Kinfolk

20

IN THE VILLAGE JAMES now began to wrestle with such loneliness as he had never imagined in his life. When he tried to find the cause for his melancholy, he found it hidden deep in himself. He examined himself secretly, his temperature, his blood pressure, and even took a sample of his own blood, searching for some new germ. The season had not yet arrived for mosquitoes and malaria, he had no fleas, and other insects, so far as he knew, had not crossed the border between the old-fashioned Liangs and the new. He was determined not to speak to Mary or Chen lest he spoil their happiness, and they were too constantly gay to notice that he was not.

He was introspective and yet able to be detached, even from himself. Thus he saw that he was not actually like Chen, who, he came to perceive more and more clearly, was really like Mary. These two were simple in their separate natures. They were both good; that is, they could not be satisfied with living entirely selfishly. They needed to feel that what they did, their daily work, was of some use to their people. Beyond this, both of them enjoyed simple food, plain clothes, and a house where they need not consider whether the furniture was damaged. Books were for amusement rather than instruction, unless these books taught them some better way of doing what they would do anyway. Mary read faithfully over and over again her few schoolbooks on teaching children, and she wrote letters to her former teachers in New York, asking for pictures and new teaching materials. Chen wrote no letters to America and he ridiculed Mary’s pictures amiably, and he was not too careful as a doctor and everybody liked him. James would not allow himself to feel hurt when he saw that the people who came in even larger numbers to the clinic turned first to Chen. Chen’s foolery and good spirits made them trust him first, even though James knew himself the better doctor.

Moreover, James was impatient because he had not yet had a chance to perform an operation. The people were frightened when he spoke of anything more than lancing a boil, and even a wen he could not remove, and Uncle Tao’s stubbornness encouraged their fear. James had to restrain himself one day when a soldier came in with a gun wound in the arm, but when the man died with gangrene he could not but speak. “He would have lived, even though without an arm,” he told the man’s wailing mother. “Yet you would not let me save his life.” The mother did not like him better for such truth and when she went home she told her neighbors how she had saved her son at least to live a little longer because she would not let the new doctor cut off his arm.

James was angry with the fearfulness of the people and their ignorance, but he would not let himself hate them for these things. He would not let himself even talk about them, and he kept inside himself his discontents and his impatience. But he felt more and more that he would make no true headway unless he found some sort of bridge which would carry him into that place, whatever and wherever it was, in which the people lived. His feet were upon the physical soil of his ancestors, but his mind was not, nor could it be, and his soul was not their soul, and they knew it.

Nor could he go back. He began to understand better now Su and Peng and their kind. They too had reached this place of knowing their difference. There they had stopped. They had accepted their isolation and this he was not willing to do. There must be some way of reaching his people. He was no longer content with the little clinic, enlarged by two rooms for patients who could not go home the same day. He would not be content even with a hospital. As the months went on he saw that nothing short of deep reforms would mend ignorance and ill health and bad government.

Yes, bad government! What had not been apparent to him when he first came was that Uncle Tao was in some way connected with the country police, who were in turn connected with the local magistrate and this connection put the people in the village at the mercy of the magistrate and of Uncle Tao. The magistrate came from elsewhere and having no blood ties in the village he oppressed the people very much. No one could get justice at his court and bribes must be given at the very gate, if one were to be heard at all. No matter what evil befell a villager, he considered it a greater one to go to court to get it righted. Taxes were high, except for Uncle Tao, and those who were poorest paid the most.

There were hours in the night when James, lying restless upon his bed, hated his very name. Because he was a Liang, he told himself, the people would never trust him. Yet how could he help what he was born? He promised himself fiercely that he would find a way, though he were a Liang, to break through to his own folk. Then sometimes even his determination failed and he remembered the beautiful clean hospital in New York where he might have become a great surgeon, and he thought of his father’s fine home, and he thought of what might have been his own fortune had he stayed there and married Lili and what it would have been to have escaped the dust and filth and cold and heat of this village, and all the stupidities of his people. And yet he knew he could never have escaped. In spite of anything his heart was here. Somehow he would find a bridge to cross that short span, that fathomless abyss, between his eyes and the eyes of the man who would look at him in his clinic tomorrow morning.

In such mood James received from his father the cable saying that his mother was coming to China by air. The cable reached the city promptly enough but from there it had to be taken on foot by messenger to the village. This left James and Mary only the shortest possible time to meet their mother at the airport. As usual, Uncle Tao had first to be informed of the news.

The first difficulty, however, was that no one had yet told Uncle Tao even of the betrothal. As soon as it was known it would be impossible for Mary and Chen to meet face to face again without offending the proprieties in this ancestral village, and both Chen and Mary had been slow to give up the joy of seeing one another. Now all agreed the time had come. The mother was arriving for the wedding, which must take place soon, and James must therefore tell Uncle Tao everything immediately. He went to the elder one evening after the day’s work was done.

