Kinfolk

by Pearl S. Buck

  That Louise was gone made only one of the reasons for restlessness through the winter that now came upon the city. The old landlord, who had during those months kept prudently to his promise not to ask for the rent in advance, forgot himself in his need and became troublesome to them. The manservant had come to Young Wang and had put to him the matter of money.

  “My old lord and mistress are very poor,” he told Young Wang. “It would be a good deed if your master were to forget the signed paper and give him the month’s rent in advance.”

  At first Young Wang refused but the man came back again with a present in his hand of two pieces of jade which he gave to Young Wang, saying, “My mistress gives these to you as a present that you may sell. Only plead with your master for a month’s rent.”

  The jade was a worthless pair of ornaments such as in old times were once sewn on the sides of a woman’s crownless cap. They were thin as paper. When the man was gone Young Wang took them to James. He opened his hand and there were the jade bits on his palm. “These things were given me by the landlord as a bribe to ask you to advance the rent,” he told James. “I could not give them back because it would cause offense. Here they are.”

  “What can I do with them?” James replied. “Give them away or sell them. As for the request, I will think of it.”

  So he saved Young Wang, who when the man came back again was able to say, “My master considers it.”

  When Chen came home, and it was a cold bitter dry night at the end of the year, James told him what the landlord asked, and Chen grew angry. “We had better move away,” he said. “Once these old opium lovers swallow down their shame and begin to beg we shall have no peace.”

  But James was more tender, and he decided that he would go to see the old pair and persuade them if possible to go into the hospital to be cured. So a few days after that when he had an hour he came house earlier than usual and he knocked at the landlord’s gate and was admitted by the manservant who was all smiles at the sight of him.

  “Is your master at home?” James asked.

  “My master is always at home,” the man replied smartly. “Where has he to go?”

  James did not answer this impudence and he followed the man into the middle room of the house. It was a dreary room. Everything of worth was gone from it, and a few cheap benches and a broken bamboo table were all that remained. The manservant left him there and after a long while he came back, bringing his master. The old landlord tottered into the room, the manservant supporting him from behind, his hands under his arms like crutches. He was a pitiable figure. His padded winter robes were torn and the cotton was hanging out in a dozen places. On his feet he wore farmer’s shoes of woven reeds, the woolly tassels twisted inside for warmth. On his head was a felt cap, once black but now rusty brown, and it had a hole at the side whence a tuft of gray hair came out. So wasted was the old man, so yellow, so withered, that he was all but dead. He tried to give greeting to James and was in such distress that he could not speak.

  “I had to wake him,” the manservant declared. “He was deep in dream.”

  “Eh—eh—” the old landlord stammered.

  James leaned toward him. “Sir, you look very ill,” he said gently.

  These words and the kind tone in which they were spoken reached the old man’s dimmed mind.

  “I am very ill,” he moaned.

  “Then you ought to go to the hospital,” James said in the same gentle voice. “Let me entreat you. Come with me. I will see that you are put into a warm room and a good bed. We will give you food and we will help your illness. We can cure you so that you will crave no more for the thing that makes you ill.”

  The old man slowly came to his senses while James was thus speaking. He fastened his dead black eyes on James’s face and listened.

  “It is cold here,” James went on. “You have not even a brazier of coals.”

  “He sleeps on the k’ang,” the manservant broke in. “When we have any food to cook, the smoke from the stove creeps under the k’ang and warms him.”

  “But only for a little while—unless you use charcoal,” James remonstrated.

  “Who can pay for charcoal?” the man said rudely.

  The old man sighed. “I have no money.”

  “If you were well,” James said, “you could perhaps earn some money. Were you not once a scholar? A scholar can write letters for other people. You could even teach children again. Or I might be able to find a desk in the hospital office for you where you could copy records.”

  The old man listened to this and he thought a while. Then he shook his head. “I have nothing to live for,” he said at last. “My sons are gone. There are no grandsons here. Why should I work?”

  “You see what he is,” the manservant put in.

  James spoke again and yet again, but each time the old landlord said again that he had nothing for which to live and why should he come out of his sleep? “I sleep and I return to that place from which I came before I was conceived in my mother’s womb,” the old man said. “There I am at peace.”

  Beyond this James could not go. It was the end of persuasion. When he saw that all was useless, he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bundle of money. The servant stretched out his hands at once to receive it, but James would not see this hand. He took the landlord’s hands and into those thin yellow shells he put the money. “This is a month’s rent,” he said. “Try to keep it for food and a little charcoal.”

  He knew even as he said the words that the hope was idle. At the gate he looked back and the manservant had taken the money from the old man and was helping him out of the room again.

  He told the story that night when they were together at the evening meal and Chen rebuked him for what he had done. “You have made it impossible for us to stay here,” he said. “Now every few days this manservant will be after us.”

  “I think James did right,” Mary declared. “Only I think he should have insisted that the old man come to the hospital.”

  “When the Japs were here opium was cheap,” Peter said.

  “And how do you know that?” Chen asked.

  “Fellows at the college use the stuff too,” Peter said. “Not the crude opium, of course, but heroin pills. It makes me sick to see them. They can’t get it now. One fellow is always after me.” He closed his lips firmly as though he could not tell more.

