The handsome delicate-featured Dr. Peng Chenyu was seated at his carved desk, and leaning over him was the pretty head nurse. They were talking in earnest tones, the man smiling, the girl coquettish. Then they saw James standing square and frank as an American in the open doorway.
The girl stepped back and slipped from the room by a side door. Dr. Peng spoke in his high smooth voice. “Dr. Liang,” he said in English, “please be so kind as to knock before you enter.”
James spoke in Chinese. He rarely used English. It disgusted him that every little student nurse and interne tried to chatter in English. “That this was a private office I did not know, Dr. Peng,” he said. “I come to complain. The wards are being reduced until now my patients are lying on the floor.”
Dr. Peng smiled and lifted a small object from his desk. It was the nude figure of a woman and it was made of white jade. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, still in English. He came from Shanghai and he did not speak Mandarin well.
“A naked woman,” James said bluntly.
“Much more interesting than that,” Dr. Peng said delicately. His voice had the cadences of poetry. “It is the figure that native doctors use to diagnose the ills of an old-fashioned woman patient. She will not show herself to a man—as you have doubtless discovered—but she puts her pretty fingertip somewhere on this jade figure, to show where her pain is.” Dr. Peng laughed silently. “What amuses me is how lovingly the Chinese doctors carve these little figures, or have them carved, and how precious is the material! Do sit down, Dr. Liang.”
“I have no time,” James said. “I have come to complain about the wards.”
Dr. Peng held the little figure in his palm. “As to our wards,” he said gently, “we regret very much that they are too few.”
“This pandering to the rich disgusts me,” James said. “Every few days I find workmen putting up walls about a section of the ward to make a new private room for a general or an official.”
“It is not pandering,” Dr. Peng said. Virtue shone in his narrow brilliantly black eyes. “It is necessity. Charity patients do not pay. Generals and officials and millionaires pay very well. I daresay you would complain, Dr. Liang, if your salary were curtailed—an excellent salary it is, too. You are worth it, of course. But the rich people pay for it. Do not forget that our grants from America ceased last year. We have to find our own salaries as well as support the hospital.”
James glared into the handsome smooth face. Then he turned and went out, slamming the door slightly. What Peng had said was true. The hospital was expensive beyond all proportion to the lives of the people. Only the rich could afford to lie under these massive roofs, only the rich could afford to walk the marble-floored halls and use the tiled baths. There was no place for the poor except in the crowded wards.
He went back to the clinic and patients pressed toward him. “Doctor—doctor—good doctor,” they wailed at him when he came into the room. At first their urgency had confused him and had even made him angry. But now he knew they could not help crying out to him. They had endured so much and there were so many of them. “I am here,” he said quietly. “I will not go away until I have seen each one of you.” Only when they found that they could trust his word did they become quiet.
“Please forgive us,” an old man said gently. “Usually the doctors do not like to see so many sick and poor waiting for them and they choose only a few of us and the rest of us must go away again.”
James had found that this was so. What angered and discouraged him most profoundly was the callousness of his own colleagues to the ills of people who came to them for healing. The selfishness of the rich he had soon come to take for granted, but what he could not take for granted, as the weeks went on, was the heartlessness of doctors and nurses. Not all of them, he granted grudgingly—Dr. Liu Chen was an honor to any hospital, and he learned always to call upon one or another of three nurses. The kindness of these three he could trust, Rose Mei, Kitty Sen, and Marie Yang. All nurses had foreign names and used them carefully, just as they spent half a week’s salary on permanent waves at the hands of a White Russian hairdresser in what had once been the Legation Quarter.