Now James knew more surely with every passing day that at some time or other he must come face to face with Uncle Tao on very grievous matters having to do with the life of the people. It was no use, for example, to save from death a man who when he returned to his home would fall ill again from lack of proper food. Nor could James urge him to eat more and better food when taxes were so high that there was no money left with which to buy food. The people hid eggs as they might hide gold, for in these days of worthless money eggs were good tender even to the tax gatherer. Wheat was precious, too, and the tax gatherer or the local military lord took all except the seed wheat. The magistrate kept silent before these for he also must have his share. In the midst of soldier, magistrate, and idle scholar, none of whom produced food or clothing or shelter or tools for themselves, the man on the land who raised food and the artisan who made clothes and shelter and tools were slowly being squeezed out of life. Soldier, magistrate, and scholar clung together against peasant and artisan while they fought among themselves for the petty booty. James began to see that merely to heal the body was doubtful good. Often the man on the land came to him exhausted before he was old, with too little will to live. Something was wrong here in the ancestral village and James had determined one day soon to grapple with Uncle Tao, who allowed all to continue as it was.

But today was not the time, he knew, not only because he must think first of Mary and Chen and of his mother, but above all he had not found his own place here. He was not yet indispensable to his people. If he made trouble Uncle Tao would cast him out and the people would be silent. Before he tried to set up even one of the reforms of which he dreamed, he must have such strength in the ancestral village that Uncle Tao would not dare to cast him out. Ruthless as Uncle Tao seemed to be, yet even he in his secret heart feared the people in anger. For these people on the land and in small shops and crafts could be patient for a generation or two and then one day for some small cause their patience broke and they took up hoes and rakes and knives and mallets and went out to kill their oppressors. Men and women and children they killed. There were times when James felt the hour of the people’s anger was near at hand again, especially as the bitter winter drew on and as the bandits began once more to come out of their nests in the distant hills to the northeast.

Yet today was still not the day to speak of such things. James went to find Uncle Tao, and he found him in his bed, where he always went as soon as he had eaten his last meal for the day. Three times each day Uncle Tao ate heartily, although in the winter when the work on the land ceased he allowed to others no more than two meals. He excused himself by saying that those like himself who must take care of others are valuable and should be kept alive.

When James came into the room the youngest son of Uncle Tao was hearing his last commands and all but going away for the night. The older grandsons took turns each night sleeping on a pallet bed in Uncle Tao’s room, but tonight Uncle Tao bade the lad wait outside until he was called. Then he told James to shut the door and draw up a stool near the bed.

This unusual kindness from Uncle Tao made James wonder what was wrong here. In a moment he knew. When they were alone Uncle Tao put off the bedclothes, pulled up his night jacket, and pointed to his belly. “Feel my knot,” he told James.

James stood up and bending over the huge pallid mound of Uncle Tao’s belly he delicately probed its depths. “Is it bigger?” Uncle Tao asked anxiously. “Much bigger,” James said gravely. “Am I thinner?” Uncle Tao asked next. “You are thinner,” James agreed.

Uncle Tao pulled down his jacket and covered himself with the thick cotton quilt. “The question now is this — am I to die or to be killed?”

“If you mean that you will be killed if you are cut, then you are wrong.” He made his voice mild but excitement stirred in him. Uncle Tao was so afraid of death that he had refused the knife. Now even more afraid, was he about to ask for it? There was something piteous here. James went on still more gently. He said, “If you allow me to take this knot out soon instead of late, it is likely that you will live. Indeed, I will not do it at all unless I can do it within the next six months. It is only just to give me a reasonable chance to save your life.”

Uncle Tao listened to this with unblinking black eyes. “Let us talk of something else,” he said.

“I came to talk of something else,” James replied. Excitement died. Uncle Tao was still more afraid of dying by the knife than of anything else. James hardened again toward the stupid old man. He sat down and seeing no reason for delay or bushbeating, he said, “You will remember that you told me my sister should be married. I am come to tell you that the betrothal is arranged.”

As soon as he had said this he saw that he had made a mistake. Uncle Tao frowned. “How can this be so when I have known nothing of it?” he asked.

James knew that he must at once take a firm stand or Uncle Tao out of jealousy for his position might say that he did not want Chen even as a remote relative for the Liangs. “You know that my sister and I have been reared in America. It is not likely that we could grow up there exactly the same persons that we would have been had we stayed here in the ancestral village. In America the young choose their own mates. Then it would have been impossible for you or for me or even for my father to have compelled Mary to marry someone she did not like. She has chosen for her husband my friend Liu Chen. Nothing can be done about this.”

Uncle Tao breathed hard and rolled his head. “Yet it is I who decide what persons are to live in our village! This Liu Chen — he is not a Liang and I can say easily enough that he must not stay.”

Now James saw that for Mary’s sake he must coax Uncle Tao. So he leaned toward him and he said warmly, “Any man who has power over others can work evil or good and so can you. We trust your goodness.”

This set Uncle Tao back. His mouth hung open and he did not know how to reply. What could he say now that would not shame him? He wished that he might forget how he ought to act and act only as he felt, and in this dilemma he could not speak.

