Kinfolk

22

THE ANCESTRAL VILLAGE SEEMED to settle back into the earth after Mrs. Liang left it. None had quite realized how her busy presence had drawn them into a new energy. Within her natural self she had means of communication with everyone. While she did no more than give greeting to the sons of Uncle Tao, elder and younger, yet they saw her good open face often and they heard her loud voice kindly advising and exhorting and talking. Her short heavy footstep was not the footstep of the younger women who had never bound their feet, and certainly it was not the stumping of the older women whose feet had been badly bound in childhood. Uncle Tao missed her when she was gone, for though she had not talked much with him she had devised small comforts for him. She had washed and turned his winter padded robes and she had made him a new bedquilt, light and warm.

But upon James she had left her greatest influence. He saw what he had never known before, that his mother was not at all a stupid woman. It was true that hers was a brain which could neither receive nor retain an abstract idea, that is, an idea which had nothing to do with the simple welfare of those she loved. Heaven, God, Government, Communism, War, Human Rights, Religion, all the large words which provided modern argument she tolerated as amusement only for men. While they argued and talked she was busy, hand and mind. She did not consider that people whom she did not know and to whom she was not related were her concern. Yet if any were brought within the orbit of her knowledge she busied herself at once with their needs, too. She saw men and women whole, both as they were and as they felt they were. James was surprised and even horrified that she had not insisted on Uncle Tao’s operation, for example. He had talked with her about it and she could see for herself that Uncle Tao was gradually beginning to waste. Yet when James had urged her to persuade the old man, she had refused to do so. “Uncle Tao knows his own heart and body,” she declared. “If I persuade him and he is not so happy afterward, I shall blame myself.”

Because of her visit James understood his place in the ancestral village as he had not before. He and Mary and Chen belonged to the modem age in which they lived. The twentieth century was their atmosphere. But Uncle Tao belonged in the eighteenth century and he kept the village there with him. His mother, James saw, was the bridge between these centuries. Her interest in humanity was eternal, from the beginning of mankind and until the end. None could be too modern for her to approach with lively interest, and none too old for her to comprehend. That she was such a woman was unknown even to herself. She did not think of herself at all. She had no time for such thinking and no interest in it.

So James came to understand his mother in this ancestral village. He saw her in the strange unbalance of the world as it was, a world where new and old had to live together on their differing levels. She became significant to him. He told himself that she was the human creature most essential to men like himself, men who had sped far ahead of their native age.

Therefore when his mother had proposed to him one day that she find a wife for him, James had acquiesced with a sense almost of fatalism. He was unable to choose for himself. He might be misled again and again, and all his life could be spoiled by a wife who did not understand what he wanted to do. He did not need a woman to lead him farther away from their ancestral village. He needed and must have a woman who would root him here firmly by the force of her own life and understanding. When his mother told him, therefore, some six or seven days before she went, that she had found a young woman whom she thought suitable he had said, “I hope she is like you.”

His mother had looked surprised. “Now how did you think of that?” she demanded. “The truth is she does make me think of myself as I was when I came here to marry your pa.”

“Then sign the betrothal papers for me,” he had said. She had been troubled by his sudden willingness and had probed him for a while. “You know, James,” she had said earnestly, “if you marry such a girl as this Yumei, you cannot divorce her. She is not a new-fashioned girl. When she comes here to be your wife, it is for as long as she lives. You cannot put her away.”

“I understand that, Ma,” he had answered.

But she was still not satisfied until she had sent Mary and Chen to him, and from the wisdom of their good marriage they also besought him to think what he did.

“I think Ma has chosen too quickly,” Mary said. “She wants everything settled before she goes back to Pa.”

“Ma’s instincts about her children are surprisingly sure,” James replied. They were in his small living room, the door closed and barred, and they were speaking in English. “But there is so much you know that she will not know,” Mary urged. “Now when Chen and I talk together, our minds are the same. We do not talk across a distance.”

James smiled at this. “You and Chen both like to talk. But as you very well know I talk only a little. I can remember even when we were children, Chen, that this sister of mine complained against me because I did not talk much.”

He did not want to explain everything to them, and indeed he could not. He knew only that his life was to be here in the ancestral village and in the country around it, and if from here the work he did could spread into other parts, then he would be satisfied. He could never live as his father did. Perhaps there was too much of his mother in him. He had to live from his roots up. Well, he had found his roots, and it was time to begin living.

