — money! James spent all that his father had sent, but American money was true money and it changed for a fortune and this fortune James offered the beggar in exchange for his brother’s body.

He and Young Wang with him went to the imperial gardens on a dark night, and they waited until the moon was gone. The gate swung open and there was no gateman to see what went on, and the two of them went in and sat down under a vast old pine tree and waited half the night through. His thoughts were strange, and scarcely thoughts so much as unspoken feelings, perceptions, fears, and resolutions. From the vast gardens, miles within the high four-square walls of past empire, there came dying scents, no longer perfumes, from old trees and long grasses, from fungus upon wet bark and mosses creeping between stone and tile no longer trod by human feet. The silence was profound and yet there were sudden small gusts of wind and somewhere small bells upon a roof tinkled in a ghostly tremor. He felt life about him, dead and no longer human, and yet clinging to these haunts, strange and horrible it was to think that Peter’s young rebellion had been quenched here, where all the evils of history lad culminated and died! There was something so solemn about this possibility of his brother’s death that James could not weep. He sat crouched upon the deep bed of pine needles and leaning upon a mighty root of the pine tree that canopied above him he waited, resisting with his own inner forces the forces of the dead past that encircled him here. He was young and he was alive, and he would not allow himself to be overwhelmed. A stubbornness for life and his own life began to steady his heart and cool his mind. Peter had chosen the swift way, the gamble of violence against violence, and he lad lost. He, James, the elder, would take the slow plodding path and live, he hoped, to see his goal clear, if not to reach it.

Calmness came to him as the hours passed, and in all this time Young Wang had not spoken. Had the beggars betrayed them, after all? Young Wang had prudently held back half the money lest there be no body brought, and he promised that cash would be given after its delivery.

In the small cold hours of the night, when the owls hoot in the trees, he whispered harshly, “They are coming!” James rose and stood waiting and behind him he heard Young Wang take a stealthy step. They saw the glimmer of a paper lantern through a marble colonnade and the light fell dimly upon a cluster of human feet, staggering under a load. A half moment, and the beggars brought three water-soaked bodies and laid them under the ancient pine. It was too dark to see, but James heard the footsteps and he heard the beggars’ voices. “Take care — they are already rotting—”

Then he rose and took from his pocket the small flashlight he had brought with him from America, and this light he lit upon each dead lad, and Young Wang peered over his shoulder. The first he did not know, nor did Young Wang. The second one James did not know, but Young Wang cried softly, “It is the one in whose room he slept!” The third they both knew, for it was Peter.

Thus was certainty made sure. Now they moved quickly to do what they had earlier decided must be done. No one in the whole city would have dared to bury these bodies. Under the ancient pine the earth was soft and rich, and Young Wang had brought a spade hidden under his long Chinese coat. He began to dig swiftly and the earth came easily away. Soon he had made a bed, narrow but wide enough for three and deep enough for safety, and the bottom lay upon the stout old roots of the tree.

When it was ready the beggars helped to lift the lads, and James stooped to hold his brother’s head. They laid Peter in the middle and upon his right his friend and upon his left the unknown. Then Young Wang covered them, and when the earth was smooth he spread over them the deep pine needles which had fallen here year after year since the Old Empress herself died and was buried.

Young Wang paid the beggars and they crept away into the night. But James stood motionless under the tree and beside the new-made grave. All in him was feeling and not only that Peter was dead. For the first time he felt how small he himself was, how solitary, and how vast was the people which surrounded him, and how miserable. Had not Peter died, James could never have known of creatures who never saw light or comfort or safety. They swarmed beneath the surface of life, breeding and counterbreeding, and life pressed down upon them and held them under. In his own fashion Peter had known people more quickly than any of them and in passionate tragic fashion he had tried to help them. Yes, James told himself, in his young foolish way Peter had died to save their people.

Young Wang touched his arm. “Come,” he whispered. “This is not safe.”

And taking James’s hand with simple tenderness he led him away.

Long before dawn they were on their road again to the ancestral village. James could not quickly enough be quit of the city. Upon the surface of his mind as he rode along he thought of such things as what to tell his parents and what to tell Uncle Tao. To his parents he would simply say that he had found Peter dead and had given him burial. He might say that Peter had doubtless mixed himself with rebel students of some sort. To Uncle Tao he would only say that Peter would not come back again. It was hard to tell so half a truth but James weighed the matter well, and he knew that Uncle Tao would take fright if he knew the whole truth. Only to Mary and to Chen would he tell exactly what he had found. Beneath such surface thought he dwelled hour after hour upon the meaning of Peter’s death and how it had come about and why. It would take his lifetime to answer all he asked himself this day.

So at nightfall he rode into the village, very weary and silent, and he bade Young Wang return to his wife and his inn and never to tell even his wife what had taken place in the night.

Young Wang was somewhat offended at this and he pursed his mouth and said, “Master, I am not the sort of man who tells his wife everything! I am trustworthy and you ought to know it by now.”

