A House Divided (20 page)

In the next days and in all the years to come when there was so much to see and to make wonder over, he would have said he had forgotten that small one thing, except he had not. As clearly today, if he happened to take thought of it, as he had six years ago, he saw that man’s angry look and he could still feel the wound, which seemed to him unjust.

But if he had not forgotten, yet the memory was often buried. For Yuan and Sheng together saw much beauty in those first days in the foreign country. They rode on a train which bore them through great mountains where, although spring was warm upon the foothills, yet snow was white and thick against the high blue skies, and between these mountains there were black gorges where deep waters foamed and frothed and Yuan staring down at all this mad beauty felt it almost too much and scarcely real, but like some wild painter’s picture hung there beneath the train, foreign and strange and too sharply colored, and not made of earth and rocks and water of which his own country was compounded.

When the mountains were behind them, there were valleys as extravagant and fields big enough to be counties and machines struggling like huge beasts to make ready the fertile earth for gigantic harvests. Yuan saw it very clearly, and this was even more a marvel to him than the mountains. He stared at the great machines and he remembered how the old farmer had taught him to hold a hoe and fling it so it fell true to its set place. So did that farmer still till his land, and so did others like him. And Yuan remembered how the farmer’s little fields were made, each neatly fitted to the other, and how his few vegetables grew green and heavy with the human wastes he saved and poured on them, so that every plant grew to its richest best, and every plant and every foot of land had its full value. But here none could take thought of single plants and any foot of land. Here fields were measured by the mile, and plants unnumbered, doubtless.

Thus in those first days everything except that one man’s words seemed good to Yuan and better than anything in his own country could be. The villages were clean and very prosperous, and although he could recognize the different look of a man upon the land and a man who lived in any town, still the man upon the land did not go ragged in his coat, and the houses on this land were never made of earth and thatch, nor did the fowls and pigs stray as they would. These were all things to admire, or so Yuan thought.

Yet from those first days even Yuan felt the earth here strange and wild and not like his own earth. For as time passed and Yuan knew better what that earth was from walking often along country roads or tilling a piece for himself in the foreign school even as he had in his own country, he never could forget the difference. Though the earth which fed these white folk was the same earth which had fed Yuan’s race, too, yet working on it, Yuan knew it was not the very earth in which his forefathers were buried. This earth was fresh and free of human bones, and so not tamed, since of this new race not yet enough were dead to saturate the soil with their essences as Yuan knew the soil of his own country was saturated with its own humanity. This earth was still stronger than the people who strove to possess it, and they were wild through its wildness and in spite of wealth and learning often savage in their spirits and their looks.

For the earth was uncaptured. The miles of wooded mountains; all the waste of fallen logs and rotting leaves beneath great trees ungarnered; the lands let free to grass and pasture for beasts; the carelessness of wide roads running everywhere; these showed forth the unconquered land. Men used what they wanted, they brought forth great groaning harvests, more than they could sell, they cut down trees and used only the fields that were best and left the others to waste, and still the land was more than they could use, and greater still than they.

In Yuan’s own country the land was conquered and men were the masters. There the mountains were stripped of their forests in years long past, and in these present times were shaven even of the wild grasses to feed the fires of men. And men coaxed the fullest harvests from the tiny fields they had, and forced the land to labor for them for its fullest and into the land again they poured themselves, their sweat, their wastes, their dead bodies, until there was no more virginity left in it. Men made the soil out of themselves, and without them the earth would have been long since exhausted, and but an empty barren womb.

So Yuan felt when he mused over this new country and what its secret was. On his own bit of land he thought first of what he had to put in before he could have hope of harvest. Here this foreign earth was enriched still by its own unused strength. For a little put in, it gave forth greatly, leaping into life too strong for men.

When did Yuan come to mingle hatred in this admiration? At the end of six years he could look back and see the second step he took in hatred.

Yuan and Sheng parted early and at the end of that first journey on the train, for Sheng fell into love of a great city where he found others of his own kind, and he said the schools there were better for such as he was who loved to learn of verse and music and of philosophies, and he cared nothing for the land as Yuan did. For Yuan set his heart to do in this foreign country what he had always hoped to do, to learn how to breed plants and how to till the soil and all such things, and the more steadfastly because he soon believed this people owed their power to their wealth of harvest from the land. So Yuan left Sheng behind in that city, and he went on into another town and to another school where he could have what he wanted.

First of all Yuan must find himself a place to eat and sleep and a room to call his home in this strange land. When he went to the school he was met courteously enough by a grey-haired white man who gave him lists of certain places where he might be housed and fed, and Yuan set forth to find the best one. The very first door at which he rang a bell was opened to him, and there stood a huge woman, one no longer young, and wiping her great bare red arms upon an apron that she wore about her vast middle.

Now Yuan had never seen a woman shaped like this one, and he could not bear her looks at this first instant, but he asked very courteously, “Is the master of this house at home?”

Then this female set her two hands on her thighs and she answered in a very loud-mouthed heavy way, “It’s my house, and there is no man who owns it.” At this Yuan turned to go away, for he thought he would rather try another place than this, thinking there must not be many even in this land so hideous as this woman, and he would rather live in a house where a man was. For this woman was truly more than could be believed; her girth and bosom were enormous, and on her head was short hair of a hue Yuan thought could not have grown from human skin except he saw it. It was a bright reddish-yellow color, dulled somewhat with kitchen grease and smoke. Beneath this strange hair her round fat face shone forth, a red again, but now of a different purplish red, and in this visage were set two small sharp eyes as blue and bright as new porcelain is sometimes. He could not bear to see her, and he let his eyes fall and then he saw her two spreading shapeless feet and those he could not bear either and he made haste away, and after courtesy turned to go elsewhere.

