Kinfolk

by Pearl S. Buck

  James bent over him and pressed the huge soft mass.

  “Do you feel something like the head of a child?” Uncle Tao asked anxiously.

  “Yes, but it is not that,” James said gently.

  “What is it?”

  “A lump and it should not be there.”

  “Crabs,” Uncle Tao said dismally. “I ate too many crabs one year, and soon afterward this began.”

  “It is not crabs.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I do not know. I should have to look at it through a special glass.”

  “You can see through me?”

  “Only partly.”

  “And then what?”

  “I should probably have to cut,” James said very gently.

  Uncle Tao wrapped himself up again. “I don’t believe in cutting,” he said. “Let us talk of something else. The men of earth, for example.”

  But James was not listening. Everything seemed to fall quite clearly into place. The future, which had been confused this morning when he talked to Mary, came near, and he saw it step by step before him. Uncle Tao, with a tumor in his belly, would lead the way and without knowing it.

  Young Wang came back after seven days and in unwonted silence he packed the bags and retied the bedding which had never been used and brushed the mule which he had ridden south to his own village and reclaimed the other two which had been at the inn stables while he was away. The next morning he appeared soon after dawn, for the return to the city, and James and Mary were ready for him. Everybody in the house had got up to see them off and to cry out invitations for their return. Even Uncle Tao with heroic effort hauled himself out of bed, and tousled and bleary he staggered to the door to nod his head and murmur vaguely, “Eh, eh, meet again—meet again!”

  As soon as the two had gone he fell upon his bed to slumber. Sleep was the one way in which he could escape the horrible fear which now sat in his heart every waking hour. The young man who was his grandnephew had said he must be cut! He thought of this for one instant before he fell asleep and the withers melted in his enormous mass. Then he spoke stoutly to himself. “Whatever is in me is mine, and no one can take it away from me unless I allow it.” Upon this momentary comfort he was carried down into sleep again.

  Dawn was breaking over the village as they left it. The sky was illuminated with many small golden clouds, for the sun had not yet come over the horizon. The street looked fresh in the new light, and the smoke curling from kitchen roofs was purple. Children’s voices were cheeping behind doors, like waking chicks, and only the white geese were up and about their business. They came home at night, as decent as good men, and took shelter under the walls, but at dawn they bestirred themselves and walked in dignity and silence to the fields, in contrast to the noisy quacking ducks who went anyhow and kept no ranks. Between geese and ducks there is no communication.

  The village gate was already ajar and James had to bend his head, he sat so tall upon his mule. Outside the wall the land lay with that pristine glitter of dew which is gone as soon as the sun rises full. The fields were richly brown, for in these days they had been plowed for winter wheat, and the willow trees were golden about the villages which dotted the plain.

  “Look at these villages,” James said, “we can reach fifty of them within a day’s journey.”

  “We will begin with our own,” Mary said.

  They had talked very little in the last days they had spent in their ancestral house. Both were fermenting with ideas, and until these were clear they kept themselves separate. Mary had joined in the life of the kinswomen. She had worked with them and sat with them, answering their constant questions about herself, her clothes, her parents, her education, about America and all the strange folk there and their strange ways. Wherever they had got it, the women had heard something of the outer seas and the farther lands, but their information was woven upon dream and myth and imagination. Thus they thought that in the outer lands children were born with white hair which grew dark with age, and they thought that men and women did not mate and produce children in human ways—that is their own ways—but in some unaccountable mystic fashion. The food in the outer lands horrified them, for they had heard that it was raw meat and cow’s milk which disgusted them. They had heard that the people were covered with hair from head to foot and that their skin was of all colors and that their eyes were blue and purple and yellow like the eyes of wild beasts. With the passion of one born to teach Mary told them what she thought was the truth and in her turn she asked them questions. She learned that the elder daughter-in-law alone dared to speak to Uncle Tao, and then only since the death of Uncle Tao’s wife, a mild gentle small woman whom everybody had loved and who had disobeyed Uncle Tao in everything without rousing his anger.

  “Ah, Uncle Tao’s wife, our mother!” the middle daughter-in-law sighed. “How good she was! She was even famous as a mother-in-law. Some women fear the mothers of their husbands, but we did not fear her. She thought of us as her own flesh and blood and she would tell us not to work too hard, and so we worked the harder.”

  The eldest daughter-in-law laughed aloud. “She was too wise for any man! Whenever Uncle Tao scolded any of us she would resign from her position as his wife. ‘Tao!’ so she called him. ‘Eh Tao, I am no use to you. I see that I cannot manage your house. I beg of you to get yourself a good strong concubine and I will retire and let her control everything.’ So she said.”

  “Did he never do it?” Mary asked. She found undying interest in these small affairs of which the kinswomen told her.

  “He?” the daughters-in-law cried in chorus. They fell into fits of laughter.

  It was a merry household, and the fear of Uncle Tao’s anger only added liveliness to the day. He was a god under his own roof, and his wrath, while it cast them into terror, made them proud also, for they believed there was no other like it in the world. Even his sons boasted of their father’s rage and fatness, of his bellow and his roars of laughter. They loved him well, while they cherished their fear of him and he gave direction to their lives.