In the silence James went on. “I myself think that Mary has chosen well. Liu Chen likes you and he likes our village. Moreover, he is very useful to me in the clinic. Some day, with your permission, I shall make a hospital out of our clinic, and ours will be the first village in this whole region to have a hospital. This will bring honor to you and to the whole Liang family. People will come here from a long distance away and our inn will prosper and our few shops will grow into many and there will be markets for our men on the land,” All this James said in his smooth gentle voice and Uncle Tao could not speak against it. In some way of his own James had made Mary’s marriage a part of good that might come about and so Uncle Tao still kept silent. James went on. “I have more news. My mother is coming very soon.”

Here was something that Uncle Tao could oppose and he sat up. “Your mother should not come without your father,” he exclaimed. “I suppose that man full of ink has forgotten his ancestors! He has breathed in foreign winds and drunk Western waters. What do I care? But they all depend on me still. What would they do without old Uncle Tao to keep the tenants in their places and to collect a little money for them and hold the house together?” He sank back again and closed his eyes.

“What indeed!” James agreed. “My mother has often said that.”

Uncle Tao refused to be placated. “She had a loud voice as a girl. What has there been in these years in a foreign country that could improve her?”

James smiled and rose to his feet. “You will see,” he said, and thanking Uncle Tao he went away. To Chen and Mary he only said that Uncle Tao did not oppose anything, and Mary and Chen were both cheered.

“You need not laugh,” James told them. “Uncle Tao could if he liked put us all out of the village.”

But they did not believe him. In these days nothing could make them afraid or sorrowful, and they laughed at everything.

“There are many other villages,” Chen said.

Mrs. Liang looked about her in some anxiety. She had combed her hair but she had not tried to change her wrinkled garments. She was glad therefore when she saw James and Mary and not her new son-in-law. They saw her at the same moment and at once they were a knot of three, their arms about each other.

“Oh Ma, thank you for coming,” Mary cried.

James took her bags and bundles and led the way to the cart which he had hired in the city. It was clean and he had folded a new quilt over the bottom. He helped his mother to get in.

“Ma, it has no springs,” he reminded her.

“Eh, you need not tell me anything from now on,” she said in a lively voice. She was feeling much better already. This was the air of home and she breathed it in deeply. “Such good smell!” she cried. “I am smelling hot sweet potatoes—”

So it was. A vendor had come near with his small stove and he was taking out roasted sweet potatoes and laying them on the tray he carried on the other end of his pole. Mrs. Liang fumbled for her purse.

“Let me, Ma,” James said hastily and putting paper bills on the tray he counted four potatoes. Mrs. Liang shrieked. “James, you have made a mistake — so much money!”

“No, he hasn’t, Ma,” Mary said. “Money is worth nothing now, unless it is from America.”

At this Mrs. Liang looked mysteriously cheerful. She fumbled inside her garments somewhere, gave a wrench or two at her waist, and brought out a small oilcloth package. Then she looked up and met the interested eyes of the mule carter and the vendor and she pursed her lips.

“We better get going,” she said in a loud voice and in English. “I keep something to show you.” She put the thin package into her bosom, made clicking noises to the carter and James jumped in after Mary and they were off. Mrs. Liang sat between them and she put her hand on the arm of each. The country road was cobbled and the cart bounced up and down, but she did not mind this. She continued in English. “What I have in this pack is something your pa also doesn’t know. Why? Because I don’t tell him. Your pa is good but too liking to keep his money for himself. So I take small squeeze for myself!” She laughed gaily and Mary and James smiled, looking at one another over her head.

“It’s delicious to have Ma,” Mary said.

“How will we ever let you go again, Ma?” James asked. Now that his mother was here he felt warmed and more confident. Nothing was strange to her. She would be able to help him in the ancestral village, with Uncle Tao, with the hospital, with everybody. He would tell her everything.

Mrs. Liang looked from one face to the other and continued in triumph. “When I come to you, children, I bring my money with me. Your pa thinking nothing and giving me only a little for myself and for you!”

The bumping cart was shaking laughter out of her in gasps.

“Oh Ma!” Mary said fondly. “I am so glad Chen is going to see you.” She gave her mother’s hand a squeeze, and then chanced to look at it. “Why, Ma, how dirty you are,” she exclaimed.

Mrs. Liang was not embarrassed. “Never mind — it is not here like America,” she said comfortably. “Now tell me, Mary, how is this Chen looking and all that?”

They were still talking in English because the carter sat on the edge of the vehicle, within a few inches of them. The mule took its own gait while the carter stared at them with bright and curious eyes. He was young and ragged and bold.

“James, you tell,” Mary said with sudden shyness.

“Well, Mother,” James said, “he is a little taller than I am, much bigger in the bones, a square head, a big nose—”

“Not too big!” Mary put in.

“Always making jokes, doesn’t like the city, doesn’t like to dress up, doesn’t like scholars—”

“Sounds so nice,” Mrs. Liang said. “Who is go-between?”

“I was, Ma,” James said.

“And Uncle Tao?” Mrs. Liang asked shrewdly.

