Yet she knew well enough that Liang could never live in the ancestral village again. Without electricity or running water, he could not live. She understood that now. The fleas alone, jumping down out of the thatched roofs, would be too annoying for him. But nothing could clean the fleas out of the thatch of old ancestral roofs. Perhaps the next time she went back she could take some of this new stuff the Americans used for spraying flies. Of course she would go back again and again. She would not tell Liang so at once—maybe not for many months. But when James and Mary began to have children she must fly back to see them. Perhaps by that time the Americans would have better planes or at least medicines to hold down the stomach. She would go back and forth between the kinfolk, for she belonged to all of them.
She sighed as a truck rumbled by in the night; upon the river a steamer shrieked. In the ancestral village night was as quiet as heaven. A child’s crying, a dog’s barking—these were sounds of life and they did not wake the sleeping. Here the trucks, the ships—then it came to her suddenly that these were sounds of American life. Perhaps they did not waken Americans. They had not waked Liang. He had begun to snore delicately and at the familiar sound she too fell into old habit and dozed off into her own slumber.
22
THE ANCESTRAL VILLAGE SEEMED to settle back into the earth after Mrs. Liang left it. None had quite realized how her busy presence had drawn them into a new energy. Within her natural self she had means of communication with everyone. While she did no more than give greeting to the sons of Uncle Tao, elder and younger, yet they saw her good open face often and they heard her loud voice kindly advising and exhorting and talking. Her short heavy footstep was not the footstep of the younger women who had never bound their feet, and certainly it was not the stumping of the older women whose feet had been badly bound in childhood. Uncle Tao missed her when she was gone, for though she had not talked much with him she had devised small comforts for him. She had washed and turned his winter padded robes and she had made him a new bedquilt, light and warm.
But upon James she had left her greatest influence. He saw what he had never known before, that his mother was not at all a stupid woman. It was true that hers was a brain which could neither receive nor retain an abstract idea, that is, an idea which had nothing to do with the simple welfare of those she loved. Heaven, God, Government, Communism, War, Human Rights, Religion, all the large words which provided modern argument she tolerated as amusement only for men. While they argued and talked she was busy, hand and mind. She did not consider that people whom she did not know and to whom she was not related were her concern. Yet if any were brought within the orbit of her knowledge she busied herself at once with their needs, too. She saw men and women whole, both as they were and as they felt they were. James was surprised and even horrified that she had not insisted on Uncle Tao’s operation, for example. He had talked with her about it and she could see for herself that Uncle Tao was gradually beginning to waste. Yet when James had urged her to persuade the old man, she had refused to do so. “Uncle Tao knows his own heart and body,” she declared. “If I persuade him and he is not so happy afterward, I shall blame myself.”
Because of her visit James understood his place in the ancestral village as he had not before. He and Mary and Chen belonged to the modem age in which they lived. The twentieth century was their atmosphere. But Uncle Tao belonged in the eighteenth century and he kept the village there with him. His mother, James saw, was the bridge between these centuries. Her interest in humanity was eternal, from the beginning of mankind and until the end. None could be too modern for her to approach with lively interest, and none too old for her to comprehend. That she was such a woman was unknown even to herself. She did not think of herself at all. She had no time for such thinking and no interest in it.
So James came to understand his mother in this ancestral village. He saw her in the strange unbalance of the world as it was, a world where new and old had to live together on their differing levels. She became significant to him. He told himself that she was the human creature most essential to men like himself, men who had sped far ahead of their native age.
Therefore when his mother had proposed to him one day that she find a wife for him, James had acquiesced with a sense almost of fatalism. He was unable to choose for himself. He might be misled again and again, and all his life could be spoiled by a wife who did not understand what he wanted to do. He did not need a woman to lead him farther away from their ancestral village. He needed and must have a woman who would root him here firmly by the force of her own life and understanding. When his mother told him, therefore, some six or seven days before she went, that she had found a young woman whom she thought suitable he had said, “I hope she is like you.”
His mother had looked surprised. “Now how did you think of that?” she demanded. “The truth is she does make me think of myself as I was when I came here to marry your pa.”
“Then sign the betrothal papers for me,” he had said. She had been troubled by his sudden willingness and had probed him for a while. “You know, James,” she had said earnestly, “if you marry such a girl as this Yumei, you cannot divorce her. She is not a new-fashioned girl. When she comes here to be your wife, it is for as long as she lives. You cannot put her away.”
“I understand that, Ma,” he had answered.
But she was still not satisfied until she had sent Mary and Chen to him, and from the wisdom of their good marriage they also besought him to think what he did.
“I think Ma has chosen too quickly,” Mary said. “She wants everything settled before she goes back to Pa.”
“Ma’s instincts about her children are surprisingly sure,” James replied. They were in his small living room, the door closed and barred, and they were speaking in English. “But there is so much you know that she will not know,” Mary urged. “Now when Chen and I talk together, our minds are the same. We do not talk across a distance.”
