“What would you like me to do, Uncle Tao?” James asked. By now he knew that Uncle Tao must seem to give direction everywhere.
“Anything — anything,” Uncle Tao said. He was feeling amiable tonight, having eaten well. “That is,” he said after a long draw of smoke, “you are not to meddle with the land. Your grandfather meddled with it and we were all but in the hands of the tenants before I took it back. You young ones who have been to school, you cannot understand the land.”
“There is only one thing I can do which will be useful to you,” James said with proper caution. “I see that many of our tenants look sickly. Surely they cannot do a day’s work. If you will allow me, I will try to discover what their sickness is and heal it.”
Uncle Tao’s small eyes half closed. “No cutting!” he said sternly.
“Not without your permission,” James agreed.
“Well, well,” Uncle Tao replied. “How will you begin?”
“With your permission I could take one of the empty rooms and keep it as a medicine room. I have a few medicines which I brought with me when I came, and when I need more I can get them through the city hospital. To that room the sick ones can come.”
Uncle Tao turned this over and over in his mind. “What if you kill someone?” he asked after some minutes. This thought filled him with horror. “No, no,” he said in alarm, “it is better to let them die naturally.”
“I will kill no one,” James said.
Uncle Tao wagged his head. “You would be blamed if one dies, and then I as your eldest relative would have to pay for it.”
“Consider,” James reminded him. “When a tenant declares himself sick and cannot work, then I will see if he is truly ill or only pretending. Moreover, there are the children. It is a pity for children to waste away. And the women who die in childbirth—”
“You cannot concern yourself with women,” Uncle Tao said firmly.
“A doctor concerns himself with all human life,” James replied.
Thus coaxing and persuading he led Uncle Tao to the place where he agreed that James might use a certain room which had a door of its own to the street. This door had been barred for generations and it had been made long ago secretly by a wicked Liang son who went out at night against his father’s command.
James was weary indeed by the time Uncle Tao had reached his permission, but when he rose to go Uncle Tao stayed him again. “As to your sister—” so he began and James sat down once more.
“Your sister is — one of those new ones,” Uncle Tao said solemnly. He laid aside his pipe, now grown cold. “She makes a disturbance in our village. Already I see my daughters-in-law are growing forward. The youngest one spoke to me the other day. Such a thing has not happened before. I speak to command her, but I expect no reply.”
James could not but smile at this. “What shall I do with my sister?” he asked.
“She should be married,” Uncle Tao said in the same solemn voice. “Women who are not married go about cackling like hens who lay no eggs.”
James did not reply to this. It would make a disturbance indeed if Uncle Tao stepped in to arrange a marriage for Mary! Yet Uncle Tao now prepared to do so. “In this village,” he said, “there is a very decent fellow who does not belong to the Liang blood. His father came here as a peddler and then settled himself as a tailor. I gave him permission. The son is a tailor also. I will speak to the father.”
James made haste to avert this catastrophe. “Uncle Tao, let me talk with my sister,” he begged. “If I fail I will come and tell you.”
“Well, well,” Uncle Tao granted him. “But let it not be too long. Women are a family burden until they are married.” So James went away at last and now he found Chen in his room, the one next to his. He was changing his garments from his old working uniform to the Chinese robe which he wore when he was at ease.
“Where were you?” James asked. “I have been home this hour and more. You and Mary — I could find neither of you.”
“I was helping her clean the schoolroom,” Chen said with an air of lightness.
“Is there already a schoolroom?” James asked.
“Mary has taken one,” Chen replied. “I told her it would be better to ask Uncle Tao first, but no, she said she would go and tell Uncle Tao when it was done. The young mothers are all on her side. They are helping her. They want their children to learn to read, and some even talk of learning themselves. The youngest daughter-in-law is quite determined.” All this he said in the same light voice, half carelessly, as he usually spoke.
“I want to tell you and Mary about Peter,” James said. “I will go and find her. We can meet in my room.”
All through that evening they sat together and they talked about Peter and why it was that he could not be happy. They well knew. The weight of their country, vast and old, lay heavy upon them all, and they were of such conscience that they could not escape.
“What Peter could not see,” James said at last, “was that destruction does not heal. For what can be destroyed except people? Yet the people are the treasure of the nation.”
“And our people are good,” Chen said.
“I tell you ours are the best people in the world. Ignorant and dirty and fighting disease with nothing except their natural health—” James broke off here and shook his head.
“Peter was too young for this life,” Chen said.
“Perhaps too spoiled,” Mary said in a low voice. The two men did not argue this and they sat a while not speaking and watching the guttering candles on the table.
“When I have children,” Mary said at last and as though she had been thinking of it for a long time before she spoke, “I will not let them go to America. They must grow up here, where our life is. They must learn to do with what we have and if they want more they must make it with their own hands. They must not dream of what others have made.”
So she spoke of her own marriage and it came into James’s mind to tell her what Uncle Tao had said. But he did not. The time was not fitting. They were speaking of solemn things, and what Uncle Tao had said was only cause for laughter.
The next day, after sleep so deep that he was ashamed of it, James began the clearing of the room Uncle Tao had given him. Plenty of help he had, for the place was full of children eager to see any new thing. These children he put to work so pleasantly that they thought it all a game, and thus were carried out old baskets of rubbish and broken furniture and rags and papers and all such stuff as gets itself together somehow in an old house where there are too many people. The room was large, having earlier been two rooms, and the floor was of beaten earth and the walls of brick. James bought lime from the village store and he mixed it with water and brushed the walls and sprinkled the floor. The children stood amazed to see him do everything himself, for they were not used to their elders so bestirring themselves. None had seen Uncle Tao so much as fetch his own pipe. When after this James bought boards and nails and put them into shelves they were even somewhat ashamed of him. Who had ever heard of a man who knew books turning carpenter? By now all the ancestral Liangs wondered at these new Liangs and their friend Chen who had dropped upon them from the skies. Behind their backs be sure there was much talk about them, but which of the three knew it? They went zealously about their business, full of faith that the ancestral village could become a place where all were clean and healthy and learned.
It was a healing thing they did, and the first to be healed were themselves. The spring came and went and summer spread over the land. Uncle Tao slept like a vast half-naked Buddha under the date tree, and at night the whole family moved their beds into the courts and slept there and the village street was lined with such beds. It was a gay season, for children ran about together and women gossiped and men sat late drinking hot water and tea and fanning themselves so that when they burst into sweat they were cooled. Day after day James rose early and let the sick come to him before the sun rose too hot. The fame of his healing spread over the countryside and people came to him from a long distance away and Chen helped him always, so that they worked together as closely as two hands.