  James, listening to all this, now decided to speak what was in his mind. He looked around at them all. They had put on padded Chinese garments. Only thus could the intense cold of the house be borne. Here in the middle room which they all shared, there was the foreign stove which they had found at the thieves’ market, not the large stove they had hoped to have but a little one which blazed red when coal was put into it, and turned cold soon after. Yet it was far better than nothing. This room was the only place which held any heat except the kitchen, and there the grass and reed fuel gave but a quick warmth that passed as soon as the flames died down. Padded cotton garments on their bodies and padded cotton shoes on their feet kept them from frostbite. They looked no whit different from the people on the streets.

  “The time has come, I think, for us to move to the village,” James said. “I know we thought of spring. But we cannot be colder there than here. And the cost of food and fuel will soon be beyond us. We cannot be worse off there.”

  Money was indeed becoming worthless. There was no true money. What the people used were baskets full of paper printed in America with Chinese letters and figures, signifying gold and silver that did not exist. All that James and Mary and Chen could earn barely paid for their food and rent and fuel, besides wages to the ones who cared for them. There was nothing left for clothing or pleasure. And soon, as the paper stuff grew more abundant and the figures were printed higher, even this would not be enough.

  “Why should we wait for spring?” Mary exclaimed. “There is food in the village, and there is plenty of room. I want to go now.”

  Jam
es turned to Peter. “What do you say, brother?” he asked. He dreaded the answer, for what would Peter do in the village? There would be no students there and he would be lonely and unhappy. He would refuse to go. To his surprise Peter said no such thing. He lifted his head which so often he held down as though he were thinking of something secret and far from them all. “I am ready to go,” he said. “I shall be glad to get away from here, at least.”

  Chen slapped his two hands on the table. “It is all folly,” he declared, “but I will follow you three fools.” They laughed and the thing was decided.

  Yet so large a move could not be done in a day. First Uncle Tao must be written to, and this James did, telling him of his father’s permission to receive the rents. Then the hospital must be told of their decision to leave. Never did James know that he had so many friends among the doctors and the nurses. Dr. Kang gathered together all the other doctors and they gave a small feast, not for farewell, Dr. Kang declared, but for advice. It was given in Dr. Su’s house and Mrs. Su herself supervised the dishes. Since only men were present Mary was invited to come and help Mrs. Su, and these two young women busied themselves in the kitchen and ate in Dr. Su’s study, while the doctors kept to themselves in the dining room. In the kitchen Mrs. Su apologized for everything before Mary, although secretly she was proud of her small clean foreign-style house. “Before the Japanese came,” she said, stirring long strands of flour noodles into a pot of chicken broth, “I would not have thought it possible to keep a house without five servants at least. Now I am lucky to have this one Lao Po.”

  Lao Po was an old woman who kept perfectly silent and did nothing but wash the dishes which Mrs. Su dirtied and sweep the floor upon which were dropped flour and bits of grease and bone. She understood only a country dialect, for she did not come from the city.

  Mrs. Su spoke to Mary in English. “Now of course money is nothing. I pay Lao Po food and room and bedding and some clothes beside her cash. She is not clean, but what can I do? Su will not look at her because he says she is so unclean. I say, ‘Su, it is true Lao Po is dirty, but find me someone clean.’ He cannot for no poor people can be clean. Let us tell the truth about ourselves. Our poor people are very dirty. After all, we are not Americans here today. We need not be ashamed before each other.”

  “Everything is nice,” Mary said politely. Indeed the little house with curtains at its windows and wicker chairs with cushions in the living room seemed a palace of comfort to her.

  Mrs. Su moved her chopsticks to a pot of pork bits simmering with chestnuts. “Louise is really very lucky,” she said next. She did not know whether Mary knew that Louise had met the American here, and she could not be easy until she found out. “Of course it is better to marry a Chinese—we all agree to that. But Alec is a good American—not roughly chewing gum and swearing words all the time. He is nice family, I am sure. And I think Louise can never be happy here. She is really quite American herself.”

  Mary, slicing big white winter pears for a dessert before the meal, did not answer this.

  Mrs. Su felt that by her silence she assuredly knew. Therefore she plunged into a half confession. She laughed first to show that she thought it nothing. Then she said, “You know Louise begged me so hard to come here and see Alec sometimes—of course always I was here with them. I felt very unhappy. I should have come and told you first. But I did not know how to say it to Louise. And they are so modern—we are all modern, of course. But I must ask you to excuse me if I did wrong.”

  Mary looked up with her large too truthful eyes. “I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Louise didn’t tell me.”

  Mrs. Su regretted her queasy conscience and she made haste to talk about something else. “It does not matter now, with such happy ending,” she said quickly. “Of course I knew Alec would be good husband and not just fooling. Now tell me, do you really leave our city?”

  “We want to go to our ancestral home,” Mary said. She began piling the thin slices neatly in a pyramid on a flowered dish.

