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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  So she smiled, and then she sighed and said, “You have heard doubtless that my own son died. Yes, the enemy struck him and he was lost. Now I have no one. He was doing no evil, either. He had only come to the city to look and see what went on, and he had no weapon in his hand. I always said that if your father had not put the notion into his belly he would never have come. Yes, when I see Jade I know that all our evil came from the day your father bought Jade from my son. Because we are poor we lost all. But that is what it is to be so poor.” She wiped her eyes, and Wu Lien coughed and tried to comfort her.

  “Is your son’s father well?” he asked.

  “How can he be well when we have not enough to eat?” the cousin’s wife replied. Then an idea came up out of her vitals into that witless brain of hers. She turned to Wu Lien, her eyes suddenly dry.

  “Wu Lien, you are a kind good man,” she said. “I never look into that smooth face of yours without seeing goodness there. A man does not grow so fat as you unless he has an easy heart and a liver without gall in it. Can you not find my old man a worthless little piece of work here in these walls that would pay us something?”

  She looked about her as she spoke and thought how fine it would be to live here in this safe place. There were easy chairs to sit on and the beds were as good doubtless, and the food plenty, and who cared what rulers paid for them?

  “But will my father let him come?” Wu Lien’s wife asked. “He is angry with us, and will he not be angry if his cousin follows us here?”

  Now nothing made the cousin’s wife more vexed than this. By rights her husband should have had more power in the village than Ling Tan, for he was older, but no one remembered that he was, and Ling Tan had easily taken his place as the head over his cousin, who was a small weak man with a piping voice and the little goat’s beard that quivered as he talked.

  “Your father ought not to tell us what to do,” the cousin’s wife said. “And my man always thinks as I do, and what I think is that we must first get food, for who will feed us if we do not feed ourselves?” It was running off her tongue to tell these two that Ling Tan had half his grain in secret stores and that he had told them all to kill their pigs and fowls and salt them down, but she hesitated, for she had done this, too, and then what would she say if it were found out?

  But Wu Lien had been thinking while she spoke and now he said, “It will be best if we help you in the village. That is to say, come here sometimes and we will give you food and a little money and whatever you need, and then you can give us the news. We always like to hear how you do, and my wife’s father and her mother and all her brothers.”

  This he said innocently but what was behind it was plain enough, and the cousin’s wife saw it and smiled. Soon she rose and said she must be going. Wu Lien put his hand in his bosom and brought out some money and gave it to her, and said, “Take this for your trouble in bringing the fish, and next time, eat the fish yourself. If anyone condemns you, then I will speak for you to those higher than I.” She bowed herself double in thanks and Wu Lien waved his hand to wave her courtesy away.

  “I have a little power,” he said modestly, “and where can I use it better than for old friends?”

  And his wife looked at him proudly and thought what a noble figure was his in the wine-red robe of satin he wore, and she said earnestly to the cousin’s wife, “Cousin, do us yet one more kindness. When you can, speak for my children’s father to my parents. They do not give him his due. They cannot see his wisdom in seeming to agree here, and—”

  But Wu Lien put up his hand for silence. “I do agree,” he said loudly. “I believe that what Heaven brings to pass is best, if we can see it so.”

  “What wisdom that is!” the cousin’s wife cried. “Be sure I will speak all good for you whenever I can. It is what I say myself—it is only folly to deny what is here, and I tell my old man that every day.”

  So she bowed herself away and went out. In the city streets she bought a few things she wanted, a needle and some inches of cloth for shoes, and a small piece of meat, though she had to walk far to find even these, and the prices she paid made her all but put her money back again. Yet she did spend it, for she walked far and passed many empty shops, and a doleful man who waited on her at last said, “Buy or not as you will, woman. You will not find better anywhere. We are all ruined together here.”

  But she was smelling the meat. “What is this meat?” she asked. “Is it dog meat? If it is I will not eat it. I can kill my own dog.”

