Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (36 page)

“Where can I buy one of these boxes?” he asked the man.

“I will get you one,” the man said.

And then they talked and Wu Lien heard for the first time how great was this war. The man told him that here they were a part of a whole, and that some day there would not be a single country outside the war, and he sighed as he said it.

“My fellows rejoice at this,” he told Wu Lien. “They see a chance to grow powerful and rich, each man for himself. But I have no wish for such things. I should like to go home to my town which is a quiet place by the sea and there live with my wife and children and old parents. I ask no more.”

“It is enough,” Wu Lien agreed.

“And too much, it seems, to get now-a-days,” the man said sadly.

This was how Wu Lien himself came to have such a box for his own, for not long after his enemy friend gave it to him. Wu Lien kept it in his room and thereafter in his every empty moment, far into the night, he kept the voice alive and he listened. Most of the time there was nothing, nonsense or strange music or idle words, but now and again truth came out of the box. Then he took it in greedily, and he heard how the peoples abroad suffered and how what befell them was the same as had come here, and he heard the anger of nations and the fury of rulers. When it was over, he went to bed dazed with what he heard and trembling with the size of the times.

“Evil—evil,” he muttered, “it is all evil.”

“What is wrong with you now?” his wife asked him one night. “It is that soup you drank. I thought it had a smell.”

He only groaned, for how could he tell a woman that the world was being destroyed? He grew closer than ever in his being, for now he knew that peace was so far off that by the time it came men might have forgotten it as they forget a dream long past and the young could not even dream of peace because they had not seen it since they were born.

It happened one day that as he was listening to his box, and it grew to be a thing he did more and more often, Ling Tan’s old third cousin came in to give his news and he saw Wu Lien listening, and he asked what it was. Wu Lien told him, and then full of what he had just heard he could not forbear saying to the cousin that the whole world was at war. When the cousin asked him how he knew, he showed him how this box did its work, and what peg to turn, and which to subdue, so that the voice would come out. At this moment nothing came out except music, but there it was, a pleasant noise, and from it an evil thought came into the cousin’s mind.

This cousin was not altogether the fool he looked, but he had been in his life so badgered and oppressed first by his mother and then by his wife, and his love of learning among men who had no learning had so set him apart that he had never had his own will and his wits out and at work. But now opium had done for him what he had not been able to do for himself. Since he had begun to smoke opium and to hide it, he felt himself desperate and in such danger anyway that more danger or less was nothing, so long only as he could get his opium every day. This man who had never been able to put his head out of his quilt at night to see what a rat did in his room, now without changing his meek outer looks grew daily more brazen within. He stole what he could from counters in shops and sold it, and he took his wife’s good clothes and pawned them, and when she cried out that she had been robbed he kept his face as it ever was, and no one could have pretended better surprise. Every thing he had went for opium. Many a day he lied to his wife and said that Wu Lien had given him nothing because he had spent all that Wu Lien had given him. And he took to smoking before he went to Wu Lien to give him courage to make up lies for news, and after he left he smoked again because he had two coins in his pocket, and his daring grew with his hunger.

Today, as he listened to the box, it came to him that what a thing it would be if he had such a box and he could set it up in a secret room and listen to it, and there in a tea shop take people’s money to hear what he knew and from that money he could do as he liked. This notion which would never have entered into his skull had his brain been his own, so full of danger to his life it was, now seemed to him a thing possible and easy to do because of his false courage. He sat on and on that day, pretending to listen to the box and he learned everything about it with twice his usual quickness to learn anything, and still he sat on. At last Wu Lien was called away.

“I do not like to leave you here,” Wu Lien said to him as he went. “It is against the enemy law for any of our people to listen to this box, and I am safe only because I live within these walls. But if any know that you listen here alone, there may be trouble for both of us.”

“Only let me finish this that I hear now and I will go,” the cousin begged him.

Wu Lien was willing for this and he went away. As soon as he had gone that cousin took the box and unwound its wires from a metal pole that ran through the room for support to the roof, and he put the box under his wide scholar’s robe and tied the wires to his belly band and he walked out of the room as coolly as he had come in. By that time everyone knew him and let him come and go as he liked. Well he knew he would never dare to come back and face Wu Lien again, but he did not care. He had the way to make money enough for what he wanted.

And yet now the thing was done he must have an accomplice here in the city, and who could it be? He could not take the box home for he must still deceive his wife and let her think he came and went to the city to Wu Lien and she must not know how much money he had. He knew no one, and so what could he do ? Yet his unnatural brain could drink of this too, and he thought of the thin yellow girl who stirred his opium. She always wanted money, and he would give her some of what he earned. He would not teach her how to turn the pegs but he would only give her something to keep the box safe for him.

To that usual place he went then, and when she bent over his pipe to light it he said to her in a low voice.

“Would you like to make more money than you do now?”

“How can I?” she asked cautiously. “Do you want to keep me?”

“No—no, I have one woman too many already,” he said quickly.

“What then?” she asked.

“Let me smoke only a little,” he begged her, “only enough to stop my hunger but not enough to make me sleep, and then lead me where none can hear us and I will tell you.”

So she did, and when he woke fully to himself he was in a room he had never seen before, a poor room, with only a board bed and a broken table and two benches in it. But it was clean and there was a bamboo bird cage in the small window, and in the cage a plump small yellow bird. The singing of this bird was the first thing he heard when he came to himself. For a moment he thought it was his box, but he put his hand to his belly and felt it hard and square under his robes and the corners bit into his belly.

Then he came to himself wholly and there was the thin girl and she was shaking him.

“Wake—wake,” she called in his ear. “It is long past midnight.”

