“How can you go into the city alone?” he asked.
Ling Sao tossed her head at this. “Do I fear any man?” she asked.
So she ate her food and called out to her daughter and her sons’ wives what they should do while she was gone. “Orchid, you must tie your smallest son to your back and get your hands free for once and you must prepare the food, and, Jade, you shall keep the fire going for her so that the smoke will not harm my grandson’s eyes, and as for Pansiao she must weave as she ever does, except that if your father wants anything, child, then you must answer his call, for the other two have their own husbands, and as for you, my third son, if you want anything ask your sister. The tea must be kept hot in the basket, and do not put any food by for me, for I will eat myself full at my daughter’s house and enough to last me until tomorrow. She always buys some extra meats for me, or sends out and fetches in sweets and dumplings. I shall eat enough for two days.”
They all listened to her, and Ling Tan went into his room and brought out some money for her to spend, which she made much show of refusing.
“Why should I waste our good silver? Be sure I will not take it! Keep it to buy seeds with in the autumn. Besides, I want nothing. If you give me a gift I cannot say I want anything.”
But Ling Tan pushed it toward her laughing, and so in the end she took it as she had planned to do from the beginning and as he knew she would. If he had not given it, she would have asked for it, but since he had been so courteous, she felt she too must reply with courtesy.
So at last she was ready to go and they all came with her to the door to wish her a good day, and she set off with a few presents tied into a white handkerchief to give her daughter, six hens’ eggs and a handful of ripe peaches and some dried persimmons.
The sun was well up over the mountain when she set out at her usual steady walk, but not high enough in the sky to be hot. It would be hot, though, for there was not a cloud to be seen, and no wind rippled the water in the rice fields. But she was eager for the day, hot or no, because she was hearty enough to like a day now and then different from others, and she liked to go into her daughter’s house and see what was new, and to feel the two servants respectful before her because she was the mother of their mistress. That what they gave her was anything like what they showed the mother of her son-in-law was not of course to be expected, yet it was enough to make her know that she was not a common visitor.
She was still so early that every now and again she passed a neighbor carrying his vegetables or straw to the city markets and every now and again one shouted to her to ask her how she did and how her old man was and where she was going. To every one she answered cheerfully and asked him of some small thing she knew of in his household, and all this made the walk seem quick to the city. Nevertheless, the sun was very hot when she entered the deep shadows of the city gate and she was glad of the coolness, and she sat down on a melon vendor’s little stool and ate an early melon, though afterwards it made her a little sorry, too, for it lay green for a while in her. But she stopped again and drank some hot tea at a small shop to send it down, and when it was down she felt well again and so at last she came to her daughter’s door.
The shop was open and the two clerks there, but not all the cases were full nor was all the glass mended. She went about looking for what used to be there and she saw that much of it was gone. What was left were such cloth and small goods as could be bought in any little village shop. All the bright things, the strange foreign things, the lamps and lights and toys and straw hats and rubber shoes, the cups and bowls and dishes with flowers on them of a foreign color were gone. She knew then that the loss here had been very great and that her daughter’s husband had not dared yet to make it right, and he must fear trouble to come.
So with her full lips pursed together she went back of the shop and found all worse than she had feared. Her daughter’s husband sat slack in his chair, his flesh so fallen away that with the fat gone he looked as though his skin were a garment too big for him. Never had she seen such once-fat jowls hang down in such dewlaps, or a belly once full so overhang itself like a windless bag. He lay asleep when she came in and her daughter sat beside him fanning him. When she saw her mother she made a sign for silence and dared not give over fanning.
Ling Sao bent to whisper in her daughter’s ear. “Is he ill that he looks so slack?”
“Ill with bad luck,” her daughter whispered back. “He cannot eat.”
Now Ling Sao knew very well that when a creature, man or woman or beast, cannot eat his food he is on his way toward the grave, and she was frightened at the thought of her daughter a widow so young, and so she stole into the house and without stopping to look at the children or to greet her son-in-law’s mother, she rolled up her sleeves and went into the kitchen and pushed aside the servant who stood at the stove.
“Mend the fire for me,” she told the woman with such will that the woman obeyed even without greeting. “Begin it small,” Ling Sao commanded her. “When I bid you, let it burn up quickly for the space of a hundred breaths. Then make it small again.”
Out of the eggs she had brought and with some bits of meat and onion she found in a bowl on the table she made a dish so fragrant with goodness that Wu Lien, waking a little to brush off a fly, smelled it and opened his eyes.
“What is that fine smell?” he asked.
“My mother has brought some new eggs from the country and she is cooking them,” his wife replied.
“I can eat them,” he said.
When his wife heard this she ran into the kitchen at the moment that Ling Sao was lifting the eggs into a bowl and she seized the bowl.
“He wants them,” she cried, and took up some chopsticks as she ran and she gave the bowl to Wu Lien.
Now Wu Lien had eaten nothing or as good as nothing since the day his shop was ruined, and because he was a man who filled himself full three times a day by habit, his hunger was gradually rising in him though he had not known it and thought himself as low as the first day. Here was this good food under his nostrils, eggs such as a city man does not know from birth to death, and he plunged in his two chopsticks and did not take the bowl from his face until it was empty. Ling Sao and her daughter stood watching him, and the two women’s eyes turned to look at each other in their pleasure and then back at him again. When he brought the bowl down empty they laughed, and then a great belch of wind came up out of him and they laughed again.
And Ling Sao cried, “I know why I felt I must come here today, and my old black hen who lays an egg once or twice a month laid an egg four days together and the yellow one two eggs, one day after another, and so the gods work their will. Now you are well.” She turned to her daughter, “Fetch him the hottest tea he can drink and he will be as good as the first day he was born.”
While her daughter did this she sat down and shouted for the youngest child to be brought to her, for Ling Sao was a woman who never felt herself whole unless she had a child on her knees or across her hip, and so while she held her daughter’s youngest child naked except for his wetting cloth in her hand under him, she watched Wu Lien drink his hot tea and his last wind came up and while this was going on she talked to him for his good.
“Whatever the ill, you ought not to stop your food or to let your flesh waste away,” she said. “You must remember that you have parents and sons and no man belongs to himself but to these before him and after him. If he lets himself be destroyed, or if he destroys himself, the proper relationships are broken off and the nation will fall.”
Wu Lien opened his eyes heavily at her. “Who knows but that the nation must fall anyway, old mother?” he said sadly.
Ling Sao looked at her daughter, not understanding such talk.
“That is all he thinks about,” the young woman said. “Over and over again he says the nation will fall.”
Ling Sao fanned herself briskly. “The nation is nothing except the people and we are the people,” she said. “You, Wu Lien, ought
not to consider that one day of ill luck can overthrow you. You must buy more goods and put in your foreign things again and call upon the city to protect you and so take heart.”
But Wu Lien only groaned. “I have bad news to tell,” he said, “I have saved it in myself for these three days—four days tomorrow, it will be.”
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 cha
nged 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.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 6
