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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  But now and again those diggers came upon strange things, an old bowl or two, some jars full of something now dust, a broken skeleton of a child long dead, and some bones of a man’s leg, and deepest of all a small brass box all green which when they forced it open held a few jeweled pins and a pair of heavy gold earrings, such as none of them had ever seen.

  “These belonged to our ancestors,” Ling Tan said reverently, “and we are not worthy to touch them.” He took them and he buried them again in the wall of the room, and left them there.

  They made the secret room strong and deep and bigger than Ling Tan had ever thought it could be. They put beams across the top to keep earth from falling in and these beams were held up by pillars of brick they took from the walls of the loom room, for Ling Tan’s house was not earth but brick, and when there was not enough brick, men from the village who had brick houses took down inner walls and by night they carried the brick into Ling Tan’s house. So in less than two months after Lao Er came home that secret room was finished.

  Now Lao Er said, “We have a place to put our guns.”

  The morning of the day after the secret room was finished he left the house before dawn, food in his hand and two pairs of extra sandals tied to his belt, and he went toward the hills.

  XI

  IN THAT YEAR WHEN the rice harvest was ripe to be cut and while the grain stood yellow in the fields, the enemy sent men everywhere to see to the harvest and to make guess of what the yield would be and to command the farmers that rice was to be sold at a fixed price. The price was so low that it scarcely paid to sell the grain at all. Though Ling Tan and the men he knew took the commands in silence, as they had schooled themselves always to do, for anger was too dear if it gave the enemy a cause to kill one of them, yet their hatred of these small bandy-legged men who were the enemy grew until their skins were tight. For a farmer is a man who will bear much until it comes to the matter of his land and his harvest that he takes from it. The harvests are his life, and if they be taken from him what has he to show for his life?

  With their heads bowed Ling Tan and his fellows stood sullen before the enemy, and when the enemy were gone they met together and planned how they would hide the grain. They cut their grain all together and quickly so that it was not possible for the enemy to be everywhere at once, and secretly they threshed at night behind the doors and the windows they covered with cloth to hide the one small light they threshed by, and such grain they hid. There were those who dug under their houses as Ling Tan had and made holes for the hiding of the grain and some had relatives living in villages in the hills, and these took loads away by night. And yet so evil were these times that many such loads were seized by the robbers and the bandits who hid themselves wherever the enemy was not, and robbed their own people. There were such men, even in these times.

  In the daytime Ling Tan and his fellows threshed what was left in the open and on the threshing floors and the enemy wondered that so much standing grain could bring so little rice. That year the yield was only half what it had been the year before, and the farmers told the enemy that some years it was so with them that the straw grew very thick and strong but there was little grain in the heads, and could they help it if now Heaven had sent such a year?

  Then what could the enemy do? If they believed the farmers lied and killed them who would till the land next year? They could only take the rice that was left. What made Ling Tan’s gall come up in his throat bitter and hard to swallow was that the enemy not only took their rice at the price set, but they sold it again in the city at their own price after they had what they wanted for themselves, and the price they sold it for then was three and four times what they had paid the farmers, and in this way, too, did the enemy pillage the land and the people.

  Now the law against fish was enforced, that in all the land only the enemy should have the right to eat fish, and Ling Tan caught no more fish in his pond by day, but he used a seine by night if he wanted fish. Every bone of a fish they ate must be hid and the scales and the fins and any offal must be buried, and they ate fish only at night behind their locked doors, and so did all the village. And yet a show must be kept too, and so once in a while a man walked into the city with a little fish in his hand to give to the enemy. Sometimes the enemy came out and ordered them to catch fish, and then only did Ling Tan and the others have to catch some good fish to save their lives.

  Ducks and fowl of all kinds, and pigs and cows, all were taken by the enemy at their own price and meat grew so scarce that men did not think of meat any more. Ling Tan was glad he had killed his own meat early, and he kept his old water buffalo thin and tough so that even the enemy looking at that stringy frame did not ask its death yet.

  It was after his son had gone to the hills that they came to bid him deliver his pigs and his fowl which they had registered. He saw them coming one morning, but now he was used to looking up from his work and seeing little bandy-legged men coming toward him. He gave no heed until he saw their feet before him and he could always tell the foot of an enemy because the great toe is forced apart from the others.

  When he saw these feet he made his face stupid and his eyes dull and he let his mouth hang and slowly he rose and stared at them. And one who spoke to him shouted loudly:

  “We have registered for you two pigs and some ducks and hens and it is required that you sell them to us.”

  “Pigs!” Ling Tan said stupidly, “I have no pigs.”

  “You have!” the little man bellowed. “It is written down here that you have two pigs.”

  “My pigs died,” Ling Tan said.

  “If you killed them you will be killed,” the little man said severely.

