“Why?” Louise asked. She had separated the front half of her hair into a long curling bang over her forehead.
“You look like one of those poodles that American ladies lead about on strings,” Mary said. “We want to see the village so as to understand ourselves better.”
“I don’t need to see it for any such reason,” Louise declared. “It has taken me long enough to learn to endure this place and if I see more it will be too much.”
“You cannot stay here alone,” Mary declared.
“Peter will stay with me,” Louise said. “Peter won’t want to go.”
So it proved. After the evening meal they sat about the table in a pleasant mood of satisfied hunger and good exercise and Mary announced again that she and James were going to visit the village. Peter said that he would not be able to leave the university for so much as a day. He spoke so promptly that Mary knew that Louise had already prepared him.
“What is going on at the university?” James asked. He was pleased that Peter had not said any more about going back to America, even though the time would come when of course he must go for his training as an engineer.
“We have been studying our own ancient history,” Peter said earnestly. He seemed to have grown taller since he came and his looks had changed. He had a student haircut and his hair, clipped close at the sides, stood upright on top. Moreover, he had stopped wearing his American clothes, except for special occasions, and he wore instead a blue cotton Sun Yat-sen uniform. James and Mary had both welcomed the change, partly because there was no hope of buying new Western clothes, and partly because it proved that Peter was changing in secret hidden ways. Just what his inner change was they did not know, but certainly he was far more serious than he had ever been in New York.
“Well, what has ancient history to do with you?” James inquired.
He himself felt years older than when he first came a few months ago. It was not only the work at the hospital and the continual presence of the desperately ill. There was something in the air of this city, so old, so stolidly beautiful, that sobered everybody. Yet this soberness was not sadness. He was actually enjoying life more than he ever had. There was time enough here to enjoy the changes of the sky, the goodness of food, the quiet of night, the frolic of kittens — for the two old cats sent by their landlord to fight the weasels had instead devoted themselves to the birth and rearing of large families. So must even the poor here, he thought, savor their days and their hours.
“Scholars in our history have always undertaken the reform of the government,” Peter said in a firm voice.
James was mildly alarmed. “I hope you will undertake nothing so dangerous!” he exclaimed. “Pa put you in my charge and I would fail in my responsibility if I let you get into trouble. You might even lose your life if you go too far.”
Peter looked with disgust at this cautious older brother. “How do you propose to help our country?” he asked in a lofty voice.
“I don’t know,” James said honestly. “But I think it would be of no help if I were killed before I could do anything at all.”
Mary listened, torn between her two brothers. She admired Peter’s fire and forthrightness, and yet she held James in love and respect.
“Peter, you would learn more about the people if you came to the village with us,” she now said.
“The people!” Peter exclaimed impatiently. “You and Jim are always talking about the people. It is their fault that the country is so rotten. Had they had even a little energy, a little less concern only for their daily bowls of rice, things could never have come to this pass. I tell you, reform must be from the top.”
There was no agreement in this argument and the end of it was that some weeks later, before the cold weather set in, James and Mary having received a leave of twelve days, set out for their ancestral village, Anming. Chen, after much indecision, stayed with Peter and Louise, but Young Wang was fearful for his master’s welfare, and with many curses and threats to Little Dog and his mother, he went with James. The baggage he had prepared for the journey was formidable. Insisting that no one could sleep on the beds in the village inns, he had three rolls of bedding, a small portable earthenware cookstove, poker and tongs and tea kettle, earthenware pots and dishes, chopsticks, several pounds of tea, two loads of charcoal, mosquito nets, and foreign flea powder. The journey was by muleback and Mary wore Chinese trousers and jacket and James, too, put aside his Western garments.
The approach to an ancestral village is one of the spirit. Mrs. Liang had told her children a great deal, in her desultory way, about the village and the Liangs who lived in it. Thither she had been taken as a young bride, less than twenty years old. Her own home had been in a suburb outside Peking, although her family had come three generations before she was born from a small town in the province of Hupeh, whose people are noted for their fiery tempers and virile frames. More revolutions have sprung up in Hupeh than in any other part of China, and revolutionary leaders are born there any day in the year. They lead revolutions with equal zeal for large reasons or for none at all, and they eat red pepper with every meal. From this province an obscure ancestor of Mrs. Liang’s had become a traveling peddler of cotton cloth, had married a poor girl, and had settled with her in a cheap mud house outside the city wall. With what was left of his pack he had set up a minute shop which had prospered through the generations to something like modest wealth. There Mrs. Liang had grown up into a girl, so buxom that her father had decided to betroth her early.
How is a son betrothed to a daughter? The Liang family went to Peking often at the festival seasons, especially at New Year, when the theatricals are best, and there the girl’s father, who had come to the city to buy goods, met the boy’s father at a feast with mutual friends. The father, anxious to settle his daughter and hearing of a boy unbetrothed, approached the mutual friend, who approached the other father and thus the parents arranged the lives of their children.
For Mrs. Liang’s family the marriage was an advance, and so fine a one that when Dr. Liang, then a rebellious student, had refused marriage and demanded that his wife know how to read and write, Mrs. Liang went unwillingly and yet of her awn accord to a girls’ school.
“Ah, that was torture,” she told her own children in a solemn voice. “I who knew already how to do all that a wife should do was compelled to sit in a room with small children and learn letters! Only for your father I did it.”
To her children she could not, of course, tell the agonies of marrying a proud, discontented, even scornful young man. So she told them about the Liang village and the gentry into which she had married.
“The Liang village, your ancestral home,” she had often said, “does not lie on low ground where it can be flooded. True, there are no high mountains such as those to the north of Peking. But the ground swells and the village stands upon the swell. It is not a large village but neither is it a small one. A mud wall, strengthened with crushed brick, stands around he village. The gates are of wood, studded with brass nails. They are closed at night. Inside the gates the main street runs across, and there are many alleyways. Our house, your ancestral home, lies to the north, so that the rooms and the courts face south. There are sixteen rooms, four to each court. When I went there the old parents were still living. Ah, my mother-in-law, your grandmother, was very severe! I cried every night. Whenever your grandfather coughed or sneezed, I was blamed.”
Dr. Liang, hearing the tale often, always smiled at this point. “Yes, Liang,” his wife would insist with solemnity, “it is true. You do not know how much I suffered.” She turned again to the children. “When your pa’s feet were cold I had to rub them warm with my hands. When he did not eat I had to find special dishes. I tell you, to be the wife of a learned man is not easy. Your father’s father was, on the other hand, a large easygoing person who, while he never spoke to me, was kind to everybody. When he came into the room I must go out, but he always said to somebody else, ‘Tell her not to hurry herself.’ I wept when he died, I can tell you, because that left me alone with my mother-in-law. When she died, there was only Uncle Tao left. He is still there. Eh, that Uncle Tao!”