“So I do,” James said to comfort him, and the two parted.

James went first to his own room. He hoped to find Chen there, but the rooms were empty. He washed himself and then he went to find Mary, but she too was not to be found. Next must he then go to Uncle Tao to announce himself returned, as younger should do to elder, and Uncle Tao he found sitting in the main room doing nothing. He was waiting for his pipe to be filled, for he had declared the tobacco damp and the grandchild who served him for the day had gone to find a dry handful by the kitchen stove.

“Eh, you are back again,” Uncle Tao rumbled, when he saw James come in. “Did you find that young mischief?”

“Yes, I did,” James said and he tried to smile. “He will not come back, Uncle Tao. I arranged everything in the city.”

“If he likes the city I do not want him here,” Uncle Tao said. The grandson came running in now with the tobacco and Uncle Tao took it in his hand, felt it and smelled it. He forgot Peter in this task. When he found himself pleased he commanded that his pipe be filled. Then he was ready to speak again.

“Eh — eh—” so he began.

James leaned forward to listen. “Yes, Uncle Tao.”

“What do you want to do here, eh?” Uncle Tao went on smoking between every word.

“What would you like me to do, Uncle Tao?” James asked. By now he knew that Uncle Tao must seem to give direction everywhere.

“Anything — anything,” Uncle Tao said. He was feeling amiable tonight, having eaten well. “That is,” he said after a long draw of smoke, “you are not to meddle with the land. Your grandfather meddled with it and we were all but in the hands of the tenants before I took it back. You young ones who have been to school, you cannot understand the land.”

“There is only one thing I can do which will be useful to you,” James said with proper caution. “I see that many of our tenants look sickly. Surely they cannot do a day’s work. If you will allow me, I will try to discover what their sickness is and heal it.”

Uncle Tao’s small eyes half closed. “No cutting!” he said sternly.

“Not without your permission,” James agreed.

“Well, well,” Uncle Tao replied. “How will you begin?”

“With your permission I could take one of the empty rooms and keep it as a medicine room. I have a few medicines which I brought with me when I came, and when I need more I can get them through the city hospital. To that room the sick ones can come.”

Uncle Tao turned this over and over in his mind. “What if you kill someone?” he asked after some minutes. This thought filled him with horror. “No, no,” he said in alarm, “it is better to let them die naturally.”

“I will kill no one,” James said.

Uncle Tao wagged his head. “You would be blamed if one dies, and then I as your eldest relative would have to pay for it.”

“Consider,” James reminded him. “When a tenant declares himself sick and cannot work, then I will see if he is truly ill or only pretending. Moreover, there are the children. It is a pity for children to waste away. And the women who die in childbirth—”

“You cannot concern yourself with women,” Uncle Tao said firmly.

“A doctor concerns himself with all human life,” James replied.

Thus coaxing and persuading he led Uncle Tao to the place where he agreed that James might use a certain room which had a door of its own to the street. This door had been barred for generations and it had been made long ago secretly by a wicked Liang son who went out at night against his father’s command.

James was weary indeed by the time Uncle Tao had reached his permission, but when he rose to go Uncle Tao stayed him again. “As to your sister—” so he began and James sat down once more.

“Your sister is — one of those new ones,” Uncle Tao said solemnly. He laid aside his pipe, now grown cold. “She makes a disturbance in our village. Already I see my daughters-in-law are growing forward. The youngest one spoke to me the other day. Such a thing has not happened before. I speak to command her, but I expect no reply.”

James could not but smile at this. “What shall I do with my sister?” he asked.

“She should be married,” Uncle Tao said in the same solemn voice. “Women who are not married go about cackling like hens who lay no eggs.”

James did not reply to this. It would make a disturbance indeed if Uncle Tao stepped in to arrange a marriage for Mary! Yet Uncle Tao now prepared to do so. “In this village,” he said, “there is a very decent fellow who does not belong to the Liang blood. His father came here as a peddler and then settled himself as a tailor. I gave him permission. The son is a tailor also. I will speak to the father.”

James made haste to avert this catastrophe. “Uncle Tao, let me talk with my sister,” he begged. “If I fail I will come and tell you.”

“Well, well,” Uncle Tao granted him. “But let it not be too long. Women are a family burden until they are married.” So James went away at last and now he found Chen in his room, the one next to his. He was changing his garments from his old working uniform to the Chinese robe which he wore when he was at ease.

“Where were you?” James asked. “I have been home this hour and more. You and Mary — I could find neither of you.”

“I was helping her clean the schoolroom,” Chen said with an air of lightness.

“Is there already a schoolroom?” James asked.

“Mary has taken one,” Chen replied. “I told her it would be better to ask Uncle Tao first, but no, she said she would go and tell Uncle Tao when it was done. The young mothers are all on her side. They are helping her. They want their children to learn to read, and some even talk of learning themselves. The youngest daughter-in-law is quite determined.” All this he said in the same light voice, half carelessly, as he usually spoke.