When his mother saw that he was calm and sure, she went on with the betrothal. Of course Uncle Tao must be consulted, and there was no difficulty there. Uncle Tao was pleased except that he felt Mrs. Liang had gone ahead of herself in choosing the girl and that this should have been left to him. But when she told him about the Yang family and he heard that they owned their land and had some cash besides and that Yang Yumei could not read and write, he felt content. “Two like your daughter,” he had declared, “would be too many for our village.”

Mrs. Liang did not tell him that Mary was resolved to teach her new sister-in-law to read immediately after the wedding. With men like Uncle Tao it did not do to tell everything. A little truth at a time was as much as he could bear without losing his temper.

Before she went back to America, therefore, Mrs. Liang had seen to it that the betrothal papers were signed and sealed and the first gifts exchanged. Into the hands of the eldest daughter-in-law of Uncle Tao she put the final plans for the wedding and for the last gifts. Since the parents could not be present at the wedding Uncle Tao must stand in their place, and the wedding should be small. Dearly did she wish that she could stay and do it all herself, but she did not feel it right to hasten the wedding by so much. James should have a month at least in which to prepare his mind, and she dared not leave Liang alone for another month. His letters had been short and unsatisfactory and she had not heard from him for two weeks. Then she controlled her worry. “I cannot worry myself on two sides of the ocean at the same time,” she confided to Mary.

“Oh, poor Ma,” Mary had answered. “You mustn’t worry about us, at least. I can’t promise about Pa.”

Mrs. Liang had bristled. “Your pa is fine,” she had retorted, and was strengthened in her resolve to return quickly to him.

She busied herself after that and arranged for James to have two more rooms for his share of the house and she bought some good furniture from the local carpenter, who was a Liang tenth cousin. Then she had wrenched herself away from the beloved village.

James had set the wedding day. During the holidays he knew he would have no new patients. He did not intend to take a honeymoon, for he knew that nothing would terrify his unknown wife more than that. Nevertheless he did not wish to have all the hours of the day and many hours of the night busy as they now were with the sick. His marriage, incredible as it would seem to Su and Peng and their kind, excited him with curiosity and wonder, and he wanted time to begin it well. It might be successful. Certainly he would love no one again as he had loved Lili. That fire had burned itself out even to the capacity for renewal. He did not want to love like that. It had been a destructive love.

Half amused at himself, he declared to Mary and Chen that there was sound wisdom in the ancestral way of choosing a wife for a man.

“Take Ma,” he said one evening as they idled for an hour before he went back to settle his patients for the night. “Surely she knows me better than I know myself. She knows the family traits. Who could choose better for me?”

They neither agreed nor disagreed with him. They smiled and listened, aware that this marriage was for him more than marriage. It was reunion with his own people.

Thus did James Liang wait for his wedding day. The idea of this marriage pleased him more and more, and it pleased Uncle Tao and the family, for it was like their own marriages. They drew close to James as they had never done, and he felt this and was made happy by it. The tenants on the land and the villagers, who had so long thought him half foreign, now began to tease him and laugh at it and treat him as one of themselves, and James liked this, too. He found himself laying aside his aloof ways, and he was more lively in his talk and bearing than Mary had ever seen. She said nothing to him lest she damage this new nature, but to Chen she said with much wonder, “I believe Yumei is making a new man of Jim, even before they meet.”

“He has chosen his way, and so he can stop thinking about it,” Chen said. He, too, did not speak to James of his new ways, although the two were together constantly.

Never had James worked so hard. He and Chen had already begun work in the first three rooms of what was to be their hospital. While masons and carpenters built added rooms, the sick lay on the floors and in tiers of beds against the wall. The courtyard swarmed with their families who came to stay and see with their own eyes that no damage was done to their helpless relatives. What patience did it take to try to heal those who were near death! But James had put his dogged will to work at the level at which he found his people. He would heal them in a house like their own, though clean and filled with fresh air. The earthen floors were sprinkled with un-slacked lime and he caught sunshine in every corner that he could. The hospital faced south, and the one-story rooms stood in lines with open courts between, and the places where the sun could not reach were used for fuel and boxes. He had begun with three rooms, easily within the cost of the money his mother had given him of her savings. The people would have to pay for each room as it was needed. He explained this and everyone paid a little and this little was put aside. When he cured a local warlord or a petty official, he asked more and they gave more for the sake of pride. Su and Kang and Peng would have laughed, James knew, but this was his hospital and not theirs, and it was the only way he could build it.

