James sat down in the wicker easy chair. The room seemed pleasantly cool after the street. Young Wang had drawn the shutters and had laid out fresh towels. He pattered about the room now dusting everywhere with a damp cloth.
“Peking is a great city full of big dust,” he said cheerfully. James watched him without speaking. Within his mind, always preoccupied with his work and not given to much sorting of thought, he felt that he had come to a dividing place. He would have to become one person or another. Either he must join the league of his fellow doctors and live oblivious of his countrymen, or he must take some sort of plunge which he could not define. The surface life was safe enough and quite pleasant. He need not give up his professional standards. His colleagues were good and careful and sometimes superlative doctors. But except for Liu Chen they were not more than that. They worked the full day, they did their duty to the hospital. No one could complain that when Dr. Kang decided to take a case he was less than competent. Dr. Su, who was more human and therefore more likable, even went further sometimes than his duty. But it would have occurred to none of them, and perhaps not even to Liu Chen, to go beyond the demands of his profession.
“You are thinner,” Young Wang said, staring at him as he whisked his cloth about the legs of the table. “You must think of your body.” He reached the mirror and he paused to stare at himself with humorous eyes. He laughed and pointed a finger at his own image. “That big turnip there,” he said. “Anybody can tell he comes from the country!”
“How did you find your village?” James asked.
Young Wang accepted the invitation to converse. He threw the duster over his shoulder and squatted on his heels.
“Sit on a chair,” James said.
“I do not dare,” Young Wang replied politely, and began at once smoothly and coolly to tell his tale. “When I returned to my village I found it was under water. The rains have been too heavy and the nearest dike of the river overflowed. I had first to hire a boat in the small city nearby and I went to my village. It was nearly gone. The houses had crumbled and only the treetops stood above the water except at one place where the land rises a few feet. Upon this small island my village crowded itself. We are all Wangs and of us there are a hundred and five hearts. Thanks to the gods, the waters had risen slowly and so our men had been able to move food and bedding and some small benches for the old to sit on. Also we have some bamboo mats which we have spread upon willow poles for shelter.”
Young Wang laughed as though the predicament were amusing. Then he looked rueful and shook his head. “It is very hard on old people and small children,” he sighed. “Several small ones have fallen into the water and have been swept away. Three old people have died and there has been no place to bury them and so we let them down into the water. This is very bad because now they cannot lie with our ancestors and so all the old people are afraid to die. This is bad, too, for death is natural to the old and they should find comfort in it.”
James listened with growing horror. “Does no one come from the city to help you?” he demanded.
Young Wang raised his eyebrows at the question. “Who comes to help?” he asked. “People have enough trouble for themselves. Ours is not the only village. There are many like us.”
“The mayor of the city should help,” James declared. “Or the governor of the province should at least take notice.”
“No one takes notice of the folk,” Young Wang said. “Those governors and officials are high people and they have their own affairs.”
He sighed loudly, rose from his heels, and whirled his duster over the mirror, glancing at himself with some admiration as he did so.
James watched this. How deep was Young Wang’s grief for his family? He seemed callous and even gay, and yet surely he had feeling. “Did you leave your family on that island?” he asked.
“My parents I took to the city and also my brothers and sisters.” Young Wang picked up a fountain pen from the table and pulled the top from it cautiously. “I found rooms in an inn for them. But it costs very much money and so I came back to work for you, master. Before this, wages were nothing to me, but now I ask that you give me three months’ in advance, and then I will go back to them at the end of the month and pay for what I owe and if the waters have sunk down, I will help them to move again to the village.”
“But you said there was no house,” James reminded him.
“Oh, the house is never mind,” Young Wang replied. “A few days’ labor will put up a mud house again. I will carry some thatch from the city markets and we have willow trees for poles.”
He tested the pen on a bit of paper. “This is one of those self-come ink pens,” he said. “I wish very much someday to have one. But still why should I have it when I cannot write my own name?”
These last words Young Wang said with more sorrow than he had said anything and a flush of shame rose from his neck and spread over his face. He covered the pen again and laid it on the table. “Shall I bring you some night food?” he asked.
“No,” James replied. “I must return to the hospital and see how my patients are before they sleep. I will eat later in the dining hall downstairs.”
“They give you good food here?” Young Wang asked wistfully.
“Excellent.”
“Do the servants eat what is left?”
“I will see that you get your food,” James replied. He knew that doctors often had their private servants. They were fed, probably at the hospital kitchens.
Young Wang immediately looked cheerful. “With my belly certain of fullness three times each day, I fear no god or man,” he declared.
“That is good,” James replied. He went away to his patients and left Young Wang standing before the mirror, arranging the belt about his thin waist.
5
JAMES LIANG WAS NOT A MAN who put his thoughts easily into words. He had learned to distrust words as gestures and flourishes of the mind, more especially of his father’s mind. As a child and a boy he had sat through long evenings in the big comfortable living room and had listened to his father and his friends, elegant and educated in the cultures of England and Europe. Whatever they discussed, and they discussed everything, was spun into a web of words which yet had no substance. By the end of an evening instead of conclusion and conviction the web had dissolved into a mist, and the mist itself dissolved in the silence of the room when they had gone. His father, so genial and brilliant with his guests, came back from the door silent and empty. If the boy James asked a question he was impatient. “It is time for sleep,” he always said shortly.