Much of his private thought went into angry pondering over this callousness of his fellows. Dr. Kang, for example, with whom he often operated, was a delightful friend, an enthusiastic companion on the rare evenings when they were free to go to a famous restaurant or to sit in the deserted palace gardens or even to ride outside the city walls to sleep for the night in some cool old temple. Kang was a learned man, and not only a graduate of Johns Hopkins. He knew Chinese literature as well as Western and he had a famous collection of musical instruments from many places in the world. He was the friend of a great actor, and one day in August he took James to his friend’s house, and James met the pleasant round-faced man who had a genius for making himself look like a beautiful woman. The whole afternoon was a dream out of history. The house was huge, room opened into room and court led to court. In an outdoor pavilion they had sat and had eaten the cream-filled Tibetan sweetmeats which the actor loved and dreaded. “My career depends upon my figure,” he said with a rueful merriment, “and my cook, alas, is superb. Only while the Japanese were here could I eat and let myself grow fat. Also I grew a moustache and beard. Now that they are gone I must return to my roles.”
He touched the strings of a flat harp and sang in his high falsetto which gave so perfectly the illusion that it was a woman’s young voice. The air was tender with sweetness and mild sadness. The atmosphere of age and mellow living and thinking suffused the evening.
Every chair, every table, the scrolls upon the walls, the tiles of the floors, the lattices of the windows, the carvings of the outdoor pavilion in which they had sat, the shrubs and rocks of the garden courts—all were exquisite and planned with a sophisticated sense of beauty. Kang had seemed entirely at home there as he had discussed with his friend the detail of a song, the finesse of a gesture. James had listened, feeling himself unlearned and crude because he had spent his life in the West. He began that night to blame his father for taking him away so young into the foreign world.
In the hospital the next day he was shocked afresh by Kang’s arrogance and his complete indifference to suffering. He was an excellent surgeon, one of the best that James had ever seen at work. His thin strong hands were all fine bone and smooth sinew. Any patient might be grateful for those hands working in his vitals with such speed and accuracy. But once the task was over whether the patient lived or died was none of Kang’s concern. He seldom inquired. He often refused altogether to operate on an old woman, on a poor man, or on a frightened child. Crying children especially annoyed him.
“Take the child away,” he had ordered Rose one day.
“But it is mastoid, Doctor,” she urged. “The boy will die.”
Kang shrugged his shoulders and washed his hands thoroughly at the spotless basin. Rose took the child to James and told him the story. James operated and the child lived.
There was no use in talking to Kang but James did it. “That mastoid case,” he had said the next evening. They were on their way to a wedding. One of the older doctors was taking a young wife. Kang was pulling on his white gloves. He never wore Chinese clothes and his black dinner suit was as immaculate as it would have been were he in New York.
“What mastoid?” he asked. He frowned at the red tea flower in his buttonhole. It looked somewhat faded, but this was not the season for the flowers.
“That boy who was brought from his village yesterday morning,” James said. For the first time since he had come he wore his tuxedo and it was not well pressed. Young Wang had left him at Peking to return to his village home and the hospital servant was green and untrained in Western ways.
Dr. Kang had looked impatient. “My dear Liang, surely I can choose my own cases.”
“But the boy would have died,” James remonstrated.
“Thousands—millions, I might say—must die,” Dr. Kan
g had retorted. “When you have been here a year or two longer you will understand that common sense alone compels you to take the long view. What are we? A handful of doctors in a nation as medieval as Europe in the sixteenth century. We cannot possibly save everyone from dying. We would be the first dead, did we try!”
It was true. James did not reply. He followed Kang into the wide hall which ran through the doctor’s house and stepped into the carriage which stood waiting at the gate.
The wedding was to be at the Peking Hotel. Modern weddings were seldom in homes, as the old-fashioned ones still were, and now streams of fashionably dressed people were being driven in horse carriages and motorcars toward the hotel. Dr. Su, the groom, had been three times married and twice divorced. His first wife still lived in the remote ancestral homestead somewhere in Szechuan, but nobody had ever seen her, nor did he ever speak of her. Two sons, now grown, were internes at the hospital but they also never spoke of the small silent illiterate woman who was their mother. Tonight they stood near their father when James entered the lobby of the hotel. Dr. Su, in Western evening dress and white gloves, welcomed his guests pleasantly, and a uniformed servant offered cocktails and tea. Dr. Su had been married so often that he did not take the event with any embarrassment and he chatted with his colleagues and friends.