“Uncle Tao is willing.”

“When is wedding?”

Mary looked shy again. “It depends on you, Ma, and when you have to go back to Pa.”

“Six weeks only,” Mrs. Liang said.

“Oh Ma!” Their voices rose in chorus. “We thought it would be six months at least,” Mary cried.

Mrs. Liang looked grave. She glanced at the carter and lowered her voice and still speaking English she explained her anxieties. “Your pa is too valuable,” she ended. “I cannot just to leave him loose. Violet Sung is like some hungry tiger outside door of apartment.”

“Oh Ma,” Mary murmured while James kept silence.

“Just like Louise,” Mrs. Liang retorted. “Oh Ma — she says, oh Ma, you are screaming — such talking all the time! But I tell you I am older. Just now, Mary, you are engaging and you think men are too perfect.”

“Only Chen,” James said, smiling.

“Maybe just now Chen is too perfect,” Mrs. Liang conceded. “But here is China and men have no such good chance as in America where ladies are waiting everywhere with open bust and leg. I tell you, men cannot continue perfect in such case. You mustn’t think I am blaming your pa too much. No! I blame elsewhere — Violet Sung and whole America!”

“Tell us about Louise,” James said, seeing his mother was growing agitated.

To tell all about Louise occupied many miles, and by the time they understood the happy state of their younger sister, it was time to stop for the afternoon meal. Mrs. Liang let her appetite have its way and she consumed several bowls of noodles, steamed vegetable dumplings, steamed meat roll, bean curd with chopped raw onion, and salt fish. Clearly she was happy. Both James and Mary were alarmed for her digestion but she was triumphant. “Many years my stomach is homesick also,” she said. “Now I feel too good.”

She slept for a while when they got in the cart again and it was twilight when they drew near to the inn where they were to spend the night. There when they were in their rooms, the door closed and barred after they had washed and had eaten a snack of bread in a thin sheet some twenty inches in diameter but rolled about garlic, they made ready for bed. Then Mrs. Liang delayed James as he was going into the next room. Alone with them she spoke Chinese.

“I had told myself I would not ask about your younger brother,” she said sighing, “but I find him always in my thoughts. Tell me all you know, and then I will think of him in the night and be ready to put my sorrow aside tomorrow.”

“Ma, you should sleep,” Mary said. But Mrs. Liang shook her head. “I know my old heart.” So James sat down on the edge of the hard board bed and he told his mother everything he knew. It was all too little, and because it was so little she wept bitterly. “At least we know where he is buried,” she said at last. “When the times are good again, we will move him into the place where our ancestors have their graves and where he belongs because living or dead he is still a Liang.”

She bade James leave her then, and when he was gone she said to Mary, “If you hear me weeping in the night, let me weep.”

Mary promised, but she told herself that she would lie awake and listen for her mother’s weeping. With all will to do so, nevertheless with health and youth and happiness and the long day’s riding across the country in the cold clear air, she fell quickly asleep. When they woke in the morning her mother was her usual cheerful self, and when they had washed and eaten they climbed into the cart and set forth again.

Who could have known that the carter was an evil fellow? James had chosen him for his fresh face and his ready smile and for the agile way in which he leaped upon the cart. But like most men in evil times, he was made up of many parts. He earned a fair living by his mule cart but money was almost worthless, and he took goods too as tender. Thus he managed to feed himself and his young family and his old parents. Had the Liangs been ordinary traveling folk he would have dealt fairly with them, and had they been official folk he would have been fearful. But to him as he listened to the clack of some language he had never heard upon, their tongues they were only foreigners.

Toward afternoon, having heard this clack for many hours, he leaned toward James and said, “What is this talk that you make?”

James smiled. “It is English,” he said.

The carter stared at him. “Yet you have all the same color of hair and eyes that I have and your skin is like mine except that you are not under the sun and wind every day, and I can see you are always washing yourselves. What is your country?”

James was surprised. “We are Chinese, also, and the only reason we know a foreign language is because we have spent some years on the other side of the sea.”

“What did you there?” the carter asked.

When James told him, he went on to ask many more questions, wanting to know how rich Americans were and what they ate and how they looked.

In the goodness of his heart James told him much, and the carter listened. Now Mrs. Liang did not like the way the carter began to look and so she broke in upon this talk in English.

“James, don’t talk too much,” she exclaimed. “I think this fellow is maybe bad.”

“Why, Ma, how suspicious of you!” Mary cried.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Liang conceded, “but he has something I don’t like.”

James smiled and ended the talk by saying he was sleepy, as indeed he was. Through the night before he had been wakeful after talking about Peter. But it was not only Peter. His mother had brought other memories with her, too, memories of his childhood and his boyhood in the comfortable American city. He thought of the great bridge by the river, and how he used to dream of what lay beyond it. Now he knew. There was no magic homeland. Here were poverty and oppression, and indifference to both. He began to sink again into the morass of despondence about himself and his life. Was he not throwing himself away, after all? Well, perhaps his mother would help him to answer that question. With some sort of return to childhood, which he fully recognized, he wondered if he should let her tell him, before she went back to his America, what he ought to do with his life.

