Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck)

by Buck, Pearl S.

  Ling Tan looked around on these who were his, and his heart was soft in him as he saw their eyes all turned to him. “What can I do to save them?” he thought. From other troubles he could have saved them, from famine and flood, from sickness even perhaps, and from poverty and from the evils of usury and of cruel magistrates and all those evils that are common to man. But what could he do now?

  “I cannot save you,” he said aloud, “for I cannot save myself in this new trouble that has come upon us. Today I saw with my own eyes what you, Wu Lien, told us about before. Now I know that what has been and today was, will be again tomorrow and we have nothing but our bare flesh against these foreign weapons. The gods made us human beings of soft and easily wounded flesh, for they dreamed us good and not evil. Had they been able to see what men would do to each other, they would have given us shells such as turtles have, into which we could have drawn our heads and our soft parts. But we were not made so, and the gods made us and we cannot change ourselves. We can only bear what is come and live on if we can, and die if we must.”

  So he spoke, and he looked at each face that looked back at him. Then he began again, “You, my two elder sons, are men, and you, Wu Lien, are older than they. If you have anything to say, then say it.”

  His two sons looked at Wu Lien to speak first, and so Wu Lien coughed and said:

  “Certainly I have no way to save myself, and I can only ask your forgiveness that I have had to come here to your house and to bring my household with me. I am a man who only knows how to do business with others, but in this hour who is there with whom I can trade? In times of war such men as we must live as they can and where they can and hope for peace.”

  Then Lao Ta said, “There are two things which can be done when fire comes down out of heaven, one is to escape it by running away from it, and the other is to let it come down and bear it. In this, my father, I say I will do what you do.”

  “But I,” said the second son, “I will escape it.”

  This Ling Tan heard and he finished what he had to say:

  “If I were a man with no land, I would go also. If I were a young man even, perhaps I would go. I will say nothing to any who go. But as for me, I stay here where I was born and where I have lived. Whatever comes, whether the whole city falls or not, whether the nation falls as some said today on the streets that it must fall, here I will stay. Let those who wish stay with me, and those who would go, let them go.”

  Then his second son felt himself reproached and he cried out:

  “You blame me, my father!”

  “I do not blame you,” Ling Tan replied, making his voice gentle. “No, more, I think it well that you go. If all who stay here die, then there will be you to carry on our name somewhere else and I only bid you come back to see whether we are alive or dead after the war is ended, and if we are dead then to burn incense to our names and claim the land.”

  “I promise that,” the second son said.

  In all this no woman spoke, for it was not a time for a woman’s voice, but each saw what her place was and prepared to take it. When they parted again, then each wife told her own husband what she thought. Wu Lien’s wife praised him for saying nothing and saying it so well, for she was pleased enough to stay here in the house where she had been born and she felt safe so long as she was not in the city, and Jade praised her husband because he had spoken so firmly. Only Orchid sighed and said she wished that she and her children could go away to some place where the flying ships could not come.

  But her husband said to her, “If all the people in the east go to the west, will it not be to give the land here to the enemy? No, my father is right—we must stay by the land.”

  “Well, at least Jade will be gone,” Orchid said. She did not like Jade because she would not gossip much or talk with her but when she had a little time she went and sat in her room and read her book. And she was jealous now that Jade had conceived, because until now she had been the only son’s wife to have children in this house and her secret hope had been that Jade would be barren. “Women who like to read are always barren,” she had often said and always thought, and now Jade had proved her wrong.

  As for Ling Sao, she praised her husband heartily for staying where he belonged, in his own house and on his own land.

  “Who would not have come here if we had gone away?” she said, “and maybe an enemy no further than our own village. Yes, and that woman and her stinking husband, your third cousin who is always picking at characters like a cock at grains of corn, they would be glad to come into our big good house, pretending to take care of it for us, and I had rather have robbers any day whom I could curse and have the law on instead of my kin that I must always speak well to and never say what I truly think however hateful they are.”

  As for the third son, what he thought no one asked and he said nothing. When he thought of what he had seen in the city his food came up again into his mouth, but not from fear so much as anger. He plotted in himself in wild young ways how he might take revenge upon the enemy, and he lay awake at night weeping and biting his nails because he felt himself helpless and too young. But no one knew it. The younger daughter thought nothing at all because she did not know what to think, since she understood so little of what had been said and no one remembered her much more than the dog, to whom they were kind enough too, but without heed.

  The next day the flying ships came back again and the day after that, and again on the next day and the next, and every day they came back and the city was scourged by death and by fire. But Ling Tan did not go there again, nor did any of his house. They stayed where they were and tended their crops and put by their food for the winter as they did in every other year. The only change they would allow the enemy was that when the ships came over their heads now they left the field and hid themselves in the bamboos. For one day a flying ship had dipped low like a swallow over a pool, and had cut the head clean from a farmer who stood staring at it. Then it went on again as though what it had done was play.

