The next day, after sleep so deep that he was ashamed of it, James began the clearing of the room Uncle Tao had given him. Plenty of help he had, for the place was full of children eager to see any new thing. These children he put to work so pleasantly that they thought it all a game, and thus were carried out old baskets of rubbish and broken furniture and rags and papers and all such stuff as gets itself together somehow in an old house where there are too many people. The room was large, having earlier been two rooms, and the floor was of beaten earth and the walls of brick. James bought lime from the village store and he mixed it with water and brushed the walls and sprinkled the floor. The children stood amazed to see him do everything himself, for they were not used to their elders so bestirring themselves. None had seen Uncle Tao so much as fetch his own pipe. When after this James bought boards and nails and put them into shelves they were even somewhat ashamed of him. Who had ever heard of a man who knew books turning carpenter? By now all the ancestral Liangs wondered at these new Liangs and their friend Chen who had dropped upon them from the skies. Behind their backs be sure there was much talk about them, but which of the three knew it? They went zealously about their business, full of faith that the ancestral village could become a place where all were clean and healthy and learned.
It was a healing thing they did, and the first to be healed were themselves. The spring came and went and summer spread over the land. Uncle Tao slept like a vast half-naked Buddha under the date tree, and at night the whole family moved their beds into the courts and slept there and the village street was lined with such beds. It was a gay season, for children ran about together and women gossiped and men sat late drinking hot water and tea and fanning themselves so that when they burst into sweat they were cooled. Day after day James rose early and let the sick come to him before the sun rose too hot. The fame of his healing spread over the countryside and people came to him from a long distance away and Chen helped him always, so that they worked together as closely as two hands.
Even so they could not tend all who came, and in the midst of summer James wrote letters to the three good nurses at the city hospital, Rose, Marie, and Kitty, and invited them to come and help. Of the three he hoped one might come. Yet he made his letter stern, for he did not want them deceived. “I can pay you a tenth of what you are getting now,” he wrote. “But you will have food and shelter. How then will you be paid? As I myself am paid, by healing those who have nowhere else to turn for healing.”
Out of the three two came, Rose and Kitty, for Marie had married herself to a young doctor, and he would not let her leave home and he would not come with her.
At the city hospital it was still considered folly indeed that James and Chen had buried themselves in a village and long tongues wagged and said, “They like to be lords over the poor. Who can believe that they live like the villagers?”
“We will tell you what we see,” Kitty promised.
“Why should they live like villagers if it is their wish to make the villagers themselves better?” Rose asked. The Liang house opened to these two also, and they lived together in one room next to Mary.
It must not be supposed that all things went well. Rose was a cheerful careless girl and she was happy enough. But Kitty was a third, and as the months passed she was sometimes peevish because she thought that Mary and Rose were a close two and did not take her into their friendship deeply enough, and then Chen saw with some alarm that she showed signs of leaning upon him for friendship. He went sheepishly to James one night and said that Kitty should be sent back to the city. “The country is a hard test, Jim,” he said. “Only those who are full of their own richness can bear it. Kitty is too thin of soul. She will make you trouble sooner or later.”
“I will keep her busy,” James said. He tended as he spoke the growth of a culture from some unknown disease which had come to him that day. He had never seen it before. It settled in the legs of men and women and children, and they swelled monstrously from the hips down, while above the hips they withered. Whether it was contagious, whether it caused death, these things he was trying to discover.
So Chen was obliged to speak out. “This Kitty is looking toward me, Jim,” he said with a wry face. “A woman who does not marry and cannot find her happiness in work—well, a man must be careful of such a woman.”
“Why do you not marry her?” James suggested. “Then I would not lose a helper.”
He heard Chen choke and he looked up to see his friend fiery red. “No, I thank you,” Chen said.
But James would do nothing quickly and so for a while he saw to it only that Kitty had much work to do. As for the redness of Chen’s face, he took it as a sign of his friend’s habitual delicacy where women were concerned.
At this time of his life it must be said that James was not acute to such matters. He was delving too deeply into the lives of many to dwell upon the life of any one. Thus he had begun to see that many of the illnesses which he had to heal were the fruit of other evil things. The food which the people ate was not good enough, and when he tried to teach mothers that measles could be a deadly disease here where it was new, and that one child could give it to another, they were too unlearned to understand such things, and never could they believe that cucumbers were dangerous if they were first soaked in pond water and that while it was good to boil the water they drank, it was useless if they rinsed their mouths with water that was not boiled. A cut, however slight, could not be rubbed with mud, he told them, and above all the cord that tied a child to its mother must not be cut with her kitchen scissors. The curse of this whole region was the “ten-day seizure,” as the people called it, of newborn infants, and the cause of it was in the use of rusty iron scissors.
“What shall we use then?” women asked him.
Then Rose told how in her village far to the west they had learned to use the inside leaf of a reed, and the nearer to the heart it was the more likely was the child to live. This seemed magic to the mothers, but James tried to make them see that it was still only what he had said, for the heart leaf of a reed was cleaner of invisible soil than was a pair of iron scissors used to cut anything else as well as the child’s cord. Still the truth was beyond their understanding and none could believe that what could not be seen could be a cause of death.