In this distrust of words James had turned to his American schoolmates, who spun no webs either of thoughts or of words. A hard-hitting fist was more honored than a graceful phrase, and a fact was always more valuable than an idea. Action instead of feeling was what he had learned outside his home, and action he preferred when his father yielded often to the inexplicable melancholy of the exile. From this melancholy his father’s only escape again was in words. A mood, caught from a gray sky over the river and a chill autumn wind, was translated into an essay of tragedy. James was grown before he understood that nothing his father wrote was from conviction. All was from feeling, transient enough. Therefore the young man had learned also to distrust feeling.
Thus, he had nothing with which to understand his own melancholy as the summer ripened in the ancient city. That he was not happy he knew. That he was lonely he knew very well. He tried to believe that this was because of Lili but his too honest heart told him that it was not. He came to putting it in words only in the few brief letters which he wrote to his sister Mary, among the dutiful ones he wrote his father and mother.
“I may as well tell you that there is too much here that is rotten,” he wrote to Mary. “I suppose this is partly because we are an old people and much dead wood has not been cut away. There is decay here—I cannot find out just where, but I see it in Su and Kang and Peng and others. It is even in the nurses. But also it is in
the cooks and the orderlies. Money sticks to every hand. Well, it sticks to many hands in America, too, but here there is no pretense about it. Maybe pretense is not good. Anyway, I somehow feel I have no home in the world.”
In this letter he said nothing about Lili, and reading it in the solitude of her own room Mary rejoiced. Then she read the letter again slowly. It had come to her at a moment when she herself was restless. The summer in the Vermont mountains had filled her with health and energy which as yet had no purpose. She had no lover. She had rejected with some disgust a young Chinese journalist who had pursued her. To accept an American would have been to violate the profound love of her country which was the true passion of her heart. She had quarreled all summer with Louise when she found that this younger sister moped when the mail was delayed. It had not taken too long to discover that Louise read a letter from Estelle almost as eagerly as she read the less frequent ones from Philip.
Mary had taken Louise for a walk when she discovered this, and upon a path fragrant with pine trees in the sun she had faced her sister. “Louise, don’t be a fool.” Thus their talk had begun.
Louise had blushed. Both girls stood still, and by chance it was Louise who stood in the sunshine. Mary looked at her intently and severely. “So you blush!” she cried.
Louise tossed her curled hair. “No, I don’t blush.”
“Your face is red,” Mary said. “I can see something in your eyes. Do you think Philip will marry a Chinese girl? You are silly, Louise. His father and mother will not allow it.”
“Who talked about marriage?” Louise asked. She began to walk on quickly. Mary had waited a moment, watching the slender figure of her sister in its pale yellow dress. Then she had followed with impetuous steps.
“I hope you are not thinking of anything else, Louise,” she said. She seized her sister’s hand. “Louise, do not forget—we are not American. Although we have never seen our own country, yet we are Chinese. We cannot behave like American girls.”
Louise pulled her hand away. “Let me alone,” she cried, and suddenly she began to run down the path and Mary had not pursued her. She sat down on a log and sitting alone she had tried to think what she should do, whether she should tell her parents, whether even she should write to James.
In the end after the family had come back to the city she had talked to Peter, but he had been scornful. “It doesn’t matter what Louise does,” he had said in his young and lordly fashion. “I tell you Louise is already spoiled.”
Mary’s heart had stopped. “Peter, what do you mean?” she had demanded.
Peter had laughed at her look. “Perhaps they have not slept together, if that is what scares you. Mary, you are very old-fashioned. No, but if Philip wanted Louise she would go to him.”
“Doesn’t Philip want her?”
Peter shook his head.
“You mean you have talked with him about Louise?” Mary cried.
Peter looked unwilling. Mary and he breakfasted early and usually alone, and they were talking in the dining room before their parents had come down. “I saw him kiss her one day,” he said at last.
“No!” Mary whispered. “Did Louise let him?”
Peter grinned. “She helped.”
Mary was silent for a moment. As plainly as though she had been in Peter’s place she saw the tall young American with Louise in his arms. “I shall tell Pa,” she said.
Peter shrugged his shoulders. “You have always had too much courage,” he said. He had risen from the table at that, and had gone away to his own affairs. He had only two weeks left him before college and nothing else was important to him.
When Dr. Liang came down ten minutes later he found his elder daughter looking very pretty but preoccupied. He wondered if she were thinking about some young man. Her marriage was the subject of frequent conversation between him and Mrs. Liang and he intended as soon as he saw a suitable young man to make the proper preliminary approaches. Now, observing his daughter’s pretty face and figure, it occurred to him that he ought not to delay too long.
“Good morning, Pa,” Mary said.
“Good morning,” he replied. He sat down and sipped the glass of orange juice at his plate.
“Pa!” Mary said suddenly.
