“It is another way of stealing,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. But she did not withdraw her accumulating capital.
The second savings account she merely put into a box which she kept behind the towels and sheets in a closet. She thought of it as the children’s money, though she had no idea how to get it to them. Had Lili married James it would have been easy to ask Mr. Li to exchange the American dollars for Chinese ones in Shanghai, but the Liangs now saw very little of the Li family, who, it was said, were about to join Lili in England. Yet the important thing was to have the money in hand. Mrs. Liang got it by charging Dr. Liang more for everything she bought. This, she told him, was the high cost of living, and if he looked at American papers, he could see for himself that prices were rising every day. She herself followed the price lists closely and made a new rise whenever they did, at the same time continuing to inquire of Dr. Liang when he was going to send the children some money.
Thus, Mary’s letter could not have reached them at a better time. It was written to them both. After some thought Mary had decided not to try to explain any of her feelings about the village or even about Uncle Tao. She would merely say that she and James thought they ought to do something for the ancestral village, where the people were very poor and Uncle Tao himself was sick and James said he needed an operation. “We think of going there to live and to see what we can do for them,” she wrote. “It made me sad to see the children growing up with no chance to go to school and no one even telling them to wipe their noses. Really, Pa and Ma, you should have told us what things here are like, instead of letting us think that our country is one beautiful cloud of Confucianism. But maybe you have been away so long that you have forgotten.”
Her father was displeased with this. “I don’t see what Confucianism has to do with wiping children’s noses,” he said.
“That is not what she is really talking about,” Mrs. Liang said. “So Uncle Tao needs to be cut! Eh, I hope James won’t do it. It is much better to let Uncle Tao die naturally. Sooner or later it must happen. Why prevent fate?”
“When you talk like that I wonder whether you have learned anything in all these years you have had the advantages of America,” Dr. Liang said angrily.
“Please excuse me,” she replied, having learned submission in small matters.
Dr. Liang read on. “Now you will wonder what we can live on,” Mary wrote. “We have thought that all out. Food and room we can have under the ancestral roof. But I need money if I am to have a school, and James will need some too.”
Here Dr. Liang paused and looked severely at his wife. “Why should she need money for a school when the government sets up schools everywhere free?”
“You know they would not put a school in that dead little village of your ancestors,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. “Please go on.”
Dr. Liang hesitated, decided not to answer and read on, “Uncle Tao says he sends you some money every year for land rent. Pa, I want this money. Put into American money it will mean very little to you. It is so little that you have never even mentioned it to us. But in the village it will be enough for me. And there is something good in using that money for the ancestral village. It comes from our land. I feel it is right to keep it here.”
At this point Dr. Liang became really annoyed. “I cannot understand why Uncle Tao said anything about that money,” he said. “It is no one’s business but mine.”
Mrs. Liang’s surprise was great indeed. “But Liang, you have never told even me you had this money!”
“It is too little to think about,” he declared.
“So you kept it for some use of your own,” she said with evil suggestion. She knew to a penny what he earned and while he signed all the checks she studied the checkbook and could foresee the balance at the end of every month. She had never seen any notice of the deposit of rent funds from China.
“I buy a few books,” he said gently.
“If that is all, then certainly you can give our children so little a sum,” she retorted. “I will write and tell them that you will do so and they can show the letter to Uncle Tao.”
“Uncle Tao will scarcely accept your letter,” Dr. Liang reminded her.
She immediately went into tears, and this destroyed his peace. “You know I cannot do the work which supports you, let me say, as well as myself, if you cry and make the house miserable,” he told her.
“Let me go home!” she sobbed.
The scene proceeded according to old pattern, and the end of it was that Dr. Liang sat down and wrote a letter to James, which he was to show to Uncle Tao, asking that the rent funds be given to his son. “I have been stirred by my daughter’s letter,” Dr. Liang wrote. “She tells me that the village needs repairs and so on. I make my contribution thus to our ancestral family. Let the land keep its own.”
Mrs. Liang did not wholly approve this way of putting it. “I hope Uncle Tao does not think that you mean for him to keep the money,” she said, taking the letter.
But Dr. Liang would not change what he had written. It sounded too well.
Nevertheless the whole transaction made him melancholy. He went into his study and shut the door and sat down in a deep leather chair and held his head in his hands. He felt harried and confused. His privacy was invaded. He was vaguely ashamed that his children had seen the village as he was sure it must be now. All these years since his childhood had passed doubtless without any repairs being made. Centuries had passed over the village and each had left its mark. No one had made improvements. As young men in the Liang family grew up they had simply gone away if they did not like the village and its ways, even as he himself had gone away. The ones who had stayed were the ones like Uncle Tao, who, although they belonged to the gentry, were very little above the coarse peasants. Those peasants! How he despised them in his heart! Stubborn, strong, fearing no one, there was none to control them. His own parents had been afraid of them. He remembered his mother pleading with his father to allow the peasants lower rents and larger sharing of the harvest, lest in their anger they come against the Liang house and destroy it. Such things did happen in other ancestral villages. Were the landlords firm in maintaining their just dues, the peasants could and did willfully come against them with hoes and mallets and clubs and axes and while they seldom killed anyone, they would break valuable furniture and slash silken bedding and rip satin curtains and hack and hew walls and beams. Once this had happened even in the Liang family and he could still remember that when he was a little boy his own paternal grandmother had paused on the way home from the funeral of an old cousin, and she had pointed with two delicate fingers to a deep ditch beside the Liang burying ground.