Uncle Tao himself declared all this was nonsense, and what Uncle Tao said had great force upon others. This was strange enough for it was not long before James saw that Uncle Tao was not well loved here in the Liang village nor by the people on the surrounding Liang lands. But he was admired and people told one another what he had said, and his half-bitter, half-joking words were carried from mouth to mouth. Yet he had a grasping hand and it could tighten secretly, and the people feared him because he was always on the side of the rulers, and their rulers from long habit the people hated. When the emperors were ended the people had rejoiced but now they were beginning to say that the emperors were better than their present rulers. There had been only one emperor, they said, and under him one viceroy in every province and under the viceroy one magistrate in every county, and though these all took their tribute, there was a limit to it. Now little rulers popped out everywhere and who knew where they came from? Each collected tax, and if a farmer refused to pay the tax a band of soldiers appeared with foreign guns. One soldier with one gun is too many anywhere.
Uncle Tao was always friendly with the tax gatherers. He himself paid no taxes, for he declared that all he had belonged to the people and from the people must the tax be gathered. So saying he fed tax gatherer and soldier and what could the people do?
All this the country women poured into Mary’s ears when she went out to visit among them, for she was one who listened to any tale, and after she had heard these things she took them to James and Chen, and demanded that something be done with Uncle Tao. They talked long and argued much, shut up in their private rooms so that no ears could hear and no mouth run to tell Uncle Tao. For these three too had their lesser enemies,
in spite of every effort they made to keep all friendly. Thus the eldest daughter-in-law was jealous of Mary because the younger women followed her and learned to read, instead of spending all their time in washing and sewing, and the eldest one said she had no time for reading and would not learn. This daughter-in-law went to Uncle Tao and complained that Mary made trouble in the house and that all was better before these new Liangs came. She talked with her husband too and turned him against the new Liangs and their friend Chen. And when autumn came it was known that Uncle Tao did not like so much learning in the village and Mary found her schoolroom half empty.
The village was split in two by the time the midautumn festival came, and some were with the new Liangs and some were against, and those who were against were all for Uncle Tao and the old ways. As if this were not trouble enough Rose said one day to James that Kitty was with those who were against them, and therefore she should be sent back to the city. James sent for Kitty then and in the midst of the evening’s work when bandages must be wrapped and tools boiled in the tin tank Chen had made to set upon a charcoal fire, he told her gently enough what he had heard. At this, such a stream of venom came spitting out of Kitty’s mouth as he had not imagined could be in a woman’s heart.
“You and your sister and that Liu Chen!” she cried. “You are too good for me—and for everybody. Why are you here? Is it likely that you are here for nothing? Who does anything for nothing and can it be that you are here only because this is your ancestral village? Are you so old-fashioned as that? Nobody believes it. You are here because you are secretly Communists—I know it! Your lives are in my hand. One word to that old fat uncle of yours and one word to the county police and you will be gone!”
For a moment James could not speak, so aghast was he at this wickedness and so ashamed of his own stupidity in not seeing early that Kitty was not the good young woman he had thought she was in the city hospital. He looked at her thin face and unhappy eyes, and it came to him that she was not evil but weak. When all went well with her, she could be good, but the soil in her heart was shallow, and goodness was a plant that must have deep roots with which to live. So he spoke very gently. “Why did you come to our village?” he asked. “No one made you come. I told you the life here was bitter.” He saw that she was brimming with some secret, but he did not want to hear it. Instead he took half of his scanty store of money which had come in as his share from the autumn harvests and he said, “You must leave at once. Pack your box and roll up your bedding. I will hire a cart to take you back to the city. If you go today, I will not send a bad report of you to the hospital. You can return to your old work and forget that you ever were here.”
She pouted for a while and struggled with her wish to speak out her whole mind, but prudence was in her too and she obeyed. When she was gone Rose had the courage to tell the truth, which was that Kitty had come because of Liu Chen, whom she had loved for a long time. At this Mary grew indignant in her turn, and she said, “Such women cannot understand that marriage is not everything and that work comes first,” and she could not understand why Rose laughed so much when she said this and at last Rose had to give over lest she make her friend angry.
Yet for James all this was still only upon the surface of the day’s life. He was beginning to understand that sickness and health, that ignorance and learning, poverty and comfort, war and peace, sorrow and joy were all fruits of human confusion or of human wisdom. Here in this one small village set in a spreading countryside was the whole world. What was true here was true anywhere. Something was wrong here and nobody knew why. The Liang family had plenty of food and yet there were others, even outside the gate who starved. James, himself a Liang, had learning enough to raise him high, and yet there were those here, even his kinfolk, who could not read their own surname if they saw it written down. These differences remained in spite of all he could do. James could eat plain food and wear cotton clothes and walk barefoot in his shoes and yet the deep difference remained. And what could he do, he asked himself?
