Then one day when it was very hot, and Sheng was indolent with heat and lay asleep, Yuan wandered forth alone, and riding on a public vehicle or two, he came into a region he had not dreamed was here in such a city. For he had been surfeited with its richness. To him the buildings were palaces, and every man took for matter of course that he had all he would of food and drink and garments and his needs were not for these things, for they were his due and only to be expected. Beyond these were the needs of pleasure and of better garments and food made not to live by but to take zest in. Thus were all the citizens of this city or so it seemed to Yuan.
But upon this day he found himself in another city, a city of the poor. He stumbled on it, unknowing, and suddenly it was everywhere about him. These were the poor. He knew them. Though their faces were pale and white, though some were black-skinned as the savages are, he knew them. By their eyes, by the filth upon their bodies, by their dirty scaly hands, by the loud screams of women and the cries of too many children, he knew them. There in his memory were the other poor he knew, very far away in another city, but how like these! He said to himself, recognizing them, “Then this great city, too, is built upon a city of the poor!” Ai-lan and her friends came out at midnight into such men and women as these were.
Yuan thought to himself, and with a sort of triumph, “These people, too, hide their poor! In this rich city, crowded secretly into these few streets, are these poor, as filthy as any to be seen in any country!”
Here then Yuan truly found something not in books. He walked among these people in a daze, staring into narrow shadowed rooms, choosing his footsteps among the garbage of the streets, where starved children ran half naked in the heat. Lifting up his head to look at misery on misery he thought, “It does not matter that they live in lofty houses — they live in hovels still — the same hovels—”
He went back at last, when darkness fell, and entered into the cool lit darkness of the other streets. When he came into Sheng’s room, Sheng was gay again, awake, and ready with a friend or two to sally forth into the street of theatres to make merry there.
When he saw Yuan he cried out, “Where have you been, cousin? I nearly feared you lost.”
And Yuan answered slowly, “I have seen some of the life you told me was not in the books. … Then all the wealth and strength of these people still cannot keep away the poor.” And he told where he had been and a little of what he saw. And one of Sheng’s friends said, careful as a judge, “Some day, of course, we will solve the problem of poverty.” And the other said, “Of course if these people were capable of more they would have more. They are defective somehow. There is always room at the top.”
Then Yuan spoke out quickly, “The truth is you hide your poor — you are ashamed of them as a man is ashamed of some secret vile disease—”
But Sheng said gaily, “We’ll be late if we let this cousin start us on this talk! The play begins in half an hour!”
In those six years Yuan came near to three others who befriended him among all the strangers among whom he lived. There was a certain old teacher he had, a white-haired man, whose face Yuan early liked to see because it was very kindly marked by gentle thoughts and perfect ways of life. To Yuan this old man showed himself, when time went on, as more than a teacher only. He spent willingly much time in special talk with Yuan, and he read the notes Yuan wrote in planning for a book he hoped to write, and with very mild correction he pointed out a place or two where Yuan was wrong. Whenever Yuan spoke he listened, his blue eyes so smiling and so filled with understanding that Yuan came at length to trust him greatly and at further length to tell him inward things.
He told him, among much else, how he had seen the poor in the city, and how he wondered that in the midst of such vast riches the poor could live so desperately. And this led him on to talk of the foreign priest and how he had besmirched Yuan’s people by his vile pictures. The old man listened to it all in his mild silent way and then he said, “I think not everyone can see the whole picture. It has long been said we each see what we look for. You and I, we look at land and think of seed and harvests. A builder looks at the same land and thinks of houses, and a painter of its colors. The priest sees men only as those who need to be saved, and so naturally he sees most clearly those who need to be saved.”
And after Yuan had thought of this awhile, unwillingly he knew it to be true, and in all fairness he could not quite hate the foreign priest as wholly as he did, or even as he wished he could, for still he thought him wrong, and still he said, “At least, he saw a very narrow part of my country.” To which the old man answered always mildly, “That might be, and must be if he were a narrow man.”
Through talk like this in field and schoolroom after others had gone home, Yuan learned to love this old white man. And he loved Yuan and looked on him with increasing tenderness.
One day he said to Yuan, half hesitating, “I wish you would come with me tonight, my son. We are very simple folk — only my wife and my daughter Mary and I — we three — but if you will come and take your supper with us, we’ll be glad. I’ve told them so much about you, they want to know you, too.”
This was the first time anyone had spoken thus to Yuan, in, these years, and he was very moved by it. It seemed a warm and special thing to him that a teacher would take a pupil to his private home. He said shyly therefore in the courteous way of his own tongue, “I am not worthy.”
To which the old man opened his eyes wide and smiled and said, “Wait until you see how plain we are! My wife said when I first told her it would be a pleasure to me if you came, ‘I’m afraid he’s used to much better than we have.’ ”
Then Yuan protested again in courtesy and yielded. Thus he found himself walking down the shaded street into a small square court-like yard, and thence to an ancient wooden house, standing back in trees, and set about with porches. There at the door a lady met him who made him think of the lady whom he called his mother. For in these two women, ten thousand miles apart, who spoke two different tongues, whose blood and bones and skin were not alike, there was yet a common look. The white smoothed hair, their full settled look of motherhood, their simple ways and honest eyes, their quiet voices, the wisdom and the patience graven on their lips and brows, these made them like. Yet it was true there was a difference in the two which Yuan could perceive after they were seated in the large main room, for about this lady there was an air of contentment and simple satisfaction of the soul which his lady mother had not. It was as if this one had her heart’s desire in her lifetime, but the other had not. By two roads the two had come to a good tranquil age, but the one had come by a happy road and with companionship, while the other had come by a darker way and she walked alone.
But when this lady’s daughter came in, she was not like Ai-lan. No, this Mary was a different sort of maid. She was, perhaps, a little more in years than Ai-lan was, much taller and not so pretty, very quiet, seemingly, and governed in her voice and look. Yet when one listened to the words she spoke, there was sense in all she said and her dark, grey-black eyes, somber in hue when she was grave, could flash out merrily to match a witty twist her words might take. She was demure before her parents, yet not afraid, and they deferred to her as to an equal, and Yuan perceived this.
Indeed Yuan saw very soon she was no common maid. For when the old man talked of what Yuan wrote, this Mary knew of it, too, and put a question so quickly and so aptly before Yuan that he was taken aback and asked her, wondering, “How is it that you know the history of my people so well that you can ask me of one so far away in history as Ch’ao Tso?”