Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (13 page)

“You are the best mother in the province,” he said, “and where is there one like you beyond the seas? I would not have you a cool thin soul. I like you hot and gusty and I like your quick tongue even when it is turned on me.”

He laughed as he spoke, and she grew red with pleasure and began to comb her hair again, and to hide her pleasure she tried to be surly while she smiled.

“You old turnip,” she said, and searched for something she could do for him. “Come here, old man, and let me see that spot on your cheek and see if you are to have a boil after all these years.”

He came near to her and bent over her to humor her, knowing very well why she wanted to touch him and to do something for him.

“It is only where a flea bit me,” he said.

“Do not tell me what it is,” she said, “I can see for myself.”

She felt it and saw that it was nothing and so she gave him a small blow on his bare shoulder because she loved him so well.

“And can you not catch a flea any more, and must you be bitten like a child, you bone?” she said.

They both laughed then, and he thought to himself that if this woman died before he did, even then he would not marry another, for after her any would be like a carrot dried without salt.

“Do you know why you do not like Jade?” he asked, to tease her.

“I know all I want to know,” she said, beginning to comb her hair again, and making her eyes mischievous.

“You do not know this,” he said. “It is because she is so much like you.”

“That Jade!” she cried, trying to be angry. But secretly in her heart she was pleased for Jade was beautiful and she knew against her wish that the girl was no ordinary one.

“Both of you are stubborn wilful women and it is the only sort I like,” he said. He put his hand on her neck and she felt it there as she had felt it when they were both young. But because she was long past forty she knew that to another it would have seemed shameful that two middle-aged people should be like two young ones, and so she tossed her head and pulled away and he knew what she was thinking and laughed and when she saw his brown face above her and his white teeth she forgot that he was the father of her children, the man she had lived with all these years, and she put her arms around his waist and held him hard against her and felt his heart against her cheek, beating so steadily and so strong that all her blood ran to the measure of that beat.

“Ought we not to understand our son and Jade?” he asked. “They are like us.”

“I always did say our second son was more like you than any of the others,” she answered. Then she let him go and went on binding up her hair, and so the moment was over, and both of them the better for it.

Yet as day followed day, they grew used to the two gone, and the rent in the house was mended and the work went on. But Ling Tan moved his third son up and let him work in the fields with him instead of herding the buffalo and in his place he hired a small lad for a penny a day to sit on the beast’s back on the days it was not needed for work.

As for Orchid, she was happier with Jade gone, for now there was no one to reproach her for too little work done, and no one to have smooth hair when hers was rough because she had not had time to comb it or thought she had not. Hers was easily the highest place among the younger women now that Jade was not there to do everything better than she did.

But Pansiao was sorry Jade was gone, for in the last few weeks Jade had taken a while in the evening to teach her to read a few characters. To the others it had seemed nothing more than a game but Jade knew what it was to the silent young girl who moved in such accustomed ways through the house that they all forgot her easily. Only Jade had seen how seldom the child spoke and to how few, for she, too, had been a silent child in her own father’s household and one of many in the women’s courts. Her father had been richer than most men, an owner of land he rented as well as farmed, and he had a concubine and so Jade grew up among two women’s children and they numbered seventeen in all. Among so many she was alone and she was always drawn to the silent rather than to the talkative. In this household where both Ling Tan and Ling Sao spoke freely and Lao Er talked easily and Orchid talked as easily as she breathed and the third son was away all day she saw the quiet gentle girl and wondered if she were lonely. And so out of this wonder one day, not knowing what else to say to the child, she had asked:

“Would you like to learn a few characters? Then you could read my book instead of sitting alone.”

“Oh, I am not able,” Pansiao had answered quickly. “How can I remember the letters when I forget what my mother tells me so easily?”

“It is easy to remember the characters because they tell you something you want to know,” Jade said, and so she persuaded Pansiao and it was true that the young girl did remember and Jade had never to say a character’s name twice, for every character spoke for itself to her.

Now that was over again, and Jade was gone, and Pansiao could only go over and over the characters she knew, until one day in her great hunger to know what others said, she drew near to one of the women students who passed by so often and asked her for a letter or two, and by this means she learned to read a little. Then one day a kind student gave her a book out of the few she carried.

“Take care of it,” she said, “for in these times books are dearer than food.”

Pansiao thanked her and took the book, and though she could not read enough yet to know what it said, it stood to her a goal to be reached some day, and she went through the book with a bit of charcoal and marked every character that she knew. But they were not near enough together to speak to her.

… As for Ling Tan, his only wonder was how quickly they all grew used to what was now their daily life. Day after day the flying ships came over, and they grew used to them, having said that they would stay where they were, though the enemy took the very city itself. Half of the city went away and then another third of what was left until only those stayed who had nowhere to go, or they were those who had no money at all, or those who said it made no difference to them who ruled the city so long as there was peace in it and they waited for any peace that was an end to war and these flying ships. Some end was near, all knew, for mile by mile the enemy armies drew closer and city after city fell into their grasp. There was no news of what happened in those cities because those who fled first knew nothing and after a city fell and the enemy had the land, there was only silence. None knew whether the enemy was cruel or good, and all waited.

Ling Tan waited, too, but while he waited the work had to be done, and he could not always be running into the bamboos because there were flying ships above his head, and yet he did not want to risk his head and stay alone in the fields and tempt the enemy above to see him there. So he went into the village tea shop one evening at a time when most men are glad to leave their wives awhile and sit together in peace without the noise of scolding women, and of crying children being put to bed, and at such a time he rose and spoke in the tea shop and said:

“My elder brothers, you and I are laboring men. War or no war, we must bring food out of the earth, and how can we do it sitting idle in a bamboo grove for a long while every day in the best part of the day when we are not yet tired?”

