The other children, Mary, Peter, Louise! He was shocked by the imminence. What had happened? Mary he would have welcomed — but all three of them, so young, so unprepared! He was profoundly distressed. What would he do with them? He was only himself beginning to be reconciled, or rather resigned to not being reconciled, to what life was here. Peter! What could he do with Peter, who was more American than any American? It was too late to cable back in protest. That was like his father, too, to inform only after he had acted.
“Bad news?” Dr. Liu Chen asked. He had come in also to wash, having today taken the place of an anesthetist who had died a week ago of cholera. There was just enough cholera in the city to worry the doctors but nothing like an epidemic. Still, it was more than the city had suffered in many years. The war had left dregs everywhere and old diseases had been stirred up again. People were afraid of plague once more in the north.
“Not exactly,” James said. Had it been one of the other doctors he would not have gone on, but Liu was comfortable and kind. Above all, he was modest. He had been educated at a small college in the United States and afterward he had taken his internship at a settlement hospital which no one knew when he mentioned it. He was modest but he was not humble. He carried himself with pleasant composure and when he went to a party that any of the doctors gave, he was friendly and never pretended to anything. He himself gave no parties. Several times he had invited James to dine with him, and they went always to a restaurant and never to a hotel.
“I have strange news from my father,” James went on. “He tells me he is sending my two sisters and my brother to me, and I cannot imagine why, since they are all in school.”
Dr. Liu, very clean and smelling of soap, was now carefully sharpening a small scalpel on a fine oiled stone. “Perhaps he wishes them to learn something of their own civilization,” he suggested. He spoke, as always, in Chinese. His English was not very good, for he came from a part of the country where the people confused two or three consonants and he found that by doing so in English he often said what he did not mean.
“Perhaps,” James said. Being much troubled he went on again, as he stood watching the hairline edge on the scalpel. “The question is where shall I put them. I shall have to find a house somewhere.”
“That is not too difficult, provided you do not want what is called a modern house,” Dr. Liu said. He placed the scalpel carefully into the sterilizer and turned on the electricity. This made him think of something. “I have invented a sterilizer to be used with charcoal,” he said. His square ugly face lit with enthusiasm as he spoke.
Long ago Liu Chen had given up improving his looks. He was above middle height, his frame was strong, for he came of peasant stock, and his cheekbones were high and his eyes small. He would still have been a peasant had it not been for a missionary who had taught him to read and then had helped him go to school. Liu Chen had a good mind which held tenaciously everything he poured into it, but nothing was learned easily. He took great care to learn exactly, therefore, for he knew that whatever his mind had seized could never be changed. He was somewhat too slow to be a first-rate surgeon, but he made up for this by taking a deep personal interest in his patients. Rose or Marie often met him in the night, especially just before dawn in those hours when the sick die easily. He would be prowling through the wide corridors on his way to a room or a ward, to see for himself how his patients did. He looked apologetic when he met a nurse, for his presence seemed to accuse them. Indeed, Marie, who was mischievous, had once teased him.
“You think no one knows anything except yourself,” she said, scolding him.
Liu Chen had smiled bashfully. “It is not that.”
“Then what is it?” she had demanded, standing before him with her hands on her hips.
“I am only afraid I did something wrong,” he answered. “Something you would not know about.”
Standing beside his patient he did not speak. He watched intently, listening to the breathing and touching the skin to see if it were dry or moist, and then with the lightest pressure he would feel the pulse and catch the heartbeat. If all were well, he would steal away. But sometimes he would shout for the nurse and call for oxygen and stimulants to pull back a still living creature from death. The patient did not know what had happened, but he would open his weary dull eyes and see the doctor standing there, gaunt and silent, and he would feel safe. Then he would himself take the turn for life. This was especially true with children, for Dr. Liu loved all children. Whether he had any of his own no one knew, for he never spoke of his family. No one even knew where he lived. James perceived only that this strange uncouth man was different from the other doctors. In some ways he was less skilled, and yet he had a living spirit in him which he was able to impart to the sick and which was better than cold skill.
“I would like to see your sterilizer,” James said now.
Liu Chen turned away and pretended to adjust something on the handle of the door of the instrument case. “Some day,” he said. “Meanwhile, can I help you to find a house? I know one in the hutung two streets to the north of here. It is large, but it is cheap because it is haunted.”
“Haunted?”
“Yes — by weasels,” Liu Chen replied. He had adjusted the handle and he closed the door firmly. He answered James’s smile with his own. “You, of course, will not mind weasels. But they are akin to foxes among our people, and while I also do not fear them, I remember that my old grandmother in our village would have burned a house down rather than live in it, were it haunted by weasels.” His face took on a curious apologetic look that was yet very much in earnest. “You know, I would not say this before our friends, the other doctors, but I sometimes wonder if there is not more to these old beliefs of the folk than we think? Certainly there is something mischievous about weasels. They steal into a house by the hundreds once people grow afraid of them.”
James laughed. “I will go with you to see the house this evening,” he promised.
So it was arranged and he could only spend the rest of the day at his usual work, wondering and waiting for the letter which his father had promised, and which since it came by air would reach him before he had to go to Shanghai to meet his sisters and brother. The cable had put out of his mind the talk with the wounded man, and in the afternoon after his hours were over he met Liu Chen at the stone lions that guarded the hospital gate and they walked briskly along the street, unheeding of the cries of ricksha pullers beseeching them to ride. One such fellow persisted in running after them. He was a tall lean hound of a man, and he fell into cursing when neither James nor Liu Chen turned to hire him. “You!” he shouted after them. “You ought not to use your legs and rob us of our wages! Such as you make Communists of us!”
The two men did not turn but they heard this and James remembered then the man whose leg he had taken off in the morning. “Do you know anything about the Communists?” he asked Liu Chen.
“No,” Liu Chen said shortly. “Nobody knows anything about them.” He quickened his pace and turned a corner and they walked down a quiet lane between high brick walls. “This is the hutung,” he said. “The gate is yonder.”
They went fifty feet farther and reached a plain wooden gate made double and hanging upon heavy iron hinges. It stood ajar and Liu Chen pushed it open. They stepped over a high lintel and into a deserted court where the weeds grew high between the stones. Once inside Liu Chen closed the door safely. Then he pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and his bare head. “Eh!” he said in a low voice. “You must not ask a man in broad daylight what he knows about the Communists. It made my sweat pour out.”