“You mean—” James said.
“I do mean that, indeed,” Liu Chen said quickly. “Come, let us see the house. It is too big for you, but you can shut away some of the courts. Or I might rent a little one for myself.”
“That would be pleasant,” James said.
Liu Chen laughed loudly. “If your sisters are pretty!”
James did not laugh and neither did he answer. For the first time it seemed to him that Liu Chen was coarse, because of his peasant origin. Almost at once Liu Chen saw that he had offended. “No — no,” he said quickly. “I was only joking.”
“Have you wife and children?” James asked.
Liu Chen shook his head somewhat moodily. “No, I have no wife. Look at me, and you see a man spoiled. I cannot take a peasant woman because I am too good for her. But I am too much peasant for any of these new women, do you see? Even though I have been to America, in their dainty noses I still smell of the ox. What would they do in my father’s house? My mother cannot read a word and she is like any country woman. Well, I do not go home much because they grieve that they have no grandson. I am caught between old and new — I have no home and perhaps I am to have none.”
“I cannot believe that,” James said. “It seems to me that you are the best of both kinds of people.”
This praise moved Liu Chen. His square face grew red and his eyes glistened. “You are too kind,” he said and he coughed as though he were choking. “Come,” he said. “We must see the house.”
This house had been a very handsome one when it was built and the strong old brick walls and the stout beams held. But the paint was peeling from the wood and the lime had blistered. The stone floors were covered with a coat of sand blown there by many windstorms. There were none of the things to which Mary and Louise and Peter were accustomed, or to which James himself was used — no bathroom, no heating of any kind, no electricity, no running water. There was a well; there were four large courts which held some good trees and a terrace with ancient peonies still living; there were twelve large rooms, three to each court and connected with outdoor passageways whose balustrades were finely carved. In the windows there were delicate lattices and behind the lattices the paper had been replaced with glass most of which was still not broken. Everywhere were the footsteps of weasels in the sand and the long trailing marks of their brushes. In the dust upon the lintels were their marks and there were bones of mice and Chickens and birds which they had eaten and bits of fur and skin and feathers.
James stared about him and Liu Chen watched him. “It looks too bad, does it not?” Liu said. “Still, a few servants hired to clean, and you will see a different house. You can buy a foreign stove at the thieves’ market and a carpenter will make some beds and tables and the tailor some bedding. A charcoal stove and a cook — and he will buy some earthenware pots — you will see how easily it can all be done, and how cheaply. But perhaps you have plenty of money.”
“I have not,” James said quickly. His father must send him money, and yet how well he knew his father would often forget! Peter must go to college and so must Louise. Mary could teach somewhere. Between them they could pay the daily bills, and what their father sent could be used to make their life better. “I will take the house,” he told Liu Chen, “and mind you, if you want a room, you shall have it. I can see you would be very useful to us. After all, we are too much like foreigners here in our own country. Our father let us grow up in America.”
Liu Chen turned red again. His skin was thin and clear and easily flushed, although it was dark. “No, no,” he said, “do not feel you must be polite. And please call me Chen.”
“I am not polite — I mean it,” James said.
“Then wait and see whether the others like me,” Chen said modestly.
By now they had reached the inner court. It was quiet here and strangely peaceful. The deserted house encircled them and under their feet the weeds grew high and sun-browned between the stones. A great twisted pine stood against the house, its branches so thick and widespreading that their weight had bowed the trunk and the tree looked like an old man carrying too heavy a burden. The sun had shone upon the pine all day and the needles were fragrant and the walls held the fragrance, for no wind could reach here. Chen threw himself on the wild grass under the tree and James sat down beside him. Twilight was still an hour away.
“You asked me about the Communists,” Chen said abruptly. “They have taken my own village which is three hundred miles to the northwest. Therefore I do know something about them.”
“Is your house safe?” James asked.
“Yes, for we are poor enough to be safe. My parents owned no land. They were tenants before the Communists came. Now they are landowners. Their landlord was the usual sort, short-tempered, greedy, but not more than many others. When the Communists came they did not kill him, for the people pleaded for him. They only strung him up by the thumbs and gave him a good beating and then allowed him as much land as he could work himself — no more. To my parents they gave a small farm. Now we are the landowners!” Chen laughed dryly.
James laughed. “I suppose you like the Communists.”
Chen sat up and wrapped his arms about his knees. His spiky black hair stood up on his forehead and his thick eyebrows drew down. “No,” he said, “no! Had I been only a peasant still, nothing more than the son of my father, I daresay I would have been happy enough, but I am something more. I am a doctor.”
“Do they want doctors?” James asked.
“They want them very much. They want them too much. They have offered me a great deal. But they cannot offer me enough.” These words Chen spoke in short sentences and his eyes were bitter. He tugged at a clump of grass between two stones and it came up root and all. Ants scurried out, terrified by the sudden light of day. “You know, there is very much that makes me angry at the hospital. I say this because I see it makes you angry, too. You don’t understand why our fellow doctors are so cold, do you?”
“No,” James said quietly. “That puzzles me very much. Kang, for instance, a superb doctor, but not caring whether people live or die. I say to myself, what is the use of being a doctor in that case?”
They were speaking Chinese, not the old slow involved speech of the past, but the quick terse tongue of the modern, energized by the languages of the West.
“So I say also,” Chen said solemnly. “And I am very angry with Kang and Su and Peng and all those men. They have no feeling for our own people. You cannot understand it, Liang, but I can. I have seen old scholars like them, too. There is so much you cannot understand. I can understand you because I was also in America, but I was there only for a few years. You will have to learn to know our people. You must begin with the simple ones. Yet most of us are simple.”
Chen cleared his throat and made his voice somewhat louder, almost as though he were about to begin an argument. “Liang, listen to me! These new men, Kang and Su and Peng and their like, they are not really very new. Their learning is new, but the men behave like the old ones. In my village there was an old scholar. Now why do I call him a scholar? He went up for the Imperial Examinations five times and after the first degree, he failed every time. Yet each time he came back more lordly than before. He could dine with no one except our landlord. The two of them went together. And when the local magistrate came to the village to examine the crops, then the three of them dined together. They were too good for the rest of us. And later when a warlord took our region, then there were four of them to dine together. And they were all too good for the rest of us, who were only the people. Scholar, landlord, magistrate, warlord — there you have the tyrants of the people. And we have them still. To go to a college in America does not change a man’s heart. It only gives him a new weapon, sharper than the old, to use against the people — if that be his heart.”