  “If it is not dog it is ass,” he said. “They keep all other meat for themselves.”

  She considered a while, holding the meat in her hand, and then she took it. It was meat, whatever it was, and she did not want to kill her own dog.

  But as she went homeward through the barren silent streets and saw the ruin everywhere, and how the half-starved people crept along from door to door, and how few were the rickshas even, since so many men had been killed and those left were too weak to pull a load, she grew frightened, and she thought, “Certainly we must make some sort of use of Wu Lien in that good place. We must get our fingers into fat, too, my old man and me. What use is it if we starve?”

  And she walked homeward, sure that she would do whatever Wu Lien asked and she determined to keep her ears close to Ling Tan’s door, for in that house the center of the village was.

  “I shall tell that man of mine what we must do,” she thought, and she planned how she would feed him well tonight and then even perhaps grant him some of her favor when they went to bed. Then when he was well content she would tell him how their fortunes could be made.

  This she did, and the poor man was too innocent to know why that night he had one good after another given him, and only after he had partaken of all did he see why she was so unusual in her temper. Then when he had heard, he groaned and said:

  “I ought to have known that you had made up your mind to something,” and he felt he was between two grindstones, the one his wife and the other his deep fear of Ling Tan, and something more than fear, too, for he respected the man who was his younger cousin. In his heart he thought Ling Tan more powerful than Wu Lien sitting in the midst of enemies, and he told his wife, “If Ling Tan or his sons should find out that you and I had betrayed them, do you think our lives would not end at that moment? Why, those men kill as easily as they breathe nowadays, and if they saw us their enemies, down we would go with all the rest!”

  At this his wife reviled him and she said, “Of all the men on earth you are least like a man, and why am I tied to you? Will you do what I say or not?”

  “But what do you say?” he urged, trembling at her side.

  “We are Ling Tan’s enemies,” she said, “and I have always hated him.”

  “But I do not,” he muttered, “he has been good to us, and fed us often and when he had the loom he gave us all his short pieces, or nearly all, such as he did not need in his own house, and once a year he gave me enough for a robe, too, or a coat. It is hard for me to forget all this.”

  “It is not hard for me to forget it,” his wife said. “Do you think this meant anything to him? He likes to give us his short pieces and his small gifts of food. It makes him bigger in his own eyes. Do people give anything away unless it makes them better to themselves? Shall we thank him for his own pride?”

  Thus she twisted the poor wretch at her side and he listened and groaned and shut his eyes and tried to sleep, and she pulled him awake again until in his weariness he cried:

  “Oh, do what you will, for you will do it anyway, and I am no stronger than another man that I should defy a woman!”

  Thus Ling Tan’s cousin and his wife became ears and eyes in the village for Wu Lien, though the cousin was always unwilling and kept as much as he could to himself. Yet how could he keep all? That woman had her ways of torture, and to keep peace in his house and himself from misery, bit by bit he yielded to her the news he heard when Ling Tan called the men together to tell them what they must do,
and faithfully the woman went to Wu Lien and told him, and took her reward. But Wu Lien never told the things she told him, and he kept them only for his own knowledge.

  Then Jade, not knowing, planned how it could come about that through Wu Lien a gate might be found into the enemy. She made up her mind one day that she herself would carry food into the city and sell it if she could at Wu Lien’s door. She told no one what she did, for this young woman could be as cool and bold as any robber. She chose a day when her husband was in the hills, and waited until her child was sleeping and then she put on a wig of gray hair, which she had from a wandering troupe of actors that she and Lao Er had met when they went west, and Lao Er had bought it for her so that she might hide her youth and beauty with it. Now she put it on and smeared her face with dye, and lifted up her lip with putty and dyed that, and blacked her teeth and put a false hump on her back, and old shoes to hide her young feet. She slipped out of the little back door while Ling Sao slept and went to a secret field behind the bamboos where Ling Tan raised some winter cabbage out of the eye of the enemy, and there she plucked a basket full. He was working on the front land and did not see her. Then winding her way among the grave lands, she went toward the city.

