Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

Mrs. Liang continued to sob but not too loudly lest Nellie the maid hear her. She did not know that Nellie had already heard her and was now standing at the door with her ear against it. When she heard nothing but Chinese she looked peevish and when she heard Mrs. Liang’s sobs her lips framed the words, “Poor thing!” Then after a moment, still hearing nothing but Chinese, she went back to her dishes again.

“You have no proper feeling for me as your husband,” Dr. Liang went on severely. “What will people say when they hear that our daughters behave like wantons? They will say that our Confucian ways cannot withstand the ways of barbarians.”

As long as he spoke of Louise Mrs. Liang had only continued to sob but now when he blamed her she wiped her eyes and puckered her lips. “Why then did you come to America, Liang?” she demanded. “At home it was easy to watch the girls. I could have hired amahs to go with them everywhere. How can I go about with them here? Am I an amah? And if I hired two white amahs could they be trusted?”

Dr. Liang pushed back his chair. Their quarrels proceeded always in the same way. He attacked his wife with scolding words until she reached the point of real anger and then he grew majestic and uttered a final sentence. This he did now. “When Louise comes downstairs, send her to my study,” he commanded.

He refused to finish his meal and he walked with dignity out of the room and across the hall to his study and closed the door. Once alone he allowed himself to be as disturbed as he felt. He sat down in his easy chair and cracked his finger joints one after the other and stared at a rubbing of Confucius that hung on the wall. This rubbing he had not valued for a number of years because he had bought it for a dollar in an old shop in Nanking. Since it was paper and could be folded up small he had brought it with other trifles to America to use sometime as a gift. But only a few years ago he had seen one exactly like it in an exhibition and it had been reprinted in a great popular magazine. Then he found his own copy and had it framed in imitation bamboo. When visitors came into his study he pointed to it gracefully. “There is my inspiration,” he said.

Now he looked at Confucius with some irritation. This morning the rubbing merely seemed to be that of a foolishly complacent old man swaddled in too many robes. He turned away from it, closed his eyes, and let his anger against Louise swell to a point where it would be properly explosive. There he maintained it by force of will while he read again his morning portion of the Analects.

Meanwhile Louise had tripped downstairs barefoot, still wearing her nightgown over which she had thrown a pink satin bed jacket. She peeped into the dining room and saw her mother sitting alone at the table. So she came in.

“Oh, Ma,” she said. “I was afraid Pa was here. I am so hungry but I didn’t want to get up. I thought maybe Nellie would bring me up a tray.”

“Your pa wants to see you,” her mother said coldly.

Louise took a bit of toast and nibbled it. “Why, what have I done?” she asked pertly.

Mrs. Liang frowned and pursed her lips. “Pei!” she exploded softly. “Think what it is you have done that you do not want him to know!”

Louise looked alarmed. “Who told him?” she demanded.

“Never mind.”

“It was Mary!” Louise exclaimed.

“Never mind!”

“Oh, Ma!” Louise wailed.

In his study Dr. Liang heard the duet and he rose and opened the door suddenly. Both women looked at him, but he stared only at his daughter. “Go upstairs and put on your clothes. Then come to my study,” he commanded.

“Isn’t she to eat something first?” Mrs. Liang demanded. The presence of one of the children always gave her courage.

“No,” Dr. Liang said and shut the door.

Mother and daughter looked at one another. Then Mrs. Liang spoke. “Go upstairs,” she said softly. “I will fetch you a tray and you can eat while you dress.”

“Scrambled eggs, please,” Louise whispered.

Dr. Liang, listening, heard only the hurrying footsteps of his daughter on the stairs. He leaned back, mollified. He was still obeyed.

Upstairs Louise did not go to her own room. Instead she opened the door of Mary’s room. Mary was at her desk, writing to James, and she saw her younger sister standing with her back to the door, the wide satin skirt of her nightgown whirled around her, and her pretty face pink with anger.

“Mary, what did you say to Pa?” Louise demanded in a loud whisper.

“Peter told me you let Philip kiss you,” Mary said gravely.

“Did you have to tell Pa?” Louise demanded.

“Yes.”

Louise stared at her sister. Something adamant in that soft little face confounded her and she suddenly began to cry. “I hate you!” she sobbed, still whispering, and she opened the door and whirled out.

Mary sat for a long moment, then took up her pen again and wrote, “I think the only thing that can keep Louise from being a fool is for me to bring her to China. If the ocean is between her and Philip perhaps we can guard her.”

When she had finished her letter she sat quite thoughtfully for a long time. Then she got up and began to tidy the small drawers at the top of her bureau.

In something over half an hour she paused in this task, and opening the door of her room she heard the unmistakable sounds of a stick beating upon something soft. Then she heard screams — Louise’s voice — and almost at once her mother’s loud shouts. She ran downstairs swiftly and opened the door of her father’s study. He had his malacca cane in one hand, and with the other he held Louise by the hair. He had bent her back, but he held her head firmly while with his right hand he lifted the cane and struck it upon her shoulders. Mrs. Liang was vainly trying to put herself between the cane and the girl.

“My father?” Mary said distinctly.

Dr. Liang’s face was twisted and purple. But at the sight of his elder daughter he looked dazed and threw down the cane and pushed Louise away from him.

“Take her out of my sight,” he gasped. “I never want to see her again.”

Louise lay on the floor where she fell, sobbing aloud, and Mrs. Liang sat down in a chair. Sweat was pouring down her cheeks and she lifted the edge of her coat to wipe it away.

“Father,” Mary said again. The intense quiet of her voice seemed to bring silence and order into the room. “What you have done is not right.”

Dr. Liang had thrown himself into his leather armchair. His hands trembled and his face was ashen. “She is no longer my daughter,” he said. He looked with contempt upon Louise where she still lay weeping, her face buried in her arms.

“The American girls kiss boys and think nothing of it,” Mary pleaded. “Remember that she has been here all her life. You brought us here, Pa. We can’t remember any other country.”

“It is not only the kiss,” Mrs. Liang said heavily. “There is more than the kiss.” She spoke in Chinese but “kiss” she said in English.

“What has she done?” Mary asked. Her heart began to beat hard. Had Peter lied to her? Did he know?

“Don’t repeat it!” Dr. Liang shouted.

Mrs. Liang groaned aloud. “Eh-yah! I could not—”

Louise suddenly stopped weeping. She was listening. But she did not move and she lay, a figure of young sorrow, upon the floor.

Dr. Liang’s face began to work in strange grimaces. “Everything for which I have striven is now destroyed,” he said in a strangled voice. “I am about to be disgraced by my own daughter. My enemies will laugh at me. My students will deride the teachings of Confucius because my own daughter has derided them.”

Mary was sorry for them all. She stood with pity warm in her dark eyes. She understood her father’s pride and her mother’s bewilderment. And she understood very well Louise, who in eagerness to make herself beloved had confounded herself more than any.