Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (8 page)

Ling Sao interrupted him. “There you have been wrong,” she said. “To keep ill news in your belly spoils the liver and dries the gall. Anger and sorrow and ill news—all must come out, for the body’s health.”

“It is not my private ill fortune,” Wu Lien said. “This is ill news for the nation. The East-Ocean enemies have sent their ships to the coast nearest us and their soldiers have stepped upon our land and our soldiers have met them but we are not strong enough for them.”

Now Wu Lien knew when he said this that the minds of the two women could not comprehend what he was saying. They had never been away from this city and the countryside around; and to them the two hundred or so miles that lay between here and the coast were like two thousand. They had never sat in a train nor even in a foreign spirit car nor had they been the seven miles to the river port to see a foreign ship. All they knew was that once, years before, these foreign ships had let their guns out against a wandering army in this city, because they held some foreigners, and in the country Ling Tan’s household had heard the distant guns like thunder and they had often talked of it, until they forgot it.

“Do you remember those guns you once heard?” Wu Lien now asked. “There are now such guns at the coast, laying waste that city there.”

“I remember them,” she said comfortably. “I was scraping out the rice cauldron with sand and it clattered in my hands and rang an echo. I cried out to my old man that it was an earthquake. But in the end no harm came of it.”

“Harm will come of this,” Wu Lien said, groaning. For he was a merchant and twice each year he went to the coast to buy his goods and he knew the city there very well, and he could see what was ahead of him now. The students who had destroyed his goods were only the forerunners of the evil to come. He dared not buy any more such goods, and if he did not, what had he to sell in his shop that could not be bought anywhere?

“Comfort yourself,” Ling Sao said. “The sea is very far away, and even the river is far enough. What can they do to us?”

“They have flying ships,” he said. It made him angry that these two women would not be afraid and he wanted to make them share his own fears. So he went on to sound as fearful as he could imagine. “Those flying ships can come up from the sea in two hours and let their eggs down on us and burst our house apart into dust and what can we do against them?”

“You shall all come to our village,” Ling Sao said stoutly, “I always did say a city is a place full of danger. I can see this little meat dumpling every day if you live in our house. … Oh, Heaven, I ought to die!” This she screamed forth suddenly because at this moment the little boy she held let out his water and she, listening to Wu Lien, had forgot to hold the cloth to him and down the water came upon her best coat. There was great commotion and her daughter leaped forward to take the child but Ling Sao would not give him up and they struggled over him.

“No, curse me,” she said laughing, “what do I care for his little water? He is not the first child that has used me so, and it will dry in a breath or two.”

In the midst of this commotion Wu Lien’s old mother came out from her room where she had been sleeping, and so Ling Sao must spring to her feet for that, because Wu Sao’s place was above hers, and so she gave her greeting.

“Here I am troubling your household again,” she said loudly, “but I heard of the shop and I came to see for myself. Now I tell your son that he is not to let himself be so disturbed. A man ought to eat for his parents’ sake, and he with no father, he ought to remember you, Elder Sister, and take care of himself, because his flesh is yours and not his own.”

Now this mother of Wu Lien was a woman so fat that she could not walk more than the three or four steps from one place to another and she was too fat to try to talk, because her voice had grown into a whisper, so she nodded and smiled and sat down. As soon as she sat down she began to cough, not as a person ought to cough, but with a deep shaking rumble that made her eyes stand out like fish bladders and her face turn purple. When this began Ling Sao’s daughter ran for red sugar and Wu Lien leaped to pour tea for his mother and the maid servant came running out of the kitchen to rub her back and her neck, and what with the child and this old woman by the time quiet was come again, that which Wu Lien was saying had been forgotten, and he did not say it again in his mother’s presence.

Instead he excused himself, telling them that he must go into the shop, for suddenly it seemed to him in his anxiety that he could not bear the presence of women. This Wu Lien was not a stupid man. He read a newspaper once or twice a month and he went to the largest tea shop in the city and he listened to all that was said there of what happened everywhere. He knew, therefore, what it might mean if the things he had heard were true. He felt the more fearful for he himself did not hate the East-Ocean people and he saw no good in war at any time, for his business would be ruined and many others with him. Only in peace could men be prosperous, for in war all was lost. This country of his was not like some others he had heard of, where only in war was there work enough to be done. He had often sat listening in the tea shop to those who talked of things they had seen in foreign countries, and this he held was a main difference, that in foreign countries war was a business, but here it had never been.

Now, suddenly weary of all the women’s commotion in his house, he made up his mind that he would go to the tea shop for awhile, where for shame he had not been since his shop was ruined, and so he dressed himself in his room, seeing with grief how loose his trousers were around his belly and how long was the tie to his girdle. When he went out he took another way than through the room where the women sat and he went by a side street instead of the main one, and when he came to the tea shop he sat at a small side table instead of the one in the center where he usually sat with his friends. All of them, he knew, must have heard of his shop, and none had come near him, and so he did not know how he stood with them, whether he could still be called a good merchant, or whether he was a traitor. So he waited to find out what he was.

It was not long before he heard. For a little while it seemed good to him to be back here in the place where all were men and where there were no children and women to disturb the talk. But today it was not as usual. The place, though full of men, was silent. In silence men sat and drank their tea, or if they spoke it was only to exchange a few words, and then to fall silent again. Little meat was eaten and there were no full tables of noisy sweating men gorging themselves on good foods and emptying their wine cups to each other. They were all dressed neatly and quietly and none laid aside his coat because he was hot and to let his sweat flow. Instead it seemed as though they were cold with fear.

