He tried to make his voice pleasant, easy, something a woman need not fear.
“How heavy this is! I hope you have not a headache from wearing it all day.”
At this she looked up quickly and then away again. “I have a little headache,” she said, “but it will pass soon. I am very healthy.”
He liked her plain voice, the accent rustic, yet clear. She was not pretty, but her face was good, the features straight and the skin smooth and brown as is common with country women. Her eyes were wide apart and large enough to look honest. The mouth was generous and it looked sweet tempered. For so much he could be grateful.
He sat down opposite her. “Tell me about your life,” he said. “Then I will tell you about mine.”
A mild look of surprise came on her face but after a few seconds she began without shyness. “What have I to tell? We are newcomers here and our ancestral home is some three hundred li away. I have no learning — and of this I am ashamed. But in a busy household on the land there is no time for a girl to go to school. My two younger brothers can read. We older ones had always to work. I am the middle child of my parents.”
“It is easy to read,” James said. “My sister will teach you if you wish.”
“I do wish,” she said. “That is, if you can spare the time for me to learn.”
“There will be time,” James said.
Then simply, so that it would not awe her, he told her of his own life and how it had been spent abroad and why he had wanted to come back to his own people. She listened, sitting motionless, her head inclined, not looking at him, and he found himself telling her more than he had planned. When he had finished she said in a grave quiet way which he already saw was natural to her, “Our country is now in bad times. There are those who go away in such times and those who come back. The good ones come back.”
He was delighted with this. In so few words she had put what he had tried to tell himself often in many ways, but never so simply and clearly. Now he could make the proposal of friendship. “You are tired. Let me say what I have to say. You and I have chosen one another in the old way of our ancestors—”
He went on and she listened. When he had finished she gave a small quick nod of her head and for the first time she looked into his eyes. “Your mother told me you were a good man,” she said. “Now I know you are.”
After his wedding his life flowed on scarcely changed from what it had been. Within a few days Yumei had taken her place in the household. She was a quiet woman. Yet when they were alone James found an increasing pleasure in talking with her. She had a large mind, and her thoughts were fresh because they were her own. Since she had been always busy in her family of brothers no one had taken time to know her thoughts, and this treasure was his own now to discover. Soon she began to make small comfortable changes in their rooms and he found his food served hot and on time, at hours when he could most easily eat. When he came in at night there was always something light and hot to eat and he found he slept better for it.
And it was Yumei who first told him that Uncle Tao was frightened and in pain. “Please look at our Old Head,” she said to him one morning. “Yesterday he was weeping behind his hand when he thought no one could see him. But I saw him and when the others left, I asked him to tell me what was wrong, and so I know that the knot in him weighs on his veins and he cannot sit or sleep.”
“I have long told him that he should let me cut it out,” James said to defend himself.
She sat down at a distance from him and folded her hands as she always did when she was about to talk with him. She spoke freely to him but she kept the little formalities she had been taught. “Please forgive me,” she said. “You know everything better than I do, I think, but this one thing perhaps I know better — it is how people feel. The middle child, especially if she is a daughter, is the one who looks at both elder and younger and she is a bridge between them. Now Uncle Tao wants secretly to be rid of his knot, but he is afraid he will die if he is cut.”
James was a little impatient with this. “I have told him he will die if he does not have it out.”
“He told me you said so,” she replied in the same quiet voice. “That is what makes him so afraid. He has no way to turn. Now let us tell him this way. Promise him that he will live if he has it cut out.”
“But he might not live!” James exclaimed.
“Promise him he will live,” she said coaxingly. She was looking at him now, her eyes bright and soft. “If he dies he will not know it. If he lives then you will be right. And if he believes he will live, it will give him strength not to die.”
It was hard to refuse this shrewd persuasion. James sat silent for a while thinking it over. It happened to be true enough — the belief that he would live was more powerful than any medicine for a sick man.
“Surely life is the most precious thing,” Yumei urged, when James did not speak.
Again it seemed to him that she was right. Men continued to kill each other as they had for centuries and for many reasons, not knowing that life was more precious than anything for which they died.
“I will do it, if Uncle Tao can be persuaded,” he said at last.
“I will persuade him,” she said.
What Yumei’s persuasion was, none knew. But all knew that some sort of slow powerful gentle argument was going on between the old man and the young woman. She served him every day with a favorite food and she sat with him while he ate and when he had eaten she began her persuasion, urging him to life. For how would the Liang household continue without him, she asked. She pointed out that in such times as these the old and the wise were the only lamps to guide the feet of the people. She so persuaded Uncle Tao that he ceased to think of himself as an aging useless old man. She filled him with the necessity to live. It became his duty to live, and then she made him believe that he could live. When he had reached this place she went and told James.
All were astonished. Uncle Tao’s sons were fearful but he himself put courage into them. The elder daughter-in-law was not too pleased at this success of a newcomer over the older ones who had failed, and Mary, who liked Yumei well, could not but wonder if Uncle Tao were worth so much trouble.
But James gave none of them time to think, either for or against. He knew that he must take this moment when Uncle Tao’s courage was high. He prepared the next day to do the work, and he took no more patients that day and set himself to this one stupendous task. Did he fail with his own flesh and blood, did Uncle Tao die, no one in the ancestral village would believe in him again and he would have to move his hospital elsewhere. This monstrous knowledge was forced upon him by the excitement of the kinfolk in the house and by the villagers and by the men on the land, who came in when they heard what was about to happen, and to stay until they knew Uncle Tao had been cut and sewed up again safely.
Again luck was with James. There was no wind or sand the next day and the small operating room was clean. Early in the morning Uncle Tao was moved there upon a litter carried by his sons, and all the tenants who had spent the night in the courts rose while he passed and groaned in unison. Uncle Tao did not smile or speak. He kept his eyes shut and his lips set. When they lifted him upon the table he was inert. For him everything had begun. Only once did he speak after this. When he felt himself on the table he opened one eye. “Where is that young woman?” he asked.