Kinfolk

  “It is lovely already,” Mary said.

  “But the walls!” Louise cried suddenly. “I hate these walls all around the courts—we can’t see from the windows!”

  “We can always walk out of the gate,” James said. “The gate will not be locked. Our ancestors liked walls. You’ll find that everybody here still has walls.”

  “Where is my room?” Peter asked.

  “We can divide the rooms as we like,” James replied. “But I thought you and I would share this left part of the house, Peter, and the girls will take the rooms on the right. By the way, Mary, if you or Louise see something like a rat, it is only a weasel. I think they are all gone, but in case they aren’t they will not stay long after we move in.”

  “Weasels?” Louise shrieked. “I never heard of them in houses!”

  “You will hear of many things here,” James said, “some pleasant and some not.”

  He had not yet made up his mind how he would treat Louise. Until now she had only been the pretty and spoiled little sister in whom he had a sentimental interest. Now suddenly she had become a woman without any of the lingering years between childhood and womanhood. She was a flower which had not been given time to bloom. The bud had been forced. For Mary had told him at last exactly what had happened. In the hours together in their cabin on the ship she had got from Louise the full story. It had been easy indeed, for Louise spent many evenings in tears, and when she found that Mary was not disposed to scold her, tears had led quickly to confidence, often repeated. Mary had told James everything on the train, while Louise and Peter were in the dining car and James had decided that he was not hungry. James had taken a second-class compartment for the four of them, feeling that the crowded open car was too much to bear so soon after America. While the train swayed and shook over the landscape of small farms and barking dogs and shrieking geese, whose blue-clad peasants stood watching the cars rush past, Mary told James.

  “Louise thought Philip would marry her. I excuse her that much,” she said at last.

  James had listened amazed and angry with Louise. Strangely, he thought, he could not blame Philip. Americans were not taught as Chinese were. When Louise was willing, it could not be imagined that Philip would not accept.

  “Louise was a fool,” he said. Outside the window the hills of central China were flattening into the long levels of the north.

  “It was first Estelle’s foolishness,” Mary said. She was watching her brother’s face. James must not be too hard on Louise now. The little sister had suffered from her parents. “Estelle persuaded Louise too much,” Mary went on. “I think she made Louise forget she is Chinese. Such things they can do, but we cannot.”

  “Philip wouldn’t marry a Chinese,” James said brusquely.

  “Anyway, don’t talk to Louise,” Mary begged. “Pa talked so loud, and Ma cried and cried.”

  So James allowed no sign to escape him to let Louise know that now he knew what she had done. But in his heart he agreed that his father had been wise to send her at once thousands of miles away. So young a wound would heal. It would be difficult to marry her now to a man who would forgive her. Yet marriage, it seemed to him, was the only possibility. Louise would not be satisfied to return to girlhood and innocence, even if she could. Everything in her had been forced. A green fruit had been ripened by unseasonable heat.

  Yet it seemed to him, after thought, that he must be firm with Louise. She must be treated as a grown woman although as a girl, too, who needed to be watched and restricted. He wished very much that he could arrange a marriage for her in the old-fashioned Chinese way, and transfer to a husband the responsibility for this pretty creature who was no longer a virgin. Only a husband could suffice, even if Louise would scarcely agree to being married off summarily.

  He pondered this again while he changed his clothes and arranged his possessions in his new room. Through the open door he heard Peter walking about, flinging down his suitcases, moving chairs and tables. Peter too would not be too easy to look after, but what to do with Louise must be his first care. The thought of Chen came into his mind. If Chen should fall in love with Louise it would be excellent indeed. Certainly he must be careful that none of the doctors who were already married, some to old-fashioned wives whom they kept in the country, grew interested in Louise. There was much looseness in what was called modern society in Peking. Men and women came together and separated. They married and divorced with no more effort than a notice put in the newspapers. There was something about Louise that repelled him and made it hard for him to be affectionate with her in his old brotherly fashion. She looked young and yet experienced. Mary looked the virgin she was, and of the two, Louise now seemed older.

