Kinfolk

6

ON A WARM SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON James was washing his hands after a leg amputation. His patient was a man, young and strong, and he would live easily. James was not concerned about his recovery. He was deeply concerned, however, over the growing number of such wounds, all gun-inflicted and all reaching him too late to save legs and arms. Seven men had died because the wounds were in the body trunk. Last night when he had gone to see his patient he had asked him bluntly where he got so deep a wound in his lower thigh.

The man was the son of a farmer to the north of the city and he spoke with a burr at the end of every noun. “Bandits keep pressing us,” he said and turned away his head.

“Bandits?” James asked.

“Bandits is what we used to call them and it is what we still call them,” the man said. His eyes were bitter.

“Where are they?” James asked.

“In our own village,” the man said bitterly. “They do not come from outside any more. They are among our own. Look you, please! I am surnamed Hwang. My whole village is Hwang. But this man who put his bullet into me is also surnamed Hwang.”

James interrupted. “You mean he is a Com—”

“Hush!” the man said. “Do not say the word. Call them bandits. Eh, they are everywhere! The hungry, the ones who will not work, the ones who hate their work, the tenants on the farm — they turn into — bandits.” He sighed. “The times are evil. Such a good gun he had! I have a cheap thing made by the Japs. I took it away from a Jap. But I am only Hwang the Honest. That’s what I am called. The bandit Hwang has a fine American gun. I saw it in his house one day. When I saw it, I knew he was a — bandit. I needed not to look into his eyes.”

“Where did he get such a gun?” James had asked. Yes, the wound had been very deep.

“These guns come from America,” the man had said. “They give them to our soldiers and then — the bandits get them.”

“How?” James had asked sternly.

“There are many ways,” the man had said listlessly.

James knew he must ask no more questions, and he went away. How many things he did not understand! Now the operation was safely over and the man would get well, and perhaps then he would talk. Actually the man had talked a good deal while he was under ether. The nurse Rose had been his assistant today and he had caught her nervous glance, when the man began to mutter.

“Bandits — bandits — my brother—”

“A little more ether,” James said to the anesthetist.

“His heart is already weak,” Rose reminded them. She held the man’s wrist between her thumb and finger.

So they let him mutter, “Starve — my brother — no — no — Communists—”

No one paid heed to this last word which had burst from the man’s mouth like a bullet from a gun.

Remembering it James wondered if he himself were naïve. He was aware, only half-consciously, of some profound though secret struggle going on among the people. Yet, since no one spoke of it he did not think of it. The day’s work absorbed him, and he disliked political quarrels. The true scientist, he believed, would have nothing to do with politics. He must keep himself whole. Yet perhaps he had accepted too easily his father’s belief in government, whatever it was.

“Heaven chooses a ruler,” his father had been wont to declare. “Only when that ruler forsakes wisdom does Heaven put him aside.” From these high-sounding words Dr. Liang Wen Hua was apt to descend to this remark, to his children. “Whatever we have in the way of a government it is better than Communism. Do you think you could enjoy our personal luxuries under those Red devils?”

At this moment, while James was so thinking, the door opened and a hand thrust itself in, holding an envelope. James recognized the hand. It was that of Young Wang who, always terrified of seeing cutting and bleeding, would on no account put his head into a room where by any chance an operation might be going on. James went to the door and took the envelope.

“An electric letter — from your father,” Young Wang’s voice said huskily through the door.

James had long since stopped wondering how Young Wang knew everything before he did. The envelope was sealed. Besides, Young Wang could not read nor write. Perhaps the clerk had told the messenger who brought the cablegram. James opened the message. It was indeed from his father. Even in a cablegram his father could not resist the careful phrase. “The other children joining you in our homeland. Sailing today. Explanation to follow by airmail.” He looked at the date. They had sailed yesterday.

The other children, Mary, Peter, Louise! He was shocked by the imminence. What had happened? Mary he would have welcomed — but all three of them, so young, so unprepared! He was profoundly distressed. What would he do with them? He was only himself beginning to be reconciled, or rather resigned to not being reconciled, to what life was here. Peter! What could he do with Peter, who was more American than any American? It was too late to cable back in protest. That was like his father, too, to inform only after he had acted.

“Bad news?” Dr. Liu Chen asked. He had come in also to wash, having today taken the place of an anesthetist who had died a week ago of cholera. There was just enough cholera in the city to worry the doctors but nothing like an epidemic. Still, it was more than the city had suffered in many years. The war had left dregs everywhere and old diseases had been stirred up again. People were afraid of plague once more in the north.

“Not exactly,” James said. Had it been one of the other doctors he would not have gone on, but Liu was comfortable and kind. Above all, he was modest. He had been educated at a small college in the United States and afterward he had taken his internship at a settlement hospital which no one knew when he mentioned it. He was modest but he was not humble. He carried himself with pleasant composure and when he went to a party that any of the doctors gave, he was friendly and never pretended to anything. He himself gave no parties. Several times he had invited James to dine with him, and they went always to a restaurant and never to a hotel.

“I have strange news from my father,” James went on. “He tells me he is sending my two sisters and my brother to me, and I cannot imagine why, since they are all in school.”

Dr. Liu, very clean and smelling of soap, was now carefully sharpening a small scalpel on a fine oiled stone. “Perhaps he wishes them to learn something of their own civilization,” he suggested. He spoke, as always, in Chinese. His English was not very good, for he came from a part of the country where the people confused two or three consonants and he found that by doing so in English he often said what he did not mean.