  “I am sorry,” Mrs. Su said. She covered the pork and uncovered a skillet of shrimp and bamboo shoots. “And I think you will be sorry, too. For people like us, well educated, village is very hard. I never was in some village. That is, not for sleeping. Sometimes in spring and summer we go outside the city for picnic and of course we stop at village to rest. Even then it is too dirty for us. Su will not eat food there. The people are very wild and dirty and all the children are sick with something.”

  Mary did not reply to this. “Shall I take the pears in now?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” Mrs. Su said briskly. “Just ask them to eat with watermelon seed and small things and in few minutes dinner is there.” She began to spoon the shrimps into a bowl and Lao Po, seeing that the moment had arrived, brought bowls for other food.

  “Lao Po!” Mrs. Su said loudly in Chinese. “I told you, put on a clean coat and wash your face and brush your hair!”

  The old woman put down the bowls on the table and went away. By the time Mrs. Su had the bowls full of food, Lao Po came back looking quite clean. “Lao Po, you take the bowls, and put them on the table. I will put the rice in the bowls. Then you can serve us all.”

  Mrs. Su was a busy little figure in all the pride of her kitchen. Over her neat Chinese dress of rose-red silk she wore a white apron and her plump and creamy arms were bare.

  Mary came back from the dining room. The men had greeted her pleasantly but with reserve. There was much gossip in the hospital that Mary was more willful than James and not so easy in temper, and that she, rather than he, guided the family destiny. It was for this reason that Dr. Su had invited only men to the feast.

  “Shall I take in these dishes, too?” she asked Mrs. Su. “No, Lao Po will do everything now,” Mrs. Su said, taking off her apron. “I don’t mind to cook, but I don’t like to appear servant.”

  She led the way to the study and they sat down. Mrs. Su enjoyed a friend with whom to talk. Mary was not so pliable a friend as Louise had been, but she was a woman and a listener. “Sit down, please,” Mrs. Su said. “Have some tea. Then our stomachs will be ready for the food. Lao Po will bring us the dishes when the men finish.”

  So sipping the fragrant tea, Mary sat and listened. Long ago she knew that women like Mrs. Su were of a kind to which she did not belong.

  “Now, really,” Mrs. Su began. Her round little face was not so pretty as it had been in the days before her marriage. It was less delicate and her eyes were no longer shy. “What shall we talk?” she asked in a bright voice.

  “You talk,” Mary said, smiling, “and I will listen.”

  Mrs. Su smoothed down her short skirt. “Shall I tell you how I marry Su?” Her voice was at once demure and cozy.

  “If you like.”

  “It all begins like this,” Mrs. Su said. “I was teaching English in Kunlun girls’ school. Naturally I don’t have to teach since my father is head of the bank, but still I cannot do nothing. One day my father say to me, ‘Someone say Dr. Su, very famous and rich doctor, is going to divorce. Of course he cannot live always divorcing. He must have wife and how would you like to be that one?’ At first I didn’t like. I told him, ‘Baba, suppose he has divorcing habit how I feel if then some day he also divorcing me?’ But Baba say, ‘No! All his other wives have been too stupid. They think only he is husband, they don’t think also I am wife. Now you are not so stupid. When you marry, you think of him first.’ So I say all right. Then my father asking Su’s friend Dr. Kang to suggest Su I am rather nice. Of course my father gives something. Then at a party Dr. Kang introduces me and I look rather nice, I must say. Su is very handsome. There are two sons, but they are nice and they don’t live here.”

  The cheerful little voice chirped along like a cricket at the door.

  In the dining room, crowded with the doctors, James and Chen were listening to a steady chorus of disapproval and dissuasion. The food was excellent. Mrs. Su was a good cook, and Lao Po faithful
ly watched for an empty bowl.

  “You will waste yourselves in a village,” Dr. Su declared loudly. His last marriage was turning out well and he was beginning to put on weight. His handsome oval face was no longer thin and intellectual looking. He had a prosperous air, he smiled often and his voice carried the dominating note of the well-satisfied man. He heaped shrimp upon James’s bowl as he went on talking. “Now, you know, Liang, the Generalissimo was very wise when in the recent war with Japan he decreed that our educated men were to stay in the colleges and not to go to the front. The youths from the villages were made into soldiers. We have too few educated men. We should conserve ourselves. We must live long. We must breed children.”

  “Eh, Liang!” Dr. Peng called jovially across the table. “You are not even married yet!”

  “Liu Chen is not married, either,” Kang retorted. “Two bachelors! We must penalize them! They must get drunk!”

  “Of course they do not live in continence,” Peng said with some malice. “Look at Liang—see, he is blushing! Eh—eh—everybody look at Liang!”

  Dr. Su as host took pity. “Now, now, Peng—because you make love to every pretty nurse does not mean that all men are like you. Come, Liang—come, Liu Chen—you two fellows—tell us what you think you can do in this village!”

  James had been all but silent until now. He was heartily enjoying his food. The cost of good food made this dinner a pleasure. He had not tasted pork and shrimp and sharks’ fins for a long time. Where did Su get so much money?

  “Perhaps I am only going to the village to learn.” His voice was cool and quiet.

  A shout of laughter answered this. “Learn what?” Su demanded. “How to eat sheets of pot bread and raw garlic?”