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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  “Then she is not a woman,” she said coldly, “and I doubt we have a grandchild out of her. I ever say let a woman take to running around on such big feet as she has, who has been to schools everywhere, and it is the end of the woman in her.”

  “She is woman enough to have our son swear he will have her and no other,” Ling Tan said. “There must be something female in her somewhere.”

  “When did any young man ever know what he wanted?” Ling Sao said peevishly. “I wish she had never come into our gate. Some devil sent her, and he had our son here, when he ought not to have been here for once, and nothing good will come of it.”

  “Give over,” Ling Tan told her. “You are only angry because you have not all your sons’ wives where you can press your thumbs on them. I tell you, there are some who can fight in the free land, and there are others like us who can fight here on our own land, and well I can see our younger son is for the free land. Let him go where he wills, then, as long as he fights the enemy.”

  This was a handful of words for Ling Tan to say, and whenever he spoke gravely there were none in his house who answered him. Even his wife remembered her duty when he took this place above her, though it was always hard for her to keep silence, and be sure that in one way or another she had her way somewhere else.

  “As for you, my son,” Ling Tan said to Lao Er, “take the message to your younger brother, and tell him that I have no way to follow this woman. I cannot leave my land for love or for anything. But his feet are loose and tied nowhere, and let him do what he likes. Only he is not to go away without sending us word that he does, and if he goes, he is not to stay long years and tell us nothing.”

  Lao Er bowed his head and so the meal was over, and he would have lingered until Jade had washed the dishes and to follow her into their room and there ask her why she seemed sad, but well he knew he could not do this in the daytime without his mother wanting to know why he did. So he could only smile at her secretly and asked her if she felt well, or was the child beginning to come, and when she shook her head at this, he said:

  “I will not go to my brother until tomorrow, and today I work with my father to finish the wheat field.”

  She nodded and tried to smile, and so he left her. All that afternoon Jade was very quiet, and Ling Sao, who stayed to spin cotton thread on her spindle, let her be silent because she thought she was feeling the weight of the child in her. Cotton was hard to come by now, and Ling Sao saved any she could raise and they sold none of it, because they needed it for their own winter garments, and since another child was coming then there would be more winter garments to be made. She sat twisting her spindle and wetting thumb and finger in her mouth to make the thread smooth and firm, and now and again speaking to Jade and telling how it was when her self gave birth, and Jade listened and said little.

  … In the field Ling Tan and his second son worked together. The times were somewhat better for farmers now than they had been, in this one way, that so many farmers had died or had gone to the free lands that there was not enough food for the enemy, and so less than they had the enemy took men off the land either for death or bitter labor. Yet Ling Tan kept his eyes on the road and whenever he saw the enemy, he would tell his son and Lao Er would go quickly into the house and take his wife and child down with him into that secret room until it was safe to come up again. For who could trust that enemy for anything except evil?

  But the bitterness of the enemy’s rule did not abate. Of what Ling Tan took from his land he had the good of less than one third, and his taxes were grievous. He could only curse in his heart because well he knew that even the high enemy did not get the good of these taxes, but the little enemies at the bottom, the petty men. For they all knew, mouth to ear, that never had such rapacious rulers put themselves over any people. There was nothing this enemy would not do for money, and if any wished to buy or sell or smuggle goods, it could be done if money enough was put first upon the palms of the enemy. The very guns the hillmen used nowadays, that came from foreign parts, were smuggled in by little enemy men who thought only of their own gain, and were traitors even to their kind. Up the river guns could be smuggled to the army in the free land, if money were given to the many outstretched enemy hands.

  All these things Ling Tan knew as every one knew, and it was so much good news. Though men might gnash their teeth for the moment, such rottenness in the enemy everywhere meant that one day they would be rotten enough to be overthrown and to be cast into the sea.

  “We wait the day,” Ling Tan often said to his son. “We will hold the land against that day.”

  … “It is nothing,” Jade said. She turned her head away from her husband and poured him a cup of hot water before he slept. There was not often tea in the pot now, and most of the time they drank hot water.

  But he caught her wrists and took the teapot from her. “There is something,” he said. “Do you think you can draw your breath differently and I not know it?”

  “You must not watch me so,” Jade said, and she tried to pull away from him, but she could not.

  “I do not watch you,” he said. “I know without watching you. When you change I know from within myself.”

  So coaxing her and commanding her and she biting her pretty lower lip and first laughing and then saying again it was nothing, and then putting her sleeve to her eyes to wipe her tears away, but angrily because she wept too easily now while she waited for the child, she yielded to him, and she said:

  “It only came to me today—how I am no better than any farm woman, and if we had stayed in the free land, would we not have done something great, too? I could have been of more use—you and I together—”

  “This is because you have seen that woman,” he said.

  “Is there any sin in her or me because she makes me want to do something greater than sit behind these walls and bear children?” she asked hotly and now she did pull away from him, and he let her.

  “Is it so little to you that you bear my children?” he asked.