“Dr. Liang—Jim,” he said affectionately in English. “Come along, man—choose your drink. Tea? You are so old-fashioned.”
James smiled. “Such tea seems rather a novelty to me,” he said. He liked Dr. Su, who was his senior surgeon, and he spoke to him in English as a courtesy. He had never heard Dr. Su speak Chinese except to a servant.
The great lobby, fragrant with lilies, was soon filled with guests. The men were in Western clothes for the most part, and the women in graceful close-fitting Chinese dress. Here and there a military officer’s uniform shone resplendently and swords clanked. There were a few elderly men in rich Chinese gowns, enough to show that Dr. Su had his grateful patients everywhere.
In the midst of the talk the music, subdued until now, broke into the Mendelssohn Wedding March and Dr. Su’s elder son, a shy, grave young man, touched his father’s arm. “Pa,” he said, “they are waiting for you.”
Dr. Su looked startled, then he laughed. “I’d forgotten,” he said frankly. He wiped his lips with a spotless white silk handkerchief, for he had been eating butterfly shrimps with his cocktails. He cleared his throat, looked dignified, and walked beside his son toward the ballroom where the guests were already assembling. He turned into a side entrance, and a few minutes later the audience saw his tall slender figure appear on the stage followed now by both sons and Dr. Kang, who was his best man.
Well-to-do modern people had many foreign weddings and there was nothing new about this one. Only the servants of the guests saw anything strange about it and they clustered about the door, gazing in the same open-mouthed astonishment with which they stared at Hollywood motion pictures. They fell back for the bride and her bridesmaids. Her father walked beside her looking hot and ill at ease. He was a retired warlord, and having taken off his uniform permanently immediately after the war, he wore now a heavy brocaded silvery satin robe and a black velvet jacket. Since he no longer troubled to hold in his large belly with a military belt, his figure was pyramid-shaped and his shaven head sat like a melon upon it. The shining figure of his daughter was tiny against his mass. Her satin gown, her train, her lace veil were shell pink instead of white and she wore diamonds in her ears, about her neck, and on her arms. Upon her finger she wore a huge diamond solitaire. Dr. Su was a prudent man and each time he had divorced his former wives he had recovered this ring.
His face did not change as he watched his young bride come up the aisle, nor did she lift her eyes. She was walking with painful intent to the march, but Dr. Su noticed that she missed the beat. He was a little annoyed at this, for she was supposed to be a fairly brilliant pianist. He had heard her play Chopin concertos with dash and execution. He himself was a good violinist, although he made the excuse that his surgery made it necessary for him to keep the ends of his fingers sensitive and therefore he could not practice as much as he wished. One reason he had chosen this little creature among scores like her was that she might accompany him upon the piano when he played for guests at his frequent dinner parties.
He looked somewhat critically at the little figure coming up the aisle followed by the train of girls in dresses of all colors. He did not know her very well, but that perhaps did not matter. He had known his second wife very well, and they had quarreled bitterly. They had been lovers before their marriage and after it. His third wife had taken an American as a lover, and that he could not tolerate, especially when he saw the tall boy in uniform. He was too handsome, too easy, too romantic looking, and Dr. Su knew that never again would he be able to hold his wife’s attention.
