Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

She leaned forward and tapped on the glass. “Let me out,” she called to the driver. “I want to get out right here.” The taxi drew up to the curb and she got out without saying good-by and slammed the door. She saw Philip’s face, startled and concerned, looking at her through the glass as the cab darted away.

ON A WARM SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON James was washing his hands after a leg amputation. His patient was a man, young and strong, and he would live easily. James was not concerned about his recovery. He was deeply concerned, however, over the growing number of such wounds, all gun-inflicted and all reaching him too late to save legs and arms. Seven men had died because the wounds were in the body trunk. Last night when he had gone to see his patient he had asked him bluntly where he got so deep a wound in his lower thigh.

The man was the son of a farmer to the north of the city and he spoke with a burr at the end of every noun. “Bandits keep pressing us,” he said and turned away his head.

“Bandits?” James asked.

“Bandits is what we used to call them and it is what we still call them,” the man said. His eyes were bitter.

“Where are they?” James asked.

“In our own village,” the man said bitterly. “They do not come from outside any more. They are among our own. Look you, please! I am surnamed Hwang. My whole village is Hwang. But this man who put his bullet into me is also surnamed Hwang.”

James interrupted. “You mean he is a Com—”

“Hush!” the man said. “Do not say the word. Call them bandits. Eh, they are everywhere! The hungry, the ones who will not work, the ones who hate their work, the tenants on the farm — they turn into — bandits.” He sighed. “The times are evil. Such a good gun he had! I have a cheap thing made by the Japs. I took it away from a Jap. But I am only Hwang the Honest. That’s what I am called. The bandit Hwang has a fine American gun. I saw it in his house one day. When I saw it, I knew he was a — bandit. I needed not to look into his eyes.”

“Where did he get such a gun?” James had asked. Yes, the wound had been very deep.

“These guns come from America,” the man had said. “They give them to our soldiers and then — the bandits get them.”

“How?” James had asked sternly.

“There are many ways,” the man had said listlessly.

James knew he must ask no more questions, and he went away. How many things he did not understand! Now the operation was safely over and the man would get well, and perhaps then he would talk. Actually the man had talked a good deal while he was under ether. The nurse Rose had been his assistant today and he had caught her nervous glance, when the man began to mutter.

“Bandits — bandits — my brother—”

“A little more ether,” James said to the anesthetist.

“His heart is already weak,” Rose reminded them. She held the man’s wrist between her thumb and finger.

So they let him mutter, “Starve — my brother — no — no — Communists—”

No one paid heed to this last word which had burst from the man’s mouth like a bullet from a gun.

Remembering it James wondered if he himself were naïve. He was aware, only half-consciously, of some profound though secret struggle going on among the people. Yet, since no one spoke of it he did not think of it. The day’s work absorbed him, and he disliked political quarrels. The true scientist, he believed, would have nothing to do with politics. He must keep himself whole. Yet perhaps he had accepted too easily his father’s belief in government, whatever it was.

“Heaven chooses a ruler,” his father had been wont to declare. “Only when that ruler forsakes wisdom does Heaven put him aside.” From these high-sounding words Dr. Liang Wen Hua was apt to descend to this remark, to his children. “Whatever we have in the way of a government it is better than Communism. Do you think you could enjoy our personal luxuries under those Red devils?”

At this moment, while James was so thinking, the door opened and a hand thrust itself in, holding an envelope. James recognized the hand. It was that of Young Wang who, always terrified of seeing cutting and bleeding, would on no account put his head into a room where by any chance an operation might be going on. James went to the door and took the envelope.

“An electric letter — from your father,” Young Wang’s voice said huskily through the door.

James had long since stopped wondering how Young Wang knew everything before he did. The envelope was sealed. Besides, Young Wang could not read nor write. Perhaps the clerk had told the messenger who brought the cablegram. James opened the message. It was indeed from his father. Even in a cablegram his father could not resist the careful phrase. “The other children joining you in our homeland. Sailing today. Explanation to follow by airmail.” He looked at the date. They had sailed yesterday.

The other children, Mary, Peter, Louise! He was shocked by the imminence. What had happened? Mary he would have welcomed — but all three of them, so young, so unprepared! He was profoundly distressed. What would he do with them? He was only himself beginning to be reconciled, or rather resigned to not being reconciled, to what life was here. Peter! What could he do with Peter, who was more American than any American? It was too late to cable back in protest. That was like his father, too, to inform only after he had acted.

“Bad news?” Dr. Liu Chen asked. He had come in also to wash, having today taken the place of an anesthetist who had died a week ago of cholera. There was just enough cholera in the city to worry the doctors but nothing like an epidemic. Still, it was more than the city had suffered in many years. The war had left dregs everywhere and old diseases had been stirred up again. People were afraid of plague once more in the north.

“Not exactly,” James said. Had it been one of the other doctors he would not have gone on, but Liu was comfortable and kind. Above all, he was modest. He had been educated at a small college in the United States and afterward he had taken his internship at a settlement hospital which no one knew when he mentioned it. He was modest but he was not humble. He carried himself with pleasant composure and when he went to a party that any of the doctors gave, he was friendly and never pretended to anything. He himself gave no parties. Several times he had invited James to dine with him, and they went always to a restaurant and never to a hotel.

“I have strange news from my father,” James went on. “He tells me he is sending my two sisters and my brother to me, and I cannot imagine why, since they are all in school.”

Dr. Liu, very clean and smelling of soap, was now carefully sharpening a small scalpel on a fine oiled stone. “Perhaps he wishes them to learn something of their own civilization,” he suggested. He spoke, as always, in Chinese. His English was not very good, for he came from a part of the country where the people confused two or three consonants and he found that by doing so in English he often said what he did not mean.

“Perhaps,” James said. Being much troubled he went on again, as he stood watching the hairline edge on the scalpel. “The question is where shall I put them. I shall have to find a house somewhere.”

“That is not too difficult, provided you do not want what is called a modern house,” Dr. Liu said. He placed the scalpel carefully into the sterilizer and turned on the electricity. This made him think of something. “I have invented a sterilizer to be used with charcoal,” he said. His square ugly face lit with enthusiasm as he spoke.

Long ago Liu Chen had given up improving his looks. He was above middle height, his frame was strong, for he came of peasant stock, and his cheekbones were high and his eyes small. He would still have been a peasant had it not been for a missionary who had taught him to read and then had helped him go to school. Liu Chen had a good mind which held tenaciously everything he poured into it, but nothing was learned easily. He took great care to learn exactly, therefore, for he knew that whatever his mind had seized could never be changed. He was somewhat too slow to be a first-rate surgeon, but he made up for this by taking a deep personal interest in his patients. Rose or Marie often met him in the night, especially just before dawn in those hours when the sick die easily. He would be prowling through the wide corridors on his way to a room or a ward, to see for himself how his patients did. He looked apologetic when he met a nurse, for his presence seemed to accuse them. Indeed, Marie, who was mischievous, had once teased him.