  The four came together at their night meal, for they had reached Peking in the late afternoon. Now that the lamps were lit, the rooms looked softened and more homelike. When Young Wang had ordered Little Dog to bring in the dishes of hot food for him to arrange upon the table, they sat down with good appetite. Even Louise looked less sullen, although she was ready at once to complain.

  “There are no closets in our rooms,” she said. “Where shall I hang my dresses?”

  “I’ll have some built,” James said. “But if you wear Chinese things you won’t need anything but the shelves in the wall cupboard. Our ancestors kept their clothes folded.”

  “I shall wear Chinese clothes entirely now,” Mary said.

  “Not I,” Louise retorted.

  “It’s quiet here,” Peter said suddenly. “You’d never know you were in a city.”

  “That’s the beauty of the walls,” James said.

  After the meal was over he had to go to the hospital. He had already been away his full week, and he wanted to see his patients, and though he was reluctant to leave the three, yet he must go. They were still at the table, cracking dried lichee nuts and drinking tea, when he rose and stood behind his chair. “If you need me Young Wang can come and fetch me,” he told them. “Tomorrow we will talk over everything and decide what each one is to do. You do not begin work until the first of the month, Mary. You ought to start college, Peter—classes opened last week. But perhaps you all want a few days in which to see the city.”

  “We are not babies,” Mary said smiling. “We can look after ourselves. And don’t feel you have to apologize to us for China, Jim.”

  He smiled back at her, thankful for her common sense. It was true that, quite without knowing it, he had been fearful lest they dislike everything here, because it was not what they were used to having in America. Mary with her shrewd eyes had understood his fears.

  At the hospital he found Chen, in whose care he had left his sick. Chen had been zealous, but in spite of all his care of the patients, a woman had died. She had come into the hospital after birth with puerperal fever, as so many women came. She had seemed better when James left, but the fever had taken a turn for the worse, and she had died quickly the next day.

  “Though I was with her, I could do nothing,” Chen mourned. “The fever ate her up. Now she leaves the newborn child. What shall we do with him?”

  “Where is he now?” James asked.

  “I have him in the children’s ward but he cannot stay there too long—you know how crowded it is, and the nurses are impatient with too many crying at once.”

  “I will have my sister Mary come over tomorrow,” James said.

  They went the rounds together and Rose and Marie pattered after them. These two nurses had attached themselves to the two doctors whom they liked best and with Kitty, who was a relief nurse, these made a solid core of five in the hospital. They took no part in the social life of the other doctors and nurses and maintained a rigid front toward gossip and love affairs. Had there been only Rose and Marie, this gossip would have reached them and they would have been accused of living with the two doctors they now followed. But the three nurses together made such gossip impossible.

  His other patients were not dangerously ill and when the rounds were over J
ames was loath to part from Chen. He wanted to talk with him. At least he wanted to get on terms of being able to talk with him and even to get his advice, perhaps, about Louise. He would not of course tell even Chen what had really happened. He would merely say that the girl was in the midst of an unhappy love affair, unhappy because her love was not returned, and that it was necessary to take her mind away from her own trouble. But before he said anything Chen must meet Louise. “Come home with me, Chen,” he said abruptly. “You are the first one I wish them to meet.”

  Chen blushed savagely. “I never know how to talk to young women,” he mumbled, “especially ones who have just come from America.”

  “Oh, come,” James urged. “You will find my sisters very easy. Louise is supposed to be quite pretty and she talks readily enough to any man. She’ll help you.”

  After a little more reluctance which James saw only covered Chen’s curiosity and real desire to come, the two set off on foot through the quiet streets. The hutung was very neat and in a few minutes they had reached it. He pushed open the door and was delighted at what he saw. Peter and his sisters were sitting in the large central court under the light of three paper lanterns which Young Wang had strung to the great pine tree. Little Dog had brought out a teapot and some chairs, and Young Wang was squatting on his heels playing a flute. It was just as he would have liked Chen to see them. He was pleased that Louise sat most clearly in the light and that she looked soft and very pretty. He glanced at Chen and saw his gaze already turned to her. He introduced them quickly.

