Scarcely had they made themselves secure when the gate groaned and gave and he heard the noise of angry men surge into his court and then into the room above which he hid, but he could see nothing nor did he dare to move. Ling Sao clung to him and he to her, drawing their breaths only enough to live, and he prayed his forefathers to help him so that they would not cough or sneeze in the heavy dust. Lucky it was that the straw after all these years made a heavy mat woven together with cobwebs and with damp so that it held around them and the beam was beneath and yet they must not move lest dust or straw float down and tell where they were.
But it was only a moment that the men were in the room below, for when they saw it empty they howled and ran from one room to another of the eight rooms and the kitchen and Ling Tan and his wife heard their good dishes thrown down and broken and they heard their furniture broken and smashed, and they only trembled lest the house be set on fire and they burned with it.
They waited for this to happen next and Ling Tan planned how he would jump and pull his wife after him. But instead of the roar of flames they heard something else. It was a scream, which at first they thought was one of the two pigs, for it sounded like a pig stuck for butchering. Then they heard a word or two and a gurgle and a long moan, and they knew what it was. The enemy had found Wu Lien’s old mother under the vines. Ling Tan moved to go down to her when he knew what it was, but his wife had her arms about him like a strong iron band.
“No,” she said in the smallest whisper. “No! She is dead. You must remember us all. She was old. There are the young to think of.”
And she held him and he knew she was right and he stayed.
So at last the wild enemy went away, but long after there was silence Ling Tan and his wife did not dare to move or to speak. They waited until their limbs were aching more than they could bear and until their lungs were choked and they must cough and spit out the dust, and their bodies were streaming with sweat, though it was a winter’s day.
Then at last he whispered in her ear,
“I will go down because some of the children may come back and think us dead.”
For herself she would not have allowed him to move but when he spoke of the children she let him, and she followed him, and down they crept again into what had been their good and ordered home.
It was ordered no more. They stood at last on the tiled floor of the main room and looked about them. There was nothing left whole, scarcely a chair and not the table even which now fell beneath their weight, nor the bamboo couch that the third son slept on, and they went from room to room, their two hands clasped together, and without one word of speech between them they saw the ruin of the house. When they had seen all, Ling Tan said:
“They have taken nothing but the rice. You see they wanted nothing we had and so in wantonness they broke to pieces what they did not want.”
This the enemy had done, and they had torn garments and slashed the quilts on the beds and why they had not set fire to everything Ling Tan could not think except that in their wantonness they wished him to see ruins instead of only ashes.
“Oh, my good red pigskin boxes that I brought here as a bride!” Ling Sao moaned when she went into their sleeping room and saw them slashed and burst open. And among all the disorders of their ruined garments and burst boxes they saw a torn snarl of human hair and Ling Tan stooped.
“What is this?” he asked.
Then Ling Sao picked it up to see. “It is Jade’s hair she cut off from her head that day,” she said.
“Lucky it is not on her head now,” Ling Tan groaned.
And yet they knew that worse than this was waiting them at the small back gate and so slowly they went toward it, dreading what their eyes must see,
“But we must be the first to see it,” Ling Tan whispered. “We must not let any of the children come in first.”
They crept through the ruined kitchen and out of the door and so to the small back court. There at their feet the old woman lay dead. It would have been enough had she been dead. But she was worse than dead. She was naked, and so wounded that they could see in a moment that in their fury those wild men had used her as they might have used a woman young and beautiful.
Now Ling Tan groaned for if this could happen to an aged soul, heavy with her years and half dazed in her wits, what of the young women in his house and what even of his own wife? He turned to Ling Sao, the blood all gone out of his face.
“The first thing I must think of is where to keep all of you who are women,” he said. “Myself I can hide and the men can scatter themselves, but if the enemy is like this, what is to become of women?”
For once she could answer nothing, for she saw too that what had happened here might more easily have happened to her, and she could not speak a word to help him. She turned her eyes away in shame even before her own husband and she bent and picked up the garments the old woman had worn and put them over her nakedness. They could not lift her, the two of them, for the old dead one was too heavy, and three or four strong men would have to work together, and all they could do was to leave her where she was. And Ling Tan stepped beyond her and opened the gate a little and looked out. There was no one to be seen, and the sun shone down that day on the land as fair as it had ever done and he cursed Heaven in his heart that it could be so merciless. Then he told Ling Sao to come with him away from this old woman.
