Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

The autumn drew on gloriously, and the moon swelled to harvest size. The frost came down and then went away again and autumn warmth returned and one day after another passed in golden silence. The people were quiet and happy for a while, for with the harvests all could eat. The bandits, always lurking over the horizon, were not yet hungry with winter and the people could take a little ease. The war withdrew farther north once more and this fear eased, too, though only for a space. The end of autumn before winter strikes is the best time of any year, and this year it was more than good, for the harvests had been heavy. Yet James alone was not content. All that he did was too small, and he had with him day and night a constant loneliness.

And then one day in midwinter he discovered the cause of his own discontent. The one room where they worked had grown into two and now they were building a third for a bath house. There was no warm place in this whole village for people to wash themselves. In the city can be found bath houses, but not in a village. Much skin disease came from filth, and while in the summer a man can stand behind his house and pour a bucket of water over himself and scrub his body with the rough dried shred of a field gourd, in winter no man longs so heartily to be clean that he will do such a thing. The bath house therefore became a dream of Chen’s own and he had hired two men to come with their mallets and pound down earth into walls. He devised an earthen stove in one corner and a pipe to carry hot water from a cauldron to a great round wooden tub and a drain to carry the soiled water away into a ditch in the village street. The fame of this miracle went everywhere, and whole families came from miles around to see it for themselves.

Chen took much pride in the bath house, and he explained to all who came how easily it had been made, how cheaply, and how any man who had a little energy to spare could make his family such a bath house. When women saw in what comfort their menfolk came home after a hot bath in winter, they went to Mary and asked why one should not be made for them and Mary carried the demand to James and Chen. Chen laughed at her as he always did, and he said with mock ruefulness to James, “You see how these new women are, always wanting everything men have!” and Mary, who never understood quickly enough that he made a joke, flew to women’s defense and Chen pretended to be frightened and he said, “Well — well, who said I would not do it?”

So a bath house was made for the women, too, and they were thrifty and brought their children to bathe with them and thus bathing became the fashion, and the village was proud and felt itself as good as any city. Even so there were those who complained and the eldest daughter-in-law grumbled and said, “All this bathing is nothing but a wasteful habit. Look at me! Now that I bathe myself, I itch all over in twenty days or so unless I bathe again. Yet before we had this bath house I went all winter and did not itch.”

Uncle Tao would not bathe at all at first for fear of getting cold, and then for fear of seeming to yield to Mary. Then when he saw how rosy the children were after a bath and how well his sons ate and how sweetly they slept when they were cleaned, he mustered up courage and one day before the new moon year he declared himself ready for a bath, too.

Neither James nor Chen had urged him, but be sure that they rejoiced at this sign of change in Uncle Tao. Chen himself saw that the room was warm and the water hot and that some sheets of cotton were ready to dry Uncle Tao’s vast body. All others were held off while Uncle Tao was bathed. He had decided that the bath should take place at high noon on a sunny day when there was no wind, and he waited some ten days or so before he found a day good enough. Then he was anxious about what he should eat, and James advised him to eat nothing until after the bath.

Uncle Tao agreed to this but he said, “As soon as I am in my clothes again I must eat well, for much strength will be drained out of me with the bath,” and he ordered all his favorite dishes to be ready for him.

On the chosen day when the sun was high over the roofs, Uncle Tao allowed himself to be led into the bath house, and two menservants helped him to undress while his sons stood by, and Chen saw to the pouring of the water and James helped Uncle Tao get into the tub. Lucky it was that they had made that tub as large as a wooden vat, for when Uncle Tao lowered himself into it, the two men holding his arms and James holding his waist, the water spurted up around him like a fountain. At first Uncle Tao was fearful that he had done a foolish thing, but while James and Chen scrubbed him well with soap they had made from raw lye and the fat of an ox that had died, Uncle Tao began to feel better and he grew cheerful.

“To bathe is a good thing,” he declared proudly, looking about at them all from the tub. “Of course it cannot be done quickly and carelessly. Nor should it be done too often. The day must be a lucky one, the water must be hot, and I must not sit too long in this tub. Add some hot to it.”

When he was clean they poured two or three buckets of fresh hot water over him from the head down and he sat like a great baby gasping under the flow, his eyes shut and his mouth open and licking in the water. Then slowly he rose again, all helping him, and James wrapped him immediately with the cotton sheets and he was dried and the clean clothes he had ordered prepared were put on him. At last he was ready to eat and he ate with great pleasure and good nature, and then he slept, and when he woke he was so comfortable in all the mountain of his being that he commanded his whole household to be bathed at once, from his eldest son down to the smallest grandchild. This caused much trouble, but Chen was well pleased. “Behold me!” he cried to James, and pointed at himself with his thumb to his breast, “I have made a successful revolution!”

How could Chen be so happy with such small things? This James asked himself. This Chen was no small-minded man, neither did he dream small dreams. Sometimes when the two friends talked into the night Chen ceased for a while to make his jokes and then James saw him for what he was, a sober-minded, large-thinking man, who was making plans far beyond the daily tasks.

“You keep me in heart,” he said on one such evening to Chen. “When I grow weak and think that perhaps Su and Peng and Kang are right, and that these villagers are beyond our strength to help, when I fear that the centuries are stronger than we are, then I think of you.”

Chen heard this thoughtfully, rubbing the crown of his head slowly with his right hand in the way he had. “Of course the people on the land are stronger than we are,” he said. “They are the strength of our nation and they cannot be easily changed.”

“Yet why do we think we must change them? All we need do is to prove a thing is good and they will change themselves. Remember the bath house!”

These few words opened a door in James’s mind. He sat thinking about them and in silence. A small earthen pot of charcoal stood between him and Chen, and he warmed his hands over it. His one care was his hands, that they stay supple so that the skin would not break. He needed these hands for healing and he wanted them whole, so that when he put ointment on the scald head of a child or washed out some old ulcer on a farmer’s leg, or cleansed the sores of a leper, the poison would not spoil his hands.

Upon his thought Chen broke. “Jim, I have something to say and I cannot say it.”

James looked up surprised. “You and I have always spoken to one another easily, Chen.”

“Yes, but this is about something else.”

Chen’s face was suddenly fiery red and James remembered that red. “You do not regret sending Kitty away?” he asked, half in play.