“Perhaps,” James said. Being much troubled he went on again, as he stood watching the hairline edge on the scalpel. “The question is where shall I put them. I shall have to find a house somewhere.”

“That is not too difficult, provided you do not want what is called a modern house,” Dr. Liu said. He placed the scalpel carefully into the sterilizer and turned on the electricity. This made him think of something. “I have invented a sterilizer to be used with charcoal,” he said. His square ugly face lit with enthusiasm as he spoke.

Long ago Liu Chen had given up improving his looks. He was above middle height, his frame was strong, for he came of peasant stock, and his cheekbones were high and his eyes small. He would still have been a peasant had it not been for a missionary who had taught him to read and then had helped him go to school. Liu Chen had a good mind which held tenaciously everything he poured into it, but nothing was learned easily. He took great care to learn exactly, therefore, for he knew that whatever his mind had seized could never be changed. He was somewhat too slow to be a first-rate surgeon, but he made up for this by taking a deep personal interest in his patients. Rose or Marie often met him in the night, especially just before dawn in those hours when the sick die easily. He would be prowling through the wide corridors on his way to a room or a ward, to see for himself how his patients did. He looked apologetic when he met a nurse, for his presence seemed to accuse them. Indeed, Marie, who was mischievous, had once teased him.

“You think no one knows anything except yourself,” she said, scolding him.

Liu Chen had smiled bashfully. “It is not that.”

“Then what is it?” she had demanded, standing before him with her hands on her hips.

“I am only afraid I did something wrong,” he answered. “Something you would not know about.”

Standing beside his patient he did not speak. He watched intently, listening to the breathing and touching the skin to see if it were dry or moist, and then with the lightest pressure he would feel the pulse and catch the heartbeat. If all were well, he would steal away. But sometimes he would shout for the nurse and call for oxygen and stimulants to pull back a still living creature from death. The patient did not know what had happened, but he would open his weary dull eyes and see the doctor standing there, gaunt and silent, and he would feel safe. Then he would himself take the turn for life. This was especially true with children, for Dr. Liu loved all children. Whether he had any of his own no one knew, for he never spoke of his family. No one even knew where he lived. James perceived only that this strange uncouth man was different from the other doctors. In some ways he was less skilled, and yet he had a living spirit in him which he was able to impart to the sick and which was better than cold skill.

“I would like to see your sterilizer,” James said now.

Liu Chen turned away and pretended to adjust something on the handle of the door of the instrument case. “Some day,” he said. “Meanwhile, can I help you to find a house? I know one in the hutung two streets to the north of here. It is large, but it is cheap because it is haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“Yes — by weasels,” Liu Chen replied. He had adjusted the handle and he closed the door firmly. He answered James’s smile with his own. “You, of course, will not mind weasels. But they are akin to foxes among our people, and while I also do not fear them, I remember that my old grandmother in our village would have burned a house down rather than live in it, were it haunted by weasels.” His face took on a curious apologetic look that was yet very much in earnest. “You know, I would not say this before our friends, the other doctors, but I sometimes wonder if there is not more to these old beliefs of the folk than we think? Certainly there is something mischievous about weasels. They steal into a house by the hundreds once people grow afraid of them.”

James laughed. “I will go with you to see the house this evening,” he promised.

So it was arranged and he could only spend the rest of the day at his usual work, wondering and waiting for the letter which his father had promised, and which since it came by air would reach him before he had to go to Shanghai to meet his sisters and brother. The cable had put out of his mind the talk with the wounded man, and in the afternoon after his hours were over he met Liu Chen at the stone lions that guarded the hospital gate and they walked briskly along the street, unheeding of the cries of ricksha pullers beseeching them to ride. One such fellow persisted in running after them. He was a tall lean hound of a man, and he fell into cursing when neither James nor Liu Chen turned to hire him. “You!” he shouted after them. “You ought not to use your legs and rob us of our wages! Such as you make Communists of us!”

The two men did not turn but they heard this and James remembered then the man whose leg he had taken off in the morning. “Do you know anything about the Communists?” he asked Liu Chen.

“No,” Liu Chen said shortly. “Nobody knows anything about them.” He quickened his pace and turned a corner and they walked down a quiet lane between high brick walls. “This is the hutung,” he said. “The gate is yonder.”

They went fifty feet farther and reached a plain wooden gate made double and hanging upon heavy iron hinges. It stood ajar and Liu Chen pushed it open. They stepped over a high lintel and into a deserted court where the weeds grew high between the stones. Once inside Liu Chen closed the door safely. Then he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and his bare head. “Eh!” he said in a low voice. “You must not ask a man in broad daylight what he knows about the Communists. It made my sweat pour out.”

“You mean—” James said.

“I do mean that, indeed,” Liu Chen said quickly. “Come, let us see the house. It is too big for you, but you can shut away some of the courts. Or I might rent a little one for myself.”

“That would be pleasant,” James said.

Liu Chen laughed loudly. “If your sisters are pretty!”

James did not laugh and neither did he answer. For the first time it seemed to him that Liu Chen was coarse, because of his peasant origin. Almost at once Liu Chen saw that he had offended. “No — no,” he said quickly. “I was only joking.”

“Have you wife and children?” James asked.

