Uncle Tao soon saw what was going on. One day after the parents were safely under the earth he said to Mr. Liang, “Elder brother, I can see that if you continue to care for our family estates we shall all be out in the fields one day with the oxen and the tenants will be sitting here in our places. You had better put me in charge. I understand all about cheating.” Mr. Liang was only too happy to agree to this. He began the series of bribes which could make it safe for him to return permanently to Peking, and fourteen months after his son’s wedding, some years after the funeral of the Empress, and after the revolution, the family went to Peking, leaving Uncle Tao in charge. During these fourteen months Mrs. Liang had got to know Uncle Tao so well that she laughed every time she thought of him, while Dr. Liang grew more and more ashamed of him.
Behind the spirit wall Uncle Tao now rolled his head round and round and shut his eyes tight, preparing to shout yet another time that he wanted to eat. Before he could get up his wind, however, a tenant sauntered in from the street. He had been at the wineshop when two strangers and a servant stopped to ask the way to the Liang house. He had purposely misdirected them in order to leave himself time to come and warn Uncle Tao that he was to have visitors.
Uncle Tao opened his eyes. “Who are they?” he asked in his rumbling husky voice.
“They look like foreigners,” the tenant replied. “A man and a woman. The woman has her hair cut short. Perhaps they are only students of some sort. They have no red hair, purple eyes or chalk skin, but they look like city people.”
Uncle Tao hated city people. “Tell them I am dead,” he said, shutting his eyes. In a family of country gentry known for its courtesy and breeding Uncle Tao showed these qualities only when he was in good mood.
It was too late to obey him. At this very moment Young Wang appeared around the spirit wall. Uncle Tao opened his eyes and stared at the dapper young fellow in a strange uniform. Young Wang smiled and for a moment only stood, looking pleasant. Then he coughed to show that he was ready to introduce himself.
“What man are you?” Uncle Tao demanded.
“I am my master’s head servant,” Young Wang began glibly. “He sends me to say that he and his sister wish to pay their respects. They are son and daughter of the Liang family, children of the Honorable One’s elder brother’s son.”
Uncle Tao heard this with stupefaction. So long had it been since he had even thought of these relatives whom he had long considered as dead in some foreign land, that now his fat underjaw hung down. “Where are they?” he demanded.
“At the gate, Honored One,” Young Wang said. He could scarcely keep back laughter. This old gentleman, for it could be seen that Uncle Tao was still a gentleman, was of a sort he knew very well. Every village had someone more or less like him. True, he had never seen any country gentry so huge, so fat, so dirty as Uncle Tao, so like the Buddha in a forgotten temple, except that now he frowned instead of smiled. His great belly creased his soiled gray silk robe and his bare feet were thrust into old black velvet shoes. Upon the vast yellow face were a few sparse white whiskers, and the head, while almost entirely bald, had a handful of hairs at the back which were actually braided into a tiny queue secured with a dingy black cord. This queue should have been cut off more than thirty years ago when the revolution came, and that Uncle Tao had kept it was a sign of obstinacy, for he hated all governments alike. Indeed long after the revolution had come and the Empress was dust he still persisted in declaring that she was alive and in ignoring the new rulers.
“At the gate!” Uncle Tao exclaimed. “How inconvenient!”
“May they come in, Honored One?” Young Wang asked.
“I have not yet eaten,” Uncle Tao replied.
Young Wang began to grow angry and turning his back abruptly he went back to the gate.
“Old One,” the tenant said apologetically, “it is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother’s son who after all is the first in the next generation after you.”
Uncle Tao lifted himself up by his hands on the arms of the bamboo chair and made as if he were about to heave himself at the tenant who fled at once around the spirit wall and out of the gate. There the miserable man saw the guests who stared at him in surprise. He smiled in a sickly fashion, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “The old man is getting his anger up,” he said, hurrying away.
“I thought that old relative looked as though he had temper,” Young Wang said.
A hearty red flew into Mary’s sunburned cheeks. “Why should anybody be angry with us?” she demanded of James. “I’m going straight in. We belong here, too.”
“Wait,” James said. “Perhaps we had better go to the inn.”
“I won’t,” Mary replied. “The inn is sure to be dirty.” So saying she walked briskly up the two cracked marble steps of the gate, went under the portal and around the spirit wall where she came full upon Uncle Tao. She knew at once that it was he. No one else could have looked at the same time so absurd and so formidable. Their eyes met. Uncle Tao frowned and drew down his full lips.
“Uncle Tao!” Mary said.
Uncle Tao did not reply. He continued to stare at her.
“My elder brother and I have returned to our ancestral home,” Mary said. “We are Liangs, and our father is Liang Wen Hua.”
“Little Bookfool, I always called him,” Uncle Tao said suddenly.
Mary laughed, and small wrinkles crossed the severe expanse of Uncle Tao’s flat face. “Go away,” he said. “I never talk to women.”
As he so spoke James appeared at Mary’s side. He bowed slightly. “Uncle Tao, you must forgive us,” he said in his best Mandarin. “We have rudely come here. Yet we think of ourselves as your children also, and of this as our home. If it is not convenient for us to stay here for a few days, please tell us.”
Uncle Tao wagged his head. “Where have you come from?” he asked.
“From Peking today, but some months ago we came from outside the seas, from America.”
“I heard some twenty years ago that the Bookfool had gone there,” Uncle Tao said with some show of interest. His thick lids lifted slightly and he began to breathe through his mouth. “How does he earn his rice?”
“He teaches school,” Mary said.
“Do they pay him well?” Uncle Tao demanded.
“Well enough,” she replied.
At this moment Uncle Tao remembered again that he was hungry. “I have not eaten,” he announced.
“Neither have we,” Mary said.
“We can eat at the inn,” James said quickly. He was a little ashamed that Mary talked so much. Old-fashioned gentlemen did not like to hear women speak.
Before Uncle Tao could answer, his eldest daughter-in-law came briskly to the door. “The fowl is ready, Old Father,” she called. Then she stared.
Uncle Tao heaved himself out of his chair. When he stood up it could be seen that he was a very tall man, in spite of his weight. He pointed a long and dirty thumbnail at the two guests. “These are my brother’s grandchildren,” he told his daughter-in-law. “It is very inconvenient that they have arrived without telling me. Now we have only the thin yellow hen to eat.”
The daughter-in-law felt that this was the moment to confess the grievous mistake that had been made. Uncle Tao would perhaps restrain himself before strangers. She began smoothly, “Old Father, the gods have guided us. Doubtless they saw these two coming hither. We chased the thin yellow hen under the cabbages and the youngest one among us reached her hands under and caught and twisted her neck off before she could escape us. When she brought out the fowl, it was not the thin yellow hen but the fat red one. We longed to die when we saw this, but now I see the meaning of it. The gods know better than we humans can know. There is enough chicken flesh with the noodles and some eggs we found in the hen to make a meal for these two also.”