Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

In something less than an hour the stationmaster sauntered by, looking neither to right nor to left, and Young Wang seized all the baggage he could carry and James rose to follow him. From somewhere two coolies appeared and silently tied the rest of the suitcases together and followed behind.

Outside on the platform the air was misty and cool and the electric lights were feeble. There was no train in sight. A few anxious souls were asleep even on the platform and they still slept. But Young Wang peered into the distance. “Train comes,” he announced in a tense whisper. Nothing could be seen but his eyes pierced beyond sight.

“How do you know?” James asked.

“Feel the earth under my feet,” Young Wang answered.

In a quarter of an hour the train pulled into the station and the crowd pressed through the gates and began climbing into doors and windows alike. But Young Wang was ahead of them all. Yelling and pushing with sharp elbows, he commandeered two seats, heaped them with baggage and sat on top of them. James, caught like driftwood on a wave, heard him roaring at the top of his lungs that his master was a Big Man from America. When he came into sight, Young Wang climbed down, smiled, and showed him a pleasant enough corner by the window.

“Bags must stay here,” he said. “If no bags, then seat will be gone soon.”

The aisles were full and men and children sat even on the baggage racks overhead. The noise on the roof meant that those who had not found places inside were on top of the car. The engine gave a series of jerks, people screamed, a few fell off, the train started northward, and James found that for a full hour he had not had time to think of Lili.

If the day was long and hideous, the night was less so only because from exhaustion he fell into a daze of unconsciousness which was not sleep. He dreamed that he was held in some prison full of writhing people who had nothing to do with him and yet he was one of them. He woke to gaze out of the dusty windows at a dull landscape whose colors he did not see.

On the morning of the second day Young Wang broke a window pane. Fresh cool air rushed in and James felt his brain cleared suddenly. He had been sitting in deep depression, unwashed, for there was no water on the train. When he had struggled to the lavatory he had found it occupied by two women, their bedding, and three children, and he had retreated again. When the train stopped Young Wang had allowed him out only with great anxiety, and had begged him not to leave the side of the train, because no one knew how quickly the train might go. Then Young Wang, rearranging his possessions to allow him to lie on top of them, had thrust a heavy oiled paper umbrella he had bought from a vendor through the cracked glass of the window.

Now James leaned toward the hole and breathed in the air. He had been poisoned by the fetid atmosphere within the car. He drank in the freshness of the morning and saw to his surprise that the land was not dim and colorless. Instead it was brilliantly green and against the vivid hue men and women in blue garments worked in the fields. Small brick-walled villages studded the level plains and on the horizon were violet-colored hills.

“Forgive, forgive!” a gentle trembling voice said. An old gentleman in a crumpled silk robe pushed past him, put his head through the opened window and was violently sick in a deprecating courteous fashion.

James waited, pinned beneath him, and at last the man stepped back, smiling with desperate calm. “I am too coarse,” he said. “But I have been trying for hours not to soil the train.”

“Do you have pain in you?” James asked.

“No pain, thank you,” he replied. “The train rolls me inside. It is a pity we must travel in such ways. A sedan chair is more healthy. The speed is too much nowadays.” He sighed and returned to his place on the floor. It was impossible not to like this old man. He had spread a quilt neatly under him and he drew it about him so that he need not touch the persons on either side of him. One was a soldier who slept with his mouth open and smelled of garlic and wine and the other was a young woman who suckled two children, an infant and a boy of three.

James turned his face again to the landscape. The old gentleman had been very careful and neat and there was no vomit on the window.

The train was many hours late. Long ago they should have reached Nanking, and only now were the purple hills looming into view. Young Wang sat up when he saw them, and began to fasten bundles together again. Somehow or other he had accumulated several more than he had brought on the train. At various places when the train stopped he had bought packages of tea, of dried fish, of fried brown bean curd, or larded cakes. Each town had its specialty and vendors brought them to the train. Since there was no food served, anything to eat was valuable and Young Wang had stored up enough for himself and James, and what was left he would give to his family as presents at some distant day. He prudently bought nothing that was fresh except at midnight two large bowls of hot soup, one of which he had given to his master. At Nanking the train stopped, and they must take a ferry and cross the river to take a north-bound train again on the other side.

“You get ready, please,” he bade James with authority. “Here is one big fight for the ferry first.”

When the train slid loudly into the station the baggage was slung about his person like armor and he plunged relentlessly into the crowd, creating a space in which James followed him with a doggedness that was almost ruthless. By this means they reached the ferry in time to find a place that was not on the edge of the boat.

“Too many people drown,” Young Wang told James over his shoulder. “Push, push, splash!”

So it happened that when they were on the ferry James saw the unlucky old gentleman, clawing his way on at the last moment, gain a tiny space as the ferry left the banks. In mid-river there was indeed a splash. A few voices cried out that the old man had fallen in the water. The ferry continued on its way, but with a shout James leaped through the crowd. He fell heavily. Young Wang had clutched his ankles and would not be shaken off.

“Let go, you fool!” James shouted. But nothing would loose the hands locked at his feet. Scores of hands reached out to prevent him when he tried to drag himself to the edge of the ferry. “Too late, too late!” they cried. “It is destiny! The current has taken that old head far away.”

It was indeed too late. The river swirled with a hundred wicked crosscurrents and had James plunged it would have been to search in vain for the quiet old man. He stood dazed for a moment, speechless with a terrible silent anger. Then he turned on Young Wang.

“Let go!” he roared. The brown hands unlocked, but Young Wang stood between him and the water. James turned his back on him and Young Wang reached out and unseen he took hold of the end of his coat and held it until they reached the shore.

On the northern shore James turned and looked back at Nanking, the capital of his country. It lay hidden behind a high gray wall, centuries old. Beyond it he could see the double crest of Purple Mountain, where Sun Yat-sen’s tomb had been built. He knew from scores of photographs how the tomb looked. Some day when he had discovered his own country he would go there and look at the tomb of the man who had lived too long, or died too soon — he did not know which.

When the train reached Peking he was in a fever of weariness. He had been traveling for days and he realized that he had become utterly dependent on Young Wang. The sprightly young man had provided him with food and hot tea at intervals, had night and morning fetched him hot water in a tin basin wherewith to wash, had pushed soldiers and women and callous men off the seats he had pre-empted for himself and his master, had fanned away flies, had again broken a window pane, and had made life somehow endurable.