  She knew where Wu Lien was and to that gate she went, but she could not have had a better key, though she did not know it, than a basket of fresh cabbages. For the markets had no green things in them and the very soldier at the gate let his mouth water at her cabbages, and she did not need to use even the name of Wu Lien.

  “Go to the kitchen, old woman,” he said, in broken words, “the cook will pay you.”

  “Where is the kitchen?” she lisped as though her teeth were bad and she made her voice cracked. For it was one of Jade’s ways that she could make herself seem anyone she chose. When she was dressed like an old woman, she took on, scarcely knowing that she did, all an old woman’s ways. She could have deceived Lao Er himself had he not seen her in this guise and in many another, too, so that he used to be amazed at all her different ways.

  “Come with me,” the soldier said. He led her through many courts, she limping behind him and snuffling through her nose, and seeing nothing except the two feet on the ground before her, and so they came to the kitchen.

  There the soldier shouted to the cook, “Here is an old woman with a basket full of something better than gold, and all I ask is a taste of the dish when it is done!”

  He laughed and went away, and there Jade was at the kitchen door. A cross fat cook came out, and it was not an enemy but a man from some kitchen of an inn or eating place now ruined. He lifted the towel from her cabbages and cursed beneath his breath, but she could not hear what he said.

  “Two pieces of silver,” he said aloud.

  She shook her head. “You know what cabbages cost now,” she told him.

  “Three, then,” he said carelessly. “It is not my cursed money that buys them and I have no time to argue. There is to be a great feast here. A feast again, they tell me—they are always feasting, and where can I get food to make a feast? Have you any meat, woman? Can you get any pork? Fish I have—fish—fish—but what is a feast without pork, or even a duck?”

  She stared at him steadfastly. Was this man a traitor?

  “If I bring you two ducks, will you pay me ten silver pieces for them?” she asked.

  “Bring them and see,” he said.

  He took the silver out of his belt to give her for the cabbages, and she asked him, “What day is this feast?”

  “Two days from now,” he said, and then the bitterness leaked out of him. “A year ago two days they had their first great victory over us. So they tell me to make a mighty feast, and all the heads will gather together to eat it.”

  She leaned toward him. “You are one of us,” she whispered.

  That fat cook looked quickly round the court. Behind him the kitchen was empty, but still he did not answer her.

  “What a place of power is yours,” she whispered. “By accident you can put anything you like into their food! How many cooks are there?”

  “Three,” he said.

  “Three!” she said after him. “Are three enough for a great feast? Ought you not to ask for help at such a time? There should be ten cooks. Are you to do all, or does a restaurant come in?”

  “They trust no one from outside,” he said. “They guard themselves.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  He lifted the cabbages out. “Will you bring the ducks tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I will,” she said, “at this same hour.”

  “The money will be ready when you come,” he said.

  He showed her a back gate, and she went through it and so into the empty streets again.

  Now Jade had put the thought of poison into the cook’s mind as she might have cast a seed into the ground, though beyond it she herself had no clear thought. But as she went through these ruined streets, she stopped here and there as though to rest and she talked in small quiet places with men and women who whispered to her the fearful evil in which they now lived. In one such place where she stopped, a peddler of old clothes had newly opened his shop again, and she went in to pretend that she looked for a coat, and she asked him how his business did, and the tears came to his eyes and he said, “Can anything be well with me again? I have lost my only son and my three daughters are worse than lost.”

  “How did you lose your son?” she asked.

  “Will you believe me if I tell you?” he said. “Yet this is the truth. He was only fourteen years old, because he was the youngest of our children. The gods gave us nothing but daughters until the last, and he was the best. When the enemy passed this door one day he liked the bright show of so many guns and uniforms and he gave them a salute—a child’s trick it was, to show himself clever. But the moment he did it, one of the enemy stepped out of their ranks and shot him here at my door and I stood beside him and caught him as he fell dead.”