“There I hid once, when your father was a child,” she had told him.
“Why did you hide, Grandmother?” he had asked. “The men of the earth rose against us,” she had said. “Why?” he had asked, and even as she spoke a dart of fear ran through his bosom.
She replied coldly, “Your grandfather wanted to raise the rents. We had many sons and their weddings came close together and we could scarcely pay for everything that had to be done. Of course men of earth understand nothing of such needs.”
He had asked no more questions. Even as a child he knew what had happened. He had heard whispers of it in the courts. He had seen anxious looks on women’s faces. The peasants were the ogres of his childhood. They were necessary because they tended the fields and reaped the harvests. Without them there was no food. They had to be ruled and yet they had to be placated and cajoled because they were men without reason. He grew up afraid of them and hating them.
Yet even now he remembered certain moments. In the spring, when the young wheat was green, the figures in blue that moved across the landscape were beautiful in the distance. When he came near he saw good brown faces. In the spring the peasants were always happy and they laughed and were kind. They were kind even to him, the landlord’s son, and he remembered a big brown fellow kneeling on the earth so that his eyes could b
e on a level with the child’s and he had smiled and brought out of his pocket a piece of steamed bread and offered it to him. His nurse had drawn him back crying that he had already eaten. But the child that had been he was willful and shouted that he wanted the bread. So the big brown man had given it to him and had continued to kneel there smiling at him as he ate.
“Is it good to eat?” the man had asked the little boy in the satin robe.
“It is good,” the boy had replied.
“It is my bread that I eat when the sun is yonder,” the man said pointing to the zenith.
Then the man had pointed to the earth. “Sun above and earth beneath, both together make man’s bread.”
He had said this gravely, as though he meant something special, but the child did not know that.
Dr. Liang pondered that saying now, as he sat in his quiet study, his head in his hands. He still did not know what the peasant meant. People, he reflected, must live at these different levels. Some must work with the hands, some with the mind. The peasants should not be lifted from their places as workers with the hands, or the higher ones would starve. He himself would, if he lived in China, be quite helpless without the peasants. Even here, he supposed, there were the workers with hands, men on American farms who had to do the crude work of producing food. Such persons must not be taught falsely that they could or should do other work.
At this moment he began to distrust his daughter Mary. James was safe enough in his profession. It was all very well to see that peasants had sound health and strong bodies for their work. But Mary spoke of schools. Surely there was no reason for a peasant to know how to read and write. This would give him the means of rising out of his class. What would happen if the whole world were scholars? Who then would provide the food? Besides, the peasant mind was a crude one. It had not passed through the centuries of refinement which he, Liang Wen Hua, for example, had in his own ancestry. He frowned and determined to write a letter to Mary. He began to regret his generosity in the matter of the rents and he got up impetuously and went to find his wife.
She was gone. The house was silent except for the maid Nellie, banging something in the kitchen. He never spoke to Nellie if he could help it. Doubtless the letter was mailed. He stood for a moment, irresolute, wondering whether it would be worth writing a second letter which he would post privately. But of course Mrs. Liang would hear of it, and now that there were only the two of them in the house, his peace was peculiarly dependent upon her.
The telephone rang, and soon the maid Nellie came into the room. “It’s the Woman’s Art Club,” she said. “They want to know if you can come to a luncheon tomorrow. The speaker is sick and they need you bad.”
“I am quite busy,” he murmured in the distant tone he reserved for her. “Stay—I will speak to them myself.”
He went to the telephone and listened to an arrogant woman’s voice explaining the crisis. American women all had arrogant voices.
“I wouldn’t think of giving up my own work to fill in for another speaker, Mrs. Page,” he said gently.
Her arrogance changed hastily to persuasiveness.
“Well,” he conceded, “only because I am profoundly interested in art and the American public has so little knowledge—”
He paused for her gratitude, and then said with mild firmness, “My fee is one hundred dollars.”
He heard a gasp at the other end of the telephone and then a quick recovery. “But of course, Dr. Liang!”
He regretted that he had not said two hundred. They were in a pinch. He subdued the thought as unworthy of him.
Mrs. Liang had posted the letter at once, and then she had taken a taxicab to Chinatown. The expense was severe, but she had never been successful in finding her way underground and she was ashamed to be seen riding a bus as though she were not the wife of Dr. Liang. In the subway she would not meet anybody she knew, but she had never been able to understand what train to get on, or once on where she should get off. Several times she had tried to get to Chinatown by subway, lured by the cheapness of such travel, but after an hour or so underground she had been compelled to come up and take a taxicab. The last time she had come up near a suburb called Queens, and the cab fare had run into dollars. Besides, who was the Queen? She supposed it must be Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Does Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt live this side?” she had asked the cab driver from sheer curiosity.