Now the steady swing of the cart soothed him. They were traveling over dusty country roads now, and there were no stones. He fell asleep.

Out of deep sleep he was wakened by the sudden swerve of the cart off the road and by the shouts of men. Then he heard his mother’s loud firm voice. He opened his eyes. The cart came to a standstill and he sat up. At the open end he saw a crowd of heads, rough and dark. An arm reached in and pulled him. He did not see his mother or Mary. He scrambled out of the cart, kicking aside the arm. Mary and his mother stood by the cart. Mary’s face was fixed into angry calm but Mrs. Liang was talking loudly across her arms, folded on her bosom. Half a dozen young men in ragged garments stood pretending not to listen, yet hesitating as they stood. They looked half impudent, half sheepish. Clearly they had not counted on Mrs. Liang.

“Your mothers!” she said to them severely. “Where have you been taught morals? Have you no reason in your skulls? Can you behave like common robbers? Are we rich folk? No! We are not rich. I have no money on me at all that can be useful to you. Look at me — have I any jewels?”

She turned one ear and the other, and held out her hands. “That ring is my wedding ring and I have not taken it off in twenty years. Yes, you can cut off my finger but if you do, your head will be cut off.”

The carter stood half turned away, pretending himself helpless. “You!” she shouted at him, “do not pretend anything!”

James broke across this torrent. “Ma, why didn’t you wake me? You men! Who are you?”

“They are robbers and bandits, that is what they are!” Mrs. Liang bawled. “They do not know we are Liangs! Wait until I tell Uncle Tao about them!”

At the name of Uncle Tao alarm spread over the face of the tallest and darkest young man. He turned to the carter and said in reproach, “How is it you did not tell us they are the Liang family?”

“How did I know?” the carter replied.

“You rice bucket!” the other retorted. “Now the old man will not want to pay us his yearly guarantee because we have attacked his relatives.”

“You had better tell us that you have offended and for once we will let the matter pass,” Mrs. Liang said in a hard voice. “If you get out of our way at once, I will not tell Uncle Tao, but if there is any delay—”

There was no delay. The tall rough young man spread out his arms as a barrier between his men and the travelers and with much dignity Mrs. Liang commanded Mary to take her seat in the cart and she herself climbed into it with James’s help. Then James stepped in and the carter took up his whip sulkily.

“Wait,” the young robber cried. “I have something to say.”

Mrs. Liang looked at him with cold eyes. “Say it then, quickly,” she commanded. “Can I waste all this time?”

The robber smiled, showing white teeth. “Lady, please know that we are not evil men. The times are very bad for poor folk like us. We belong to the earth and did we have good rulers and a kind Heaven we could work the land and find food for ourselves and our families. But the rulers are evil and Heaven looks the other way. Even so we rob only the rich.”

Now this was the usual speech which robbers made when they had done their work, and so it had been from ancient times until now and Mrs. Liang was not deceived by it. “Did all do as you do,” she said severely, “there would be nothing but robbers and then whom would you rob?”

The robber had no answer to this and he scratched his jaw and grinned and Mrs. Liang sat very straight and bade the carter go on. While they traveled the rest of that day she talked very much to the carter, until he became thoroughly frightened, and wanted to give them up as his passengers.

He stopped the mule and threw down his whip and turned to James as a man.

“Your honorable ancestor here has said so much good talk that I dare not take you to your village. Please hire another carter.” Only then did James intervene.

“Ma, let him alone,” he said. “To change carts now would be to invite a fresh band of robbers.”

So she subsided into muttering and then into silence and toward the end of the day they drove into the ancestral village.

Uncle Tao had not gone to bed. He had bade his sons help him put on his best clothes and his appetite for his night meal had been poor. Feeling that none of his children, who had lived all their lives in the village, could be of use to him in meeting a lady who had lived years in a foreign country, he had sent for Chen, who came with pleasure.

Chen knew far better than James the mass of iniquity, humor, and kindness that was Uncle Tao, for there was this difference between the two young men. James expected the best of all human beings and Chen expected nothing at all. Therefore he neither pitied Uncle Tao nor grew angry with him. He enjoyed the old man, good and evil alike, and laughed a great deal over what Uncle Tao said.

“I do not know how our honest Liang family got into all these foreign ways,” Uncle Tao grumbled. “Until my generation we did not think of leaving our ancestral home and wandering around the four seas. My brother, the father of this bookworm Liang fellow, who now does not come home at all — well, my brother went to the northern capital but no further. In the city his children heard of foreign countries and nothing would do but this bookworm Liang must run over there, taking his wife and two small children, who have grown up as bad as foreigners, and then his wife gives birth to two more who are foreigners because they were born on foreign earth. All this has happened to us Liangs! Now they come back, these foreigners. The woman who is the mother of them — I remember her. She was a big mouth.”

“On the other hand,” Chen said, “I am grateful for everything, since it will give me a good wife.”