“I want to tell you and Mary about Peter,” James said. “I will go and find her. We can meet in my room.”

All through that evening they sat together and they talked about Peter and why it was that he could not be happy. They well knew. The weight of their country, vast and old, lay heavy upon them all, and they were of such conscience that they could not escape.

“What Peter could not see,” James said at last, “was that destruction does not heal. For what can be destroyed except people? Yet the people are the treasure of the nation.”

“And our people are good,” Chen said.

“I tell you ours are the best people in the world. Ignorant and dirty and fighting disease with nothing except their natural health—” James broke off here and shook his head.

“Peter was too young for this life,” Chen said.

“Perhaps too spoiled,” Mary said in a low voice. The two men did not argue this and they sat a while not speaking and watching the guttering candles on the table.

“When I have children,” Mary said at last and as though she had been thinking of it for a long time before she spoke, “I will not let them go to America. They must grow up here, where our life is. They must learn to do with what we have and if they want more they must make it with their own hands. They must not dream of what others have made.”

So she spoke of her own marriage and it came into James’s mind to tell her what Uncle Tao had said. But he did not. The time was not fitting. They were speaking of solemn things, and what Uncle Tao had said was only cause for laughter.

The next day, after sleep so deep that he was ashamed of it, James began the clearing of the room Uncle Tao had given him. Plenty of help he had, for the place was full of children eager to see any new thing. These children he put to work so pleasantly that they thought it all a game, and thus were carried out old baskets of rubbish and broken furniture and rags and papers and all such stuff as gets itself together somehow in an old house where there are too many people. The room was large, having earlier been two rooms, and the floor was of beaten earth and the walls of brick. James bought lime from the village store and he mixed it with water and brushed the walls and sprinkled the floor. The children stood amazed to see him do everything himself, for they were not used to their elders so bestirring themselves. None had seen Uncle Tao so much as fetch his own pipe. When after this James bought boards and nails and put them into shelves they were even somewhat ashamed of him. Who had ever heard of a man who knew books turning carpenter? By now all the ancestral Liangs wondered at these new Liangs and their friend Chen who had dropped upon them from the skies. Behind their backs be sure there was much talk about them, but which of the three knew it? They went zealously about their business, full of faith that the ancestral village could become a place where all were clean and healthy and learned.

It was a healing thing they did, and the first to be healed were themselves. The spring came and went and summer spread over the land. Uncle Tao slept like a vast half-naked Buddha under the date tree, and at night the whole family moved their beds into the courts and slept there and the village street was lined with such beds. It was a gay season, for children ran about together and women gossiped and men sat late drinking hot water and tea and fanning themselves so that when they burst into sweat they were cooled. Day after day James rose early and let the sick come to him before the sun rose too hot. The fame of his healing spread over the countryside and people came to him from a long distance away and Chen helped him always, so that they worked together as closely as two hands.

Even so they could not tend all who came, and in the midst of summer James wrote letters to the three good nurses at the city hospital, Rose, Marie, and Kitty, and invited them to come and help. Of the three he hoped one might come. Yet he made his letter stern, for he did not want them deceived. “I can pay you a tenth of what you are getting now,” he wrote. “But you will have food and shelter. How then will you be paid? As I myself am paid, by healing those who have nowhere else to turn for healing.”

Out of the three two came, Rose and Kitty, for Marie had married herself to a young doctor, and he would not let her leave home and he would not come with her.

At the city hospital it was still considered folly indeed that James and Chen had buried themselves in a village and long tongues wagged and said, “They like to be lords over the poor. Who can believe that they live like the villagers?”

“We will tell you what we see,” Kitty promised.

“Why should they live like villagers if it is their wish to make the villagers themselves better?” Rose asked. The Liang house opened to these two also, and they lived together in one room next to Mary.

It must not be supposed that all things went well. Rose was a cheerful careless girl and she was happy enough. But Kitty was a third, and as the months passed she was sometimes peevish because she thought that Mary and Rose were a close two and did not take her into their friendship deeply enough, and then Chen saw with some alarm that she showed signs of leaning upon him for friendship. He went sheepishly to James one night and said that Kitty should be sent back to the city. “The country is a hard test, Jim,” he said. “Only those who are full of their own richness can bear it. Kitty is too thin of soul. She will make you trouble sooner or later.”

“I will keep her busy,” James said. He tended as he spoke the growth of a culture from some unknown disease which had come to him that day. He had never seen it before. It settled in the legs of men and women and children, and they swelled monstrously from the hips down, while above the hips they withered. Whether it was contagious, whether it caused death, these things he was trying to discover.

So Chen was obliged to speak out. “This Kitty is looking toward me, Jim,” he said with a wry face. “A woman who does not marry and cannot find her happiness in work — well, a man must be careful of such a woman.”

“Why do you not marry her?” James suggested. “Then I would not lose a helper.”

He heard Chen choke and he looked up to see his friend fiery red. “No, I thank you,” Chen said.