  But now she would not answer and for a while he did not speak, either, first because he was somewhat hurt by her, and second because he had not the words ready. He had always to sort the feeling out of his mind and then to put it into words for her. The feeling was there, strong and stubborn, and he knew she was wrong, but how could he tell her so and make her feel as he did? This Jade was so mixed with large and small, and he must be sure to pluck the right part in her now. But he struggled against his own simplicity.

  “Had I only been a learned man!” he murmured.

  He could not have spoken better, for this touched her, and she was so made that she would not hear of fault in any that was hers.

  “You are well enough,” she said more kindly, and he knew that as far as he had stepped it was well, so he went on.

  “To me, we do the bravest thing,” he said, speaking slowly and with care for truth. “How easy it is to go to the free lands! How safe it is there! It is easy to get guns together and men and to fall upon here a garrison and then there again. It is the easiest way to risk life. And we all risk life these days if we hate the enemy. And then there is glory—to do as my younger brother does, is to get glory very easily. But who gives glory to us? We only stay and try to live as ever we have. But this is our way of making war—to stay, and to take no suffering as cause to leave. In this there is no glory.”

  He paused and considered. “It may be that some day we shall be given glory for this too,” he said. “But I do not know. What does it matter if there is glory, so long as we hold the land?”

  “Yet even the land belongs to the enemy if they rule here,” she said sadly.

  “The land belongs to those who till it,” he said. “If the enemy put us off the land and sent their own kind to till and to sow and to reap, then—but then we would still fight.”

  She did not answer this and he went on. “You in your way, when you bear a child, you add another to hold the land. And can any other do this except
women like you? We who are men, we can grow food, but can we make other men to take our places? It is you who do this, and what you do is the thing that must be done if our people are to live. If women do not bear children, can we live?”

  She sat very still, hearing these words as he let them come from him one by one, as painfully as though he forged them.

  “When you have our child,” he said, “you hold our land through him.”

  That was all. He could say no more, and he was as weary as though he had fought a battle. He had fought a battle and he had won. She knew that he was right.

  … Now in all this, who had given one thought to the eldest son? He stayed in the hills doing his simple duty, and he laid his traps here and there and caught an enemy or two a few times a month, but not so often as once he had. For the enemy had grown wary of traps, and he had to beat his brains to devise new ways of making traps. In his own way he was brave enough, for he came nearer and nearer to the city and laid his traps so close sometimes that others except the enemy were caught. But if he peered down into a pit some morning and found an honest farmer cursing at the bottom, or a beggar or a peddler, he always let him free, and he was forgiven when that one knew why the trap was made.

  He went on with this work, but these days he carried in him a sulky heart, and he told no one why it was. The truth was that he felt himself neglected and overlooked and forgotten in all this matter of his youngest brother. He felt that it ought not to be that his younger brother had a wife before he did, and that his father and his mother had put aside their duty to him.

  When his second brother came and told their younger brother what the woman had said, that one made great noise to get himself ready to go to the free land. From among his men all who wanted to go with him were to go, and every man who had not his family too heavy on him was eager for it. Him, too, his brother had called and he had been very lordly and he said:

  “Do you want to go with me, my brother, to the free land? If you do, you may tell my parents I said you were to go, and I will see that nothing but good comes to you.”

  Now Lao Ta did not at all like this way of speaking. Lao San had not called him elder brother as he should, and how could he go beneath one younger than he? He wanted nothing to do with that woman or with what his brother did.

  “Since what I do best is to lay my traps,” he said, “what good can I be there, where there is no enemy?”

  His younger brother pulled down his eyebrows at him. “Do you tell me I go because there is no enemy there?” he asked in ready anger.

  Lao Ta made a meager smile. “I hear you go because a woman is there,” he said. “Whether she is an enemy or not, I cannot tell.”

  “Would she go to the free land if she were?” Lao San asked him angrily.

  Now Lao Er had told him of the token of the flag, though Ling Tan would not let him bring it here lest the enemy find it on his person, should he by chance be stopped, as any might be. But even to hear of it was to Lao San proof of her he loved.

  “How do I know anything about her?” Lao Ta answered. “I am a stupid man.”

  Thus he refused his brother and he went away before Lao San could speak again and back to his work. But his anger smoldered in him and he did not go to his father’s house for many weeks, and then he was angry because no one sent word to ask why he did not come.

  “Who cares whether I live or die?” he thought. It seemed to him that the good part of his life was over, and he thought of his little dead children and of Orchid and what a wife she had been to him, always ready and warm and kind, and how lonely he was without such a woman any more.

  Thus brooding, he grew longing and ready for a change and yet where could he find a woman to take Orchid’s place?

  “Be sure I will not ask my mother or my father to help me,” he thought. “If they do not care for me enough to do their duty to me, shall I beseech them and shame myself?”

  But he knew he was ready to begin a life for himself and he wanted a wife and children again, and so without knowing he searched, he did search. But where was there a woman for him in that countryside? There were no women except old or sick, or those who had been fouled by the enemy, and he would not have a courtesan.