Liu Chen shook his head somewhat moodily. “No, I have no wife. Look at me, and you see a man spoiled. I cannot take a peasant woman because I am too good for her. But I am too much peasant for any of these new women, do you see? Even though I have been to America, in their dainty noses I still smell of the ox. What would they do in my father’s house? My mother cannot read a word and she is like any country woman. Well, I do not go home much because they grieve that they have no grandson. I am caught between old and new — I have no home and perhaps I am to have none.”

“I cannot believe that,” James said. “It seems to me that you are the best of both kinds of people.”

This praise moved Liu Chen. His square face grew red and his eyes glistened. “You are too kind,” he said and he coughed as though he were choking. “Come,” he said. “We must see the house.”

This house had been a very handsome one when it was built and the strong old brick walls and the stout beams held. But the paint was peeling from the wood and the lime had blistered. The stone floors were covered with a coat of sand blown there by many windstorms. There were none of the things to which Mary and Louise and Peter were accustomed, or to which James himself was used — no bathroom, no heating of any kind, no electricity, no running water. There was a well; there were four large courts which held some good trees and a terrace with ancient peonies still living; there were twelve large rooms, three to each court and connected with outdoor passageways whose balustrades were finely carved. In the windows there were delicate lattices and behind the lattices the paper had been replaced with glass most of which was still not broken. Everywhere were the footsteps of weasels in the sand and the long trailing marks of their brushes. In the dust upon the lintels were their marks and there were bones of mice and Chickens and birds which they had eaten and bits of fur and skin and feathers.

James stared about him and Liu Chen watched him. “It looks too bad, does it not?” Liu said. “Still, a few servants hired to clean, and you will see a different house. You can buy a foreign stove at the thieves’ market and a carpenter will make some beds and tables and the tailor some bedding. A charcoal stove and a cook — and he will buy some earthenware pots — you will see how easily it can all be done, and how cheaply. But perhaps you have plenty of money.”

“I have not,” James said quickly. His father must send him money, and yet how well he knew his father would often forget! Peter must go to college and so must Louise. Mary could teach somewhere. Between them they could pay the daily bills, and what their father sent could be used to make their life better. “I will take the house,” he told Liu Chen, “and mind you, if you want a room, you shall have it. I can see you would be very useful to us. After all, we are too much like foreigners here in our own country. Our father let us grow up in America.”

Liu Chen turned red again. His skin was thin and clear and easily flushed, although it was dark. “No, no,” he said, “do not feel you must be polite. And please call me Chen.”

“I am not polite — I mean it,” James said.

“Then wait and see whether the others like me,” Chen said modestly.

By now they had reached the inner court. It was quiet here and strangely peaceful. The deserted house encircled them and under their feet the weeds grew high and sun-browned between the stones. A great twisted pine stood against the house, its branches so thick and widespreading that their weight had bowed the trunk and the tree looked like an old man carrying too heavy a burden. The sun had shone upon the pine all day and the needles were fragrant and the walls held the fragrance, for no wind could reach here. Chen threw himself on the wild grass under the tree and James sat down beside him. Twilight was still an hour away.

“You asked me about the Communists,” Chen said abruptly. “They have taken my own village which is three hundred miles to the northwest. Therefore I do know something about them.”

“Is your house safe?” James asked.

“Yes, for we are poor enough to be safe. My parents owned no land. They were tenants before the Communists came. Now they are landowners. Their landlord was the usual sort, short-tempered, greedy, but not more than many others. When the Communists came they did not kill him, for the people pleaded for him. They only strung him up by the thumbs and gave him a good beating and then allowed him as much land as he could work himself — no more. To my parents they gave a small farm. Now we are the landowners!” Chen laughed dryly.

James laughed. “I suppose you like the Communists.”

Chen sat up and wrapped his arms about his knees. His spiky black hair stood up on his forehead and his thick eyebrows drew down. “No,” he said, “no! Had I been only a peasant still, nothing more than the son of my father, I daresay I would have been happy enough, but I am something more. I am a doctor.”

“Do they want doctors?” James asked.

“They want them very much. They want them too much. They have offered me a great deal. But they cannot offer me enough.” These words Chen spoke in short sentences and his eyes were bitter. He tugged at a clump of grass between two stones and it came up root and all. Ants scurried out, terrified by the sudden light of day. “You know, there is very much that makes me angry at the hospital. I say this because I see it makes you angry, too. You don’t understand why our fellow doctors are so cold, do you?”

“No,” James said quietly. “That puzzles me very much. Kang, for instance, a superb doctor, but not caring whether people live or die. I say to myself, what is the use of being a doctor in that case?”

They were speaking Chinese, not the old slow involved speech of the past, but the quick terse tongue of the modern, energized by the languages of the West.

“So I say also,” Chen said solemnly. “And I am very angry with Kang and Su and Peng and all those men. They have no feeling for our own people. You cannot understand it, Liang, but I can. I have seen old scholars like them, too. There is so much you cannot understand. I can understand you because I was also in America, but I was there only for a few years. You will have to learn to know our people. You must begin with the simple ones. Yet most of us are simple.”

Chen cleared his throat and made his voice somewhat louder, almost as though he were about to begin an argument. “Liang, listen to me! These new men, Kang and Su and Peng and their like, they are not really very new. Their learning is new, but the men behave like the old ones. In my village there was an old scholar. Now why do I call him a scholar? He went up for the Imperial Examinations five times and after the first degree, he failed every time. Yet each time he came back more lordly than before. He could dine with no one except our landlord. The two of them went together. And when the local magistrate came to the village to examine the crops, then the three of them dined together. They were too good for the rest of us. And later when a warlord took our region, then there were four of them to dine together. And they were all too good for the rest of us, who were only the people. Scholar, landlord, magistrate, warlord — there you have the tyrants of the people. And we have them still. To go to a college in America does not change a man’s heart. It only gives him a new weapon, sharper than the old, to use against the people — if that be his heart.”

Chen spoke with deep passion and James was astounded. He had not heard Chen speak often in the gatherings which the doctors had together sometimes, and if he did speak it was only to make a joke at something or to point out some small foolish thing, such as a dog creeping under the table and trying not to be seen while it waited to snatch a bone. “Brothers,” he had said once when this happened at a feast of browned duck in a restaurant, “it is very hard on this poor dog that we are all dainty moderns and do not throw duck bones on the floor. For his sake let us this one time return to the ways of our ancestors.” With these words Chen had thrown the head of the duck, which he had been chewing, down upon the floor. The dog rushed for it and Kang had given it a kick that sent it howling away, but still clenching the duck head between its teeth. “Liu, don’t be a fool,” Kang had said in a surly voice. Chen had not spoken again all evening and no one had heeded his silence. Now all these words poured out of him.

“I cannot understand why you are not a Communist,” James said quietly. His heart was altogether with what Chen had said, but he wished to try him further.

Chen twisted an end of the pine branch near him and sniffed the scent loudly into his nostrils. “This pine must be five hundred years old,” he said. “Did you know, Liang, that our ancestors rewarded such trees with a title? Indeed it was so, exactly as though the tree were a human. They called them Duke this or Lord that. Well, so trees ought to be given praise to endure for five hundred years in this world! So you say I should be a Communist? I cannot be. I will tell you why. They wanted me to dip my hand in blood and swear something. Swear what? Nothing much — loyalty, brotherhood, eternal faith — all the usual oaths of a gang. But I have sworn my loyalties to all humanity and not to any part of it. I told them so and they wanted to shoot me. So I left by night. Now you see why I have no home.” Chen laughed too loudly and got to his feet. “Come, let us settle the matter of this house! Its owner lives next door — a good old man who smokes opium, and he will give you a quick bargain for cash.”

Chen walked away and James followed, surprised and interested in spite of his vague distrust. The fellow was confused and angry with life. There was no knowing what such a man could or would do before he was settled. But it was impossible not to like him. Walking slightly behind him James looked at his square shoulders and thick neck and upright jet-black hair. Chen walked with his hands in his pockets and these pockets belonged to a suit which he had devised for himself. The trousers were Western, but the dark blue material being cheap the garment had shrunk when washed so that his strong thighs seemed about to burst the seams. The coat was somewhat like a uniform except that it was bare of any ornament, and it buttoned in the front straight from hem to collar. The buttons were of ordinary white bone. There were many pockets on both sides, each of which held something and this gave thickness to Liu Chen’s thin but big frame.

They went out of the gate and down the length of the wall to another gate. Here Chen went in, and addressing a shabby manservant who sat on his heels against the wall, he asked for the master.

“The master is asleep but the old mistress is awake and it is she who decides what is to be done,” the man said without getting up. Clearly everything in this house was badly managed.

“Then we will see the mistress,” Chen said.

Still without getting up the man bawled to a woman servant who thrust her head out of the gate of the inner court, wiped her wet hands on her apron, and came out.

“What do you gentlemen want?” she demanded. “My mistress will not come out just to look at you.”

The man grinned and hooked his thumb over his shoulder at her. “Do not get yourself into talk with this old rot,” he told Chen. “Her tongue is tougher than any man’s.”

The woman pretended to box his ears and he dodged. “Eh — eh?” he cried. “It is not I who ask anything of you. You have nothing left that I want!”

“You turtle!” the woman screamed at him. Then she laughed and looked sidewise at the visitors and forced herself to be sober. “What did you say you wanted?” she asked.

Chen had watched this byplay with a grin on his face. “We want to inquire about the rent of the house next door. Of course the house is worthless because of the weasels, but my friend here is brave and he may take it if it costs little enough.”

The woman pursed her mouth but something gleamed in her eye. “There are not so many weasels as there were. My mistress hired an exorcist last month and since then the weasels are afraid.”

“We saw weasel marks plainly enough,” Chen said bluntly. “If the price is too high we do not want to wait.”

“Now then,” the woman said hastily. “Why do all you foreign Chinese have such high tempers? You are no better than the Western people. Stay here and I will ask my mistress.”

In something less than a quarter of an hour an old woman came to the gate of the inner courtyard and leaning on a carved stick she peered through. She was very old indeed, and her scanty hair, though still black, had dropped away and someone, perhaps the loud-voiced woman, had painted her scalp with black ink to look like hair. Against this intense blackness the old lady’s face was like chalk. Indeed, her whole body, tiny and bent, seemed very nearly dust. Out of this tortured frame her voice came forth shrill and piping. “You want to rent the weasel house?” she asked.

“Yes, madam,” James said.

“Then you must give me one hundred taels a month,” she said.

So old was she that still she counted money in taels! James looked at Chen who turned on his heel and marched to the gate without answer and James, seeing this, followed him. At the gate the penetrating old-voice caught them like a hook. “How much will you give me?” it inquired.