Nevertheless, when he had asked at another door or two where it was marked there were rooms for lodgers, he found himself refused. At first he did not know the reason why. One woman said, “My rooms are taken,” although Yuan knew she bed, seeing that her sign of empty rooms was there. And so it was again and yet again. At last the truth was shown him. A man said bluntly, “We don’t take any colored people here.” At first Yuan did not know what was meant, not thinking of his pale yellow skin as being other than the usual hue of human flesh, nor his black eyes and hair what men’s hair and eyes might always be. But in a moment he understood, for he had seen black men here and there about this country and marked how they were not held in high respect by white ones.

Up from his heart the blood rushed, and the man, seeing his face darken and glow, said half in apology, “My wife has to help me out in making our way in these hard times, and we have regular boarders, and they wouldn’t stay if we was to bring in foreigners. There’s places where they do take them, though,” and the man named the number of the house and street where Yuan had seen the hideous female.

This was the second step in hatred.

He thanked the man therefore with deep proud courtesy and he went back again to that first house, and averting his eyes from her dreadful person, he told the woman he would see the room she had. The room he liked well enough, a small upper room against the roof, very clean, and cut off by a stairway. If he could forget the woman, this room seemed well enough. He could see himself there quietly at work, alone, and he liked the look of the roofs sloping down about the bed and table and the chair and chest it held. So he chose to stay in it, and this room was his home for the six years.

And the truth was the woman was not so ill as her looks and he lived in her house, year after year, while he went to that school, and the woman grew kind to him and he came to understand her kindness, covered as it was by her hideous looks and coarse ways. In his room he lived as sparsely and as neatly as a priest, his few possessions always placed exactly and this woman came to like him well and she sighed her gusty sigh and said, “If all my boys was like you, Wang, and as little trouble in their ways, I’d be a different woman now.”

Then he found, as a few days went by, that this burly female creature was very kind in her loud way. Although Yuan cringed before the sound of her great voice, and shivered at the sight of her thick red arms bared to her shoulders, still he thanked her truly when he found some apples put in his room and he knew she meant kindness when she shouted at him across the table where they ate, “I cooked some rice for you, Mr. Wang! I reckon you find it hard eating without what you’re used to—” And then she laughed freely and roared, “But rice is the best I can do—snails and rats and dogs and all them things you eat I can’t supply!”

She did not seem to hear Yuan’s protest that indeed he did not eat these things at home. And after a while he learned to smile in silence when she made one of her jokes and he remembered at such times, he made himself remember, that she pressed food on him, more than he could eat, and kept his room warm and clean and when she knew he liked a certain dish she went to some pains to make it for him. At last he learned never to look into her face, which still he found hideous, and he learned to think only of her kindness, and this the more when he found as time passed by and he came to know a few others of his countrymen, in this town, circumstanced as he was, that there were many less good than she in lodging houses, women of acrid tongues and sparing of their food at table, and scornful of a race other than their own.

Yet when he thought of it here was the strangest thing of all to Yuan, that this gross loud-mouthed woman once had been wed. In his own land it might have been no wonder, for there youths and maidens wed whom they must before the new times came, and a man must take what was given him, even though it were an ugly wife. But in this foreign land for long there had been choosing of maid by the man himself. So once then was this woman chosen freely by a man! And by him, before he died, she had a child, a girl, now seventeen or so in age, who lived with her still.

And here was another strange thing,—the girl was beautiful. Yuan, who never thought a white woman could be truly beautiful, knew well enough this maid, in spite of all her fairness, must be called beautiful. For she had taken her mother’s wiry flaming hair and changed it by some youthful magic in herself into the softest curling coppery stuff, cut short, but winding all about the shape of her pretty head and her white neck. And her mother’s eyes she had, but softer, darker, and larger, and she used a little art to tinge her brows and lashes brown instead of pale as her mother’s were. Her lips, too, were soft and full and very red, and her body slender as a young tree, and her hands were slender, not thick anywhere, and the nails long and painted red. She wore, and Yuan saw it as all the young men saw it, garments of such frail stuff that her narrow hips and little breasts and all the moving lines of her body showed through, and well she knew the young men saw and that Yuan saw. And when Yuan knew she knew it, he felt a strange fear of her and even a dislike, so that he held himself aloof and would not do more than bow in answer to a greeting she might give.

He was glad her voice was not lovely. He liked a low sweet voice and hers was not low or sweet. Whatever she said was said too loudly and too sharply in her nose, and when he was afraid because he felt the softness of her look or if by chance when he took seat at table, where she sat beside him, his eyes fell on the whiteness of her neck, he was glad he did not like her voice. … And after a while he sought and found other things he did not like, too. She would not help her mother in the house, and when her mother asked her at mealtimes to fetch a thing forgotten from the table, she rose pouting and often saying, “You can never set the table, ma, and not forget something.” Nor would she put her hands in water that was soiled with grease or dirt, because she valued her hands so much for beauty.

And all these six years Yuan was glad of her ways he did not like and kept them always clearly before him. He could look at her pretty restless hands beside him, and remember they were idle hands that did not serve another than herself, and so ought not maid’s hands to be, and though he could not, roused as he once had been, avoid the knowledge sometimes of her nearness, yet he could remember the first two words he ever heard upon this foreign earth. He was foreign to this maid, too. Remembering, he could remember that their two kinds of flesh, his and this maid’s, were alien to each other and he was set to be content to hold himself aloof and go his solitary way.

No, he told himself, he had had enough of maids, he who was betrayed, and if he were betrayed here in a foreign land, there would be none to help him. No, better that he stay away from maids. So he would not see the maid, and he learned never to look where her bosom was, and sedulously he refused to go with her if she begged it to some dancing place, for she was bold to invite him sometimes.