Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

After his breakfast he dressed himself carefully in his Chinese clothes. When she saw him it must be as a man of their people. He did not want to dismay her by looking foreign to her at first, for she would discover much that was strange to her in him as time went on.

In spite of all this determined calm, James felt his heart hurry its beat when noon came. He could not but realize, silently, that what he was about to do was unchangeable. Then he remembered how often in the centuries past men, his ancestors, had stood as ignorant as he of their fate. For them as for him marriage was not for individual pleasure. It was the unfolding of life itself. Man and woman, unknown before, took that step, each toward the other, and what had been separate became one. He must think of himself as man and of her as woman. Their life was only part of the whole of life.

In such spirit he waited in the main room of the Liang house with all the Liang family. Uncle Tao sat in the highest seat, dressed in his best robe of old-amber-hued satin and his sleeved jacket of black cut velvet. Upon his head he wore his black satin cap with a red corded button. Each of the older male cousins, dressed in his best, sat in his proper seat, and the female cousins went out to welcome the bride and receive her into the house.

The red sedan wedding chair reached the gate an hour after noon. Half an hour later, while James still waited with Uncle Tao and the cousins in the big room, the doors were opened. James looked toward it. He saw Mary coming toward him, smiling and holding by the hand his bride. He saw a slender figure clothed from head to foot in scarlet satin. Her head was bent under its beaded veil, but through the strands he saw a grave good face, the eyelids dropped, the mouth firm and red.

Uncle Tao rose, and with him all the cousins. The wedding had begun.

When James entered his room that night and heard the door closed behind him, he knew that now the goodness of his life depended upon him and upon this unknown woman. She sat beside the table and her hands lay one upon the other on her lap. They were brown and not too small, and the nails were not painted. She still wore the beaded veil and her head was drooped as he had seen it and her eyelids were still downcast. She sat motionless, waiting, he knew, for him to lift the veil from her head. He went forward at once and putting his hands to the headdress he lifted it off and set it on the table.

He tried to make his voice pleasant, easy, something a woman need not fear.

“How heavy this is! I hope you have not a headache from wearing it all day.”

At this she looked up quickly and then away again. “I have a little headache,” she said, “but it will pass soon. I am very healthy.”

He liked her plain voice, the accent rustic, yet clear. She was not pretty, but her face was good, the features straight and the skin smooth and brown as is common with country women. Her eyes were wide apart and large enough to look honest. The mouth was generous and it looked sweet tempered. For so much he could be grateful.

He sat down opposite her. “Tell me about your life,” he said. “Then I will tell you about mine.”

A mild look of surprise came on her face but after a few seconds she began without shyness. “What have I to tell? We are newcomers here and our ancestral home is some three hundred li away. I have no learning — and of this I am ashamed. But in a busy household on the land there is no time for a girl to go to school. My two younger brothers can read. We older ones had always to work. I am the middle child of my parents.”

“It is easy to read,” James said. “My sister will teach you if you wish.”

“I do wish,” she said. “That is, if you can spare the time for me to learn.”

“There will be time,” James said.

Then simply, so that it would not awe her, he told her of his own life and how it had been spent abroad and why he had wanted to come back to his own people. She listened, sitting motionless, her head inclined, not looking at him, and he found himself telling her more than he had planned. When he had finished she said in a grave quiet way which he already saw was natural to her, “Our country is now in bad times. There are those who go away in such times and those who come back. The good ones come back.”

He was delighted with this. In so few words she had put what he had tried to tell himself often in many ways, but never so simply and clearly. Now he could make the proposal of friendship. “You are tired. Let me say what I have to say. You and I have chosen one another in the old way of our ancestors—”

He went on and she listened. When he had finished she gave a small quick nod of her head and for the first time she looked into his eyes. “Your mother told me you were a good man,” she said. “Now I know you are.”

After his wedding his life flowed on scarcely changed from what it had been. Within a few days Yumei had taken her place in the household. She was a quiet woman. Yet when they were alone James found an increasing pleasure in talking with her. She had a large mind, and her thoughts were fresh because they were her own. Since she had been always busy in her family of brothers no one had taken time to know her thoughts, and this treasure was his own now to discover. Soon she began to make small comfortable changes in their rooms and he found his food served hot and on time, at hours when he could most easily eat. When he came in at night there was always something light and hot to eat and he found he slept better for it.

And it was Yumei who first told him that Uncle Tao was frightened and in pain. “Please look at our Old Head,” she said to him one morning. “Yesterday he was weeping behind his hand when he thought no one could see him. But I saw him and when the others left, I asked him to tell me what was wrong, and so I know that the knot in him weighs on his veins and he cannot sit or sleep.”

“I have long told him that he should let me cut it out,” James said to defend himself.

She sat down at a distance from him and folded her hands as she always did when she was about to talk with him. She spoke freely to him but she kept the little formalities she had been taught. “Please forgive me,” she said. “You know everything better than I do, I think, but this one thing perhaps I know better — it is how people feel. The middle child, especially if she is a daughter, is the one who looks at both elder and younger and she is a bridge between them. Now Uncle Tao wants secretly to be rid of his knot, but he is afraid he will die if he is cut.”

James was a little impatient with this. “I have told him he will die if he does not have it out.”

“He told me you said so,” she replied in the same quiet voice. “That is what makes him so afraid. He has no way to turn. Now let us tell him this way. Promise him that he will live if he has it cut out.”

“But he might not live!” James exclaimed.

“Promise him he will live,” she said coaxingly. She was looking at him now, her eyes bright and soft. “If he dies he will not know it. If he lives then you will be right. And if he believes he will live, it will give him strength not to die.”

It was hard to refuse this shrewd persuasion. James sat silent for a while thinking it over. It happened to be true enough — the belief that he would live was more powerful than any medicine for a sick man.

“Surely life is the most precious thing,” Yumei urged, when James did not speak.

Again it seemed to him that she was right. Men continued to kill each other as they had for centuries and for many reasons, not knowing that life was more precious than anything for which they died.

“I will do it, if Uncle Tao can be persuaded,” he said at last.