His first wife he scarcely remembered. That wedding had been different indeed. He had been in haste and impatience to get to America. It was the first time, and America then had seemed wonderful and perfect and his home hatefully old-fashioned. But his mother would not let him go until he had consented to marry the girl to whom his parents had engaged him so long ago, so much a part of his childhood that it was nothing to him. The wedding had been the traditional one, the bride in red satin from head to foot, a veil of beads hanging over her face. The feasting had gone on for three days. When he saw her alone for the first night he had found her a pretty little thing, speechless with shyness. He had never been able to persuade her to say anything to him. A month of this silent marriage and his mother let him go. His first son was born while he was in Baltimore. His second son had been born after his return. Then he had left home, never to go back until his parents were killed during a harvesttime by angry tenant farmers. They had not hurt the timid woman who hid in a dry well nor the two little boys whom she clutched. But after that he had brought his sons away with him and their mother lived on in the old home with his eldest uncle who took over the lands.
The wedding ceremony was half through before he realized he had paid no heed to it.
“Where is the ring?” the officiating Presbyterian minister asked. “Here, sir,” the eldest son whispered. He took it from his pocket and gave it to the best man who gave it to the groom. Dr. Su put it on the delicate third finger where the solitaire shone so bravely, and thus he was married again.
The wedding music blared from the horns and trumpets of the hired hotel band and the procession marched gaily down the aisle. In the lobby Dr. Su took his stand under a huge bell of red paper roses and prepared to receive the congratulations of his friends. He was now a rich man, thanks to his father-in-law. The dining-room doors were thrown open and the smell of fine feast foods streamed out upon the summer air.
James went forward to shake hands with Dr. Su. He had been moved against his will by the wedding and the music. So he supposed would it have been had Lili been ready to marry him. Half curiously he looked at the face of the bride. It was painted and powdered into an exquisite mask, as lifeless as the face of a movie star. He bowed and turned away.
“I say,” Dr. Kang called at the door, “aren’t you staying for the feast? Everything is first rate here.”
“Thank you, I have duties at the hospital,” James said, and he went out into the street. A cluster of ricksha men seized their vehicles at the sight of him and he climbed into the nearest one. The puller was a youngish man and since the night was hot he wore no jacket. His smooth brown back rippled with the undercurrent of muscles and he ran without effort. But he was too thin and the shape of his skeleton was clear, a fine firm structure, the bones strong and delicate. He wore his hair long enough to fall almost to his neck and it flowed behind him in the breeze. His profile when he turned it was clean and large.
“Where is your home?” James asked when the fellow slowed to a walk near the hospital.
“In a village a hundred li from here,” the man replied.
“Why are you
here?” James asked.
The man turned his head and smiled and showed white perfect teeth. “There are too many of us on the land,” he said frankly. “My father owns very little and he rents as much as he can. But the landlord lives abroad and his old uncle does as he likes with the rents.”
“What village is yours?” James asked with sudden curiosity.
“The village of Anming,” the man said.
“Anming,” James repeated. “That is my village, too.”
The man laughed. “Then I will not ask you for wine money,” he declared. They were at the hospital gate now and he set down the poles of the ricksha.
“Because we come from the same village I must give you wine money,” James declared in turn. He could not tell this fellow that the absent landlord was his own father!
The man made a feint of politeness but his eyes glistened when James poured silver into his palm. “I wish our landlord were like you, elder brother,” he said smiling, and with such thanks he took up his ricksha and darted away into the street and out of sight.
James went slowly up the stairs of the doctors’ house and to his own two rooms. Something familiar struck his eyes. Upon the handle of the door hung an imitation panama hat. Young Wang’s, without a doubt! The fellow had a weakness for hats. He went in and found Young Wang in his white cotton underwear, mopping the floors. He had taken off his outer clothes, and had laid his jacket across the bed.
Young Wang grinned at him from his knees and his white teeth flashed. “Master, this floor!” he exclaimed. “How many days since it was washed?”
“How do I know?” James replied, smiling back at him. Young Wang got up, darted forward and took his hat. He held it in both hands and admired it. “What did you pay for this fine hat, master?” “I bought it in America,” James said.
“Everything is better there than here,” Young Wang said, and he put the hat reverently into the closet. Then he wrung out the cloth, emptied the pail out the window and put it under the bed.
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