He liked to be calm in the mornings and he heard with some distaste the hint of determination in her voice.
“Yes?” he replied mildly. They spoke in English.
“Pa, I don’t want to tell you this at breakfast because I know you like quiet, but I must tell you before Ma comes down. Louise is in love with Philip.”
Dr. Liang looked surprised. Nellie came in and set his oatmeal before him and he spread sugar on it in a thin even coat. When she had gone out he asked, “Who is Philip?”
“You know, Pa—he is Estelle’s brother—Estelle Morgan.”
Dr. Liang looked shocked. “An American!”
“Yes, Pa. Don’t pretend you don’t know, please, Pa! She has let him kiss her.”
Dr. Liang suddenly had no appetite. He pushed the dish of oatmeal away. “Mary, do you know of what you accuse your sister?”
“That’s why I thought you ought to know. Shall we tell Ma?”
“Tell me what?” Mrs. Liang demanded briskly. She came into the room at this moment, her full eyelids still a little swollen with sleep. “Eh, Liang—what is the matter? Is the oatmeal burned again?”
“No—it is something even worse,” he said angrily.
Mary looked at one parent and then the other. The matter was now in her father’s hands.
“Who has done something?” Mrs. Liang demanded. She sat down, yawned, and poured herself some tea from the pot on the table.
“Your youngest daughter,” he said severely.
“Louise is also your daughter,” Mrs. Liang put in.
“She. has allowed an American man to become—familiar.”
“Oh, Pa, I didn’t say that,” Mary cried.
“It is the same thing,” he said in a lofty voice. He looked at his wife. “I always said that you allowed that girl too much of her own way,” he said solemnly. “She comes and goes as if she were not Chinese. She has no breeding. She is not respectful. Now she insults even our ancestors.”
“Oh, Pa,” Mary said softly. Whenever her father became very Chinese she knew he was really angry.
“Do not interrupt me,” he replied. “And leave the room, if you please. This is for your mother and me to discuss alone.”
He waited until Mary had closed the door and then he began to speak in Chinese. His voice, usually mellifluous and deep, was now high and harsh. He pointed his long forefinger at his wife. “You,” he said, “you! I told you, when we first came here, to watch the girls.”
Mrs. Liang turned pale and began to cry. “How can I watch them?” she asked.
“You have not taught them respect,” he retorted. “They do not obey you. You should tell them what they must do and what they must not do. I have said to you many times we are Chinese. Therefore we must behave as Chinese. What is not suitable for us in China is not suitable here.”
Mrs. Liang continued to sob but not too loudly lest Nellie the maid hear her. She did not know that Nellie had already heard her and was now standing at the door with her ear against it. When she heard nothing but Chinese she looked peevish and when she heard Mrs. Liang’s sobs her lips framed the words, “Poor thing!” Then after a moment, still hearing nothing but Chinese, she went back to her dishes again.
“You have no proper feeling for me as your husband,” Dr. Liang went on severely. “What will people say when they hear that our daughters behave like wantons? They will say that our Confucian ways cannot withstand the ways of barbarians.”
As long as he spoke of Louise Mrs. Liang had only continued to sob but now when he blamed her she wiped her eyes and puckered her lips. “Why then did you come to America, Liang?” she demanded. “At home it was easy to watch the girls. I could have hired amahs to go with them everywhere. How can I go about wit
h them here? Am I an amah? And if I hired two white amahs could they be trusted?”
Dr. Liang pushed back his chair. Their quarrels proceeded always in the same way. He attacked his wife with scolding words until she reached the point of real anger and then he grew majestic and uttered a final sentence. This he did now. “When Louise comes downstairs, send her to my study,” he commanded.
He refused to finish his meal and he walked with dignity out of the room and across the hall to his study and closed the door. Once alone he allowed himself to be as disturbed as he felt. He sat down in his easy chair and cracked his finger joints one after the other and stared at a rubbing of Confucius that hung on the wall. This rubbing he had not valued for a number of years because he had bought it for a dollar in an old shop in Nanking. Since it was paper and could be folded up small he had brought it with other trifles to America to use sometime as a gift. But only a few years ago he had seen one exactly like it in an exhibition and it had been reprinted in a great popular magazine. Then he found his own copy and had it framed in imitation bamboo. When visitors came into his study he pointed to it gracefully. “There is my inspiration,” he said.
Now he looked at Confucius with some irritation. This morning the rubbing merely seemed to be that of a foolishly complacent old man swaddled in too many robes. He turned away from it, closed his eyes, and let his anger against Louise swell to a point where it would be properly explosive. There he maintained it by force of will while he read again his morning portion of the Analects.
Meanwhile Louise had tripped downstairs barefoot, still wearing her nightgown over which she had thrown a pink satin bed jacket. She peeped into the dining room and saw her mother sitting alone at the table. So she came in.
“Oh, Ma,” she said. “I was afraid Pa was here. I am so hungry but I didn’t want to get up. I thought maybe Nellie would bring me up a tray.”
“Your pa wants to see you,” her mother said coldly.
Louise took a bit of toast and nibbled it. “Why, what have I done?” she asked pertly.
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