“Twenty,” Chen said.

The old lady’s eyes were small and black and something quivered in them like points of steel. “But the weasels are very few,” she objected. “Give me fifty and I will send for the exorcist again.”

“I do not fear the weasels. Twenty-five,” James said firmly.

“Twenty-five,” the old lady wailed. “But will it be cash?”

“Cash,” James agreed. “Tomorrow.”

“Cash tomorrow,” the old lady echoed and began to cough until her skeleton shook in every bone. She went away coughing and the manservant rose. “If she is ill tomorrow I am here,” he said heartily. “I am like a son to the old pair.”

“Have they no sons?” Chen asked with some sympathy.

“They have two sons somewhere,” the man said shrugging his shoulders. “But what are sons nowadays? They are no longer filial — not if they go to foreign schools. That is why the old man keeps himself asleep with opium. He does not want to see these new times, he says. Old Lady smokes, too, but there is not always enough for both of them.”

Chen listened to this attentively. Then he said somewhat coldly, “We will come tomorrow at this time with the money.”

“I will not give it to any hand but the old lady’s,” James said, “and I want a paper saying it has been received.” He had seen the opium smokers who came to the hospital to be cured. There was neither heart nor soul left in them.

They walked toward the hospital somewhat solemnly, thinking of that strange lost household, whose sons came home no more.

“In these times the old are piteous, too,” Chen said suddenly. “Doubtless that old pair had thought their sons would care for them as they had taken care of their own parents. Doubtless they dreamed of grandchildren running about. Oh, it wasn’t all perfect in the old days — don’t mistake me! Old people grew tiresome and plenty of sons wanted to be rid of them. But duty would not allow it. Well, it was called duty but actually it was pride and shame. If a man’s parents were not cared for and happy it was his shame. If they were cared for and happy it was his pride. Now pride and shame have gone to other matters and so the old are lost.”

“What other matters?” James asked. He was not so much curious for the answer as to hear what Chen would say. He was beginning to feel a warm sort of love for this honest, thinking fellow.

Chen shook his head. “How do I know? I can’t understand. It seems to be getting rich, getting a pretty-modern woman for a new wife, living in a house with electricity and running water — stupid things.”

He sighed loudly. “Well, here is the hospital gate again. We part here, do we not? Shall we meet tomorrow here at the same time in the afternoon? Or do you need me any more?”

He was so eager, so anxious to come that James said very heartily, “Come with me, please. I dare not face the ghostly old lady alone.”

Chen laughed and so they parted, and James went back to his room. There Young Wang waited for him impatiently, for he had promised the gateman to have a feast with him tonight.

“Here you are, master,” he exclaimed. “I thought you had fallen down a well somewhere or that you had been beset by thieves.”

“No, I have rented a house.”

Young Wang’s jaw dropped. “A house!”

“Yes. Tomorrow you will go with me to see it. It will have to be cleaned.”

“I shall have to hire servants under me,” Young Wang exclaimed. “It would give me no face were I the only servant in a whole house.”

James saw himself already beset with household difficulties. “Tomorrow,” he said, “when we have seen the house we will decide on such matters.”

The next afternoon he and Young Wang went together to the stone lions and James was glad to see the strong square-shouldered figure of Chen waiting for him there. It seemed natural enough today to call him Chen.

“Have you the money?” Chen asked at once. He nodded to Young Wang, who grinned.

“I have it and a little more with which to buy a good lock for the door.”

“We must not buy any furniture until the house is clean and the carpenters and plasterers have done their work,” Chen said briskly. “There is no use in giving them places to sit down and rest themselves.”

They walked away quickly, again setting up a roar of anger among the waiting rickshas, and were soon at the gate of their landlord.

The gate was open and the manservant and woman servant were both waiting for them, wearing clean garments. Young Wang took a dislike to them at once. “These are wild people,” he told James in a low voice, but James only smiled.

After they had entered the house Young Wang was even more distressed when he saw the master and mistress. For today the old gentleman had somehow been persuaded to get up and he appeared wrapped in an old soiled gray satin robe that was now much too large for him, and although his hair had been brushed and his face washed, nothing could hide the dreadful ashen color of his skin that was stretched over his fleshless frame. Beside him and a little behind was the old mistress. Young Wang pulled at James’s sleeve. “Master, this is very evil,” he whispered. “A landlord who eats opium is like a leech fastened to your belly!”

“Perhaps I can cure him some day,” James replied. He had set his heart upon the house and he was not inclined to listen to Young Wang’s fears.

“Where is the document of rental?” Chen asked.

“Here,” the manservant said and pulled from his sleeve a small scroll which he unrolled; it was handwritten in shaky letters and James read it with difficulty. But Chen read it over his shoulder easily and quickly and he pointed out two places which did not please him.

“The rent is not to be paid two months in advance,” he said. “One month is sufficient.”

The old gentleman’s jaw fell ajar but he nodded and the brush and the ink block were fetched and with much trembling preparation he made the change.

“Now,” Chen said, “you are not to say that you take no responsibility for the house. We will make the repairs but if it is found that a beam is rotten or the foundation yields, that is to be your business.”

Once more in silence the old man made the change.

“I will add one more thing myself,” Chen said, looking very stern. And bending he wrote in a fluent style this sentence, “The landlord agrees never to ask for the rent in advance.”