James smiled at this. “You and Chen both like to talk. But as you very well know I talk only a little. I can remember even when we were children, Chen, that this sister of mine complained against me because I did not talk much.”
He did not want to explain everything to them, and indeed he could not. He knew only that his life was to be here in the ancestral village and in the country around it, and if from here the work he did could spread into other parts, then he would be satisfied. He could never live as his father did. Perhaps there was too much of his mother in him. He had to live from his roots up. Well, he had found his roots, and it was time to begin living.
When his mother saw that he was calm and sure, she went on with the betrothal. Of course Uncle Tao must be consulted, and there was no difficulty there. Uncle Tao was pleased except that he felt Mrs. Liang had gone ahead of herself in choosing the girl and that this should have been left to him. But when she told him about the Yang family and he heard that they owned their land and had some cash besides and that Yang Yumei could not read and write, he felt content. “Two like your daughter,” he had declared, “would be too many for our village.”
Mrs. Liang did not tell him that Mary was resolved to teach her new sister-in-law to read immediately after the wedding. With men like Uncle Tao it did not do to tell everything. A little truth at a time was as much as he could bear without losing his temper.
Before she went back to America, therefore, Mrs. Liang had seen to it that the betrothal papers were signed and sealed and the first gifts exchanged. Into the hands of the eldest daughter-in-law of Uncle Tao she put the final plans for the wedding and for the last gifts. Since the parents could not be present at the wedding Uncle Tao must stand in their place, and the wedding should be small. Dearly did she wish that she could stay and do it all herself, but she did not feel it right to hasten the wedding by so much. James should have a month at least in which to prepare his mind, and she dared not leave Liang alone for another month. His letters had been short and unsatisfactory and she had not hea
rd from him for two weeks. Then she controlled her worry. “I cannot worry myself on two sides of the ocean at the same time,” she confided to Mary.
“Oh, poor Ma,” Mary had answered. “You mustn’t worry about us, at least. I can’t promise about Pa.”
Mrs. Liang had bristled. “Your pa is fine,” she had retorted, and was strengthened in her resolve to return quickly to him.
She busied herself after that and arranged for James to have two more rooms for his share of the house and she bought some good furniture from the local carpenter, who was a Liang tenth cousin. Then she had wrenched herself away from the beloved village.
James had set the wedding day. During the holidays he knew he would have no new patients. He did not intend to take a honeymoon, for he knew that nothing would terrify his unknown wife more than that. Nevertheless he did not wish to have all the hours of the day and many hours of the night busy as they now were with the sick. His marriage, incredible as it would seem to Su and Peng and their kind, excited him with curiosity and wonder, and he wanted time to begin it well. It might be successful. Certainly he would love no one again as he had loved Lili. That fire had burned itself out even to the capacity for renewal. He did not want to love like that. It had been a destructive love.
Half amused at himself, he declared to Mary and Chen that there was sound wisdom in the ancestral way of choosing a wife for a man.
“Take Ma,” he said one evening as they idled for an hour before he went back to settle his patients for the night. “Surely she knows me better than I know myself. She knows the family traits. Who could choose better for me?”
They neither agreed nor disagreed with him. They smiled and listened, aware that this marriage was for him more than marriage. It was reunion with his own people.
Thus did James Liang wait for his wedding day. The idea of this marriage pleased him more and more, and it pleased Uncle Tao and the family, for it was like their own marriages. They drew close to James as they had never done, and he felt this and was made happy by it. The tenants on the land and the villagers, who had so long thought him half foreign, now began to tease him and laugh at it and treat him as one of themselves, and James liked this, too. He found himself laying aside his aloof ways, and he was more lively in his talk and bearing than Mary had ever seen. She said nothing to him lest she damage this new nature, but to Chen she said with much wonder, “I believe Yumei is making a new man of Jim, even before they meet.”
“He has chosen his way, and so he can stop thinking about it,” Chen said. He, too, did not speak to James of his new ways, although the two were together constantly.
Never had James worked so hard. He and Chen had already begun work in the first three rooms of what was to be their hospital. While masons and carpenters built added rooms, the sick lay on the floors and in tiers of beds against the wall. The courtyard swarmed with their families who came to stay and see with their own eyes that no damage was done to their helpless relatives. What patience did it take to try to heal those who were near death! But James had put his dogged will to work at the level at which he found his people. He would heal them in a house like their own, though clean and filled with fresh air. The earthen floors were sprinkled with un-slacked lime and he caught sunshine in every corner that he could. The hospital faced south, and the one-story rooms stood in lines with open courts between, and the places where the sun could not reach were used for fuel and boxes. He had begun with three rooms, easily within the cost of the money his mother had given him of her savings. The people would have to pay for each room as it was needed. He explained this and everyone paid a little and this little was put aside. When he cured a local warlord or a petty official, he asked more and they gave more for the sake of pride. Su and Kang and Peng would have laughed, James knew, but this was his hospital and not theirs, and it was the only way he could build it.