  “Can this be?” Jade asked sadly.

  “It can be, for it was,” the man sighed.

  Jade went on, and she stopped next at a half-burned house. There were many such in the city where the people lived as best they could in what was left of their homes. She sat down on the doorstep to rest, and the aged woman in that house came out to ask if she would have a drink of well water, for they had no tea, and Jade said she would only rest. But the old woman saw her looking at the ruins, and she made her voice low and said:

  “Do not seem to notice too much, for who knows who watches us? We are more lucky than the many who had all burned to ashes around them, or those who died in the ashes of their houses.”

  “But how did it come about with you?” Jade asked. “Were there bombs that fell on you?”

  To this the old woman shook her head.

  “No, we passed through that safely,” she said. “But afterwards the enemy sent their soldiers to live in our houses, and they did not care how they let fire start in our houses, and when a house caught fire they moved on to another, and my house was one of those. A soldier went to sleep smoking in that inner room, and when the bed caught fire he got up and walked out and let it burn and went elsewhere and said nothing, and we who were crowded to the other side of the house away from the enemy as far as we could go, we did not know until it was too late. So were many houses burned.” The old woman paused and shivered. “Oh, how they laugh when our houses burn!” she said,

  Jade could not speak nor answer lest she say too much and one hear her. She sat a few minutes more, her head hanging down, and then she rose and went away.

  Yet her rage was not full until she lifted her eyes and saw pasted upon the walls of a main street she chanced to enter a great sheet of paper, and on it were false pictures of the enemy smiling and holding out in their hands cakes and fruits to a group of kneeling vanquished, old men and young, and women and little children, who looked up at them thankfully. On this sheet were written in large letters these words: ‘The People Welcome Their Good Neighbor, Who
Gives Them Food, Peace, Safety.”

  When she had read these words Jade’s anger brimmed over and she went back to a certain shop she had passed, and there she asked for an ancient and well-known drug. The man behind the counter himself was as old and dried as a root. He smiled a melancholy smile as he measured out the white powder.

  “There are many who buy this medicine these days,” he said, “and they are nearly all women.”

  “Do they buy it for themselves, too?” Jade asked to deceive him.

  “The women buy it for themselves, be sure,” the man said quietly, and though he looked at her very closely he asked her nothing. He measured out the stuff and he sold it cheap, and Jade put it in her bosom and went homeward.

  Only that night did she tell those in her husband’s house what she planned, and tell she must, for she needed two ducks, and in spite of all Ling Tan had some ducks that he kept secretly for breeding. Without a word he rose and he went to where those ducks roosted and pulled down two and killed them, and Ling Sao and Jade cleaned them and plucked them and rubbed the poison into their flesh and inwards and then hung them for the night. The great power of that poison was that it was as tasteless as flour, or nearly so.

  The next morning Jade took those ducks into the city and gave them to the fat cook. She said nothing until she was paid, and then she said in a low voice, “Make your sauce rich for the ducks and put in extra oils and wine. Our ducks feed on wild food these days, and sometimes the flesh is tainted.”

  He made his little eyes wide at this and stared at her. She stared back at him full and strong and suddenly he saw she was no old woman, and he opened his mouth, but he shut it again and nodded. Then he locked the little back gate behind her and she went home by the shortest way.

  Whether or not what she did bore its fruit, how could Jade know? The news of that which happened in the city did not easily come into a little village. She waited, and she thought, “If I succeed in this, I will do it again and again. It will be my way of making war on the devils.” At last news did leak back after a long time, and it came through the third cousin’s wife. She said one day innocently that her man had seen Wu Lien on the street and he was as thin as an old goat because he had nearly died and some of the enemy had died after a feast they had eaten.