“Good, good,” Young Wang murmured.

“Now for the seal,” Chen said.

The manservant brought out the red family seal from the table drawer and he stamped it upon the paper, and James wrote his own name beneath it and Chen wrote his as a witness, and so now the money could be given over. James gave it to the old gentleman, who, not having spoken one word all the time, put out his two hands together like a bowl and received it. When he felt the money in his hands he clenched them together and rose and hurried out of the room blindly, his robes dragging after him. The old lady went after him and then the woman servant and there was only the manservant left to see them away. It was so sad a sight that James felt depressed by it and Chen sighed. “These are among the many lost,” he said gently, and they went once again to look at the house that now belonged to James.

Only Young Wang was not sad. He took lively interest in the house and discovered a cistern beyond the well, and he found a good drain, stone lined though very ancient, which could carry the household waste water through the back wall to a creek that ran behind the house. Nor was he afraid of the weasels. He took a fallen tree branch and clubbed one long lank fellow to death where it hid behind a door! “Some big female cats will chase these devils away,” he exclaimed. “Leave it to me, master. Cats are better than exorcists. But they must be big ones who will fight, or the weasels will suck even their blood.”

So in the days that followed, under Young Wang’s interest this house became a shelter again for human beings. He it was who harried carpenters and plasterers and cleaning women until the place was new again and its stale odor of the past was gone. He it was who went to the thieves’ market at dawn and bought tables and chairs and pots and bowls and kitchen ladles of beaten iron and cauldrons for the brick stoves in the kitchen. James and Chen together went to old furniture shops and bought heavy blackwood tables for the main rooms and they bought Western beds.

“My sisters will never be able to sleep on boards, however good Chinese they become,” he told Chen. “And I myself — I prefer American springs under me.”

He indulged himself and bought a few fine scrolls for the wall and an old piano that some Westerner had left behind when he went away before the war. “It is a palace,” Chen said proudly, and did not notice that James did not reply. In such indulgence James took no great pleasure. If he had been preparing a home for Lili, he thought solemnly, how different it might have been! But then, none of this would have been good enough.

The days drew on and the expected letter from his father did not arrive. James was not surprised. He could imagine, as well as though he were in that New York apartment, how his father rose each morning contemplating the writing of the letter, how after contemplation he postponed, and how meanwhile he went to his classes on Chinese literature and came home exhausted, how he refreshed himself with a short nap, some tea which in private he liked to drink with cream and sugar, although publicly he declared these things only spoiled good tea, and how after reading a little while to refresh his spirit it was too late to write a letter that day.

From his mother, however, James did receive a letter. Like most of her letters, it was so rich with piety and good purpose that he was not able to discern from it what had happened. That it concerned Louise, that she had been foolish and led away by the Americans, that she was after all very young and much prettier than Mary, who had never had American young men admirers, and he must not therefore be too harsh a judge of Louise, who was growing up pretty even to Americans, and this was very difficult and a family problem, and she had been trying to persuade his pa to come to China, too, and they would all be happy again together in a house somewhere in Peking, only of course Pa felt he could not leave his work just low and perhaps in another year or two — so his mother wrote. She had not at all approved the sudden way in which Mary had taken Louise away and Peter, too, just about to enter college to become a great engineer, but the ocean was always there and they could come back if they did not like China nowadays. Only Louise of course had better stay long enough to fall in love with a nice young Chinese. It was the elder brother’s duty to take the father’s place and if James, her dear son, knew any nice young men, Chinese of course, and could arrange a marriage for Louise, undoubtedly that would be the solution, although he must not misunderstand and think that Louise had to get married. Luckily there was nothing like that, but still there might have been and they must all be thankful. Such was the gist of his mother’s letter and James read it over thoughtfully three times and gathered that Louise was somehow a new problem.

Without much enlightenment therefore he asked for a week’s vacation and with Young Wang at his heels he waited the day on the familiar dock in Shanghai for the steamship. The house was ready. He had found work for Mary in the children’s annex of the hospital and he had registered Peter in the college now receiving a fresh life under the leadership of a famous Chinese scholar. For Louise he had planned nothing because he knew nothing. She could always enter a girls’ school. There was also a Catholic convent, kept by six sisters, two of them Chinese and four of them French. He must talk with Mary before deciding for Louise.

The day was windy and gray and the waterside was black. Small boats were pushing about scavenging in the filthy river. Each had its family of man and woman and children and a grandparent or two, and these looked cold and unhappy. He was sorry that the three who were coming to him must see the Bund on such a day. The tall modern buildings looked forbidding and alien, as though they did not belong there. They lifted their heads too high above the boats and the crowded streets.

Even Young Wang seemed subdued. He had left a small underservant in charge of the house with his old mother for amah. Young Wang was proving a stern headboy. He did not allow Little Dog the least latitude for laziness, and the boy was beginning to look harried. Young Wang himself, dressed in a clean uniform of the semi-official sort in which he delighted, stood now just behind his master. He would have preferred no women in the household, for a man was easier to serve. His master’s sisters were Chinese, but they had been in America so long that he feared they had the tedious and fussy ways of American ladies in houses. He felt somewhat diminished and in low spirits when he thought of this. Either he was headboy or he was not, he told himself. He would take orders only from his master. So far as he was concerned there was no mistress. When his master married a wife there would be a rightful mistress. This point was clear in his mind by the time the yelling coolies were lassoing the ship, and he felt better and the grin returned to his face.