But James would do nothing quickly and so for a while he saw to it only that Kitty had much work to do. As for the redness of Chen’s face, he took it as a sign of his friend’s habitual delicacy where women were concerned.

At this time of his life it must be said that James was not acute to such matters. He was delving too deeply into the lives of many to dwell upon the life of any one. Thus he had begun to see that many of the illnesses which he had to heal were the fruit of other evil things. The food which the people ate was not good enough, and when he tried to teach mothers that measles could be a deadly disease here where it was new, and that one child could give it to another, they were too unlearned to understand such things, and never could they believe that cucumbers were dangerous if they were first soaked in pond water and that while it was good to boil the water they drank, it was useless if they rinsed their mouths with water that was not boiled. A cut, however slight, could not be rubbed with mud, he told them, and above all the cord that tied a child to its mother must not be cut with her kitchen scissors. The curse of this whole region was the “ten-day seizure,” as the people called it, of newborn infants, and the cause of it was in the use of rusty iron scissors.

“What shall we use then?” women asked him.

Then Rose told how in her village far to the west they had learned to use the inside leaf of a reed, and the nearer to the heart it was the more likely was the child to live. This seemed magic to the mothers, but James tried to make them see that it was still only what he had said, for the heart leaf of a reed was cleaner of invisible soil than was a pair of iron scissors used to cut anything else as well as the child’s cord. Still the truth was beyond their understanding and none could believe that what could not be seen could be a cause of death.

Uncle Tao himself declared all this was nonsense, and what Uncle Tao said had great force upon others. This was strange enough for it was not long before James saw that Uncle Tao was not well loved here in the Liang village nor by the people on the surrounding Liang lands. But he was admired and people told one another what he had said, and his half-bitter, half-joking words were carried from mouth to mouth. Yet he had a grasping hand and it could tighten secretly, and the people feared him because he was always on the side of the rulers, and their rulers from long habit the people hated. When the emperors were ended the people had rejoiced but now they were beginning to say that the emperors were better than their present rulers. There had been only one emperor, they said, and under him one viceroy in every province and under the viceroy one magistrate in every county, and though these all took their tribute, there was a limit to it. Now little rulers popped out everywhere and who knew where they came from? Each collected tax, and if a farmer refused to pay the tax a band of soldiers appeared with foreign guns. One soldier with one gun is too many anywhere.

Uncle Tao was always friendly with the tax gatherers. He himself paid no taxes, for he declared that all he had belonged to the people and from the people must the tax be gathered. So saying he fed tax gatherer and soldier and what could the people do?

All this the country women poured into Mary’s ears when she went out to visit among them, for she was one who listened to any tale, and after she had heard these things she took them to James and Chen, and demanded that something be done with Uncle Tao. They talked long and argued much, shut up in their private rooms so that no ears could hear and no mouth run to tell Uncle Tao. For these three too had their lesser enemies, in spite of every effort they made to keep all friendly. Thus the eldest daughter-in-law was jealous of Mary because the younger women followed her and learned to read, instead of spending all their time in washing and sewing, and the eldest one said she had no time for reading and would not learn. This daughter-in-law went to Uncle Tao and complained that Mary made trouble in the house and that all was better before these new Liangs came. She talked with her husband too and turned him against the new Liangs and their friend Chen. And when autumn came it was known that Uncle Tao did not like so much learning in the village and Mary found her schoolroom half empty.

The village was split in two by the time the midautumn festival came, and some were with the new Liangs and some were against, and those who were against were all for Uncle Tao and the old ways. As if this were not trouble enough Rose said one day to James that Kitty was with those who were against them, and therefore she should be sent back to the city. James sent for Kitty then and in the midst of the evening’s work when bandages must be wrapped and tools boiled in the tin tank Chen had made to set upon a charcoal fire, he told her gently enough what he had heard. At this, such a stream of venom came spitting out of Kitty’s mouth as he had not imagined could be in a woman’s heart.

“You and your sister and that Liu Chen!” she cried. “You are too good for me — and for everybody. Why are you here? Is it likely that you are here for nothing? Who does anything for nothing and can it be that you are here only because this is your ancestral village? Are you so old-fashioned as that? Nobody believes it. You are here because you are secretly Communists — I know it! Your lives are in my hand. One word to that old fat uncle of yours and one word to the county police and you will be gone!”

For a moment James could not speak, so aghast was he at this wickedness and so ashamed of his own stupidity in not seeing early that Kitty was not the good young woman he had thought she was in the city hospital. He looked at her thin face and unhappy eyes, and it came to him that she was not evil but weak. When all went well with her, she could be good, but the soil in her heart was shallow, and goodness was a plant that must have deep roots with which to live. So he spoke very gently. “Why did you come to our village?” he asked. “No one made you come. I told you the life here was bitter.” He saw that she was brimming with some secret, but he did not want to hear it. Instead he took half of his scanty store of money which had come in as his share from the autumn harvests and he said, “You must leave at once. Pack your box and roll up your bedding. I will hire a cart to take you back to the city. If you go today, I will not send a bad report of you to the hospital. You can return to your old work and forget that you ever were here.”