Meanwhile his nights, when he was not called anywhere, were busy with teaching. He and Chen between them were training fifteen young men from neighboring villages as well as the ancestral one. These men when they had enough knowledge to know how little it was, so that they would not pretend to more power than they had, which is the danger of ignorance, would travel through the countryside to wash and disinfect sores and ulcers and bad eyes, to treat malaria and smallpox and to bring to the hospital such as they could not heal.

This was the simple but large plan which James and Chen had made for themselves. There was more than mere healing to be done. Every tool had to be contrived. They built their own operating table, with the Liang cousin’s help. They put up a diet kitchen of earthen walls and plastered the ceiling to keep the dust of the thatch from the cauldrons, and Rose, the good nurse, took this under her charge. When Mary was troubled about her lest she be lonely, lest she should not marry and have her own life, Rose laughed as she laughed at everything. “There are already too many children,” she declared, “why should I think that mine would be better than those already born?” There were many women like Rose in these times of change, women who did not want to submit to the old rules of marriage and yet who did not draw attention to themselves for any special beauty or ability. These are the good women of the world, and Rose was one of them.

His wedding day drew on, and out of deference to his unknown wife, whom now that he had decided upon the old way of marriage, he was determined to hold in respect, whether love grew between them or not, James gave up the hospital to Chen for three days. Since he could be a little idle, he took the time to see that his rooms were neat and his clothes clean and whole, in which Mary helped him. Young Wang came from the inn and they decided upon the wedding feast dishes, and then Young Wang stayed and shaved James’s face for him and cut his hair, as he used to do when he was a serving man. He gave much good advice to his old master while he did so.

“I too married a local girl, as you know,” he told James. “It has turned out well and we are expecting a child. But from the very first I let her see that I am the head and she is the hands. Women need to know their boundaries. They are like fowls. If they see the whole world before them they run everywhere squawking and laying no eggs. But if they see the wall, the fence, the yard, the closed gate, they settle down in peace upon their nests.”

To this James listened with pretended gravity. Within himself he had already determined his course. He would be as he always was, neither yielding nor imposing, and from this vantage he would wait to discover the soul of the woman. He prayed only that she had a sweet temper.

The wedding day was one of those days which are common in dry northern regions where the snow seldom falls. The sky was cloudless and cold and there was no wind. This was luck, for the wild winds of winter, tearing the sand from the deserts and grinding it against human flesh, torturing eyes and turning hair and skin the color of dust, are calamity on a wedding day. James listened when he woke that morning and was grateful for quiet. It was well past dawn, and were there to be wind it would have been already raging.

Instead it was a day of strange and even unusual peace. The house was still and the Liangs slept late, for it was to be a holiday. Then they bestirred themselves and made ready for the noon when the bride would come in her red sedan chair. Uncle Tao was got up and ate and dressed in his best garments and every child was washed and given some new thing to wear. Since fresh garments had been prepared for the new year, it was cheap enough to put them on a little early.

James rose late, too, and he took his breakfast with Chen and Mary as usual. He had wondered how he would feel on his wedding day and was surprised that he felt nothing, neither fear nor joy. This, he told himself, was because he had not seen the face of his bride. Other men had told in his hearing of their old-fashioned wives and how stupid they were and how shy upon their wedding nights, and how often they wept. He would ask nothing of her tonight. He had already planned what he would say to her. “You and I have chosen one another in the old way of our ancestors,” he would tell her. “Yet we are not as our ancestors were. We live in two worlds, the old and the new. Therefore let us be friends for a while, until we know what we are. Then, after we are friends—” He did not believe that his mother would have chosen for him a woman too stupid to understand this.

After his breakfast he dressed himself carefully in his Chinese clothes. When she saw him it must be as a man of their people. He did not want to dismay her by looking foreign to her at first, for she would discover much that was strange to her in him as time went on.

In spite of all this determined calm, James felt his heart hurry its beat when noon came. He could not but realize, silently, that what he was about to do was unchangeable. Then he remembered how often in the centuries past men, his ancestors, had stood as ignorant as he of their fate. For them as for him marriage was not for individual pleasure. It was the unfolding of life itself. Man and woman, unknown before, took that step, each toward the other, and what had been separate became one. He must think of himself as man and of her as woman. Their life was only part of the whole of life.

In such spirit he waited in the main room of the Liang house with all the Liang family. Uncle Tao sat in the highest seat, dressed in his best robe of old-amber-hued satin and his sleeved jacket of black cut velvet. Upon his head he wore his black satin cap with a red corded button. Each of the older male cousins, dressed in his best, sat in his proper seat, and the female cousins went out to welcome the bride and receive her into the house.