“Lady, you’re nuts,” he had replied pleasantly. This also she did not understand. There were many things said by Americans which could not be understood and she had learned by experience that questions did not make them any plainer. So she merely accepted this reply.
Today she wanted to go to Chinatown to shop for various groceries which could not be bought elsewhere. Since she had plenty of time, this being one of Neh-lee’s days, she would also inquire into the state of her savings account and perhaps visit a little while with Billy Pan’s wife whom she had learned to know. True they did not understand one another entirely, since Mrs. Pan was Cantonese. Still, it would be pleasant just to sit a while with a Chinese woman of whom she need not be afraid. With Liang’s friends she was easily ashamed. They were, she feared, secretly surprised that the great Dr. Liang’s wife was not young and beautiful. But with Mrs. Pan she was the superior one—the wife of the great Dr. Liang.
The taxicab, she thought as she sat squarely in the middle of the seat, was after all the American ricksha. In Peking she had her own private ricksha, and how pleasant that had been! She had paid Old Yin, the puller, seven dollars a month and he had eaten the kitchen scraps and had slept in the gatehouse. Yet whenever she had wanted to go anywhere in the city he had been ready to take her there, thinking himself lucky to have his food and bed sure every day. While she spent long hours talking over everything with her many friends and playing mah-jongg, Old Yin had slept in the footrest of the ricksha, his head against the seat. Thinking of him she smiled. Where was he now? So genial, so faithful, so polite, so much better than the taxi driver!
She looked out of the window anxiously, convinced as always that the driver was taking her many extra miles. However often she came to Chinatown she was never quite sure of the way. She leaned back and closed her eyes. In any car she easily felt seasick. When they had crossed the ocean she had been sick every day. There was another anxiety. When they went back to China, if Liang was ever willing to go, who would hold her head? On shipboard one of the children had always stayed with her. Liang could not bear to see anyone sick and he always left the room. She smiled, remembering something. One day the sea had been evil and even Liang had got sick. How nice that was! He had lain in the lower bunk groaning and insisting that some lobster he had eaten was not fresh. But of course he was only seasick.
Ah well, Liang was her husband and she would never have another. Even had she been young and beautiful she would not have run from man to man as women did nowadays. But she was neither young nor beautiful and she was grateful for Liang. It was honorable to be his wife, and if he had a peevish temper at home, he might have been worse. He had never beaten her, and she had learned, after all these years, how to torture him.
The driver woke her. “Where are you going in Chinatown?” he asked gruffly.
“Corner Mott and Pell,” she said instantly.
He growled and whirled about a few streets and then stopped with a jar. She tried to get out and could not. “Up, up, up!” the driver said angrily.
“Up?” she said blankly, looking at the glass in the ceiling. “I came in the door.”
“Handle!” the driver shouted. “Push it up!”
Mrs. Liang suddenly hated him. “You do it,” she said and waited. She counted out the change carefully, cutting his tip in half for his being rude. She held the money in her hand while he moaned and opened the door. Safely on the sidewalk she gave him the money and turned instantly into the grocery store, catching a glimpse of his glowering face before he drove off. She sighed.
“What you want
?” an American voice demanded. She saw a Chinese boy behind the counter, a new clerk.
“Eh, you,” she said. “You don’t talk like Chinese.”
“I’m American,” he retorted. “What you want, lady? Got some nice green cabbages today—also fresh ginger roots.”
“Two pound cabbage, one-quarter pound ginger,” she ordered.
So it was, she reflected. This Chinese boy an American! Why, Louise was an American at that rate. She was the mother of an American! That was the way these foreign nations did. They took even your children. It was a good thing Louise was in China. When she had finished shopping, and had stopped in to see Mrs. Pan, she would go home and write a private letter to Mary. “Let your sister be friend with some nice Chinese boy,” so she would coax Mary. She ordered shredded chicken and small dried shrimps and a brown jar of soy sauce. She bought pickled mustard leaves and salted turnips and fresh bean curd and salted fish. Then she waited while it was all tied together.
“What your name?” she asked the boy.
“Louie Pak,” he replied.
“You go to school?” she asked with her endless human curiosity.
“Yeah—just finished high school.”
“Now you go back to China?”
“Naw,” he replied with scorn. “Whadda I wanta go there for? I’m gonna go into drugstore work.”
She felt scarcely less alien to this boy than she would have were he blue-eyed and yellow-haired. There was something outrageous about him and she felt vaguely indignant. “All boys must go back to China,” she said firmly. “China needs educated boys.”
He tied the string in a double knot. “Yeah? Well, they hafta get along without me,” he retorted.
She took her bundle and walked away, feeling his bold eyes upon her, critical doubtless of her stout figure and Chinese dress. When she reached Mrs. Pan’s house she went in full of protest about such boys. Mrs. Pan was ironing children’s clothes in her small compact kitchen. She was the mother of many children and her ironing was never done. But when she saw Mrs. Liang she put the iron away and hurried into the clean little parlor.