James saw them at once. They stood apart from both Chinese and Americans in a small close knot of three. Peter was between the two girls and he was holding his hat with both hands. A fresh autumn wind had sprung up with the dawn and was increasing as the skies grew dark toward noon. This wind blew into the air like a red flag the scarf Louise wore and fluttered her curled hair. Mary had wrapped her blue scarf tightly about her head. He saw their faces quite clearly and he felt concern and yet a sort of warm pleasure that here at last was something of his own.

He would not acknowledge that these months had been lonely but now he knew they had been. He did not know why. He was surrounded with people from morning until night and his work was satisfying and yet discouraging — satisfying because everything done for the crowds of sick amounted to much, and yet discouraging because he was always conscious of the millions beyond all aid. Underneath satisfaction and discontent was the feeling that he was living on the surface of his country and that he had put down no roots into it. He was still alien, and he wanted to lose this feeling of being alien. He wanted to plunge deep into the earth and the waters of his people, and he did not know how. He wanted to belong here so profoundly that he could never go away again. He could not live airily the rootless surface existence of the other doctors. Chen of course was the exception to them. He had grown very fond of Chen and he had begged him to come and share the house with them, but Chen had until now refused. When James had spoken again he had said, “Let us wait and see. It may be that your sisters and brother will not like me and then it will be difficult for both of us if they want me to go away again.”

“How foolish you are,” James had replied.

“No, I am only shy,” Chen had said and had roared out his great laugh. This laugh, James now knew, did in reality cover a very tender shyness, and so he had said no more.

But it was not only doctors who were living unrooted upon the surface of the life here. James discovered that there were many others who also lived thus, young men and women who had lived and studied in France and England as well as in America, and even some who had studied in Russia. But these who had studied in Russia were different from the others. They had not, at least the ones he knew in Peking, allied themselves with the Communists, but they talked in words of force. The people, they declared, should be “forced” to change their medieval ways of thinking and feeling and behaving. What this force was to be they did not say, nor did they know how it was to be applied. James, listening to much talk at their gatherings, had gradually withdrawn from them all and he devoted himself entirely to his work in the hospital. Yet he knew that though he spent his whole life in this work, it would not reach below the surface. Suppose that he had four hundred patients a month, that would be fewer than five thousand persons a year, and if he lived his life out, that would not be half a million people and what were so few among the hundreds of millions? Somehow he must live in larger and deeper ways, which he had not yet discovered.

Meanwhile here was the family responsibility thrust upon him by his father and he must meet it first. There was a shout from the wharf coolies; they threw out the great knots of woven rope and the ship ground against the dock. The gangplank was lowered, and he waited and then felt Mary’s warm arms about him and Louise’s hands in his, and Peter thrust his arm through his brother’s.

“You’re looking well, Jim,” Mary said breathlessly. “A little thin, maybe.”

“Shanghai is some place,” Peter said.

Only Louise said nothing. James saw that she was very much thinner and that she looked as though she had been crying. He had taken rooms at the best of the few good hotels, and he had ordered a good luncheon for this midday and now he was glad that he had done so, for the rain began to fall in earnest and shivering ricksha coolies crowded under the roof of the dock, and the miserable scavenger boats tried to hide themselves under the piers. Louise looked at them and looked away.

“Young Wang!” James called. “You take care of the baggage, please!”

Young Wang appeared smiling. “I will do it, master. And please, here is the carriage.”

He had hired a carriage whose cushions had been newly covered with khaki and whose horse was something less starved than others. The driver was huddled under an oilcloth on his high seat but when he saw his customers he jumped down and took away the old newspapers which he had spread over the cushions.

It seemed even a little cozy inside the carriage, especially when the big oilcloth apron smelling of tung oil had been fastened to hooks in the umbrella top and the horse trotted away from the dock.

“Well,” James said, smiling on them all. “This is nice.”

They smiled at him wanly, or so he thought.

“Louise was seasick,” Mary said.

“So were you,” Peter said.

“Not much, really,” Mary retorted. “You are too proud of yourself, Peter.”

The long sea voyage had worn down their tempers a little. “I wish I could have ordered a good day for you,” James said, trying to be cheerful. Still, he told himself, it was well enough to go through the streets behind this oilcloth curtain. Chinese people seemed always unprotected against rain and snow. Their cotton garments melted like wet paper, and while in the sunshine they looked gay enough all of them were miserable in rain. And the Bund lasted for so short a distance. Too soon the streets became crowded and disheveled. The hotel entrance was pleasant and a smart doorman received them. Their rooms, taken for a day and a night, had made inroads upon his funds but James was grateful for temporary comfort. The lobby was warm and lined with palms, and sheltered at least from the weather. Well-dressed Chinese and a few foreigners sat upon the imitation-leather chairs. It was not too different from what they were used to, James thought. Upstairs the rooms were clean. He had taken two, one for himself and Peter and one for the girls, with a connecting bath.

“What measly towels!” Louise said when she looked in.

“I believe they are made in the factories here,” James said.

“Why is it we can’t do anything as well as other people?” Louise muttered.

“Now, Louise,” Mary said, “don’t begin by being disgusted with everything.”

“We’d better have some food,” James said. “We’ll all feel better. Then we can go to a movie this afternoon, if you like. That sounds like New York, doesn’t it? Let’s get ready.”