  All this Mary saw, but she herself could not like Uncle Tao. “For example, Uncle Tao,” she now said to James as their mules jogged along the narrow footpaths to the main highway to the city. “What is he but a mass of ignorance and dirt? I shall not be thwarted by him. He despises women but I despise him. I shall go my own way and do what I plan to do.”

  “What do you plan to do?” James asked, smiling at his downright sister. She made a picture anything but formidable. Her short hair was blowing in the sharp autumn wind and her cheeks were red and her eyes bright and dark. Her profile, against the horizon of earth and sky, was young and exquisite and she held her small body lightly straight upon the shambling bony mule.

  “Whatever you do, Jim,” she said briskly, “I am going back to the village to live.”

  “On what?”

  “On Pa’s rents,” she said calmly.

  James was mightily amused at this but he kept his face grave. “How do you think you will get the rents out of Uncle Tao?” he asked.

  “I shall tell Pa to write to him that I am to have them. If Uncle Tao doesn’t listen to Pa, I will make him miserable until he listens to me. After all, I belong to the family and I have a right under that roof.”

  “Until you are married,” James reminded her.

  “I shan’t marry.”

  “You are declaring eternal war against Uncle Tao,” James said.

  “Yes!”

  They pulled their mules aside for a few moments, for they now met a long line of farmers carrying their grain to the city. It was heaped into baskets made of bamboo, and carried at either end of a limber wooden pole. Although the air was cold, the men were already sweating and they had thrown open their cotton jackets, showing brown bodies rippling with muscles.

  “We are a handsome race,” James said as he watched the men.

  “We are wonderful,” Mary agreed. They exchanged a long look of plea
sure in themselves and then they went on again.

  “You know,” James said thoughtfully, “Uncle Tao is also wonderful in his way.”

  “He likes you because you are a man,” Mary retorted.

  “Well, he is a man, too, and perhaps in the bottom of their hearts men do like men best,” James said. A glint of mischief showed itself in his eyes. “So do women like men best, Mary, and here is the root of the quarrel between men and women.”

  She rejected this lapse into theory. “Uncle Tao is more of a mountain than a man,” she said heartlessly. “What you found in that lump of meat I cannot imagine. I never heard him say anything worth hearing.”

  “He did not talk when you were around,” James replied.

  She refused to be moved. “Jim, please don’t pretend you really like Uncle Tao. You know that he will be your chief obstacle and enemy when you go there to live.”

  “Who said I was going there to live?” James demanded.

  “I know you are. You may say even to yourself that you haven’t decided. But you have. I can feel it in you.”

  James yielded gracefully. “You are right, Mary, though I don’t know how you know. I am going back there to live out my life. I don’t know how or when. I scarcely know why. But I am.”

  All Mary’s good humor returned. “And how do you think you will make your living?” she asked with loving sisterly malice.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet. But I have an idea that somehow Uncle Tao will help me.”

  Mary shouted with laughter. “Oh Jim, oh Jim!” she cried. “Jim the Silent Dreamer!”

  It was night when they drew near to the house in the city. The hutung was quiet, for rain had begun to fall, the cold rain of autumn, and children were inside their homes. At the gate they had got off their mules stiffly, first shouting for Little Dog to come and fetch the baggage, and Young Wang led the beasts away to the owner. Little Dog came running and then Peter and Louise and lastly Chen came out to meet them. Chen had been somewhat distressed when he was left in the house with Louise, having only Peter to be a third, but they had laughed at him for being old-fashioned. Nevertheless he had been very scrupulous and so busy at the hospital that he had not been alone with Louise while James and Mary were away. A strange thing had shown itself at the hospital and he was disturbed by it and he was glad to see James home again. But he said nothing of it now.

  “Eh, you two,” he said amiably, his spiky hair standing on end about his big honest face, “you’ve come back safely from your ancestors, have you?”

  “You both smell of garlic,” Louise declared.

  Peter stood grinning, his hands in his pockets. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t come back,” he suggested.

  “We’d have to come back for a bath if nothing else,” James said gaily.

  They walked together into the house. A rich smell of cooking hung about the rooms. Little Dog’s mother ran out, her face black with soot. “Oh, Heaven, let it be that you have not eaten yet!” she cried. “I have the meal ready.”

  “We have not eaten,” Mary replied. “But wait, good mother, until we have washed ourselves.”

  “Little Dog shall run to the hot water shop quickly and buy hot water,” the woman promised.

  So it was that in a very few minutes the hot water was brought in great steaming buckets and poured into the glazed pottery tub in the washroom. This was for James, and Little Dog’s mother fetched a wooden tub and put it in Mary’s room for her, so that the meal need not be held back too long.

  How good was the hot water, and what a blessing the soap! “When I get to the village,” Mary mused in the midst of this comfort, “I shall make a bath house first of all for the women.”

  In his pottery tub James sat cross-legged like a smooth young Buddha. “A bath house for the men,” he thought. “That will be the first thing for the village.”

  They came to the table with monstrous appetites, eager to tell everything, and to hear all. “First to hear,” James said, “and then to tell.”

