Chinese Literature

cluded that their not getting along well with relatives and friends was chiefly due to his wife’s stinginess. He remembered how severely she had treated the tenants on his land every year when she collected the rent. He also remembered how one of his old classmates had asked him for the loan of ten dollars and how his wife would not allow it. At that time, the reasons she gave him had seemed adequate, though.

“To help friends is the proper thing to do,” she said. “But your help often becomes an obligation instead of a favour if you extend it many times. And if once, for some reason, you can’t do as the friends ask you to, he will bear you a grudge; therefore it is much better for friends not to lend money to each other. Anyway, we have enough to live on. So it is unlikely we shall ever have to borrow from anybody.”

Formerly Mr. Li was very grateful to his wife for being so shrewd. Sometimes he had even helped her in her calculations and offered suggestions. But now he considered his wife alone was to blame for the difficult position in which he found himself.

He sat down and began a reply to her. With the brush Old Pan had given him as a present, he wrote very slowly in the manner of the calligrapher Li Pei-hai, choosing his words as carefully as when he wrote essays, smoking one cigarette after another meanwhile. He told his wife that he himself was leading a very hard life, but that everyone should be patient at this time when the war of resistance was being fought.

“T have repeatedly asked you to be patient. I’m asking you again to be patient.”

He sighed and took another whiff. The smoke from the cigarette in his hand made him knit his eyebrows slightly while he continued to write. He said that all the members of his wife’s family were vulgar and grasping, and had nothing but their own interests at heart. Since he was afraid that one of his in-laws might open the letter, he wrote on the envelope, “Anyone who opens this letter without permission is a brute” and put an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. But after a while he thought the mark too evident a sign of bad temper and blotted it out again.

That night he slept worse than usual. Again and again the two questions nagged at him:

“When will this war come to an end? How can victory be brought about more quickly ?”

He tossed and turned. The old mattress on his bed was very hard and made him uncomfortable. He turned again. He found it too hot to keep his arms under the cotton quilt, but too cold to put them outside. His head was burning. He felt dizzy. He had thought he could find the correct answers by following a straight line of reasoning, but now this line seemed to be clogged up with a disorderly lot of things.

Suddenly he remembered Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle. Oh, if only he, Mr, Li, could fall into such a sleep . . . for what

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