He wanted very much an hour alone with Mary but he knew that there would be no chance for this. In his room with Peter he did not know whether to ask questions or not. He began tentatively enough as he watched his younger brother brush his hair carefully before the mirror.

“It’s a great surprise, all this,” he said. “Ma’s letter didn’t make anything very plain, either, and I haven’t heard from Pa.”

“It’s a big fuss about nothing, if you ask me,” Peter grunted. He took out a cigarette rather ostentatiously. He had not smoked when James was at home, because this doctor brother had objected to his smoking before he had stopped growing. Now he wanted James to know that he did as he liked and expected to continue doing so. James understood and said nothing.

“Louise made Pa angry,” Peter went on. “I never thought he really meant to ship us off, though. He threatens so many things he never does. But there was no question about this. He went himself and bought the tickets and he wouldn’t pay for any tuition for us. I want to turn right around and go back, of course. I can make up the few weeks that I am missing at college. I’m still going to be an engineer.”

James smiled. “Better stay a few months anyway, now you’re here,” he said. “Half a year doesn’t matter at your age. And I’ve fixed up rather a nice house in Peking for us all. It’s a fine old city — makes you proud.”

“Is it better than Shanghai?”

“I think so anyway.”

There seemed nothing to say for a few minutes. Then James returned to the effort. “So you don’t know really what Louise did?”

“Oh, I know,” Peter said. “She’s in love with Philip Morgan, and Phil doesn’t want to marry her. That’s about it. I know Phil. He doesn’t want to marry anybody now. When he does he will probably marry some debutante.”

He was careful not to say that Philip probably did not want to marry a Chinese. He thought of himself as an American. Now something occurred to him. “Say, I heard something interesting on the ship. We had a fellow on board from Hollywood. He’s coming out here to shoot some pictures. It’s a story about a GI — sort of a Chinese Madame Butterfly story he said, only the GI doesn’t go away. He takes his gal home. He said that while they don’t want stories about white met and Negroes getting married they don’t mind Chinese any more. Pretty good, isn’t it?”

James smiled. He could not speak, watching this brother of his. Peter was utterly and completely foreign. He had nothing to help him here, no shred of knowledge, no hour of experience, to help him endure being Chinese. For it would be a matter of endurance. Peter had never absorbed either atmosphere or ideas from their father, and now James realized, though grudgingly, that the atmosphere of ancient Chinese philosophy which his father had so persistently built around them had helped only him and Mary. Even after they understood its artificiality, and then perhaps its uselessness in these swift modern times, it had become a part of them, thinly spun, indeed, but there, nevertheless, its mild silvery thread running through the structure of their beings. But Peter and Louise had absorbed none of it. Instead they had come to despise it, and they were never deceived for an instant by its unreality. Nor did they understand or care that once it had been a reality.

“So Louise was sent here to get over a love affair,” James said.

“Something like that,” Peter said briskly. He got up, bored by Louise. “Jim, if I stay for this autumn will you promise to make Pa let me go home in time for midyears?”

“If you won’t call it home,” Jim replied. “This is home, you know.”

“Oh well — you know what I mean,” Peter said. He stood restlessly, his hands jingling some change in his pockets. “I don’t want to waste time, even if I have plenty of it.”

“I think you ought to go back at midyears,” James said, getting to his feet. “There is no good place here to get engineering. The country needs fellows like you — needs them now, if this eternal quarrel would ever end between the government and the Communists. We’re all held up by that. But maybe by the time you’re through, it will be settled one way or the other.” He paused. “Of course there’s always the chance you may not want to go back. Something steals into you. I don’t want to go back — though there’s much I don’t like here, I can tell you.”

“I know I’ll want to go back,” Peter said. “Come on, let’s eat.”

It was the end of talk, and they joined Mary and Louise in the hall and went downstairs to a hearty lunch of barley broth, boiled beef, cabbage and potatoes and a cornstarch pudding. It was the standard hotel meal for foreigners.

But it was quite pleasant in the motion-picture theater. The building had been designed by an American and the seats were still new enough not to have their upholstery torn and the springs exposed. The air was thick with the smell of Chinese food, for everybody seemed to be munching something, but they grew used to that. It was still raining when they came in and it was pleasant to get under shelter. The picture was American, too. It was a Western, and after it was finished there was an old Harold Lloyd comedy, so old that to the four young people sitting together it was new, and they laughed at it. When they came out it was nearly dark and again the hotel seemed shelter. Young Wang had brought their baggage and when they came in he served tea with small cakes and sandwiches from the hotel kitchen. These tasted good and they began talking as they ate. James told them about the house in Peking, which perhaps sounded better than it was as he told of it, and Peter heard about the college and Mary about the hospital. Louise, James said, could make up her mind about what she wanted to do when she got there. Maybe she would just want to keep house for them for a few weeks until she saw everything. None of them talked about America. They did not unpack very much because they were to take the train before noon the next day. The trains were better now and they did not need to go more than an hour before theirs started. Young Wang would go early and spend a little money.

They parted, brothers and sisters, with a warm family feeling. It was good to be together. Before he went to bed James sent a cablegram to his parents. “Children arrived safely. All well. We go north tomorrow. Love and respect. James.”

He lay awake long after Peter was breathing in deep even waves of sleep. He had wanted to get Mary away and ask her about Lili, but he had not dared to leave Louise alone. There was something desperate in her face.