She pouted for a while and struggled with her wish to speak out her whole mind, but prudence was in her too and she obeyed. When she was gone Rose had the courage to tell the truth, which was that Kitty had come because of Liu Chen, whom she had loved for a long time. At this Mary grew indignant in her turn, and she said, “Such women cannot understand that marriage is not everything and that work comes first,” and she could not understand why Rose laughed so much when she said this and at last Rose had to give over lest she make her friend angry.

Yet for James all this was still only upon the surface of the day’s life. He was beginning to understand that sickness and health, that ignorance and learning, poverty and comfort, war and peace, sorrow and joy were all fruits of human confusion or of human wisdom. Here in this one small village set in a spreading countryside was the whole world. What was true here was true anywhere. Something was wrong here and nobody knew why. The Liang family had plenty of food and yet there were others, even outside the gate who starved. James, himself a Liang, had learning enough to raise him high, and yet there were those here, even his kinfolk, who could not read their own surname if they saw it written down. These differences remained in spite of all he could do. James could eat plain food and wear cotton clothes and walk barefoot in his shoes and yet the deep difference remained. And what could he do, he asked himself?

Upon such thoughts James fed and he grew moody and downcast and wondered at his own discontent. He began to think of himself as a man apart, one destined for some great thing, and yet he could not discover how he was to do anything great in the midst of such ignorance and stubbornness as the people had. Ignorance and stubbornness went together in them. Yet some were grateful for what he did, and when he saved a child for a mother, he was warmed for a moment by her joy. But then he asked himself, what was one child saved among these millions? He thought constantly, without telling anyone of his discontent with himself. He said in his heart, “I am cut off from the very people whom I want to help.” This was true. While he could speak very kindly to the people who came to be healed or whom he met on village street or country road, he felt no link of flesh or spirit with them. He grew more solitary as the months passed, and this frightened him. Must he say that Su and Peng and Kang and their kind were right? Could there be no bond between himself and his own people?

In this state of mind he looked with new eyes at Mary and Chen. For a long time he had not talked with them except of the day’s needs as they rose. Mary had moved her school outside the Liang house when she found the trouble it made, and once outside these walls, others in the village dared to come to it, and her room was full again. People who could not read or write themselves believed that there was some great good fortune in learning and mothers sent their little sons to Mary, hoping that with learning these lads need not be only common farmers and muleteers and carriers. These poor mothers dreamed their dreams, too. “Why can not I be content as Chen is content?” James asked himself. Both Chen and Mary had found a way to root themselves here and he had not. James watched Mary and he could discover in her lively looks not one hint of discontent. And Chen too was happy. Asking no profound questions of himself, he did the day’s work well, and he it was who taught the village ironmonger to make a knife so keen of edge that it could lance a boil or cut a surface ulcer. His homemade sterilizer he declared better than ever and he used it daily.

Not one man or woman had yet allowed the cutting away of any inner part, and James and Chen had both to see some waste away and die rather than be cut. Uncle Tao was everywhere loud in his words against cutting and the people knew that he would not let James cut away the thing that grew larger month by month in his own belly. The stout old man still contended with this inner growth and he ate much and slept much and no longer walked far from his room, and by dint of such eating and sleeping he was still strong. Yet some day, as James and Chen both knew, he would be weaker. When that day came they must be ready for it.

The autumn drew on gloriously, and the moon swelled to harvest size. The frost came down and then went away again and autumn warmth returned and one day after another passed in golden silence. The people were quiet and happy for a while, for with the harvests all could eat. The bandits, always lurking over the horizon, were not yet hungry with winter and the people could take a little ease. The war withdrew farther north once more and this fear eased, too, though only for a space. The end of autumn before winter strikes is the best time of any year, and this year it was more than good, for the harvests had been heavy. Yet James alone was not content. All that he did was too small, and he had with him day and night a constant loneliness.

And then one day in midwinter he discovered the cause of his own discontent. The one room where they worked had grown into two and now they were building a third for a bath house. There was no warm place in this whole village for people to wash themselves. In the city can be found bath houses, but not in a village. Much skin disease came from filth, and while in the summer a man can stand behind his house and pour a bucket of water over himself and scrub his body with the rough dried shred of a field gourd, in winter no man longs so heartily to be clean that he will do such a thing. The bath house therefore became a dream of Chen’s own and he had hired two men to come with their mallets and pound down earth into walls. He devised an earthen stove in one corner and a pipe to carry hot water from a cauldron to a great round wooden tub and a drain to carry the soiled water away into a ditch in the village street. The fame of this miracle went everywhere, and whole families came from miles around to see it for themselves.