The red sedan wedding chair reached the gate an hour after noon. Half an hour later, while James still waited with Uncle Tao and the cousins in the big room, the doors were opened. James looked toward it. He saw Mary coming toward him, smiling and holding by the hand his bride. He saw a slender figure clothed from head to foot in scarlet satin. Her head was bent under its beaded veil, but through the strands he saw a grave good face, the eyelids dropped, the mouth firm and red.

Uncle Tao rose, and with him all the cousins. The wedding had begun.

When James entered his room that night and heard the door closed behind him, he knew that now the goodness of his life depended upon him and upon this unknown woman. She sat beside the table and her hands lay one upon the other on her lap. They were brown and not too small, and the nails were not painted. She still wore the beaded veil and her head was drooped as he had seen it and her eyelids were still downcast. She sat motionless, waiting, he knew, for him to lift the veil from her head. He went forward at once and putting his hands to the headdress he lifted it off and set it on the table.

He tried to make his voice pleasant, easy, something a woman need not fear.

“How heavy this is! I hope you have not a headache from wearing it all day.”

At this she looked up quickly and then away again. “I have a little headache,” she said, “but it will pass soon. I am very healthy.”

He liked her plain voice, the accent rustic, yet clear. She was not pretty, but her face was good, the features straight and the skin smooth and brown as is common with country women. Her eyes were wide apart and large enough to look honest. The mouth was generous and it looked sweet tempered. For so much he could be grateful.

He sat down opposite her. “Tell me about your life,” he said. “Then I will tell you about mine.”

A mild look of surprise came on her face but after a few seconds she began without shyness. “What have I to tell? We are newcomers here and our ancestral home is some three hundred li away. I have no learning — and of this I am ashamed. But in a busy household on the land there is no time for a girl to go to school. My two younger brothers can read. We older ones had always to work. I am the middle child of my parents.”

“It is easy to read,” James said. “My sister will teach you if you wish.”

“I do wish,” she said. “That is, if you can spare the time for me to learn.”

“There will be time,” James said.

Then simply, so that it would not awe her, he told her of his own life and how it had been spent abroad and why he had wanted to come back to his own people. She listened, sitting motionless, her head inclined, not looking at him, and he found himself telling her more than he had planned. When he had finished she said in a grave quiet way which he already saw was natural to her, “Our country is now in bad times. There are those who go away in such times and those who come back. The good ones come back.”

He was delighted with this. In so few words she had put what he had tried to tell himself often in many ways, but never so simply and clearly. Now he could make the proposal of friendship. “You are tired. Let me say what I have to say. You and I have chosen one another in the old way of our ancestors—”

He went on and she listened. When he had finished she gave a small quick nod of her head and for the first time she looked into his eyes. “Your mother told me you were a good man,” she said. “Now I know you are.”

After his wedding his life flowed on scarcely changed from what it had been. Within a few days Yumei had taken her place in the household. She was a quiet woman. Yet when they were alone James found an increasing pleasure in talking with her. She had a large mind, and her thoughts were fresh because they were her own. Since she had been always busy in her family of brothers no one had taken time to know her thoughts, and this treasure was his own now to discover. Soon she began to make small comfortable changes in their rooms and he found his food served hot and on time, at hours when he could most easily eat. When he came in at night there was always something light and hot to eat and he found he slept better for it.

And it was Yumei who first told him that Uncle Tao was frightened and in pain. “Please look at our Old Head,” she said to him one morning. “Yesterday he was weeping behind his hand when he thought no one could see him. But I saw him and when the others left, I asked him to tell me what was wrong, and so I know that the knot in him weighs on his veins and he cannot sit or sleep.”

“I have long told him that he should let me cut it out,” James said to defend himself.

She sat down at a distance from him and folded her hands as she always did when she was about to talk with him. She spoke freely to him but she kept the little formalities she had been taught. “Please forgive me,” she said. “You know everything better than I do, I think, but this one thing perhaps I know better — it is how people feel. The middle child, especially if she is a daughter, is the one who looks at both elder and younger and she is a bridge between them. Now Uncle Tao wants secretly to be rid of his knot, but he is afraid he will die if he is cut.”

James was a little impatient with this. “I have told him he will die if he does not have it out.”