  “They died of sickness,” Ling Tan said, “and I dared not bring their carcasses for fear you would say I killed them.”

  “Where are the bones?”

  “The dog gnawed them and we cracked them and pounded them to meal and put them in the land,” Ling Tan said.

  Now Ling Tan had kept the eleven young pigs in the loom room until it was taken down, and then he had killed them all except two and Ling Sao had salted them. Only the two had he kept alive to breed more and these two he had driven far behind the village and tied them to stakes, and if they were found they were found.

  The enemy was angry enough and yet what could they do? If they took Ling Tan who would tend the land? So all they could do was to threaten him and say that if they found him lying it would go ill with him indeed and he listened as though he understood nothing and so they went away, complaining that the people of this country were so stupid that it made the lives of those who conquered them a burden.

  When they were gone Ling Tan squatted down again and hidden under his wide bamboo hat he smiled and took a little comfort for the moment because even in a small way he had harassed the enemy. And thus did all the other men on the land, each as skilfully as he could but few were as skilful as Ling Tan.

  But Ling Tan’s eighth cousin, who had been the village butcher, as his father was before him, and his father’s father very far back, could no longer live. The loss of all his business filled his belly and his grief was a load in him that would neither come up nor go down, and he could not eat. One day his neighbors saw the boards of his shop still not opened at noon, and since his wife had gone into refuge and his two sons had escaped to the hills, they knew he was alone. They called Ling Tan, therefore, and he opened the boards. There in the empty butchery Ling Tan found his eighth cousin hung by his own girdle from an iron meat hook. The man had cleaned his shop before he died and had cleaned himself and put on his blue coat and trousers freshly washed, and now he hung there, a good and decent man dead.

  “This one, too, the devils have killed,” Ling Tan said sorrowfully and he lifted his cousin down and the next night buried him. Even for the funeral his wife dared not come home and his sons came only because it was night.

  All the life of Ling Tan’s house now was shaped day by day to the sight of the little
bandy-legged men coming down the road—“The devils,” men called them now. Ling Sao in every waking moment of her life watched from door and window and she sat spinning or she worked near the house and when they came she went and told Jade and Jade took the child instantly and went behind the stove and down the ladder and Ling Sao closed the hole and spread earth and straw over the wooden cover and no one could have dreamed what was there in the dark kitchen. When the men had gone Jade came out again and took up her work, but she never went outside the gate, nor did Ling Sao take the child out until night fell.

  But the fame of the child leaked out and one by one all the women of the village came to see him and praise him. The third cousin’s wife came too, and she praised him somewhat, but she could not praise him much because of her envy. When she saw that boy, how he was beyond any other child that she had ever seen, her belly knotted in the middle and for a day or two she could not eat and sleep. By some evil chance she saw him first when Jade was nursing him at her breast and the sight of the young mother and her full bosom and the greedy handsome boy turned her blood to gall. She could scarcely get out the words she must speak for even scanty courtesy, and she followed these words by other mournful ones.

  “It is no good sign to have so fine a child as this,” she said sadly. “It is always such children who die young. My son was like that when he was that age.”

  This Ling Sao could not bear and she burst out, “Why, cousin, how can you say so? I was with you when you gave birth to your son, and he came out so small and green that I swear I thought he would not draw breath and I dared not wash him but I rolled him up as he was in your man’s old trousers and let him be until you could wash him. And do you not remember how he had the flux and stayed like a little starved cat until he was nearly three? Only when he was ten or eleven did I draw my own breath easily when I saw him.”

  But the cousin said angrily, “I think I can remember my own child better than you can, cousin, and you have always liked to help children to be born and you have helped so many you have mixed another with mine.”

  Then she could not forbear saying to Jade, “Yes, such a child mine was and he could have fathered this child of yours and ought to have if the will of the gods had been heeded, and we have been punished enough that it was not heeded, for had he wed you as he ought to have done, he would now be alive and this would be his son.”

  Now Jade was angry and she covered up her bosom and said proudly, “I am content with my life, though I grieve that you have lost your only son.”

  When at last the cousin went away Ling Sao and Jade were angry together for this child they loved, and it was a bond between them that they did not like this cousin’s wife, and they agreed that she should not be allowed to take the child in her arms before he walked lest her venom poison him when she breathed upon him.

  As for the cousin’s wife she went home and cursed her husband that her son had not wed Jade and that this was not their grandchild and that their son had died and that they had no more children and that when they died they would be dead indeed with no son to live after them. She worked herself into such a misery and fury that the poor old scholar was crazed and went and beat his head against the outer wall of his own house, where Ling Tan happened to see him and ran to save him. When he found out what was the matter he laughed the laugh of a man who has no trouble with the women in his own house, and he took his cousin to the tea shop and let him tell his woe and ease himself over tea and small fried rice cakes. Then Ling Tan advised him to tell his woman next time she was so evil in her temper that he would take a concubine.