Chen took much pride in the bath house, and he explained to all who came how easily it had been made, how cheaply, and how any man who had a little energy to spare could make his family such a bath house. When women saw in what comfort their menfolk came home after a hot bath in winter, they went to Mary and asked why one should not be made for them and Mary carried the demand to James and Chen. Chen laughed at her as he always did, and he said with mock ruefulness to James, “You see how these new women are, always wanting everything men have!” and Mary, who never understood quickly enough that he made a joke, flew to women’s defense and Chen pretended to be frightened and he said, “Well — well, who said I would not do it?”

So a bath house was made for the women, too, and they were thrifty and brought their children to bathe with them and thus bathing became the fashion, and the village was proud and felt itself as good as any city. Even so there were those who complained and the eldest daughter-in-law grumbled and said, “All this bathing is nothing but a wasteful habit. Look at me! Now that I bathe myself, I itch all over in twenty days or so unless I bathe again. Yet before we had this bath house I went all winter and did not itch.”

Uncle Tao would not bathe at all at first for fear of getting cold, and then for fear of seeming to yield to Mary. Then when he saw how rosy the children were after a bath and how well his sons ate and how sweetly they slept when they were cleaned, he mustered up courage and one day before the new moon year he declared himself ready for a bath, too.

Neither James nor Chen had urged him, but be sure that they rejoiced at this sign of change in Uncle Tao. Chen himself saw that the room was warm and the water hot and that some sheets of cotton were ready to dry Uncle Tao’s vast body. All others were held off while Uncle Tao was bathed. He had decided that the bath should take place at high noon on a sunny day when there was no wind, and he waited some ten days or so before he found a day good enough. Then he was anxious about what he should eat, and James advised him to eat nothing until after the bath.

Uncle Tao agreed to this but he said, “As soon as I am in my clothes again I must eat well, for much strength will be drained out of me with the bath,” and he ordered all his favorite dishes to be ready for him.

On the chosen day when the sun was high over the roofs, Uncle Tao allowed himself to be led into the bath house, and two menservants helped him to undress while his sons stood by, and Chen saw to the pouring of the water and James helped Uncle Tao get into the tub. Lucky it was that they had made that tub as large as a wooden vat, for when Uncle Tao lowered himself into it, the two men holding his arms and James holding his waist, the water spurted up around him like a fountain. At first Uncle Tao was fearful that he had done a foolish thing, but while James and Chen scrubbed him well with soap they had made from raw lye and the fat of an ox that had died, Uncle Tao began to feel better and he grew cheerful.

“To bathe is a good thing,” he declared proudly, looking about at them all from the tub. “Of course it cannot be done quickly and carelessly. Nor should it be done too often. The day must be a lucky one, the water must be hot, and I must not sit too long in this tub. Add some hot to it.”

When he was clean they poured two or three buckets of fresh hot water over him from the head down and he sat like a great baby gasping under the flow, his eyes shut and his mouth open and licking in the water. Then slowly he rose again, all helping him, and James wrapped him immediately with the cotton sheets and he was dried and the clean clothes he had ordered prepared were put on him. At last he was ready to eat and he ate with great pleasure and good nature, and then he slept, and when he woke he was so comfortable in all the mountain of his being that he commanded his whole household to be bathed at once, from his eldest son down to the smallest grandchild. This caused much trouble, but Chen was well pleased. “Behold me!” he cried to James, and pointed at himself with his thumb to his breast, “I have made a successful revolution!”

How could Chen be so happy with such small things? This James asked himself. This Chen was no small-minded man, neither did he dream small dreams. Sometimes when the two friends talked into the night Chen ceased for a while to make his jokes and then James saw him for what he was, a sober-minded, large-thinking man, who was making plans far beyond the daily tasks.

“You keep me in heart,” he said on one such evening to Chen. “When I grow weak and think that perhaps Su and Peng and Kang are right, and that these villagers are beyond our strength to help, when I fear that the centuries are stronger than we are, then I think of you.”

Chen heard this thoughtfully, rubbing the crown of his head slowly with his right hand in the way he had. “Of course the people on the land are stronger than we are,” he said. “They are the strength of our nation and they cannot be easily changed.”

“Yet why do we think we must change them? All we need do is to prove a thing is good and they will change themselves. Remember the bath house!”

These few words opened a door in James’s mind. He sat thinking about them and in silence. A small earthen pot of charcoal stood between him and Chen, and he warmed his hands over it. His one care was his hands, that they stay supple so that the skin would not break. He needed these hands for healing and he wanted them whole, so that when he put ointment on the scald head of a child or washed out some old ulcer on a farmer’s leg, or cleansed the sores of a leper, the poison would not spoil his hands.

Upon his thought Chen broke. “Jim, I have something to say and I cannot say it.”

James looked up surprised. “You and I have always spoken to one another easily, Chen.”

“Yes, but this is about something else.”

Chen’s face was suddenly fiery red and James remembered that red. “You do not regret sending Kitty away?” he asked, half in play.

Chen gave a snort. “That Kitty! No — no — but what made you think of a girl, Jim?”

“Your red face.”

Chen began rubbing his crown again. “Ha — yes — well—” So he stammered.

“Come — come!” James said.