In his place he sat waiting to see if any would greet him. He ordered some green tea and when a careless small waiter brought it to him and wiped out the bowl with a foul black cloth he had not the courage to reprove him. Instead he blew in it and rinsed it out with the hot tea and drank a bowlful slowly, watching for an eye to catch his. If he were greeted, all would be well. If he were not, then he must know his name had been put up for a traitor. For these students had their revenge not only in destruction but they would print in newspapers and post on walls and on the city gates all those whose goods they had destroyed and call them traitors.

At the moment that he filled his bowl for the second time he did catch the eye of a man he knew, one of his own guild, with whom he had often feasted and drunk tea in this very place. Had all been well, the man would have shouted to him and Wu Lien would have bade him come to his table. But the man’s eye slipped over him as though he were a stone.

“I am a traitor,” Wu Lien thought heavily. So quickly had the world about him changed that what a few weeks ago was good business today was traitordom.

The tea in his mouth changed to salt water and he put down his copper coins and got up and went away. Down the street at the same book stalls where Lao Er had bought his book he stopped and bought a newspaper, and stood there reading it. That city on the coast, he read, was set afire and in the blaze the armies now fought. He read and groaned aloud to read the name of one good shop after another gone and ruin everywhere. Why it need be so he had no idea. A bare month ago there had been a small trouble in the North. For years there had been headlong talk by students against the East-Ocean, people, but what good business man had listened to them? He and his kind prospered and once in a year or so he met an East-Ocean merchant or two who were full of courtesy and kindness, though their tongues were stiff when they spoke any language except their own, and in courtesy he had learned enough of their language to do his business with them. He had no quarrel with them then or now, and what was their quarrel with him?

He felt so bewildered standing there that the old bookseller asked him if his belly pained him or if something were wrong with his vitals. He shook his head at that and folded his paper and went a roundabout way to his house and entered again by the way he had come.

There through the opened window he heard the women’s voices still clacking and he shouted for his wife and when she came running he bade her bring his food here that he might eat in peace and when he had eaten he would go into his shop and take inventory of what was there.

“I shall buy no more new goods,” he thought sadly. “I am ruined, I and my house, and as long as I live I shall not know why, or why what I have done honorably all my life is now held against me for a crime.”

Of this Ling Sao knew nothing. She ate heartily of her daughter’s meats and she examined the children from head to foot, and when the old woman went to sleep again and she was alone with her daughter she inquired concerning all her affairs so that she could gauge the measure of her daughter’s happiness and success in this house.

“Does your husband like you as well as ever?” she asked her daughter.

“If anything, more,” her daughter replied laughing. “He calls for me whenever he wants anything, and it is I who serve him. He gave me a new piece of silk for a coat before the shop was looted and now he says he wishes he had taken much more from the shop and given it to me. He says I am such a woman as he would have asked for had he had the chance to ask.”

“But does he go out at night?” Ling Sao asked again, pursing her lips. She did not tell her daughter so, but she knew that if a man speaks too well to his wife she must take care also, lest he speak out of an ill conscience of some sort and praise her to make amends.

“Never,” the daughter replied with pride, and so the mother’s heart was set at rest. For she never forgot that there were in the city women of a very different kind from her daughter. This daughter was an honest hearty woman who could never even put paint on her face without getting it askew so that anyone could see it, and she was already growing plump and her bosom was full for her last child, and Ling Sao knew that city women keep their bodies thin as snakes, and they have no breasts, and so daintily do they spread their paint and powder that they look almost as though they grew themselves like that except that all know there are no such women.

So at last the end came to a very pleasant day for Ling Sao and she made ready for the walk home again, and in her handkerchief she tied some cake her daughter gave her and she took a last swallow of tea and smelled the two children’s cheeks and squeezed their small bodies once more and called farewell to Wu Sao who had spoken only twice all day, once for food and once for tea, and nodded to her daughter, and so passed through the shop where Wu Lien was. But since there were other men there, too, she only bowed to show she knew her manners and then went down the streets.

Never, it seemed to her, had the city looked so prosperous as it did this evening. The shops were full and busy and the streets noisy with vendors and the people came and went laughing and talking. The wind had died down and the night was hotter than the day had been and already there were those who had moved their beds out on the street to sleep there and were now eating their evening meals where they could watch all that went past them. There was laughter everywhere and loud calling back and forth and no one stopped to ask if he knew another’s name, but he called anyway and made a joke and to Ling Sao it seemed that all were as merry as though they were of one blood.

“So we are of one blood,” she thought in comfort. “People of Han we are, and if these people in the city have their own smell, why, we have ours who live outside the city wall, but still we are all of one flesh.”

And so walking homeward and smiling to herself she fell to thinking of a thing she had heard, how foreigners have hair and eyes of any color they happen to be born with.

“I do pity them,” she thought, “for if it were I and I could not be sure if what I gave birth to would have black hair and eyes as humans do, how could I give birth? I would cast the child too soon, I know.”

So she went on home, and saw how all the fields were fertile. The rice fields were dried and the young rice was beginning to head and there was the promise of fine harvest. All was well with the land and when all was well with the land then everything was well.

At home she found them waiting for her, and each one had done as she had bid. The day away had made her glad to come home again and as she looked from one face to the other, each seemed better than she had remembered. Even Jade seemed better and she looked at that pretty young face and thought, “How can I blame my second son for loving her too well?” And of Orchid she thought, “A soft good soul and I must not be so hard on her.” And she took her own little daughter’s hand and looked at the calluses that the threads had made and said, “Tomorrow you shall not weave. Let the loom be idle a day, and rub some oil into these hands.”

When Ling Sao was mellow and kind the whole house seemed full of health and they all sat enjoying it like heat from a gentle fire or like sunshine that is not too hot or like wind that is not too cold. And thus while they sat and while they ate together, peace filled them, and they listened to all she had to tell and she talked and talked and yet with all her talking she forgot to tell them what Wu Lien had said.