Upon such thoughts James fed and he grew moody and downcast and wondered at his own discontent. He began to think of himself as a man apart, one destined for some great thing, and yet he could not discover how he was to do anything great in the midst of such ignorance and stubbornness as the people had. Ignorance and stubbornness went together in them. Yet some were grateful for what he did, and when he saved a child for a mother, he was warmed for a moment by her joy. But then he asked himself, what was one child saved among these millions? He thought constantly, without telling anyone of his discontent with himself. He said in his heart, “I am cut off from the very people whom I want to help.” This was true. While he could speak very kindly to the people who came to be healed or whom he met on village street or country road, he felt no link of flesh or spirit with them. He grew more solitary as the months passed, and this frightened him. Must he say that Su and Peng and Kang and their kind were right? Could there be no bond between himself and his own people?
In this state of mind he looked with new eyes at Mary and Chen. For a long time he had not talked with them except of the day’s needs as they rose. Mary had moved her school outside the Liang house when she found the trouble it made, and once outside these walls, others in the village dared to come to it, and her room was full again. People who could not read or write themselves believed that there was some great good fortune in learning and mothers sent their little sons to Mary, hoping that with learning these lads need not be only common farmers and muleteers and carriers. These poor mothers dreamed their dreams, too. “Why can not I be content as Chen is content?” James asked himself. Both Chen and Mary had found a way to root themselves here and he had not. James watched Mary and he could discover in her lively looks not one hint of discontent. And Chen too was happy. Asking no profound questions of himself, he did the day’s work well, and he it was who taught the village ironmonger to make a knife so keen of edge that it could lance a boil or cut a surface ulcer. His homemade sterilizer he declared better than ever and he used it daily.
Not one man or woman had yet allowed the cutting away of any inner part, and James and Chen had both to see some waste away and die rather than be cut. Uncle Tao was everywhere loud in his words against cutting and the people knew that he would not let James cut away the thing that grew larger month by month in his own belly. The stout old man still contended with this inner growth and he ate much and slept much and no longer walked far from his room, and by dint of such eating and sleeping he was still strong. Yet some day, as James and Chen both knew, he would be weaker. When that day came they must be ready for it.
The autumn drew on gloriously, and the moon swelled to harvest size. The frost came down and then went away again and autumn warmth returned and one day after another passed in golden silence. The people were quiet and happy for a while, for with the harvests all could eat. The bandits, always lurking over the horizon, were not yet hungry with winter and the people could take a little ease. The war withdrew farther north once more and this fear eased, too, though only for a space. The end of autumn before winter strikes is the best time of any year, and this year it was more than good, for the harvests had been heavy. Yet James alone was not content. All that he did was too small, and he had with him day and night a constant loneliness.
And then one day in midwinter he discovered the cause of his own discontent. The one room where they worked had grown into two and now they were building a third for a bath house. There was no warm place in this whole village for people to wash themselves. In the city can be found bath houses, but not in a village. Much skin disease came from filth, and while in the summer a man can stand behind his house and pour a bucket of water over himself and scrub his body with the rough dried shred of a field gourd, in winter no man longs so heartily to be clean that he will do such a thing. The bath house therefore became a dream of Chen’s own and he had hired two men to come with their mallets and pound down earth into walls. He devised an earthen st
ove in one corner and a pipe to carry hot water from a cauldron to a great round wooden tub and a drain to carry the soiled water away into a ditch in the village street. The fame of this miracle went everywhere, and whole families came from miles around to see it for themselves.
Chen took much pride in the bath house, and he explained to all who came how easily it had been made, how cheaply, and how any man who had a little energy to spare could make his family such a bath house. When women saw in what comfort their menfolk came home after a hot bath in winter, they went to Mary and asked why one should not be made for them and Mary carried the demand to James and Chen. Chen laughed at her as he always did, and he said with mock ruefulness to James, “You see how these new women are, always wanting everything men have!” and Mary, who never understood quickly enough that he made a joke, flew to women’s defense and Chen pretended to be frightened and he said, “Well—well, who said I would not do it?”
So a bath house was made for the women, too, and they were thrifty and brought their children to bathe with them and thus bathing became the fashion, and the village was proud and felt itself as good as any city. Even so there were those who complained and the eldest daughter-in-law grumbled and said, “All this bathing is nothing but a wasteful habit. Look at me! Now that I bathe myself, I itch all over in twenty days or so unless I bathe again. Yet before we had this bath house I went all winter and did not itch.”
Uncle Tao would not bathe at all at first for fear of getting cold, and then for fear of seeming to yield to Mary. Then when he saw how rosy the children were after a bath and how well his sons ate and how sweetly they slept when they were cleaned, he mustered up courage and one day before the new moon year he declared himself ready for a bath, too.
Neither James nor Chen had urged him, but be sure that they rejoiced at this sign of change in Uncle Tao. Chen himself saw that the room was warm and the water hot and that some sheets of cotton were ready to dry Uncle Tao’s vast body. All others were held off while Uncle Tao was bathed. He had decided that the bath should take place at high noon on a sunny day when there was no wind, and he waited some ten days or so before he found a day good enough. Then he was anxious about what he should eat, and James advised him to eat nothing until after the bath.