Chen swallowed, clenched his hands together on his lap and plunged in. “I want to marry Mary,” he said abruptly.

“Eh?” James said stupidly.

“You hear me,” Chen said. Even his eyes looked red.

“But you are always laughing at her,” James said still stupidly. “And she never knows what you are laughing at. And you quarrel how often!”

“Married people always quarrel,” Chen said.

“Ah, but Chen, you two do not act like people in love!”

“And have you been in love?” Chen asked.

How seldom James thought of Lili, how resolutely he had put her away, and yet now her soft charming face, her childlike voice, came creeping back into his memory. He remembered his love for her, and how while it lived that love had wrapped him about in a dream. Mary and Chen did not walk in dreams. She was busy and brisk and she commanded Chen to do this and that and Chen laughed at her and sometimes he made a great show of obedience and sometimes he only laughed and did nothing, and when she flew at him he pretended terror. It was not at all what had been between him and Lili.

“I have been in love,” James said gravely.

“Did she die?”

“She married someone else.”

“What a fool she!” Chen exclaimed cheerfully. “Well, better luck for me, Jim — and for you too, someday.”

“I shall not soon marry,” James said.

“I shall,” Chen retorted. “But the question is — how can I tell Mary?”

He sat with his legs spread wide, his hands on his knees, his hair standing upright, and his square face so rueful that James burst into laughter himself. “You tell her everything else. Why can you not tell her this?”

But Chen was grave. “No, no. This is different. It is serious. A man cannot just go and speak to a woman so.”

“Why not? You are not a villager in love, are you?”

Chen continued to look grave. “It is delicate. The old way is not good — for us, that is. Yet I do not like the American way for us, either. I saw it in the movies. It was too disgusting to me — also insulting to Mary.”

It was so amazing to see Chen, who was always ready for anything, thus confounded by love, and by love for Mary, whom he saw every day and whom he teased as easily as he breathed, that James was speechless for a few minutes, half amused, half impressed. In this silence Chen continued to talk. “Besides, how do I know she thinks of me as I wish her to do? It may be that she will need a little education — you know, someone to say to her for instance, ‘Eh, Mary, this Chen, who is such a rough joking fellow — at heart he is different. He is rather good. He is very faithful’—some such thing, Jim.”

“Shall I say this to her for you?” James asked.

“Will you, good brother?” Chen said, very red again in the face. “That is what I want to ask.”

“Why not? I will say that and much more.”

“You like me well enough?” Chen asked with a little new anxiety. “Your father, for example — would he object to me?”

“My father seems so far away that I had not even thought of him. As for me, you are already my brother, and I will gladly give you my sister to bring our two bloods into one.”

Chen sat back and he wiped his face with his sleeve and blew out a great sigh of relief. “Now then, I feel better,” he said in a loud voice. “Of course — I must not be too happy yet. She may not like me for a husband.”

“To this I cannot honestly reply,” James said. “I have never seen her thinking of any man or even of a husband.”

They considered Mary, and Chen asked excitedly, “Jim, eh — why not ask her now?”

“But she will be going to bed.”

Chen got up and looked through the court. “The light is still behind her window,” he said. “Eh — how can I sleep now until I know?”

“But how will you sleep if she does not want you?” James asked in reply.

This could not be answered. The two young men looked at one another. Chen was suddenly pale. He set his pleasant lips grimly. “I must know,” he muttered.

James lingered one moment more. “Then I will ask her,” he said, and he went to do it.

Mary was brushing her short straight black hair when she heard the knock on her door. She had taken off her outer garments and she had put on a bathrobe of red wool that she had brought with her from America. She opened the door and saw her brother.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I want a few minutes with you, Mary.”

“Come in,” she said. “But what is it that can’t wait until tomorrow?”

They were speaking in English, and somehow in this language he found it difficult to say what must be said, and he dropped back into Chinese. “I come for a strange thing.”

“What is it?” she asked still in English.

“I am a go-between, a marriage broker, and I bring an offer.”

“Don’t be silly!” she exclaimed.

“Is it silly? Perhaps it is,” James replied. “For I told him to come to you himself, and he cannot. He is shy of you when it comes to love.”

Did Mary know of what he was talking? He thought she did. Her eyes were wide and dark and her cheeks were pink and her lips parted. He waited for her to speak and she did not. She sat on the edge of her bed and he sat on the stool by her table and they continued to look at one another.

“Chen loves you, Mary,” he said simply and he spoke these words in English.

“Oh,” Mary said and it was a sigh, very soft, like a child’s.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“But — but how does he know?” she demanded.

“He seems to know,” James said tenderly.

She sat gazing at him, her cheeks pinker.

“And do you say nothing?” James asked.

“I am trying to find out how I feel,” she said. “I think I feel — happy.”

“Good! Take a little longer.” So he encouraged her.

They waited and he saw her eyes drop to her small bare feet. “I didn’t have time to put on my slippers. My feet are getting cold.”