“He told me you said so,” she replied in the same quiet voice. “That is what makes him so afraid. He has no way to turn. Now let us tell him this way. Promise him that he will live if he has it cut out.”

“But he might not live!” James exclaimed.

“Promise him he will live,” she said coaxingly. She was looking at him now, her eyes bright and soft. “If he dies he will not know it. If he lives then you will be right. And if he believes he will live, it will give him strength not to die.”

It was hard to refuse this shrewd persuasion. James sat silent for a while thinking it over. It happened to be true enough — the belief that he would live was more powerful than any medicine for a sick man.

“Surely life is the most precious thing,” Yumei urged, when James did not speak.

Again it seemed to him that she was right. Men continued to kill each other as they had for centuries and for many reasons, not knowing that life was more precious than anything for which they died.

“I will do it, if Uncle Tao can be persuaded,” he said at last.

“I will persuade him,” she said.

What Yumei’s persuasion was, none knew. But all knew that some sort of slow powerful gentle argument was going on between the old man and the young woman. She served him every day with a favorite food and she sat with him while he ate and when he had eaten she began her persuasion, urging him to life. For how would the Liang household continue without him, she asked. She pointed out that in such times as these the old and the wise were the only lamps to guide the feet of the people. She so persuaded Uncle Tao that he ceased to think of himself as an aging useless old man. She filled him with the necessity to live. It became his duty to live, and then she made him believe that he could live. When he had reached this place she went and told James.

All were astonished. Uncle Tao’s sons were fearful but he himself put courage into them. The elder daughter-in-law was not too pleased at this success of a newcomer over the older ones who had failed, and Mary, who liked Yumei well, could not but wonder if Uncle Tao were worth so much trouble.

But James gave none of them time to think, either for or against. He knew that he must take this moment when Uncle Tao’s courage was high. He prepared the next day to do the work, and he took no more patients that day and set himself to this one stupendous task. Did he fail with his own flesh and blood, did Uncle Tao die, no one in the ancestral village would believe in him again and he would have to move his hospital elsewhere. This monstrous knowledge was forced upon him by the excitement of the kinfolk in the house and by the villagers and by the men on the land, who came in when they heard what was about to happen, and to stay until they knew Uncle Tao had been cut and sewed up again safely.

Again luck was with James. There was no wind or sand the next day and the small operating room was clean. Early in the morning Uncle Tao was moved there upon a litter carried by his sons, and all the tenants who had spent the night in the courts rose while he passed and groaned in unison. Uncle Tao did not smile or speak. He kept his eyes shut and his lips set. When they lifted him upon the table he was inert. For him everything had begun. Only once did he speak after this. When he felt himself on the table he opened one eye. “Where is that young woman?” he asked.

“I am here,” Yumei replied coming in at this moment. She looked at James with apology. “I had to tell him I would stay with him.”

“Very well,” James said.

Never had he undertaken so heavy a task and never had he been so afraid. Chen was with him and so was Rose, and she saw his hands tremble and she looked at Chen and saw that he saw it, too.

“Steady, Jim,” Chen said in English. “We are here with you.”

“Thanks,” James said. But he knew that still he was alone. His was the hand that held the knife.

Rose put the ether cone over Uncle Tao’s face and he kicked out his legs.

“Our good Old Head, I told you this would be done first,” Yumei said in a quiet voice.

Uncle Tao shouted violently and then less violently and then he gave out only a mumble and then a murmur, and then he was silent.

Now the eldest son of Uncle Tao had demanded to be in the room with his father to see that all went well. He stood against the door to let no one look through it, for the window was painted white, to keep out curious eyes, and he groaned when his father fell silent. “Is he not dying?” he asked.

“No,” Yumei said, “I listen to the breathing.”

James paid no heed to any of them. He had gone into that battlefield where he must make his solitary fight with the enemy who was Death. He must put out of his mind all else except victory. Chen had bared Uncle Tao’s great belly and it was shaven and clean. Now with his knife James drew down a straight clean cut. The elder son moaned and fell to the floor and hid his face against the door. Yumei did not look but she stood by Uncle Tao’s head, hearing his breathing. Once it faltered and she touched Rose’s arm who spoke to Chen, who pressed a needle into Uncle Tao’s arm.

The room was terrible in its silence. In the silence James worked swiftly. He was face to face with his enemy now, and time was on the side of life. Chen was a matchless partner, standing at his side. Veins were clipped and held, and masses of old yellow fat were turned back. Working against time and the slowing breath, James lifted out at last the tumorous weight and threw it into the waste bucket. He did not look at Uncle Tao’s face. Rose was watching that — Yumei, too, he remembered. Chen was handing him the veins, each to be put into place. His hands moved delicately, swiftly, and his courage soared. He had met his enemy and the victory was his. Uncle Tao would live.

