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.
Uncle Tao rose, and with him all the cousins. The wedding had begun.
When James entered his room that night and heard the door closed behind him, he knew that now the goodness of his life depended upon him and upon this unknown woman. She sat beside the table and her hands lay one upon the other on her lap. They were brown and not too small, and the nails were not painted. She still wore the beaded veil and her head was drooped as he had seen it and her eyelids were still downcast. She sat motionless, waiting, he knew, for him to lift the veil from her head. He went forward at once and putting his hands to the headdress he lifted it off and set it on the table.