  “But can I?” the poor scholar groaned. “I have not for months tried myself.”

  At this Ling Tan was angry indeed at his cousin’s wife, and he said, “Can it be that she denies you everything?”

  “I ask only for peace,” the man said, mumbling in his scanty beard.

  “But peace is not to be had for asking,” Ling Tan answered back. “It must be sought and fought for and sometimes brought by force, in a house or a nation.”

  The old scholar sighed at this and looked humbly at his cousin.

  “I am a man of learning,” he said, “and how can I be as strong as a woman is? The strongest thing on earth is a woman, and our father Confucius spoke well when he said that a woman should not, by law, be allowed a will of her own, and I tell you, cousin, let us even be glad the enemy are men and not women, for when women conquer then men are lost indeed.”

  Ling Tan could scarcely hold back his laughter at this and he said, “Doubtless you are right, cousin, but I swear that if I were you I would beat that woman until she leaned against the wall to keep from falling.”

  “Would you?” the poor cousin murmured wistfully. “Oh, if you only would, cousin!”

  “No—no,” Ling Tan said, laughing more than ever, “not for you, cousin! Two things a man must do for himself, sleep with his own woman and beat her if she needs it.”

  He rose as he spoke and the cousin rose dolefully, too, and Ling Tan watching him walk slowly home shook his head and had no hope that by anything he had said he had given his cousin greater strength.

  … So those autumn days went on until Ling Tan’s fields were bare of grain and he had stored food enough to feed his house. He was beginning to wonder if any ill had happened to his second son when one night at midnight he heard a knock upon his door, and it was a knock he knew, because his son and he had agreed upon it when he went away. He rose, for his wife was asleep, and he went to the door and opened it a crack, ready to shut it if he had been wrong. But when he opened it he heard his second son whisper:

  “It is I, my father,” and he let him in, and not him only for with him came two others. One by one in the darkness they spoke, and Ling Tan heard the voices of his two other sons.

  “Oh, Heaven and earth are good,” he whispered and he led them into the windowless kitchen and there he lit the lamp and saw before him, all alive and well, his three sons, and he knew as soon as he saw his third son, that he was not a robber.

  “What more can I, who am a man, ask, than the sight of you three?” he said. Indeed they were a sight to make a man proud, for the months in the hills had changed those two, his eldest and his third son. Never had he seen them look so strong and sunbrowned, so fearless in the eyes. That was the greatest change, that the two who had left his house sad and weakened by their grief, were now fearless and they had forgotten what their grief was. “You went to the good hillmen,” he said to his third son.

  “I am only with those who make war on the devils,” his third son answered and then he said, “Tell my mother I am hungry and I want some of her good food before we leave.”

  “But must you leave soon?” Ling Tan asked.

  “Before the darkness changes we must be at the foothills again,” the eldest said.

  “Even though we hide you?” Ling Tan asked.

  “Yes, this time,” the eldest said, and seemed to want to say no more. So the father led them down into the secret room, and each soon took off his back a load he carried there and when they were unrolled he saw that each had carried a dozen guns. There were such guns as he had never seen, short strong guns of a foreign sort. He took up one and looked at it.

  “Where did you get these guns?” he asked.

  The youngest son laughed. “We take them from the enemy,” he said.

  Then Ling Tan when he had admired the guns awhile remembered his last son was hungry and he put the gun down and went and waked Ling Sao. She rose and had the fire going in a few minutes and Lao Er waked Jade and she brought the child and there in that secret room they all gathered and ate the noodles and salt pork that Ling Sao soon had ready. They had a table there and benches and they dared to have the light, and as long as the two sons stayed they talked and told each other everything and Ling Sao could not have enough of looking at her sons. Ling Tan had warned her to mention no sorrowful thing and not to bring to their minds again anything that had happened of evil. Stil
l she was a mother first and she could not forbear whispering to her eldest son as they were about to leave again:

  “Son, have you found anyone yet to take to be the mother of more children to you?”

  He smiled down at her but he did not shake his head.

  “Is this a time to think of it?” he asked.

  “It is always a time to think of more children,” she said sturdily. “Who will take up the work after you if you have no sons?”

  “Well, mother, perhaps you are right, and I must look and see what can be found,” he said.

  And the father laughed and said, “What would come to us all if the women did not keep us breeding?”

  And Ling Sao emboldened by their laughter said loudly, “What would happen to you if you had no women would be that none of you would be born at all.”

  “No man can deny that, old woman,” he said.

  And she went on:

  “And I shall not be satisfied until you, too, my little son, are wed, and I want grandsons from you all before I die.”

  “You are a woman never satisfied,” Ling Tan exclaimed and in the laughter of all this the two went away and to the hills again. Ling Tan shut the door and barred it behind them, well content once more within his house.