“There I hid once, when your father was a child,” she had told him.
“Why did you hide, Grandmother?” he had asked. “The men of the earth rose against us,” she had said. “Why?” he had asked, and even as she spoke a dart of fear ran through his bosom.
She replied coldly, “Your grandfather wanted to raise the rents. We had many sons and their weddings came close together and we could scarcely pay for everything that had to be done. Of course men of earth understand nothing of such needs.”
He had asked no more questions. Even as a child he knew what had happened. He had heard whispers of it in the courts. He had seen anxious looks on women’s faces. The peasants were the ogres of his childhood. They were necessary because they tended the fields and reaped the harvests. Without them there was no food. They had to be ruled and yet they had to be placated and cajoled because they were men without reason. He grew up afraid of them and hating them.
Yet even now he remembered certain moments. In the spring, when the young wheat was green, the figures in blue that moved across the landscape were beautiful in the distance. When he came near he saw good brown faces. In the spring the peasants were always happy and they laughed and were kind. They were kind even to him, the landlord’s son, and he remembered a big brown fellow kneeling on the earth so that his eyes could be on a level with the child’s and he had smiled and brought out of his pocket a piece of steamed bread and offered it to him. His nurse had drawn him back crying that he had already eaten. But the child that had been he was willful and shouted that he wanted the bread. So the big brown man had given it to him and had continued to kneel there smiling at him as he ate.
“Is it good to eat?” the man had asked the little boy in the satin robe.
“It is good,” the boy had replied.
“It is my bread that I eat when the sun is yonder,” the man said pointing to the zenith.
Then the man had pointed to the earth. “Sun above and earth beneath, both together make man’s bread.”
He had said this gravely, as though he meant something special, but the child did not know that.
Dr. Liang pondered that saying now, as he sat in his quiet study, his head in his hands. He still did not know what the peasant meant. People, he reflected, must live at these different levels. Some must work with the hands, some with the mind. The peasants should not be lifted from their places as workers with the hands, or the higher ones would starve. He himself would, if he lived in China, be quite helpless without the peasants. Even here, he supposed, there were the workers with hands, men on American farms who had to do the crude work of producing food. Such persons must not be taught falsely that they could or should do other work.
At this moment he began to distrust his daughter Mary. James was safe enough in his profession. It was all very well to see that peasants had sound health and strong bodies for their work. But Mary spoke of schools. Surely there was no reason for a peasant to know how to read and write. This would give him the means of rising out of his class. What would happen if the whole world were scholars? Who then would provide the food? Besides, the peasant mind was a crude one. It had not passed through the centuries of refinement which he, Liang Wen Hua, for example, had in his own ancestry. He frowned and determined to write a letter to Mary. He began to regret his generosity in the matter of the rents and he got up impetuously and went to find his wife.
She was gone. The house was silent except for the maid Nellie, banging something in the kitchen. He never spoke to Nellie if he could help it. Doubtless the letter was mailed. He stood for a moment, irresolute, wondering whether it would be worth writing a second letter which he would post privately. But of course Mrs. Liang would hear of it, and now that there were only the two of them in the house, his peace was peculiarly dependent upon her.
The telephone rang, and soon the maid Nellie came into the room. “It’s the Woman’s Art Club,” she said. “They want to know if you can come to a luncheon tomorrow. The speaker is sick and they need you bad.”
“I am quite busy,” he murmured in the distant tone he reserved for her. “Stay — I will speak to them myself.”
He went to the telephone and listened to an arrogant woman’s voice explaining the crisis. American women all had arrogant voices.
“I wouldn’t think of giving up my own work to fill in for another speaker, Mrs. Page,” he said gently.
Her arrogance changed hastily to persuasiveness.
“Well,” he conceded, “only because I am profoundly interested in art and the American public has so little knowledge—”
He paused for her gratitude, and then said with mild firmness, “My fee is one hundred dollars.”
He heard a gasp at the other end of the telephone and then a quick recovery. “But of course, Dr. Liang!”
He regretted that he had not said two hundred. They were in a pinch. He subdued the thought as unworthy of him.
Mrs. Liang had posted the letter at once, and then she had taken a taxicab to Chinatown. The expense was severe, but she had never been successful in finding her way underground and she was ashamed to be seen riding a bus as though she were not the wife of Dr. Liang. In the subway she would not meet anybody she knew, but she had never been able to understand what train to get on, or once on where she should get off. Several times she had tried to get to Chinatown by subway, lured by the cheapness of such travel, but after an hour or so underground she had been compelled to come up and take a taxicab. The last time she had come up near a suburb called Queens, and the cab fare had run into dollars. Besides, who was the Queen? She supposed it must be Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Does Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt live this side?” she had asked the cab driver from sheer curiosity.
“Lady, you’re nuts,” he had replied pleasantly. This also she did not understand. There were many things said by Americans which could not be understood and she had learned by experience that questions did not make them any plainer. So she merely accepted this reply.
Today she wanted to go to Chinatown to shop for various groceries which could not be bought elsewhere. Since she had plenty of time, this being one of Neh-lee’s days, she would also inquire into the state of her savings account and perhaps visit a little while with Billy Pan’s wife whom she had learned to know. True they did not understand one another entirely, since Mrs. Pan was Cantonese. Still, it would be pleasant just to sit a while with a Chinese woman of whom she need not be afraid. With Liang’s friends she was easily ashamed. They were, she feared, secretly surprised that the great Dr. Liang’s wife was not young and beautiful. But with Mrs. Pan she was the superior one — the wife of the great Dr. Liang.