“Old-fashioned wives are best,” Uncle Tao grumbled. “When I frowned my wife trembled. When I shouted she wept. When I urged her she smiled. I did not praise her more than two or three times a year, for women and children cannot be praised. It makes them impudent. But this granddaughter of my brother whom you want to wed! Eh, I tell you, your life will not be too good. Begin strong, that is my advice to any man. Do not ask women anything. Do not tell them anything that is in your mind. I had a good wife, but I made her good.”

Chen listened to all this, keeping back laughter. Uncle Tao looked magnificent, as he sat in the most honorable seat in the main room. He wore an ancient yellow brocaded satin gown which was frayed about the edges with age. It hung to his heels and though it was cut full, the sleeves covering his hands, yet it was tight across shoulders and belly. He wore new white cotton stockings which his elder daughter-in-law had made for him and a pair of large black shoes of quilted satin on thick padded soles.

Thus they were conversing of many things in the universe when a hubbub at the gate where the other members of the family waited in their best clothes told them that the expected ones had arrived. Chen got up quickly and left the room. He should not be the first to greet the newcomer, and he stepped into a side court.

Uncle Tao did not stand up when they came in. He sat like an old emperor in his big carved chair by the table, his long pipe in one hand. He stared hard at Mrs. Liang and nodded his head.

“Eh — eh,” he mumbled, “so you have come back!”

Mrs. Liang stared back at him. “Uncle Tao, are you well?” she asked in a loud clear voice.

“At least I am not deaf,” he said tartly. “Where is your outside person — where is Liang Wen Hua, my nephew?”

“He could not come, Uncle Tao. He teaches school, you know, and they would not let him come.”

“What do they pay him?” Uncle Tao inquired.

She evaded this question. “He sent his obedience to you, Uncle Tao, and he bade me say that if there is anything you would like from the foreign country he will send it within his humble means.”

“I have no foreign wishes,” Uncle Tao replied with majesty. “Have you eaten?”

“Not yet, Uncle Tao,” Mrs. Liang replied.

All the daughters-in-law clustered about. “Come and eat, come and eat,” they clamored and she went with them.

Mary had not followed her mother. Instead she had gone to her room, pausing for a moment beside Chen who waited for her at the inner gate of the side court. They felt safe for this instant since everyone was with Mrs. Liang.

“Are you tired?” he asked in a low fond voice.

“Not too tired,” she replied, looking at him from under her lashes. “You must go and see Ma.”

“Now that she is come, I am frightened.”

“Silly,” she said softly. “She likes you already.”

“Then you have said too much about me.”

Mary gave him a little push. “Go on.”

“All by myself?”

“All by yourself,” she decreed.

She waved her hand and went on, and he turned aside into his own room to take a last look at his hair and he stared at his face in a small old metal mirror that hung on the wall above his table. An ugly fellow, he told himself!

He shrugged his shoulders then and went to find Mrs. Liang. In a large side room, she was surrounded by relatives, men and women, who sat down to give her company while she ate, for the family had already eaten. James was with her and he rose when he saw Chen.

“Ah, here he is,” he called. “Ma, this is Chen.”

Mrs. Liang rose, her hands hanging at her side, and she looked at Chen. The first look was doubtful, her eyes grew warm, and next she smiled.

“So this is you,” she said kindly. Then as though she were a foreigner she put out her hands and took his hand between both of them while the relatives stared. It was a good and warm clasp and Chen liked her then and there. If this was the woman that Mary would one day be, he was pleased.

“Eh, eh—” he said in Chinese. “You must sit down and eat your food while it is hot. I will sit down here.”

Properly and modestly he sat down at some distance away and she sat down again and the relatives began their chatter. In the midst of the hubbub she stole glances at him sitting there and half the time their eyes met, with increased content.

James saw his mother take her place in this Liang household as though she had never been away. Despite the years she had been gone her roots were not disturbed. She was correct in all her relationships, and never once did her tongue slip into the wrong title for sisters-in-law, elder and younger, and for their husbands and their children. They liked her. What had been sharp in her as a young girl was gone. What had been sharp even in her life in her own home, James saw was gone. She had become mellow and mild.

“Ma likes it here,” Mary said.

“It is her true home,” Chen replied.

Yet Mrs. Liang did not sink back into old ways. She approved Mary’s little school and she went about the village urging mothers to send their children to learn. In America, she told them, all people are compelled to go to school.

The villagers were aghast to hear of such tyranny. “Who then does the work?” they inquired. When she told them that learning to read did not spoil working men by turning them into scholars they could not believe her. They were used to their scholars who when they learned were too good for work.

One night she said a word of wisdom to Mary. “Now these ancestral people do not understand that a person can read and at the same time work. It is necessary that you continually show them it is possible.”

She herself washed her own garments and helped in the kitchens and in all ways surprised the Liang women who expected her to act as a learned and idle woman. The fame of this went out over the Liang lands, and women began to come and see Mrs. Liang and then to tell her of their troubles and even, because she too was a woman, of how Uncle Tao oppressed their families. But Mrs. Liang was shrewd. She knew that oppression was like a sword in the hands of two who struggle for its possession.