  V

  WHEN ALL COULD SEE that now death was to come every day except when it rained, then those who lived inside the city walls did two things. They filled the temples and prayed the gods for rain until they dared pray no more lest there be a flood, and then they went out of the city to find rooms in small country inns or a corner in a farmer’s house or they slept on the gravelands or somewhere under a tree. Never had Ling Tan seen such piteous sights as he now saw, women and little children and old people with all they could save tied up in bundles they carried and most of them on foot, for only a few of the rich could ride these days. He had seen people come down from the North in times of famine, but they were the poor and the farming people whom the land had failed for a little while, but it could not fail them every year and they always went back to it.

  These now were rich and poor together and they did not know if ever they could go back. Sometimes he felt more sorry for the rich than the poor because the rich were so helpless and delicate and knew little of where to find food. All their lives food had been served to them by others and they did not need to ask where it was found or how it was made, and the poor did better than the rich in these days, used as they were to too little always. And best of all those bold poor did who risked their lives to stay in the city and to go into the emptied houses of the rich and take what they liked from them.

  These people poured like a flooding river out from the city over the countryside. And the stream of people from the city was joined by a greater stream from the east. For as the enemy toward the east took the land foot by foot people fell back from before them and joined themselves to others like them and the great river of moving people began to flow inland toward the west, not knowing where they went and sure only of death if they stayed.

  At first Ling Tan let his house be open to these people, and the women spent themselves in cooking for them and feeding them and crying out in pity for their sufferings. There were the wounded and the little children too
who could go no further and must be left behind, and these had to be put with those willing to take them, and many died. But this was what saved Ling Tan, that none of these people thought his house was far enough from the enemy as they gained the land foot by foot. They were restless until they had pushed on beyond river and lake and mountain, into the inlands behind the high mountains where the enemy dared not go lest they be cut off.

  Now here was the chance for Lao Er to go, too, and so he and Jade waited until there came by those with whom they wished to share travel, those who were not old or sick or burdened with too many little children. Day after day they waited to find whom they wanted and one day there came by a party of forty or more young men and women. The women had feet as free as men, which had never been bound, and Jade liked them as soon as she saw them. Their hair was cut short like hers and in their little bundles they all had books.

  “We are students of a certain school,” they told her, “and our eyes are on the mountains a thousand miles from here where our teachers are gone already and there in caves we will go on with our learning and when this war is over we will come back ready to shape the peace well.”

  Not one of these men and women talked of wasting himself in war, and this pleased Ling Tan very much. They stopped at his house not for a night, but only at a midday to ask for tea to drink with the bread they had with them, and so he heard them talk and he praised them:

  “Those who have no learning have only their bodies and they are the ones who ought to fight if there must be fighting. But you who have wisdom stored in your skulls, you have a treasure which ought not to be spilled like blood, and it ought to be kept for the day when we must have wisdom to tell us how we ought to live. In times like these wisdom is useless because nothing can save us except the chance that we are saved. But when the folly of war is ended, then we must have wisdom.”

  And in the shade of the willows outside his gate, for the court was too small for so large a crowd, Ling Tan put many questions to these young men and even to the women, for to his amazement one answered as well as the other, and after a while he forgot whether it was man or woman who answered him. And from them he found out for the first time what had happened at the coast and why the enemy had attacked them at all, and long was their talk together.

  This Ling Tan was a man who though he lived as his ancestors had in this valley was still acute enough. Life, he always told his sons, did not change. Men ate with different tools in different times, but food was food. They slept upon different beds, but sleep was the same. So now he believed that it was only men’s times that were changed and not men. When he inquired therefore of these young men and women he asked what weapons the enemy had rather than what the enemy was. When he heard that the enemy envied his nation the land, he understood at once the whole war and its cause.

  “Land,” he said looking about on the many young faces and filling his water pipe as he spoke, “land is at the bottom of what men want. If one has too much land and the other too little, there will be wars, for from land come food and shelter, and if land is too little food is poor and shelter small, and when this is so, then man’s mind and his heart are kept small too.”

  They listened to him with respect but unbelieving, for to them Ling Tan was only an old farmer who could not read or write and what did he know of all that they learned in books? But since they had not yet lost all the courtesy taught them by their parents, they made haste to seem to agree with him.

  “It is true, old father,” they said, not believing him in their hearts.

  But he was content with them whether they believed him or not, and so when his second son came to him in the middle of the afternoon and told him that he and Jade wanted to go with these young men and women who were all strong on their feet and full of courage he thought it over for a short space and then as his habit was before he decided anything he went and talked with his wife.