“Where are they? I’ll find them for you.”

“No, they’re here, under the bed.” She found the slippers for herself and put them on.

“You ought to be careful on these earthen floors,” James said. He rose. “Well, shall I tell him that tomorrow you will speak to him yourself?”

She raised her long straight lashes. “Yes,” she whispered. She turned and picked up her brush again and stood watching for an instant the dark straightness of her hair.

“I want you to be happy, Mary,” he said at last.

“I am always happy,” she said with a look of sweet firmness which he knew so well, and he left her to go back to Chen.

He found that friend of his prowling restlessly around the room.

“How long you were!” Chen exclaimed.

“I wasn’t,” James retorted. “She hadn’t thought of it—”

“Hadn’t thought of me?” Chen moaned.

“Let us say — of marriage.”

Chen sat down as though his legs were suddenly weak. “But all women must marry,” he remonstrated.

“Not nowadays. Chen, you are too old-fashioned.”

“Then I suppose she doesn’t—”

“She wants to talk with you tomorrow herself.”

“You mean she didn’t—”

“She did not refuse you,” James replied slowly and clearly. “She is thinking. I daresay she will think all night. But knowing her, by tomorrow doubtless Mary will know what she wants.”

Chen groaned. “I shan’t sleep all night.”

“Then you will be foolish and tomorrow you will not look your best.”

Chen was alarmed. “True — I had better go to bed now.” He turned in haste and made off to his own room.

James lay awake long enough that night himself. This then was why Chen had been so well content here in the village. His love was here. A man could live and work if he had his love. His mind stole back to Lili — foolishly, he told himself, for she was married now and perhaps even the mother of a child. But he had known her for a little while as she was, and this fragment of memory was all that he had. There had been American girls in love with him, he knew well enough, but he had never loved them. When he had felt them grow warm toward him he had grown cold and had withdrawn into his work. Their flesh was alien to his. And yet was he to live solitary all his life? No, heart and body cried. Yet how could he find here a woman to love? He belonged neither to old nor to new. He wanted a wife who would be a companion to him as well as the mother of his children. He wanted love as well as mating.

He could not find an easy place that night upon his bed and it was nearly dawn before he slept.

But Mary lay quietly, in her bed. She lay on her back and she gazed up into the canopy above her. The moon shone outside and the room was not quite dark. The night was cold and still. It was midwinter. They had been here in the village a year. She had known Chen for more than a year. She had never thought of being in love, because being in love brought so much trouble. Louise was always in love, and Jim had been in love. She and Peter never fell in love, and Peter was dead. What was being in love? She had always thought of Chen and Jim together, but now she remembered she always put Chen first — that is, she always said it so—“Chen and Jim.”

Once Peter had reproached her. “Why do you say Chen’s name before your brother’s?” he had demanded.

She had stared back at him. “I don’t know,” she had said honestly.

She shut her eyes and thought of all the people she knew. Chen’s face came first against the dark curtain of her eyelids. When she wanted the schoolroom made she had gone to Chen, not James. They had worked hard but it had seemed like play. Chen made her laugh. Sometimes he made her angry, but then it felt good to be angry with him. He did not mind. She could be as angry as she wanted with him and he did not mind. She felt comfortable with him. She could be herself with him. Was this being in love? “I will ask him tomorrow,” she thought.

It was not easy for a man and a woman to be alone in the ancestral village. Tongues wagged quickly, and it was taken for granted that man and woman were interested only in their differing sex. It was necessary for a new Liang to work while she talked with a man. So Mary the next day in the afternoon cleaned James’s room while she talked to Chen. Children came by and a servant or two and a new tenant farmer looking for Uncle Tao and two women who wanted to send their children to school and some of the cousins and daughters-in-law passed through the court. All they saw was Mary working hard to clean her brother’s room and Chen reading a book on the threshold of his own room which opened upon the same court. When no one passed, Chen and Mary paused. They talked in English for safety.

“Is this being in love?” she asked, when she had told him how she felt.

“If you are content to be with me, it is enough to begin with,” Chen said joyously. “I cannot expect a good girl like you, Mary, to behave like a wild Western woman.”

“But you must promise to let me go on teaching.”

“I promise,” Chen said instantly. “More than that, I insist upon it.”

“I might want to stop,” Mary said suddenly.

“I shall forbid it!” Chen exclaimed. His eyes were twinkling. Then he laughed. “You shall do exactly what you want to do, now and forever,” he said tenderly.

She stood looking at him doubtfully and so adorable was her face, the eyes so big and black, her mouth so full and red, that he felt distracted with happiness. He looked hastily about and saw no one in sight. Overcome with himself he stepped forward impetuously and took her in his arms, broom and all, and kissed her exactly as he had seen such things in American movies. He had never dreamed it possible, nor had she. Both were astounded at the success they both made of it. Chen stepped back. “Do you mind?” he asked humbly.

She stood transfixed, gazing at him and clutching her broom in both hands. She shook her head at his question and her eyes were entranced.