11
THE WINTER WAS DRAWING ON in New York and for Dr. Liang the best part of the year was at hand. Now that he had got used to a quiet house he was beginning to like it. Moreover, the presence of the children in China gave him protection. When some of his enemies, and he was always pained by their number, mentioned their surprise that he continued to stay abroad when his country so obviously needed all well-educated citizens, he could smile rather sadly and say, “I am supporting four young citizens now in China. Somebody unfortunately has to pay the bills, and with inflation what it is, this is done more easily with American money than Chinese.”
The fact that he had not yet sent them any money was beginning to weigh on his conscience. Neither he nor Mrs. Liang had ever mentioned the concubine quarrel again, but she had asked him several times whether and when he was going to send the children money.
“Even though James and Mary have jobs, I am sure it is not enough,” she said one day with the stubbornness natural to her. “Besides, we are the parents and we should support the younger ones at least enough to pay for their rice.”
“Certainly you are right,” he replied with unusual politeness to her. “As soon as the lecture season begins, I intend to double my engagements and send them a generous amount.”
“Meantime?” she asked.
“Well, well,” he said impatiently.
The end of this was that Mrs. Liang began another private savings account. One she already had. She had begun it aimlessly, merely for her own comfort in case she should decide someday that she could not bear America any more and that even respect for a husband was not everything in a woman’s life. The money was not deposited in a bank. Instead she had put it thriftily out to loan in Chinatown, and Billy Pan managed it for her, as a favor to the famous Dr. Liang, who knew nothing about it. Each month the capital increased with pleasant regularity. Mrs. Liang was sometimes a little angry because the interest rate was low, but Mr. Pan declared that he could not break the American law, which could be invoked if those who borrowed felt themselves ill used.
“It seems strange that I cannot lend my own money on my own terms,” Mrs. Liang said.
“Well, you can’t except in China,” Billy Pan said flatly. He did not propose to break American law, however absurd. America was still greater than the Chinese Dr. Liang.
“It is another way of stealing,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. But she did not withdraw her accumulating capital.
The second savings account she merely put into a box which she kept behind the towels and sheets in a closet. She thought of it as the children’s money, though she had no idea how to get it to them. Had Lili married James it would have been easy to ask Mr. Li to exchange the American dollars for Chinese ones in Shanghai, but the Liangs now saw very little of the Li family, who, it was said, were about to join Lili in England. Yet the important thing was to have the money in hand. Mrs. Liang got it by charging Dr. Liang more for everything she bought. This, she told him, was the high cost of living, and if he looked at American papers, he could see for himself that prices were rising every day. She herself followed the price lists closely and made a new rise whenever they did, at the same time continuing to inquire of Dr. Liang when he was going to send the children some money.
Thus, Mary’s letter could not have reached them at a better time. It was written to them both. After some thought Mary had decided not to try to explain any of her feelings about the village or even about Uncle Tao. She would merely say that she and James thought they ought to do something for the ancestral village, where the people were very poor and Uncle Tao himself was sick and James said he needed an operation. “We think of going there to live and to see what we can do for them,” she wrote. “It made me sad to see the children growing up with no chance to go to school and no one even telling them to wipe their noses. Really, Pa and Ma, you should have told us what things here are like, instead of letting us think that our country is one beautiful cloud of Confucianism. But maybe you have been away so long that you have forgotten.”
Her father was displeased with this. “I don’t see what Confucianism has to do with wiping children’s noses,” he said.
“That is not what she is really talking about,” Mrs. Liang said. “So Uncle Tao needs to be cut! Eh, I hope James won’t do it. It is much better to let Uncle Tao die naturally. Sooner or later it must happen. Why prevent fate?”
“When you talk like that I wonder whether you have learned anything in all these years you have had the advantages of America,” Dr. Liang said angrily.
“Please excuse me,” she replied, having learned submission in small matters.
Dr. Liang read on. “Now you will wonder what we can live on,” Mary wrote. “We have thought that all out. Food and room we can have under the ancestral roof. But I need money if I am to have a school, and James will need some too.”
Here Dr. Liang paused and looked severely at his wife. “Why should she need money for a school when the government sets up schools everywhere free?”
“You know they would not put a school in that dead little village of your ancestors,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. “Please go on.”
Dr. Liang hesitated, decided not to answer and read on, “Uncle Tao says he sends you some money every year for land rent. Pa, I want this money. Put into American money it will mean very little to you. It is so little that you have never even mentioned it to us. But in the village it will be enough for me. And there is something good in using that money for the ancestral village. It comes from our land. I feel it is right to keep it here.”
At this point Dr. Liang became really annoyed. “I cannot understand why Uncle Tao said anything about that money,” he said. “It is no one’s business but mine.”
Mrs. Liang’s surprise was great indeed. “But Liang, you have never told even me you had this money!”
“It is too little to think about,” he declared.
“So you kept it for some use of your own,” she said with evil suggestion. She knew to a penny what he earned and while he signed all the checks she studied the checkbook and could foresee the balance at the end of every month. She had never seen any notice of the deposit of rent funds from China.
“I buy a few books,” he said gently.
“If that is all, then certainly you can give our children so little a sum,” she retorted. “I will write and tell them that you will do so and they can show the letter to Uncle Tao.”
“Uncle Tao will scarcely accept your letter,” Dr. Liang reminded her.
She immediately went into tears, and this destroyed his peace. “You know I cannot do the work which supports you, let me say, as well as myself, if you cry and make the house miserable,” he told her.
“Let me go home!” she sobbed.
The scene proceeded according to old pattern, and the end of it was that Dr. Liang sat down and wrote a letter to James, which he was to show to Uncle Tao, asking that the rent funds be given to his son. “I have been stirred by my daughter’s letter,” Dr. Liang wrote. “She tells me that the village needs repairs and so on. I make my contribution thus to our ancestral family. Let the land keep its own.”
Mrs. Liang did not wholly approve this way of putting it. “I hope Uncle Tao does not think that you mean for him to keep the money,” she said, taking the letter.
But Dr. Liang would not change what he had written. It sounded too well.
Nevertheless the whole transaction made him melancholy. He went into his study and shut the door and sat down in a deep leather chair and held his head in his hands. He felt harried and confused. His privacy was invaded. He was vaguely ashamed that his children had seen the village as he was sure it must be now. All these years since his childhood had passed doubtless without any repairs being made. Centuries had passed over the village and each had left its mark. No one had made improvements. As young men in the Liang family grew up they had simply gone away if they did not like the village and its ways, even as he himself had gone away. The ones who had stayed were the ones like Uncle Tao, who, although they belonged to the gentry, were very little above the coarse peasants. Those peasants! How he despised them in his heart! Stubborn, strong, fearing no one, there was none to control them. His own parents had been afraid of them. He remembered his mother pleading with his father to allow the peasants lower rents and larger sharing of the harvest, lest in their anger they come against the Liang house and destroy it. Such things did happen in other ancestral villages. Were the landlords firm in maintaining their just dues, the peasants could and did willfully come against them with hoes and mallets and clubs and axes and while they seldom killed anyone, they would break valuable furniture and slash silken bedding and rip satin curtains and hack and hew walls and beams. Once this had happened even in the Liang family and he could still remember that when he was a little boy his own paternal grandmother had paused on the way home from the funeral of an old cousin, and she had pointed with two delicate fingers to a deep ditch beside the Liang burying ground.