Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“Listen to him!” Peter said contemptuously.

“Be quiet, Peter,” James said. He leaned forward and looked at the American. He liked this tall angular young man. His brown hair was mingled with the street dust and his face was grimy. But it was an honest face and for an American the features were delicate and quite good. It might be true that Louise would never marry a Chinese. Perhaps the first human perceptions stamped by life upon a newborn child were the ones which finally seemed most real. He and Mary had been born in China but Louise and Peter were American born. Some American nurse in a hospital in New York had lifted her from the bed of birth and had cared for her in the first weeks, and at home Nellie had taken her place. The first instincts of the child’s flesh had entwined themselves with blue eyes and blond hair and white skin. Louise could not change these instincts now.

“You really want to marry my sister?” James said to Alec.

Alec lifted his head. “I’ve been thinking it all out,” he said. “I want to marry her and go home. We’ll take the baby with us. She’s told me all about herself and she knows all about me. Lanmei was the first girl I was ever in love with and I’ll be happier with Louise than I would with any regular American girl. Besides, the baby will be easier to explain. And people aren’t as old-fashioned as they used to be. You can’t marry a Negro, but most people don’t mind a Chinese.”

Peter burst at this. His clenched hands flew from his pockets. “Don’t mind a Chinese!” he bellowed. “But we mind Americans, let me tell you! We’ve had about enough of Americans, I tell you! At the school tonight we framed up a protest to the government — about the way Americans are interfering in China. Gosh, when I tell them my sister is marrying one of them!” His anger ended in a wail.

James turned on him with forbidding eyes, but Peter gave him look for look. Then he yielded and rushed from the room.

Alec tried to smile. “You can’t blame them, I guess,” he said. “But what they don’t see is that fellows like us can’t help what any government does. We’re helpless, too. I want to get the hell out of here myself.”

James had been thinking hard and swiftly. Now he spoke with sudden clarity. “I think it is what you ought to do. Tomorrow you can come and tell me about your family and your situation. If I am satisfied I will tell Louise that so far as I am concerned, she may marry you.”

Alec lifted his head. “I want to thank you, sir,” he stammered. “I wish I knew how to thank you.”

Chen said, “Jim, what about your parents?”

“I stand in my father’s place,” James replied. “He has put my sisters and my brother in my care.”

Alec was on his feet. “I’ll come around tomorrow — here?”

“To my office in the hospital, please,” James said. “Then we will see the child together. Louise is very young for the care of so small an infant. But I suppose she can learn.”

They stood while Alec shook their hands and while he went to the door, smiled back, and went away. Then James turned to Chen. “Tell me I have done right,” he pleaded.

They sat down opposite each other at the table. “I think you have done right,” Chen admitted. “Yet how do I know?”

There was a footfall at the door and Mary came in.

“Done what right?” she asked. She sat down at the third side of the table between them.

“I have told him he can marry Louise,” James said simply.

She sat for a long moment. Then she got up and said, “I’ll go and tell her. She keeps crying.”

But she paused a moment and looked at Chen. “I thought you were going to be in love with Louise,” she said bluntly. Chen opened his eyes wide. “I? In love?” He gave a great shout of laughter, and she left him still laughing.

The wedding took place quietly. Alec and Louise wanted no guests. They were both American citizens and they went to the American Consulate one afternoon with James and Mary as witnesses and there, before an acquiescent though unwilling consul, the marriage was performed. Peter would not go and Chen had refused, saying that only two witnesses were needed and he would stay with the baby. The baby was at the hotel waiting for them in Chen’s care when the wedding party came back.

“I am a good amah,” Chen declared. “A better amah than a doctor.”

He had the baby in his arms, and the baby, dressed in new yellow rompers that Mary had made for him, was holding Chen’s thumb tightly and staring into his rugged face. The few days before the wedding had been busy with new clothes not for the bride but for the baby, everything made American. Louise and Alec had devoted themselves to the study of formulas and schedules, and Mary had lined a Chinese basket with cotton padding and blue silk for a traveling cradle. Another basket with a lid carried bottles and sterilizer and all that a child would need for a long journey.

That night the bride and groom with the little boy took the train southward to Shanghai. It was a strange wedding party, and yet a happy one. James and Mary and Chen saw them off and stood until the train disappeared into the night, shades drawn against possible bandits and only the great engine headlight flaring.

Gazing after the moving train, James buttoned his coat about him tightly. “Now I must cable Pa,” he said.

Mary clung to his arm as they turned to go home again and Chen fell in beside her. “I know we have done right,” she said with her old sweet stubbornness. “It doesn’t matter what Pa says.”

“Louise would never have been happy here,” Chen said. They began to trudge together in common step down the half-empty street. The night was cold and there would be frost. People walking by gathered their robes together and hurried on.

“It takes a certain kind of person to live in China now,” Chen mused.

“What kind of person?” Mary asked.

“Someone who can see true meanings; someone who does not only want the world better but also believes it can be made better, and gets angry because it is not done; someone who is not willing to hide himself in one of the few good places left in the world — someone who is tough!”

They were passing an ironmonger’s shop and the ironmonger being behind with his work had not yet put up the boards. Upon his anvil he beat a piece of twisted iron that he was making into a knife which a student had ordered that day. The flaming metal threw out sparks and lit up his black face in a grimace of effort. His white teeth gleamed. This same light fell on the three and Chen looked down into Mary’s upturned face as they passed.

“Somebody tough,” he repeated half teasingly, “somebody like you — and me — and Jim.” Mary laughed and she took her other hand out of her pocket and put it in Chen’s arm, and they marched along, in step.

Peter stayed in his own room during the wedding. Young Wang had been amazed and horrified and when the others had gone he went to Peter’s door. He liked this younger son of the family and longed to come to good terms with him. He imagined them almost friends, rather than master and servant. Sometimes, brushing Peter’s large shoes after a rain and cleaning cakes of Peking mud from under the soles, he imagined himself talking thus and even saying Peter’s name. “Pe-tah, hear me! I am older than you, although born in a low family. Your family are gentry, mine are small farmers only. Nevertheless in these new times who is high and who is low? Let us be friends. I tell you, students are no good. In the old days we common folks looked up to scholars and students. They were the governors. I tell you,” here Young Wang brushed the shoes with fury, “now we know that it is we common folk who must resist scholars and warlords and rich men and magistrates. These four are the enemies of the people.”