Meanwhile his nights, when he was not called anywhere, were busy with teaching. He and Chen between them were training fifteen young men from neighboring villages as well as the ancestral one. These men when they had enough knowledge to know how little it was, so that they would not pretend to more power than they had, which is the danger of ignorance, would travel through the countryside to wash and disinfect sores and ulcers and bad eyes, to treat malaria and smallpox and to bring to the hospital such as they could not heal.
This was the simple but large plan which James and Chen had made for themselves. There was more than mere healing to be done. Every tool had to be contrived. They built their own operating table, with the Liang cousin’s help. They put up a diet kitchen of earthen walls and plastered the ceiling to keep the dust of the thatch from the cauldrons, and Rose, the good nurse, took this under her charge. When Mary was troubled about her lest she be lonely, lest she should not marry and have her own life, Rose laughed as she laughed at everything. “There are already too many children,” she declared, “why should I think that mine would be better than those already born?” There were many women like Rose in these times of change, women who did not want to submit to the old rules of marriage and yet who did not draw attention to themselves for any special beauty or ability. These are the good women of the world, and Rose was one of them.
His wedding day drew on, and out of deference to his unknown wife, whom now that he had decided upon the old way of marriage, he was determined to hold in respect, whether love grew between them or not, James gave up the hospital to Chen for three days. Since he could be a little idle, he took the time to see that his rooms were neat and his clothes clean and whole, in which Mary helped him. Young Wang came from the inn and they decided upon the wedding feast dishes, and then Young Wang stayed and shaved James’s face for him and cut his hair, as he used to do when he was a serving man. He gave much good advice to his old master while he did so.
“I too married a local girl, as you know,” he told James. “It has turned out well and we are expecting a child. But from the very first I let her see that I am the head and she is the hands. Women need to know their boundaries. They are like fowls. If they see the whole world before them they run everywhere squawking and laying no eggs. But if they see the wall, the fence, the yard, the closed gate, they settle down in peace upon their nests.”
To this James listened with pretended gravity. Within himself he had already determined his course. He would be as he always was, neither yielding nor imposing, and from this vantage he would wait to discover the soul of the woman. He prayed only that she had a sweet temper.
The wedding day was one of those days which are common in dry northern regions where the snow seldom falls. The sky was cloudless and cold and there was no wind. This was luck, for the wild winds of winter, tearing the sand from the deserts and grinding it against human flesh, torturing eyes and turning hair and skin the color of dust, are calamity on a wedding day. James listened when he woke that morning and was grateful for quiet. It was well past dawn, and were there to be wind it would have been already raging.
Instead it was a day of strange and even unusual peace. The house was still and the Liangs slept late, for it was to be a holiday. Then they bestirred themselves and made ready for the noon when the bride would come in her red sedan chair. Uncle Tao was got up and ate and dressed in his best garments and every child was washed and given some new thing to wear. Since fresh garments had been prepared for the new year, it was cheap enough to put them on a little early.
James rose late, too, and he took his breakfast with Chen and Mary as usual. He had wondered how he would feel on his wedding day and was surprised that he felt nothing, neither fear nor joy. This, he told himself, was because he had not seen the face of his bride. Other men had told in his hearing of their old-fashioned wives and how stupid they were and how shy upon their wedding nights, and how often they wept. He would ask nothing of her tonight. He had already planned what he would say to her. “You and I have chosen one another in the old way of our ancestors,” he would tell her. “Yet we are not as our ancestors
were. We live in two worlds, the old and the new. Therefore let us be friends for a while, until we know what we are. Then, after we are friends—” He did not believe that his mother would have chosen for him a woman too stupid to understand this.
After his breakfast he dressed himself carefully in his Chinese clothes. When she saw him it must be as a man of their people. He did not want to dismay her by looking foreign to her at first, for she would discover much that was strange to her in him as time went on.
In spite of all this determined calm, James felt his heart hurry its beat when noon came. He could not but realize, silently, that what he was about to do was unchangeable. Then he remembered how often in the centuries past men, his ancestors, had stood as ignorant as he of their fate. For them as for him marriage was not for individual pleasure. It was the unfolding of life itself. Man and woman, unknown before, took that step, each toward the other, and what had been separate became one. He must think of himself as man and of her as woman. Their life was only part of the whole of life.
In such spirit he waited in the main room of the Liang house with all the Liang family. Uncle Tao sat in the highest seat, dressed in his best robe of old-amber-hued satin and his sleeved jacket of black cut velvet. Upon his head he wore his black satin cap with a red corded button. Each of the older male cousins, dressed in his best, sat in his proper seat, and the female cousins went out to welcome the bride and receive her into the house.
The red sedan wedding chair reached the gate an hour after noon. Half an hour later, while James still waited with Uncle Tao and the cousins in the big room, the doors were opened. James looked toward it. He saw Mary coming toward him, smiling and holding by the hand his bride. He saw a slender figure clothed from head to foot in scarlet satin. Her head was bent under its beaded veil, but through the strands he saw a grave good face, the eyelids dropped, the mouth firm and red.