  “Liu Chen, my elder sister Mary, my younger sister Louise, my brother Peter. Liu Chen is my best friend, as I have told you, and now let us call each other by our first names. Chen be at home here.”

  Little Dog ran to fetch more chairs and his mother fetched bowls and some small cakes and a dish of watermelon seeds and Young Wang retiring behind the pine tree continued to play softly his gently winding airs. It was very pleasant. In a little while they were laughing, for not one of them except Chen could crack watermelon seeds properly, and he was compelled to teach them. It was the first time that James had seen Louise laugh since he had met her in Shanghai. Now with a fat black seed between her white teeth she opened her red lips to show Chen that she could crack it, and Chen began to tell her how to do it. But she was laughing so much she could not.

  By the time the evening was over they were all gay, for Chen revealed that he knew sleight of hand. “I had an uncle who was a traveling juggler,” he confessed. “You see, the lane cannot support everybody, and since we were not scholars, we had to work. But my uncle would not work, and since he had long thin hands without any bones, my grandfather feared he might become a pickpocket and disgrace an honest family. Se he apprenticed him to a juggler, and my uncle grew very clever.”

  Young Wang stopped his flute playing, and he sat on the outside of the circle on a piece of broken brick, and behind him stood Little Dog and his mother, and they all watched Liu Chen and laughed continually at what he could do. He took bowls of water out of the air and he swallowed lighted cigarettes and made Louise’s earrings disappear.

  When all had laughed until they were weary, and the moon was high in the sky Chen slapped his knees. “It is nearly midnight and Jim and I must go early to work.” He rose and tightened the girdle which he wore always about his waist instead of a belt.

  “I have tried to persuade Chen to come and live with us,” James said.

  “Oh, yes,” Louise cried eagerly. “That would be fun.”

  “There is plenty of room,” Mary said, “and we’ll all live more cheaply, several together.”

  “I’d like it,” Peter said politely. He was not quite sure, now that he had stopped laughing, what Liu Chen was. A doctor? But he spoke no English apparently. All evening, while they had slipped in and out of English, he had steadily spoken only Chinese.

  “Now you see how welcome you are,” James said. “Come, Chen, promise us.”

  Chen looked about on them, his eyes glistening in the moonlight and a half smile upon his lips. His eyes fell last on Louise. “Well, well, I will think about it,” he said. “Perhaps it is too soon,” he said, laughing again. “I have bad table manners and when I sleep I snore loudly.”

  “Never mind!” Mary said.

  The end of it was that in less than a week Chen moved into the house, taking the far end room beyond Peter’s. To Little Dog Young Wang said, “Now there is somebody in the house who knows what must be done. He is no foreigner like the others.” And he slapped Little Dog lightly on both ears, to show him that he, like Liu Chen, would stand no nonsense under this roof.

  Mrs. Liang’s letter reached her children only after a month. She had not understood that extra stamps were needed for airmail and so it had been carried across the ocean by an ordinary steamship, had waited the pleasure of a clerk in the Shanghai post office who had just got himself married and was in no haste about his work, and had reached the hospital in mid-autumn.

  The autumn was unusually mild. There had been no high winds and therefore little dust, and the camel caravans had not yet come in for the winter to stir up the streets with their huge flopping feet. Since it was the first really peaceful year since the Japanese had withdrawn, the chrysanthemums were large and fine. Gardeners in private houses and in commercial gardens had vied with each other to produce the sort of flowers that they had before the war. Mary had gone drunk with pleasure in them. Chrysanthemum vendors had learned that if they came to the gate early in the morning before she went to the hospital or late after she came back, they were sure of a sale. She had bought dozens of pots. The court was lined with them, and they stood against the walls of the house inside the rooms. In her own room the window was a bower with her favorites, whose curled scarlet petals were lined with gold.