“Right is not always with the poor,” she answered James when he told her one day how much it troubled him that Uncle Tao had no thought for the people. “First you must ask why are people poor? Is it because they will not work or because they are thieves or because misfortune has overtaken them? Only when you know this can you know how they must be helped. With some the surest help is work or starvation.”

“Uncle Tao is too hard,” he said.

“He is hard,” she agreed, “but do not you be soft.”

To Mary she said, “Your brother James needs a good plain wife.”

“He does,” Mary agreed, “but where shall he find her?”

“I hope he is not looking at that little Rose nurse,” Mrs. Liang said. She did not approve of any woman working at a man’s side and she looked sidewise very often at Rose as she worked with James every day.

“James does not look at any woman since Lili married Charlie Ting,” Mary said.

“James is stupid,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed.

“Why not Rose, Ma?” Mary inquired.

Her mother raised her eyebrows, shrugged her plump shoulders, scratched her head with her gold hairpin, and cleaned her ears, all without answering. Then she said, “A bowl ought not to be too small for the hand that holds it,” and would say no more.

Meanwhile the wedding day drew near. For the sake of decency before the relatives Chen and Mary kept apart, and did not meet at all until the day itself came. It was natural that Mrs. Liang should put her whole mind on this wedding, but James felt his mother’s eyes often upon him. He knew her well. As soon as her mind was free she would have a plan concerning him.

On the night before the wedding he said to Mary, “As soon as you are married, Ma will be after me for something. I can feel it.”

“She wants you to marry,” Mary said.

He pretended to be terrified at this and begged Mary to prevent their mother. But in his heart he was amused, curious, and cautious.

The wedding day was a good one. The sun came up round and yellow, and there was neither cloud nor snow. Uncle Tao had been astonished when he heard that none of Chen’s family was to come, but when he knew their circumstances, how they were held in Communist country, he could only pity them, and for once he did well. He ordered a good feast to last the whole of one day and all the village was invited to it, and such tenants as cared to walk the distance from the land. The wedding was an old-fashioned one.

“It is easier to have it so than to explain why I do not have it so,” Mary had said.

So the marriage took place before the relatives, and Chen chose as proxy for his family a distant Liang cousin, and the papers were written, the wine drunk, the millet bowls exchanged, and so the ceremony was done. It was a bitter cold day, but the sun continued to shine and when men, women, and children were full of hot food it was good enough. There was no such thing as a honeymoon, for that was too foreign. Mary moved her boxes into Chen’s room, and James gave up his room for their sitting room and he went into another room near his eldest cousin. The next day Mary went as usual to her school and Chen to the clinic and neither gave a sign of inner happiness. Yet James knew it was there. His very flesh was sensitive to their secret joy. He would not have lessened their joy by an iota, and yet suddenly it increased his own loneliness.

This he bore quietly and when Chen had given greeting that morning after the wedding night, James began to speak of the enlargement of the clinic into the hospital. This he had planned for early spring. At the same time he planned to set up classes for itinerant first-aid centers. There were two bright boys in the village who wanted to learn medicine from him, one a cousin of Young Wang’s wife, for whom Young Wang had come to intercede, and the other the son of the village night watchman. When he perceived that Chen was answering “yes-yes” to all he proposed, and that his thoughts were not here, he stopped his talk, and it was at this moment that James felt his loneliness grow monstrous.

All through the day James and Chen worked side by side and Rose worked near them, tending the long line of the sick who now came from many parts of that region, some walking hundreds of miles, and the dying brought in litters or clinging to the back of some near relative. The old sorrow was that too often they came too late, having tried witchcraft and sorcerers first.

That day Chen watched Rose and he saw she was pretty and dexterous, and in his own new-found joy he considered within himself whether Rose might not be a good wife for his friend. In the middle of the morning’s work when they had drawn aside to discuss the case of a child with a huge water-filled head, suddenly in the midst of their talk he said in English, “Jim, you too should marry.”

James looked at him somewhat startled. “We were speaking of this sick child—”

“I am thinking of you,” Chen said. “I tell you—”

“It is quite proper that the day after your own marriage you should think all men ought to marry,” James said with a dry smile.

“Well, why not the little Rose?” Chen asked boldly.

“You!” James retorted. “No — Rose is well enough and we ought to marry her off somewhere some day, I suppose, but not to me. Come, come—”

“Have you seen a better?” Chen urged.

“I have seen no woman that I want now for my wife,” James said, too quietly.

They talked of the child again and decided to draw the water from its head, and so they did, warning the mother that she must come often, for this healing was not sure. But while he worked, Chen’s mind was busy far inside itself. James had said he had seen no woman whom now he wished to marry. Then why not one whom he had not seen? If his heart was dead let it be waked by life itself, if not by love. A man should marry and have children, with or without love. Love was blessing but life was good enough.

In the middle of that night, being melted with love, he said to Mary, “Why should we not find a wife for Jim? He will not choose for himself — then let us choose.”

“As if James would let us!”

