So a bath house was made for the women, too, and they were thrifty and brought their children to bathe with them and thus bathing became the fashion, and the village was proud and felt itself as good as any city. Even so there were those who complained and the eldest daughter-in-law grumbled and said, “All this bathing is nothing but a wasteful habit. Look at me! Now that I bathe myself, I itch all over in twenty days or so unless I bathe again. Yet before we had this bath house I went all winter and did not itch.”
Uncle Tao would not bathe at all at first for fear of getting cold, and then for fear of seeming to yield to Mary. Then when he saw how rosy the children were after a bath and how well his sons ate and how sweetly they slept when they were cleaned, he mustered up courage and one day before the new moon year he declared himself ready for a bath, too.
Neither James nor Chen had urged him, but be sure that they rejoiced at this sign of change in Uncle Tao. Chen himself saw that the room was warm and the water hot and that some sheets of cotton were ready to dry Uncle Tao’s vast body. All others were held off while Uncle Tao was bathed. He had decided that the bath should take place at high noon on a sunny day when there was no wind, and he waited some ten days or so before he found a day good enough. Then he was anxious about what he should eat, and James advised him to eat nothing until after the bath.
Uncle Tao agreed to this but he said, “As soon as I am in my clothes again I must eat well, for much strength will be drained out of me with the bath,” and he ordered all his favorite dishes to be ready for him.
On the chosen day when the sun was high over the roofs, Uncle Tao allowed himself to be led into the bath house, and two menservants helped him to undress while his sons stood by, and Chen saw to the pouring of the water and James helped Uncle Tao get into the tub. Lucky it was that they had made that tub as large as a wooden vat, for when Uncle Tao lowered himself into it, the two men holding his arms and James holding his waist, the water spurted up around him like a fountain. At first Uncle Tao was fearful that he had done a foolish thing, but while James and Chen scrubbed him well with soap they had made from raw lye and the fat of an ox that had died, Uncle Tao began to feel better and he grew cheerful.
“To bathe is a good thing,” he declared proudly, looking about at them all from the tub. “Of course it cannot be done quickly and carelessly. Nor should it be done too often. The day must be a lucky one, the water must be hot, and I must not sit too long in this tub. Add some hot to it.”
When he was clean they poured two or three buckets of fresh hot water over him from the head down and he sat like a great baby gasping under the flow, his eyes shut and his mouth open and licking in the water. Then slowly he rose again, all helping him, and James wrapped him immediately with the cotton sheets and he was dried and the clean clothes he had ordered prepared were put on him. At last he was ready to eat and he ate with great pleasure and good nature, and then he slept, and when he woke he was so comfortable in all the mountain of his being that he commanded his whole household to be bathed at once, from his eldest son down to the smallest grandchild. This caused much trouble, but Chen was well pleased. “Behold me!” he cried to James, and pointed at himself with his thumb to his breast, “I have made a successful revolution!”
How could Chen be so happy with such small things? This James asked himself. This Chen was no small-minded man, neither did he dream small dreams. Sometimes when the two friends talked into the night Chen ceased for a while to make his jokes and then James saw him for what he was, a sober-minded, large-thinking man, who was making plans far beyond the daily tasks.
“You keep me in heart,” he said on one such evening to Chen. “When I grow weak and think that perhaps Su and Peng and Kang are right, and that these villagers are beyond our strength to help, when I fear that the centuries are stronger than we are, then I think of you.”
Chen heard this thoughtfully, rubbing the crown of his head slowly with his right hand in the way he had. “Of course the people on the land are stronger than we are,” he said. “They are the strength of our nation and they cannot be easily changed.”
“Yet why do we think we must change them? All we need do is to prove a thing is good and they will change themselves. Remember the bath house!”
These few words opened a door in James’s mind. He sat thinking about them and in silence. A small earthen pot of charcoal stood between him and Chen, and he warmed his hands over it. His one care was his hands, that they stay supple so that the skin would not break. He needed these hands for healing and he wanted them whole, so that when he put ointment on the scald head of a child or washed out some old ulcer on a farmer’s leg, or cleansed the sores of a leper, the poison would not spoil his hands.
Upon his thought Chen broke. “Jim, I have something to say and I cannot say it.”
James looked up surprised. “You and I have always spoken to one another easily, Chen.”
“Yes, but this is about something else.”
Chen’s face was suddenly fiery red and James remembered that red. “You do not regret sending Kitty away?” he asked, half in play.
Chen gave a snort. “That Kitty! No — no — but what made you think of a girl, Jim?”
“Your red face.”
Chen began rubbing his crown again. “Ha — yes — well—” So he stammered.
“Come — come!” James said.
Chen swallowed, clenched his hands together on his lap and plunged in. “I want to marry Mary,” he said abruptly.
“Eh?” James said stupidly.
“You hear me,” Chen said. Even his eyes looked red.
“But you are always laughing at her,” James said still stupidly. “And she never knows what you are laughing at. And you quarrel how often!”
“Married people always quarrel,” Chen said.
“Ah, but Chen, you two do not act like people in love!”
“And have you been in love?” Chen asked.
How seldom James thought of Lili, how resolutely he had put her away, and yet now her soft charming face, her childlike voice, came creeping back into his memory. He remembered his love for her, and how while it lived that love had wrapped him about in a dream. Mary and Chen did not walk in dreams. She was busy and brisk and she commanded Chen to do this and that and Chen laughed at her and sometimes he made a great show of obedience and sometimes he only laughed and did nothing, and when she flew at him he pretended terror. It was not at all what had been between him and Lili.
“I have been in love,” James said gravely.
“Did she die?”
“She married someone else.”
“What a fool she!” Chen exclaimed cheerfully. “Well, better luck for me, Jim — and for you too, someday.”
“I shall not soon marry,” James said.
“I shall,” Chen retorted. “But the question is — how can I tell Mary?”
He sat with his legs spread wide, his hands on his knees, his hair standing upright, and his square face so rueful that James burst into laughter himself. “You tell her everything else. Why can you not tell her this?”
But Chen was grave. “No, no. This is different. It is serious. A man cannot just go and speak to a woman so.”
“Why not? You are not a villager in love, are you?”
Chen continued to look grave. “It is delicate. The old way is not good — for us, that is. Yet I do not like the American way for us, either. I saw it in the movies. It was too disgusting to me — also insulting to Mary.”