Yet life after battle with death is a wary thing, poised always like a bird for flight. Uncle Tao had to be watched day and night, and Yumei never left him. She had some sort of life in herself which caught and held the life in Uncle Tao when it was about to escape. James with all his skill was not so alert as she to know when Uncle Tao needed food quickly or the needle thrust into his arm.

It was Yumei who did a thing at once absurd and yet of great comfort to Uncle Tao. She picked up the tumor from the waste and put it in a big glass bottle which had once held medicines. This bottle she filled with strong kaoliang wine, and she sealed it and put it in Uncle Tao’s room. She knew it would give him pleasure to look at his tumor, even when he was too weak to speak.

He stared at it for a long time one day. Then he had asked, “Is that — it?”

She nodded. “That is what wanted your life, Uncle Tao,” she replied. He lay looking at it often after that and to see it imprisoned and helpless made him feel strong. He knew himself saved.

“Who would have thought of doing such a thing except Yumei?” Mary cried when she heard of it.

“Yumei is close to people and to life,” Chen said. To James, Chen began to speak of Yumei thus. “I begin to think your mother chose you a good woman.”

“I begin to think so, too,” James said. He was brusque because he did not want to speak of Yumei to anyone. Something as delicate as silver, as fine as a dew-laden cobweb, was beginning to be woven between him and his wife. It must not be touched.

When Uncle Tao was well enough to sit up he invited all his friends to come and see what had been taken out of him and he boasted of its size and color.

“I kept this thing in me for many years,” he said, looking around on them all solemnly. “At first I was the stronger but it grew stronger than I. Then I said to my nephew, the doctor, Take it out of me.’ He was afraid — eh, he was truly afraid! But I was not afraid. I lay down on the table and smelled his sleeping smell, and he cut me open. My elder son saw everything and he told me. My nephew lifted that knot out of me and my nephew’s woman put it in the bottle. Now I am as good as new.”

He was never weary of telling his story, and it must be said that no one was weary of hearing it. Even the kinfolk who heard the story every day or two were proud of Uncle Tao. Thereafter whenever someone complained of a pain in him somewhere Uncle Tao ordered him to come to the hospital where his nephew would cut it out and his nephew’s wife would put it in a bottle. Thus it became a matter of some fashion to have tumors in bottles standing on the table in main rooms of houses, but Uncle Tao’s was always the biggest and best of them all.

From now on James was Uncle Tao’s favorite, and nothing could be refused him. James was grateful for this, yet he saw very well that Uncle Tao had come out of the struggle with death as unrepentant as ever. He was still the same crafty bold old man and he kept his best friends among officials and secret police and tax gatherers. He still considered the tenants his possessions, and laughed when he heard of their small rebellions.

This troubled Yumei, who belonged to the people, and one night she told James of her fears. He listened, having soon learned to consider whatever she told him, for she did not talk idly.

“When that day comes and the people turn against the officials and the police and the tax gatherers,” Yumei said, very troubled, “shall we be strong enough to save Uncle Tao?” She shook her head and broke off, not answering her own question.

“Can we save ourselves?” James asked.

“Our people do not kill those who serve them as you do,” she replied. “We are safe enough.”

He knew that it was she who kept them safe. He understood more clearly with every day that Yumei was the bridge he had needed to his own people. When they feared him and his foreign ways, they went to Yumei and she came to him. Through her he saw them and comprehended what he had not been able to know before. Thus through her he began to put down his roots into his ancestral land.

What is the end of a story? There is no end. Life folds into life, and the stream flows on.

No sudden love sprang up between James and his wife. He knew that she loved him before he loved her, and he was grateful for her patience with him. His love was to be the growth of years. But it seemed to him one day not too long after his wedding that a woman deserves to have children and so at last he became her husband. He was glad that he had not waited upon any dream of love. For after this Yumei took confidence as his wife, and she became a true part of all he did. It was she who stood beside women weeping in hard childbirth and she who held children in her arms when eyes had to be burned clean of trachoma, and she was not afraid to stay with one who had to die. She was no saint. Sometimes she grew weary and wanted to be alone and then he let her be. But she could always be called back when life was threatened. She had the gift of life.

And life, James knew, was what he wanted.