Wherein
shadows
throw
their
length
across
the tidy
courtyard
FUH TANG lay ill. The heaviness upon his chest grew more and more. Kuei Ping, straightening the fever-tossed coverlets, knew that the charms of the medical man who had been summoned had no power to heal her husband. A great fear laid hold of her—a fear that drove her out into the icy night alone. No chair-bearer came in answer to her frantic call and the slender means of the household did not support a private chair. Bending her head to break the force of the wind she struggled somehow to the door of the mission doctor who had eased her own pain a year ago. With bare fists she pounded against the gate for admittance; in staccato breaths she cried out her need to the sleepy gateman.
The old man who opened the door told her that the doctor had been away since early evening. Many people were ill and the foreign doctor took no rest but he would tell her the instant she returned.
Kuei Ping refused to come inside and wait. The lonely return through the streets had no terror for her equal to the fear that Fuh Tang might call for her and find her gone when he wanted her most. The doctor came into the little courtyard, weary from a long day and night without sleep, just as the first feeble rays of dawn lit the sky. The doctor’s weariness seemed to drop from her like her outer garments as she began work upon her patient. Noon-day showed a marked change in his breathing and evening found him sleeping quietly.
Knowledge and careful nursing brought Fuh Tang back to life again but never again did he recover his old strength. A slight cough persisted long after spring was with them and Fuh Tang had returned to his work, a cough that grew more frequent as summer came on. All about them men and women and little children died of such coughs, blinked out like candles after five or six years of slow burning weariness. He did not speak of it to Kuei Ping but a great dread came over him which grew into a weariness that made work almost impossible. He did not have the disease, thus Fuh Tang argued with himself, his fatigue was but the result of his long illness, yet some foreboding kept him from going to a foreign doctor to confirm his belief that he did not have it.
It was then that he began to smoke a long-stemmed pipe. Just a few whiffs of opium quieted his nerves and gave him pleasant dreamless sleep from which he woke rested and ready for work. Upon his salary the daily food for his family depended. In leaving the family compound the two had become in reality a separate economic unit. Fuh Tang’s earnings, plus some money he had possessed at the time of their taking the small home in Peking, had been sufficient for only a very simple mode of life. During his illness his pay had come regularly. For this Fuh Tang was grateful, but he grew anxious lest he be unable to perform his daily tasks.