“You do not curse idleness more than we do,” a voice called out and a murmuring went over the crowd.

“Yes, but what will you say we ought to do?” another asked. “I saw a man shot beneath a flying ship, and he was dead and there is no idleness so great as death.”

This made them laugh wryly, and Ling Tan laughed too and went on.

“What I say is we ought none of us to go into the bamboos. Let us all stay in the fields and work and pretend we do not see the flying ships and if there are many of us they will decide it is not worth their while to take the time to cut off head by head and so they will go on.”

There was a clamor to agree with this, and thereafter Ling Tan and all his fellows worked in the fields without looking up when the flying ships went over them. They did only this one thing, they stopped every day about mid-morning and tied branches on their hats, so that looking down from above a man in a flying ship would see only green, for their big hats hid the blue of their trousers and the brown of their bare backs as they worked.

This village and the farms about it were now like an island in the steadily moving stream of people. Those who could go out of the city had gone, but every day brought fresh hundreds of fleeing people and how Ling Tan knew the enemy steadily came nearer was from asking these people where they came from, and day by day it was from places nearer and nearer to him, and at last cities that he knew, and this was how he knew that the armies of the enemy were winning the victory.

“Do our armies not oppose them?” he always asked, and the answer was more often rueful than not.

“Our men retreat to save themselves for a greater battle somewhere,” one man after another said, but none knew where.

And that this great battle would be beyond his land Ling Tan soon came to see, for none of these people were willing to stop here but had their eyes fixed on a far distant place, and he began to make himself and his house ready for the time when over them all the enemy would rule and under this rule they must somehow live.

Was the enemy good or evil? He could not discover, for there were more tales than he could fit together. There was Wu Lien in his own house who said that such East-Ocean merchants as he had once dealt with on the coast where he went to buy his goods were always courteous and kind. And yet there was the tale he heard of a great crowd of people fleeing from that same coast and they were not on foot but in a train, and though they flew white flags for mercy and innocence, upon them the flying ships let down their death so that hundreds were wounded and dead. How could there be anything but evil in such an enemy?

These things he pondered hour upon hour as he worked under the green branches tied to his hat and as the flying ships came and went over his head.

“I will do my own work as I always have,” he thought, and it seemed to him the greatest thing that a man could do in these days was to live and keep alive his own. … So the summer passed into autumn, and the harvests that year were all they had promised. The rice was heavier in the head than Ling Tan had seen it in ten years and the harvest so great that everywhere in that rich valley the people were hard-pressed to reap it. They could think of nothing but the harvest, and when those soldiers came to them who were to defend the city sometime, and asked for straw for beds, or they asked for help in digging trenches about the city, the farmers were surly and they said, “We are very weary of all who are soldiers, who earn nothing, and who feed from us. Do your work yourselves, for we have our own work to do.”

When Ling Tan heard soldiers so answered, he was pleased, for he too despised all who took part in war. And yet he had cause one day to heed, at least for a moment, what one of those soldiers said, for when the man was thus repulsed, he began suddenly to weep, and he looked around on the half-harvested grain, and upon the healthy busy people and he said, “If we are not able to defend this land, we dare not dream what will happen to you, for with our own eyes we have seen the sufferings of our countrymen on the coastlands taken by the enemy.”

But still the others gave this man no heed, and the harvest waited, and the soldiers went away again.

Now while the grain was to be cut and threshed Ling Tan pressed everyone in his house into the work except Wu Lien who could not learn, it seemed, how to hold a scythe. But the elder daughter remembered from her girlhood here, and she gave a great laugh for they were all happy with the harvest, and she said:

“Let my man stay in the house then and help with the children and I will go out to the fields as I used to do,” and so she did, and it was a pleasure to her to feel the stalks so smooth and firm in her grasp and she still cut as well as any man and was proud of herself.

But this thing was for a day or two a trouble in the house, for when she came that night she found Wu Lien very peevish, and when she inquired into the reason for his ill temper he sent her into their room and came in after her.

“Are you my wife or are you the old man’s daughter?” he asked her. “Am I to do your work? The next thing I will be asked to suckle the children.”

She gave one of her big laughs at this, for Wu Lien was so fat that he was ashamed sometimes to go bare above his waist even in summer, because men laughed and said he was made like a woman, and there was always a man somewhere to tell of a strange sight he had seen of a man who could suckle a child. Now the moment Wu Lien spoke thus to his wife he wished he had not, and in his peevishness when she laughed he struck her across the mouth so that her mouth bled, and worse than that, her teeth cut the back of his hand.

“Bite me, will you!” he shouted and he was so unjust that she who was nearly always humble suddenly went angry as he had never seen her, and she was bold because she was in her father’s house and she bawled at him as loudly as she could:

“Who feeds you if it is not my father, and why should I not harvest a little food to help him?”

With that she went at him with all her ten nails, and he went backward before her, never having seen her like this, and with the blood still dripping from her mouth she clawed at him. Upon them Ling Sao opened the door, hearing the noise of their voices, and she sprang between them and pulled her daughter away.

“You shame me!” she shouted. “When did I ever teach you to behave so to the man who is your husband? Wu Lien, she is not my daughter and if you do not want her any more I cannot blame you. I have cheated you with a wife not worthy of you.”

So Ling Sao soothed the astonished man and scolded her daughter and she brought him out of the room and put a fan in his hand and poured out a bowl of tea for him and she told Pansiao to take the children away from him. Then she went back into the room where her daughter was, who was now washing her mouth and binding up her hair, and the mother made her tell what had happened and when she heard she could not keep from laughing a little, now that Wu Lien was not here.