He woke then, and asked where he was, and she said this was her own room and it was in the court behind the opium den where she worked. He brought out the box from his belly when he had all this clearly in his mind, and he told her his plan. She listened, her face as narrow as the palm of a hand. It grew more narrow as she understood and saw what the thing might mean.

“You have had a thought for once, you old book-fool,” she said, “and luck has brought you to me. You may keep the box here in my room, and it is safe. No one comes here whom I do not bring.”

By now the man was clear in his head and with far more than his usual clearness. He set the box under the bed where it was hidden and he put the wire into the wall where the light was and then he looked for a metal pole, but there was none. For a while he was distraught and then they found a hole in the plaster, for this was not an old house but one built quick and new and inside the wall were rods of steel, and to one of these he wrapped the wire. Then carefully turning the pegs he waited and power filled the box and the voice came out.

“The news today from the free land,” that voice said, and then it went on and told of enemy bombings and how the people hid themselves in the caves of the hills, and then the voice said, “but we are not alone. Today in the western countries, too, the people hide themselves in the pits of the earth, and the same enemy oppresses all. We do not yield—”

The cousin heard a strange noise. He looked up and there was that thin girl with her hands at her throat as though she would choke herself.

The cousin turned off the box and cried out. “What is the matter with you?”

“Do they still resist?” she whispered. “I thought no one resisted any more, anywhere!”

“Everything this box says is true,” the cousin said proudly.

“Then fortune is in our hands,” the girl said, “for what this voice says is what men long to hear.”

For a few days the cousin told a hundred lies to his wife. He told her that Wu Lien said he was to come at night and no more by day, and since he brought back double the money he had before and said Wu Lien gave it to him because he came by night, she believed him for awhile. But the cousin was lost from that day when his hand was first full of money. He smoked no longer the dregs and ashes but he went to a fine place where the pure black sticky stuff was put into his bowl and now he fell into such dreams as he had never had before. The day came soon when he did not go home and then another day passed and another and then being afraid the thought came to him, “Why should I ever go home any more? Why should I be scolded and be set upon by a woman when I can be free?”

And he wondered that he had not thought of this earlier, and from that day on he stayed in the city, sleeping all day and rising by night to tell the news he heard out of the box, and no one knew who he was, not even the thin girl, for he told his name to none, and to her he was only the old opium-smoker who owned the box. As for the cousin, he did not see from day’s end to day’s end a face he knew, and at last he was truly free.

Thus Heaven used this man, too, worthless as he was. In that whole city there were few voices that came from outside to tell these people, beleaguered by the enemy, what went on in a world still free, and the news of the box leaked secretly from mouth to ear, and all knew that in the free land their people still fought the enemy and held them back. There came to be a password among the people of that city and it was the word “Resist.” “Do we resist?” one man asked another secretly. “We resist!” was the secret answer. And now courage began to live again where it had died.

… Since nothing was clearly known in city and countryside, since all knowledge was forbidden the people and they were told nothing from above, everything came to be whispered and everything guessed and hoped. When man met man the first question asked secretly was what he had heard. “Is our army holding the free land?” each asked each, and they asked, “is there reason for more hope?”

It could not be long therefore before mouth to ear everyone knew there was news to be heard in the city, though none knew it was from the old man who was Ling Tan’s cousin.

In the village Ling Tan’s second son heard first, because he made it his business to be the one who came and went between the hillmen and those who resisted the enemy in the city and nearby. First he heard in the silent way men now had learned to talk, their eyes wandering, their lips scarcely moving, that half the world was at war now and that what they suffered here was only part of it.

Why was this news so comforting to them? Yet it did comfort everyone who heard it to know that they were a part of a whole, that their trouble was part of a greater trouble and they did not suffer alone and neglected. Eagerly men named the countries that were with them and against the enemy and they cursed the countries that were for the enemy and counted these as against themselves. Men who had never heard the names of Germans and Italians and Frenchmen, who scarcely knew there was Canada or Brazil, who had never seen an American or an Englishman, now divided these all into friends and enemies, measuring them by whether they were for or against their own enemy. It was somehow easier to eat their own miserable food when they knew there were others in the world who had no better.

Such news Lao Er carried to his father on the very day he heard it. He had gone into the city in disguise that day to sell some vegetables and to hear what there was to hear. He had soon sold all he had, for food was snatched at these days and a farmer’s baskets emptied as soon as he had passed the enemy guard at the city gate, who searched all who came and went. Then Lao Er had turned aside into a tea shop to hear what was said. He sat at a small table in a dark corner to hide his disguise. He was not so clever as Jade and it was easier for him to forget and to show his stout young legs or throw back the sleeves from his young arms and thus deny the gray beard he wore fastened into his nose with wires, and yet he dared not go without disguise lest the enemy seize him for hard labor. For the enemy everywhere pressed all young men into labor and even the old, sometimes. Not many days since he had heard of an old farmer he knew, who had come to the city to sell his radishes and who, going homeward, had been caught by enemy soldiers moving a great foreign gun along the streets. They had forced him to pull the heaviest part of that gun, and when he was slow with age and terror, they broke his right arm so that the bone stuck from the flesh, and then with laughter they had forced him on.

Remembering this, Lao Er took the more care today, and so he chose his seat far back and listening with his sharp ears that by now had learned to pick out the words he wanted, he heard two old men talking of news. After a while he took up his courage and went to those two men and said:

“Sirs, I am only a farmer, but the times are evil and if you have any good news, let me hear it and take it to my village so that we can bear a little longer what we have to bear.”

Those men were unwilling to say much but at last they did say that it might be one day that others would fight with them and against a greater enemy, and that in the common peace they too would share, and so throw off their present yoke. To this Lao Er listened and this is what he carried home.