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 th
umb 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 mad
e 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.”
Kinfolk Page 14