The thought was too bold and Mary scoffed at it. Chen was pleased that even love could not change Mary. She teased him and opposed him as she always had and this made her yielding all the sweeter.

“No, I mean it,” Chen insisted. “Jim is the very one to let us do it.”

“He never would,” said Mary.

The next day Chen waylaid Mrs. Liang as she came from the kitchens and drawing her aside into a quiet room away from the relatives he proposed to her that they should persuade Jim to return to ancestral ways and allow them to choose a wife for him.

Mrs. Liang was pleased indeed. “How is it I have not thought of this myself?” she exclaimed.

“Mary says he will not do it,” Chen suggested.

Mrs. Liang considered this. “Had he not fallen once in love with that Lili Li, I know he would not. But he is a very single heart. When he was small he once had a dog and when it died he never took another. So when he had one friend it was enough — he never had many friends. This is his temper. We will plot together.”

That evening Mrs. Liang went to Mary and Chen and together they planned what James should have for a wife. She must of course be schooled and she must not be too old-fashioned or perhaps too modern. Something between was well enough. For more important than schooling or fashion was the girl’s own nature. She must be honest, she must be one who could love a man more than herself, a thing which not all women can do. She must be good at sewing and cooking, for James did not notice when his own garments needed mending, and when he worked he often forgot to eat. She need not be pretty, but since there was not love to begin with, neither should she be ugly. Certainly she must be clean, since James would have everything clean, and she must have a sweet breath and a soft voice.

With these matters decided, they laid their plot and let days pass perfecting it and inquiring where such a girl could be found. Chen offered to go to the city and Mary thought of writing to Dr. and Mrs. Su as the best among their new friends. Mrs. Liang even tried to bring to memory the young Chinese women she had seen in New York. She could remember no one except Sonia Pan, and she would be worse than any American, because while her body was Chinese, nothing else was. Besides, Sonia would certainly not live where she could not buy chewing gum, turn on the radio, or have a permanent wave in her hair. Uncle Tao, moreover, would not tolerate her, and she would be of no use to James.

At last Chen said sensibly that they had better lay the whole plan before James himself and with much timidity and laughter and arranging of who should speak first and how it should all be broached, they invited him to take a meal with them in a room at the inn, where Young Wang now being innkeeper and his father-in-law retired, they were sure of a good meal and of being alone in an inner room. They made the excuse of this being the first month day of Mary’s marriage, and Mrs. Liang talked of having to go home in a few more weeks. She longed to stay on, to stay even another month. If James would get himself married—

Outside the little room the inn was full. Young Wang gave meals for barter of flour or wheat and for vegetables, fowl and eggs and for fish or a pig or cow’s meat. Money was useless and the people did business without it.

Young Wang served them himself. He looked like an innkeeper now, his face was fatter than it had been and he ran with sweat as he hurried in and out of the inner room.

“Eh, do not be so busy,” Mrs. Liang told him kindly, but his zeal urged him on. Only when all the food was on the table and his young wife had poured out wine and tea, did he go away and leave the four alone.

Mrs. Liang had been chosen to begin and when they had eaten she said to James, “My son, as your mother, I beg you to let me see you married to a good wife before I leave you again. Then I will not worry. You are the eldest of all my children, and why should you live alone and my youngest be dead?” The tears came to her eyes.

Mary spoke next and she said, “We have been thinking of all our friends to find one whom you might like. Don’t try to fall in love again, Jim. Just choose a nice girl and see what happens of its own accord.”

“After all,” Chen said in turn and before James could speak, “it is only this generation of our own which has so much as thought of choosing wives and husbands for themselves. Remember that it is the custom here still for parents to find husbands and wives for their children.”

To their surprise James answered at once with a sensible gravity. “I have been thinking of such a thing myself, and I have told myself the very words which Chen has just used. Am I different from my ancestors? It may be that they understood better than we do the proper relationship between man and woman.”

“Then who—” Mrs. Liang began joyfully.

James cut her off. “I will not choose for myself, Mother. You may choose for me. You gave me birth and you know me. Mary and Chen can give their advice.”

All three were set back by their easy victory. “But have you no thought about the kind of girl you — you—” Chen ventured.

“Yes, I have thought,” James said calmly. “I should like to have a good-tempered woman, one strong and healthy, and the daughter of a peasant — one of our own peasants.”

The three listening were struck speechless. The daughter of a Liang peasant! This was something too strange even for them. This was going too far back!

James looked at the three solemn faces. “Why not? Goodness and health are all I want.”

“But an ignorant woman, Jim?” Mary asked.

“You shall teach her,” James replied smiling. He put down his chopsticks. “Come, why are you all staring? I have only agreed to do what you have proposed.”

“We did not ask you to go so far,” Chen remonstrated.

“Find my bride,” James said, half teasing them. “When you have found her, I will marry her. Now let us enjoy our feast.”

Why not, he asked his own heart? There was no woman in the world whom he wanted for himself. To this his heart made no answer. It had become a machine to pump the blood through his body and keep him alive that he might do his work.