“Ma likes it here,” Mary said.
“It is her true home,” Chen replied.
Yet Mrs. Liang did not sink back into old ways. She approved Mary’s little school and she went about the village urging mothers to send their children to learn. In America, she told them, all people are compelled to go to school.
The villagers were aghast to hear of such tyranny. “Who then does the work?” they inquired. When she told them that learning to read did not spoil working men by turning them into scholars they could not believe her. They were used to their scholars who when they learned were too good for work.
One night she said a word of wisdom to Mary. “Now these ancestral people do not understand that a person can read and at the same time work. It is necessary that you continually show them it is possible.”
She herself washed her own garments and helped in the kitchens and in all ways surprised the Liang women who expected her to act as a learned and idle woman. The fame of this went out over the Liang lands, and women began to come and see Mrs. Liang and then to tell her of their troubles and even, because she too was a woman, of how Uncle Tao oppressed their families. But Mrs. Liang was shrewd. She knew that oppression was like a sword in the hands of two who struggle for its possession.
“Right is not always with the poor,” she answered James when he told her one day how much it troubled him that Uncle Tao had no thought for the people. “First you must ask why are people poor? Is it because they will not work or because they are thieves or because misfortune has overtaken them? Only when you know this can you know how they must be helped. With some the surest help is work or starvation.”
“Uncle Tao is too hard,” he said.
“He is hard,” she agreed, “but do not you be soft.”
To Mary she said, “Your brother James needs a good plain wife.”
“He does,” Mary agreed, “but where shall he find her?”
“I hope he is not looking at that little Rose nurse,” Mrs. Liang said. She did not approve of any woman working at a man’s side and she looked sidewise very often at Rose as she worked with James every day.
“James does not look at any woman since Lili married Charlie Ting,” Mary said.
“James is stupid,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed.
“Why not Rose, Ma?” Mary inquired.
Her mother raised her eyebrows, shrugged her plump shoulders, scratched her head with her gold hairpin, and cleaned her ears, all without answering. Then she said, “A bowl ought not to be too small for the hand that holds it,” and would say no more.
Meanwhile the wedding day drew near. For the sake of decency before the relatives Chen and Mary kept apart, and did not meet at all until the day itself came. It was natural that Mrs. Liang should put her whole mind on this wedding, but James felt his mother’s eyes often upon him. He knew her well. As soon as her mind was free she would have a plan concerning him.
On the night before the wedding he said to Mary, “As soon as you are married, Ma will be after me for something. I can feel it.”
“She wants you to marry,” Mary said.
He pretended to be terrified at this and begged Mary to prevent their mother. But in his heart he was amused, curious, and cautious.
The wedding day was a good one. The sun came up round and yellow, and there was neither cloud nor snow. Uncle Tao had been astonished when he heard that none of Chen’s family was to come, but when he knew their circumstances, how they were held in Communist country, he could only pity them, and for once he did well. He ordered a good feast to last the whole of one day and all the village was invited to it, and such tenants as cared to walk the distance from the land. The wedding was an old-fashioned one.
“It is easier to have it so than to explain why I do not have it so,” Mary had said.
So the marriage took place before the relatives, and Chen chose as proxy for his family a distant Liang cousin, and the papers were written, the wine drunk, the millet bowls exchanged, and so the ceremony was done. It was a bitter cold day, but the sun continued to shine and when men, women, and children were full of hot food it was good enough. There was no such thing as a honeymoon, for that was too foreign. Mary moved her boxes into Chen’s room, and James gave up his room for their sitting room and he went into another room near his eldest cousin. The next day Mary went as usual to her school and Chen to the clinic and neither gave a sign of inner happiness. Yet James knew it was there. His very flesh was sensitive to their secret joy. He would not have lessened their joy by an iota, and yet suddenly it increased his own loneliness.
This he bore quietly and when Chen had given greeting that morning after the wedding night, James began to speak of the enlargement of the clinic into the hospital. This he had planned for early spring. At the same time he planned to set up classes for itinerant first-aid centers. There were two bright boys in the village who wanted to learn medicine from him, one a cousin of Young Wang’s wife, for whom Young Wang had come to intercede, and the other the son of the village night watchman. When he perceived that Chen was answering “yes-yes” to all he proposed, and that his thoughts were not here, he stopped his talk, and it was at this moment that James felt his loneliness grow monstrous.
All through the day James and Chen worked side by side and Rose worked near them, tending the long line of the sick who now came from many parts of that region, some walking hundreds of miles, and the dying brought in litters or clinging to the back of some near relative. The old sorrow was that too often they came too late, having tried witchcraft and sorcerers first.
That day Chen watched Rose and he saw she was pretty and dexterous, and in his own new-found joy he considered within himself whether Rose might not be a good wife for his friend. In the middle of the morning’s work when they had drawn aside to discuss the case of a child with a huge water-filled head, suddenly in the midst of their talk he said in English, “Jim, you too should marry.”
James looked at him somewhat startled. “We were speaking of this sick child—”
“I am thinking of you,” Chen said. “I tell you—”
“It is quite proper that the day after your own marriage you should think all men ought to marry,” James said with a dry smile.
“Well, why not the little Rose?” Chen asked boldly.
“You!” James retorted. “No — Rose is well enough and we ought to marry her off somewhere some day, I suppose, but not to me. Come, come—”
“Have you seen a better?” Chen urged.
“I have seen no woman that I want now for my wife,” James said, too quietly.
They talked of the child again and decided to draw the water from its head, and so they did, warning the mother that she must come often, for this healing was not sure. But while he worked, Chen’s mind was busy far inside itself. James had said he had seen no woman whom now he wished to marry. Then why not one whom he had not seen? If his heart was dead let it be waked by life itself, if not by love. A man should marry and have children, with or without love. Love was blessing but life was good enough.
In the middle of that night, being melted with love, he said to Mary, “Why should we not find a wife for Jim? He will not choose for himself — then let us choose.”
“As if James would let us!”
The thought was too bold and Mary scoffed at it. Chen was pleased that even love could not change Mary. She teased him and opposed him as she always had and this made her yielding all the sweeter.
“No, I mean it,” Chen insisted. “Jim is the very one to let us do it.”
“He never would,” said Mary.
The next day Chen waylaid Mrs. Liang as she came from the kitchens and drawing her aside into a quiet room away from the relatives he proposed to her that they should persuade Jim to return to ancestral ways and allow them to choose a wife for him.