  Now she had never liked it that her second son and Jade wanted to leave this house, and she spoke out her discontent now while she washed the clothes at the edge of the pond where Ling Tan found her. She had a pair of his old blue trousers in her hand, folded on a smooth stone and full of water, and she beat the garment with her stick to drive out the dirt with the water and while she talked she went on beating.

  “I do not see why Jade should go off like this,” she said. “Who will look after her when her time comes and why should our grandchild be born somewhere out in a field like a wild hare? If our son wants to go, he will go, but I say she should stay here and have our grandchild decently.”

  Then Ling Tan answered her by grave words. “It may be better that we have very few young women in our house, and the fewer the better, and Jade is too beautiful for what may lie ahead of us.” For he was troubled by a thing he had heard, and one young man had taken him aside and told him in private what had happened to some women at the hands of the enemy. So now he was eager to have the women out of his house, all except his wife who was brown and wrinkled enough for no man to see what he saw in her face, the girl she had once been.

  She let her stick rest a moment to look at him.

  “What do you say now when you talk?” she asked. “Is there any place safer for a young wife than her husband’s home, and can any eye be sharper than mine on her? When he goes I will not let her foot stir beyond the door. I tell you it is he who makes her able to disobey me and he encourages her to her own way, so that I do not tell half of what I would tell her if he were not here. Let him go and I will say at once that her foot is not to go beyond the gate until his enters it again.”

  “There may come times when strange feet will enter our gate,” Ling Tan said.

  She went to beating again. “I fear no man,” she said loudly. “Let a strange man’s foot touch the threshold and see whether I or the dog is at him first!”

  “Nevertheless, a woman should go with her man,” Ling Tan argued, “and who will look to our son if his wife does not go with him?”

  “No one would say you are right quicker than I,” she replied, “if Jade were not carrying in her your own grandchild, and her duty to you comes first.”

  “I think it does not,” he said gently, and went away before she could argue him into doing what he did not want to do. And she, knowing why he went, could only beat the trousers, and she did this without thinking what she was doing until when she lifted them up they were beaten to holes and then she called aloud to the gods to see what she had done and how it was no fault of hers but of these times that set one’s mind awry.

  As for Ling Tan he went into his house and told his son quietly that he had better go and take Jade with him, for he knew from what the young men had told him that the second hundred miles of land had been lost to the enemy and within the third hundred miles this house stood.

  “But send me a word somehow when the child is born,” he said, “and if it is a boy send me a red cord in the envelope and if it is a girl let it be a blue one.” He wished now that he had let his son read and write so that he could have had a letter that he could take to his third cousin and ask him to read it to him. But who would have dreamed it would ever be well for a son to leave his father’s house?

  “I will do better than that,” Lao Er replied proudly. “Jade can write enough to tell you.”

  Ling Tan was astonished enough at this, and he cried out, “Can she, then? But the matchmaker did not tell us!”

  “Doubtless she thought it no added value to her,” Lao Er said, and grinned.

  “I would never have said either that it was needful for a woman to read and write,” Ling Tan said, “but it only proves how strange our times are that it can be so.” And he sat in the court smoking and thinking while his second son went in to tell Jade they were going.

  Now Jade herself had been the one to say first that these young men and women were the ones to walk with, and so she had already tied into two bundles the few things they must have if they went. There she sat on the bed’s edge waiting for
Lao Er and she lifted her great eyes at him when he came in.

  “Are we to go?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he sat down beside her and put his arm on her shoulder. “Now that we go, I wonder if it is not too hard for you,” he said tenderly. “I wish I could carry the child for you.”

  “One of these days you shall,” she replied.

  She rose as she spoke, and he saw that she had even shod herself for the long walk, for she had tied over her cloth shoes a pair of straw sandals such as he wore in the field, and she had put on her strongest plainest blue garments, such as country women wear, coat and trousers and not the long robe, that was her best and therefore made after the city fashion.

  “I am ready,” she said and took up her bundle. But he lingered. “I never thought a child of mine would be born anywhere except where I was born,” he said, sadly.

  “He will find a place of his own to be born in,” she said.

  “Yes, but we must mark the place,” he said. “It is very meaningful to a man where he is born, and we must remember whether it is among mountains or in a valley or in a town, and whether it is night or day and if there is water near by, and whether the sky is clear or dark, and what the province is and how the people there speak, so that we can tell him everything.”

  “Oh,” she said restlessly, “let us go, if we are to go!”

  But still he lingered. “It seems to me I can remember the very moment I was born in this house,” he said. “I seem to remember such darkness as I have never since known, and then light that was like a pain so that I cried out. And then I felt arms beneath me.”

  “Will you come with me or not?” she cried. “I hate to say I go then not go.”

  He heard the fear in her voice of a woman seeking safety for her young, and he rose and they went out and bowed to his father together and to the elder brother and they called farewell to all the others. But the mother they could not find anywhere, and since the young men and women were anxious to be gone and at another place for night they could only leave without seeing her.