  But it seemed there was not much to hear. Louise was very silent. Questioned, she said that she had read some books Chen had brought her from the hospital library, and she had gone to a party the new Mrs. Su had given, where there was dancing—the first time she had danced since she left home, as she persisted in calling New York. Neither James nor Mary corrected her. Home for them was now becoming the brown walls of the village rising out of the brown plain. They could not imagine Louise there.

  “I want to talk to you alone about the college,” Peter said abruptly to Jim. “There’s stuff going on there that I don’t like.”

  Chen made a brief report of the hospital. “The healthy season is coming in, and we have had no more cholera. We’ve had the usual number of childbirths already half ruined by stupid old midwives, and Peng is threatening to resign because foreign auditors want to examine the books he kept during the war.” He hesitated and then went on, “Later, Jim, when you have time, I want to tell you something.”

  “Why have each of you secrets?” Mary demanded.

  “I have no secret,” Louise said quickly. She glanced at Chen who did not look at her or speak, and Peter paid no attention. His appetite was always excellent. He had his bowl to his mouth, and he was ladling in a combination of rice, gravy, cabbage, and duck livers which he had arranged in the exact proportions he considered perfection.

  And James, sensitive to some entanglement here which could not now be unraveled, began to speak of the village.

  “I don’t know how to explain to you Uncle Tao—” He began to laugh and everybody laughed with him as he went on.

  Sitting around the table lit by candles they all listened to him and Mary did not interrupt. When this tall brother of hers set himself to a task, he did it supremely well. Chen was deeply moved. He opened his hands upward upon the table. “All that you say is as known to me as the palms of these two hands,” he said when James had finished. “Yet I never understood before that it had anything to do with me.”

  “We can do all that I have said,” James went on, “but we must move in ways that seem slow at first. The people must be with us.”

  “Slow!” Peter cried. “So slow that we’ll all be dead before we see the change.”

  Only Louise was not moved. Her face was set in its lines of prettiness. “It all sounds horrible,” she said and wiped her hand daintily on the napkin, which to the astonishment of Little Dog’s mother she insisted on having fresh at every meal.

  Alone that night for a few minutes after the others had gone to their rooms, Chen said to Jim, “Do you remember the child that was born while you were away in Shanghai, whose mother died, to my shame, because she was my patient?”

  “The one I gave into Mary’s charge?” Jim asked.

  Chen nodded. “Rose came to me a few days ago and asked me to come and see him. It is a boy, you know.”

  Jim nodded.

  “That child,” Chen said with peculiar emphasis, “is not all Chinese.”

  “No!” James cried. “But you said the mother—”

  “The mother was certainly Chinese. She was a young girl—not a student, not a girl of good family, but one of these young moderns—you know them, Jim. She had left her family. I supposed she was a prostitute but she was quite clean and the child is healthy. Well, that’s not too strange, But—” Chen pressed his lips together.

  “Go on,” Jim said. “How can there be anything you fear to tell me?”

  Chen said, hesitating very much and turning red. “Here it is, then. After the dance, late that night, Louise went to see this child.”

  “But why?” James exclaimed.

  “I don’t know why,” Chen said. “She came alone and she asked the nurse in charge to show her the child. She used your name to get in.”

  11

  THE WINTER WAS DRAWING ON in New York and for Dr. Liang the best part of the year was at hand. Now that he had got used to a quiet house he was beginning to like it.
Moreover, the presence of the children in China gave him protection. When some of his enemies, and he was always pained by their number, mentioned their surprise that he continued to stay abroad when his country so obviously needed all well-educated citizens, he could smile rather sadly and say, “I am supporting four young citizens now in China. Somebody unfortunately has to pay the bills, and with inflation what it is, this is done more easily with American money than Chinese.”

  The fact that he had not yet sent them any money was beginning to weigh on his conscience. Neither he nor Mrs. Liang had ever mentioned the concubine quarrel again, but she had asked him several times whether and when he was going to send the children money.

  “Even though James and Mary have jobs, I am sure it is not enough,” she said one day with the stubbornness natural to her. “Besides, we are the parents and we should support the younger ones at least enough to pay for their rice.”

  “Certainly you are right,” he replied with unusual politeness to her. “As soon as the lecture season begins, I intend to double my engagements and send them a generous amount.”

  “Meantime?” she asked.

  “Well, well,” he said impatiently.

  The end of this was that Mrs. Liang began another private savings account. One she already had. She had begun it aimlessly, merely for her own comfort in case she should decide someday that she could not bear America any more and that even respect for a husband was not everything in a woman’s life. The money was not deposited in a bank. Instead she had put it thriftily out to loan in Chinatown, and Billy Pan managed it for her, as a favor to the famous Dr. Liang, who knew nothing about it. Each month the capital increased with pleasant regularity. Mrs. Liang was sometimes a little angry because the interest rate was low, but Mr. Pan declared that he could not break the American law, which could be invoked if those who borrowed felt themselves ill used.

  “It seems strange that I cannot lend my own money on my own terms,” Mrs. Liang said.

  “Well, you can’t except in China,” Billy Pan said flatly. He did not propose to break American law, however absurd. America was still greater than the Chinese Dr. Liang.