  Yet one day he happened to find a woman. She was such a woman as once he would not have dreamed of thinking fit for him, but when a man grows as ready as he was now, any woman seems fit, if she is clean and whole. This was how he found her. He had chanced to lay a trap on a new road where he had not put one before and he had dug it deep and had put boards across strong enough to hold stones, and yet so cleverly that one board leaned upon another and the least weight would pull them all down. This he did because he had heard that the enemy was sending tax gatherers into that region within a day or two. When he had finished the trap, as he always did he went and warned the people who lived near that road not to use it until the enemy had passed by, and they thanked him.

  When he opened that trap the next day to see what lay in it, he found a sobbing woman. She had been there all night, and since none came by, none had heard her crying for help. He peered down in the pale dawn light and he saw she was no enemy.

  “I will bring you up,” he said, and he leaped down into the pit to help her up. Then he saw that though she was a woman no longer young, she had a soft pouting face and a childish mouth, and her eyes were red with weeping.

  “I am so frightened that half my breath is gone,” she wailed.

  “It was an evil chance that led you this way,” he said. “How could I know?”

  He helped her as he spoke and pushing and pulling he got her up and on her feet, and she thanked him and put her clothes right. Then she said, wiping her face with the end of her blue cotton coat:

  “Can you tell me where I am? I am a stranger, and my man was killed by the enemy and he told me I was to find his village if he died and his father and mother, and see if they would care for me.”

  Then she named a village of which he had never heard.

  “I think you are far wrong,” he said. “I never knew that village.”

  At that she began to weep again and she said, “How can I go on? I have spent my money and now what can I do? I hear that the enemy is very evil to women, and what if I fall into their hands?” Then she looked piteously at him and she said, “You are an honest good man, and I see it in your face.”

  At this he thought to himself, “Are not all women alike? Certainly this woman looks soft and kind. She is a widow, but is that her fault?”

  And to her he said, “Have you had anything to eat?” When she said she had not he took her to the nearest inn, only stopping to lay his trap again, and there he bought some food for her and while she ate he sat thinking. He did not sit with her, for that would have been beneath him and discourtesy to her, but he watched her from the ends of his eyes, as he sat himself elsewhere and he thought, “Has not Heaven sent her? She fell into my trap.”

  When she had finished eating, therefore, he told her to follow him. Then with much mustering of his courage, and he could not have done it had she not been so piteous and so anxious to please him for his kindness, he said to her:

  “My own father’s house is not far from here, and a day’s walking will bring us to it and my mother is a good woman, so let me take you there.”

  This he said to test her to see whether she would be willing. And why would she not be willing, who had no roof to creep under and no man to feed her? She said with great thankfulness:

  “How can I refuse one into whose hand Heaven has put me?”

  So without a word more he walked ahead of her toward his father’s house and she followed behind him, carrying her bundle of goods tied into a coarse blue cloth.

  For many miles he said nothing to her, and when he did not speak she did not, but he heard her footsteps behind him in the dust. And as he went he thought, “If it is well, I will speak again before I reach my mother’s. I must give a reason for bringing home a woman.”

&nbs
p; So when they were within sight of the village, he gathered all his courage together again and he turned and said to that woman, though his mouth went dry so to speak for himself:

  “I have lost my wife and my two children. You have lost your husband. Are we not two parts? If we come together would we not be a whole?”

  By the time the woman was so weary and so anxious to find a home for herself that she could scarcely have refused any man and so she said, “If you will have me!”

  Lao Ta nodded and without more talk he went on, and so they came to his father’s house.

  Now there could scarcely have been a worse moment for them to come than the one they had chanced upon. For early that morning Jade’s child had begun to come, and her labor had gone through the whole day and the child for some reason clung to the womb and would not come out. Ling Sao was beside herself, and Lao Er was frantic, and all the women of the village had gathered there each to tell what she would do. All had been done and still the child would not be born, and Jade’s courage was beginning to fail.

  “This child is too big—” she whispered, and in her own heart she began to doubt whether or not she could bring it to birth.

  So when at this moment Ling Sao beheld her eldest son come in with a strange woman, she had no time for what he wanted to say. Her temper was at its worst with what she had been through and the evil outlook ahead, yet the eldest son, being too simple to think of any except himself, blurted out as soon as he saw his mother:

  “Mother, this woman is your new daughter-in-law.”

  “Do not speak of daughters-in-law to me,” she cried. “I have eaten nothing but bitterness with them. Here is this Jade who cannot bear her child, and now what shall we do? There is nothing but bitterness in children and children’s children, and I am never to have any peace.”

  Now this new woman had lived long enough to know what was best for herself, and the moment she came to the village she had liked it. Then she saw that this was a good farm and a fair farmhouse, and at her age how could she look for anything better? Her luck had put her in that trap and she must make the most of it, and thank the times for giving her a chance for a man as strong as this one, though he was ten years younger than she, at least. Well, then, she must try the more for him. So, weary as she was, she put down her bundle and smoothed back her hair, and she said in a soft and pleasant voice: