“Dr. Peng!” he began and stopped.
The handsome delicate-featured Dr. Peng Chenyu was seated at his carved desk, and leaning over him was the pretty head nurse. They were talking in earnest tones, the man smiling, the girl coquettish. Then they saw James standing square and frank as an American in the open doorway.
The girl stepped back and slipped from the room by a side door. Dr. Peng spoke in his high smooth voice. “Dr. Liang,” he said in English, “please be so kind as to knock before you enter.”
James spoke in Chinese. He rarely used English. It disgusted him that every little student nurse and interne tried to chatter in English. “That this was a private office I did not know, Dr. Peng,” he said. “I come to complain. The wards are being reduced until now my patients are lying on the floor.”
Dr. Peng smiled and lifted a small object from his desk. It was the nude figure of a woman and it was made of white jade. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, still in English. He came from Shanghai and he did not speak Mandarin well.
“A naked woman,” James said bluntly.
“Much more interesting than that,” Dr. Peng said delicately. His voice had the cadences of poetry. “It is the figure that native doctors use to diagnose the ills of an old-fashioned woman patient. She will not show herself to a man — as you have doubtless discovered — but she puts her pretty fingertip somewhere on this jade figure, to show where her pain is.” Dr. Peng laughed silently. “What amuses me is how lovingly the Chinese doctors carve these little figures, or have them carved, and how precious is the material! Do sit down, Dr. Liang.”
“I have no time,” James said. “I have come to complain about the wards.”
Dr. Peng held the little figure in his palm. “As to our wards,” he said gently, “we regret very much that they are too few.”
“This pandering to the rich disgusts me,” James said. “Every few days I find workmen putting up walls about a section of the ward to make a new private room for a general or an official.”
“It is not pandering,” Dr. Peng said. Virtue shone in his narrow brilliantly black eyes. “It is necessity. Charity patients do not pay. Generals and officials and millionaires pay very well. I daresay you would complain, Dr. Liang, if your salary were curtailed — an excellent salary it is, too. You are worth it, of course. But the rich people pay for it. Do not forget that our grants from America ceased last year. We have to find our own salaries as well as support the hospital.”
James glared into the handsome smooth face. Then he turned and went out, slamming the door slightly. What Peng had said was true. The hospital was expensive beyond all proportion to the lives of the people. Only the rich could afford to lie under these massive roofs, only the rich could afford to walk the marble-floored halls and use the tiled baths. There was no place for the poor except in the crowded wards.
He went back to the clinic and patients pressed toward him. “Doctor — doctor — good doctor,” they wailed at him when he came into the room. At first their urgency had confused him and had even made him angry. But now he knew they could not help crying out to him. They had endured so much and there were so many of them. “I am here,” he said quietly. “I will not go away until I have seen each one of you.” Only when they found that they could trust his word did they become quiet.
“Please forgive us,” an old man said gently. “Usually the doctors do not like to see so many sick and poor waiting for them and they choose only a few of us and the rest of us must go away again.”
James had found that this was so. What angered and discouraged him most profoundly was the callousness of his own colleagues to the ills of people who came to them for healing. The selfishness of the rich he had soon come to take for granted, but what he could not take for granted, as the weeks went on, was the heartlessness of doctors and nurses. Not all of them, he granted grudgingly — Dr. Liu Chen was an honor to any hospital, and he learned always to call upon one or another of three nurses. The kindness of these three he could trust, Rose Mei, Kitty Sen, and Marie Yang. All nurses had foreign names and used them carefully, just as they spent half a week’s salary on permanent waves at the hands of a White Russian hairdresser in what had once been the Legation Quarter.
Much of his private thought went into angry pondering over this callousness of his fellows. Dr. Kang, for example, with whom he often operated, was a delightful friend, an enthusiastic companion on the rare evenings when they were free to go to a famous restaurant or to sit in the deserted palace gardens or even to ride outside the city walls to sleep for the night in some cool old temple. Kang was a learned man, and not only a graduate of Johns Hopkins. He knew Chinese literature as well as Western and he had a famous collection of musical instruments from many places in the world. He was the friend of a great actor, and one day in August he took James to his friend’s house, and James met the pleasant round-faced man who had a genius for making himself look like a beautiful woman. The whole afternoon was a dream out of history. The house was huge, room opened into room and court led to court. In an outdoor pavilion they had sat and had eaten the cream-filled Tibetan sweetmeats which the actor loved and dreaded. “My career depends upon my figure,” he said with a rueful merriment, “and my cook, alas, is superb. Only while the Japanese were here could I eat and let myself grow fat. Also I grew a moustache and beard. Now that they are gone I must return to my roles.”
He touched the strings of a flat harp and sang in his high falsetto which gave so perfectly the illusion that it was a woman’s young voice. The air was tender with sweetness and mild sadness. The atmosphere of age and mellow living and thinking suffused the evening.
Every chair, every table, the scrolls upon the walls, the tiles of the floors, the lattices of the windows, the carvings of the outdoor pavilion in which they had sat, the shrubs and rocks of the garden courts — all were exquisite and planned with a sophisticated sense of beauty. Kang had seemed entirely at home there as he had discussed with his friend the detail of a song, the finesse of a gesture. James had listened, feeling himself unlearned and crude because he had spent his life in the West. He began that night to blame his father for taking him away so young into the foreign world.
In the hospital the next day he was shocked afresh by Kang’s arrogance and his complete indifference to suffering. He was an excellent surgeon, one of the best that James had ever seen at work. His thin strong hands were all fine bone and smooth sinew. Any patient might be grateful for those hands working in his vitals with such speed and accuracy. But once the task was over whether the patient lived or died was none of Kang’s concern. He seldom inquired. He often refused altogether to operate on an old woman, on a poor man, or on a frightened child. Crying children especially annoyed him.
“Take the child away,” he had ordered Rose one day.
“But it is mastoid, Doctor,” she urged. “The boy will die.”
Kang shrugged his shoulders and washed his hands thoroughly at the spotless basin. Rose took the child to James and told him the story. James operated and the child lived.
There was no use in talking to Kang but James did it. “That mastoid case,” he had said the next evening. They were on their way to a wedding. One of the older doctors was taking a young wife. Kang was pulling on his white gloves. He never wore Chinese clothes and his black dinner suit was as immaculate as it would have been were he in New York.