Kinfolk

by Pearl S. Buck

“Then why did you—” she began, and could not go on.

  His eyes were downcast and he had dropped his head so that she could not look at him. His profile was gentle and his lips were trembling. She could see how Louise had come to love him. He was not coarse and big-nosed as so many Americans were, and his skin was smooth and delicate, his hair and eyes were brown. She felt rather sorry for him.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” he stammered. “Gosh, I like Louise awfully. We were all having too good a time, I guess. It was pretty late. I’m afraid I was a little tight—”

  “When was it?” she asked in a faint voice.

  “Only a couple of weeks ago—” he muttered. “We were all at a roadhouse. I’m awfully sorry. I could kick myself. The funny thing is—I guess it was the first time for both of us. We were both—scared.”

  The light changed and the taxi jerked them forward. He caught her arm and she shrank from his touch. She would have got out before the light changed, because now she knew everything she had to know. No, there was one more thing.

  “I suppose your family wouldn’t want you to marry—a Chinese girl, even if you did want to?”

  “My mother wouldn’t like it,” Philip said huskily. “My dad is more—broadminded. Of course we all like Louise awfully. She’s pretty and smart and all that.”

  There was no sign whatever of love in his voice or his eyes. She stopped feeling sorry for him and she grew angry enough to want to defend her sister. “I suppose you don’t know what you have done to our family,” she said bitterly. “It is easy for you Americans, but for us—it just spoils her chances of a good marriage—I mean, it would have to be told. And it would always be between her and her husband.”

  “Gosh,” he said miserably, “I’m sorry.”

  She wanted to wound him and she did not know how. “If it had been in the old times in China you’d both be killed,” she went on.

  “Gosh,” he said again. “I guess we ought to be glad it’s not old times.”

  To her surprise when he said this she wanted to cry. Her throat grew tight and her eyes filled with tears. He did not know what he had done and nothing could make him know because he had nothing with which to understand what he had done. It had simply been, with him, an evening’s drunkenness, then something more of fun, and now something he was vaguely sorry for. In her fury she imagined that he would have taken it more seriously had Louise not been Chinese, though it was a hundred times more serious for that very reason. But he would not understand that either—or care.

  She leaned forward and tapped on the glass. “Let me out,” she called to the driver. “I want to get out right here.” The taxi drew up to the curb and she got out without saying good-by and slammed the door. She saw Philip’s face, startled and concerned, looking at her through the glass as the cab darted away.

  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.”