“It is not crabs.”
“Then what is it?”
“I do not know. I should have to look at it through a special glass.”
“You can see through me?”
“Only partly.”
“And then what?”
“I should probably have to cut,” James said very gently.
Uncle Tao wrapped himself up again. “I don’t believe in cutting,” he said. “Let us talk of something else. The men of earth, for example.”
But James was not listening. Everything seemed to fall quite clearly into place. The future, which had been confused this morning when he talked to Mary, came near, and he saw it step by step before him. Uncle Tao, with a tumor in his belly, would lead the way and without knowing it.
Young Wang came back after seven days and in unwonted silence he packed the bags and retied the bedding which had never been used and brushed the mule which he had ridden south to his own village and reclaimed the other two which had been at the inn stables while he was away. The next morning he appeared soon after dawn, for the return to the city, and James and Mary were ready for him. Everybody in the house had got up to see them off and to cry out invitations for their return. Even Uncle Tao with heroic effort hauled himself out of bed, and tousled and bleary he staggered to the door to nod his head and murmur vaguely, “Eh, eh, meet again — meet again!”
As soon as the two had gone he fell upon his bed to slumber. Sleep was the one way in which he could escape the horrible fear which now sat in his heart every waking hour. The young man who was his grandnephew had said he must be cut! He thought of this for one instant before he fell asleep and the withers melted in his enormous mass. Then he spoke stoutly to himself. “Whatever is in me is mine, and no one can take it away from me unless I allow it.” Upon this momentary comfort he was carried down into sleep again.
Dawn was breaking over the village as they left it. The sky was illuminated with many small golden clouds, for the sun had not yet come over the horizon. The street looked fresh in the new light, and the smoke curling from kitchen roofs was purple. Children’s voices were cheeping behind doors, like waking chicks, and only the white geese were up and about their business. They came home at night, as decent as good men, and took shelter under the walls, but at dawn they bestirred themselves and walked in dignity and silence to the fields, in contrast to the noisy quacking ducks who went anyhow and kept no ranks. Between geese and ducks there is no communication.
The village gate was already ajar and James had to bend his head, he sat so tall upon his mule. Outside the wall the land lay with that pristine glitter of dew which is gone as soon as the sun rises full. The fields were richly brown, for in these days they had been plowed for winter wheat, and the willow trees were golden about the villages which dotted the plain.
“Look at these villages,” James said, “we can reach fifty of them within a day’s journey.”
“We will begin with our own,” Mary said.
They had talked very little in the last days they had spent in their ancestral house. Both were fermenting with ideas, and until these were clear they kept themselves separate. Mary had joined in the life of the kinswomen. She had worked with them and sat with them, answering their constant questions about herself, her clothes, her parents, her education, about America and all the strange folk there and their strange ways. Wherever they had got it, the women had heard something of the outer seas and the farther lands, but their information was woven upon dream and myth and imagination. Thus they thought that in the outer lands children were born with white hair which grew dark with age, and they thought that men and women did not mate and produce children in human ways — that is their own ways — but in some unaccountable mystic fashion. The food in the outer lands horrified them, for they had heard that it was raw meat and cow’s milk which disgusted them. They had heard that the people were covered with hair from head to foot and that their skin was of all colors and that their eyes were blue and purple and yellow like the eyes of wild beasts. With the passion of one born to teach Mary told them what she thought was the truth and in her turn she asked them questions. She learned that the elder daughter-in-law alone dared to speak to Uncle Tao, and then only since the death of Uncle Tao’s wife, a mild gentle small woman whom everybody had loved and who had disobeyed Uncle Tao in everything without rousing his anger.
“Ah, Uncle Tao’s wife, our mother!” the middle daughter-in-law sighed. “How good she was! She was even famous as a mother-in-law. Some women fear the mothers of their husbands, but we did not fear her. She thought of us as her own flesh and blood and she would tell us not to work too hard, and so we worked the harder.”
The eldest daughter-in-law laughed aloud. “She was too wise for any man! Whenever Uncle Tao scolded any of us she would resign from her position as his wife. ‘Tao!’ so she called him. ‘Eh Tao, I am no use to you. I see that I cannot manage your house. I beg of you to get yourself a good strong concubine and I will retire and let her control everything.’ So she said.”
“Did he never do it?” Mary asked. She found undying interest in these small affairs of which the kinswomen told her.
“He?” the daughters-in-law cried in chorus. They fell into fits of laughter.
It was a merry household, and the fear of Uncle Tao’s anger only added liveliness to the day. He was a god under his own roof, and his wrath, while it cast them into terror, made them proud also, for they believed there was no other like it in the world. Even his sons boasted of their father’s rage and fatness, of his bellow and his roars of laughter. They loved him well, while they cherished their fear of him and he gave direction to their lives.
All this Mary saw, but she herself could not like Uncle Tao. “For example, Uncle Tao,” she now said to James as their mules jogged along the narrow footpaths to the main highway to the city. “What is he but a mass of ignorance and dirt? I shall not be thwarted by him. He despises women but I despise him. I shall go my own way and do what I plan to do.”
“What do you plan to do?” James asked, smiling at his downright sister. She made a picture anything but formidable. Her short hair was blowing in the sharp autumn wind and her cheeks were red and her eyes bright and dark. Her profile, against the horizon of earth and sky, was young and exquisite and she held her small body lightly straight upon the shambling bony mule.
“Whatever you do, Jim,” she said briskly, “I am going back to the village to live.”
“On what?”
“On Pa’s rents,” she said calmly.
James was mightily amused at this but he kept his face grave. “How do you think you will get the rents out of Uncle Tao?” he asked.
“I shall tell Pa to write to him that I am to have them. If Uncle Tao doesn’t listen to Pa, I will make him miserable until he listens to me. After all, I belong to the family and I have a right under that roof.”
“Until you are married,” James reminded her.
“I shan’t marry.”
“You are declaring eternal war against Uncle Tao,” James said.
“Yes!”
They pulled their mules aside for a few moments, for they now met a long line of farmers carrying their grain to the city. It was heaped into baskets made of bamboo, and carried at either end of a limber wooden pole. Although the air was cold, the men were already sweating and they had thrown open their cotton jackets, showing brown bodies rippling with muscles.
“We are a handsome race,” James said as he watched the men.
“We are wonderful,” Mary agreed. They exchanged a long look of pleasure in themselves and then they went on again.