  She was very happy. She loved the house, and she missed nothing of what she had had in New York. The closeness of this house to the earth, its snugness under the heavy roof, the privacy of the court, the shade under the great leaning pine, all was as she liked it. Especially she liked the simplicity of life in such a house. There was no machinery to vex by breaking down when it was most needed. Little Dog’s mother and Little Dog himself were excellent servants, provided one made certain of a few rules of cleanliness. Little Dog must not wash his clothes in the dishpan, and Little Dog’s mother must not wash the rice bowls by running her fingers around them in a pail of cold water. They obeyed her with smiling tolerance, or she thought they did. She explained to them earnestly about germs, and argued with Chen when he simply said everything must be eaten hot.

  “I am sure that Little Dog understands, and I have told Young Wang to watch the other two.”

  “Young Wang is a good fellow,” Chen said, “but I trust my own intelligence rather than his. I prefer to eat my food hot, especially as there is still some cholera in the city.”

  Chen and Mary argued over many things. Both were stubborn and neither yielded to the other. Louise always took Chen’s side, whatever the argument. It seemed sometimes that she did not love her elder sister, and Mary more than once went away with tears in her eyes, which she was too proud to show. After she had so left them one day, Louise said to Chen, “Mary has never let me feel free. It was really her fault, I believe, that Pa made us come here.”

  Chen by now knew that she had been in love with an American and that her parents had sent her away. James had told him this, and Chen had listened, his heart beating rather fast and his blood feeling hot in his veins. He was angry that an American should look at a Chinese girl, but he felt sorry for Louise. She was very young, and too pretty for her own good. He discussed with James at some length the problem of beauty in a woman, and whether it was her fault that her strength was not equal to her temptations. “This strength,” Chen said, “might actually be greater than that of an ugly woman, but the ugly woman is praised for a self-control which may in fact be very slight indeed.”

  “I hope you are not sorry that you have c
ome to Peking?” Chen now said to Louise. He was surprised and somewhat alarmed at the tenderness he felt was in his voice, and hearing it he became bashful.

  “I don’t like it here as well as I do in New York,” Louise said.

  “But you have a very gay time, don’t you?” Chen urged. He knew how eagerly James hoped that this younger sister would want to stay here, and how much he hoped, indeed, that she would find a husband.

  Louise pouted and shrugged her shoulders. “There is nothing very gay in Peking,” she said.

  “There are the palaces,” Chen reminded her. They had spent several Sunday afternoons, all of them together, visiting the Forbidden City, and they had been invited on some picnics by Dr. Su and Dr. Kang to go outside the city walls and see the Summer Palace and the fine old monasteries in the hills.

  “What I mean is that there is nothing here like Radio City,” Louise said with contempt in her large black eyes.

  Chen was speaking in Chinese but she spoke English always.

  “I was never in New York,” Chen said somewhat humbly.

  “Then you never saw the best of America,” Louise retorted.

  “Perhaps,” Chen said thoughtfully. He continued to look at Louise.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she demanded.

  “Because you are very pretty,” Chen said. This truth came out of him so suddenly that he was astonished and then ashamed and he turned red.

  Louise laughed. “Have you only just found it out?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Chen said abruptly. He felt much distressed that he had spoken so coarsely and without saying anything more he went away.

  Ever since that day, now some two weeks ago, he had been troubled by his conscience. Should he not tell James that he was beginning to think often of Louise? But having said this, what else could he say? He did not want to take a wife. He had some vague ideas that he had not yet worked into reality even in his thinking. He was not at all sure that he wished to continue much longer here at the hospital. What it was he wanted to do he did not know and if he took a wife, he would be compelled to stay here, particularly if it were a young modern woman such as Louise. Yet he recognized the danger of staying near her, and of allowing his eyes to see her every day. Yet what was he to do? James would certainly demand the truth from him, and he would be ashamed to tell him that this younger sister stirred up his blood at the same time that he knew he did not want to marry her. This was coarse and he did not wish to reveal such coarseness in himself. He had always prided himself on being a better man than Su, for example, or Kang, or any of the exquisites in the hospital, and now he was feeling just as they did over a pretty girl.