All the rest of the day they sat alone in their ruined house and they did not think of food or fire. They sat listening and waiting for the night when surely one of their sons would come back to tell them how the others were. Those in the village had fared as ill as they, they knew, but they dared not go and see. It was a time when each man ought to stay in his own house.
So night came on at last, at the end of this longest day that they had ever spent, and in the night the eldest and the youngest sons came creeping home. Sitting in darkness he heard the faint sound of their footsteps and then a noise of someone caught on a piece of furniture and then Ling Tan heard his eldest son’s voice whisper:
“They are gone!”
“No, we are not,” he said out of the darkness, and then he put out his hand and touched his son, and they found each other, still in darkness, for none dared to light the lamp.
“Where are the little children?” Ling Sao asked first, for all day long she had been thinking of those little grandchildren tortured perhaps and made playthings by such cruel men.
“All are in the city,” the eldest son whispered and Ling Tan groaned out “In the city!” For it seemed to him the worst of all things that they should be there. But his son hastened to tell him how it came about.
“We took a long circle around the city,” he said, “and we came to the little water gate, and there the people told us that though the city was full of death and grief, yet there was one safe place for women and for children. And, oh my father, by then we had heard enough to know that this enemy is worst of all against women, and we dared not bring ours back here, for what can our bare hands do to save them? This only safe place is inside the water gate, and there inside that gate you know the land is empty and quiet and they told us the enemy had not come to that place seeing there was nothing to be taken, so we waited until darkness came, hiding in groves and behind houses all day and fleeing if we saw an enemy come near, and then at darkness they opened the water gate and we crept through and we took our women and children to the place of safety. It is a foreign school, father, and there is a foreign woman there. I saw her close and she had a good face though she eats the foreign religion and not ours. But there is a high wall around the school and a great gate and when we knocked on it, the gate opened and the white woman looked out of it and when she saw our wives and little children, she opened the gate wide and took them in.”
“Why did you not stay there, too?” Ling Tan asked.
“They have only room for women and children,” his son replied.
“Are they truly safe there?”
“
As safe as anywhere can be when devils are let loose,” his son said sadly.
Now Ling Tan made up his mind what he must do.
“I have a command to put upon you,” he told his sons. “If women are safe there, you must take your mother thither, too, now while the night is still dark.”
The two young men looked at their mother wondering and she hung her head before them, ashamed because they were men and she a woman, and for the first time in all their years she could not say, “I fear no man,” and so she was silent.
“But—but she—” the eldest stammered.
And their father told them what had happened to the old woman and listening they answered not a word, until he had finished. Then the eldest said:
“Come, mother, I will take you and my third brother can stay here with my father. When you are safe I will come home and the three of us will keep together somehow and we can if we know you all are safe.”
So the two young men turned their heads away while their parents parted. Never in their lives since Ling Sao came to this house when she was eighteen had she and her husband slept a single night away one from the other, and so how could they do it now? When their sons’ backs were turned, they clung to each other as they would not have dreamed of doing in any presence in other days and she moaned, “Must I leave you?”
“Yes,” he said, “and for a reason I would not have thought could be at your age, mother of my sons.”
Wars he had seen and lustful soldiers among his own people, and yet never had he seen one who would have touched a woman of her years and place. That the enemy could do this told him more than anything that they were savages and wild men, beasts and animals. He held his wife’s hand one moment more, and then he stepped back and called his eldest son.
“Take her, and do not let a harm befall her.”
“I will not,” his son said.
And so Ling Tan sent out of his house his own wife, and when she was gone he sat all night, not sleeping, but waiting until his son came back again. He wished a score of times that night that he had gone with his son; and yet what use would it have been? Two were better than three and he could not have left the third son alone, and four would have stepped twice as heavily as two.
“Find yourself a place to sleep,” he told his third son, and the boy was still so young that he could clear a place upon the floor and sleep for weariness, and in spite of sorrow.
But Ling Tan could not. He sat in the ruin of his house and waited, and after a long time his eldest son came back safe and not having met the enemy.
“I put my mother into the gate myself,” he said, “and the white woman took her in and said she would be safe if any can be safe.”
Ling Tan sighed and did not answer. Now that his wife was safe, it seemed to him he was too tired to speak or move or sleep. But his eldest son dropped down where he was and slept a while, and Ling Tan sat on by his sleeping sons and did not know what time of night it was until he heard a cock crow.
“Does a cock still crow?” he thought and wondered that it could, and he sat on until the dawn broke and he saw the pale light fall upon his sons, sleeping in the ruins of his house.
VII
IN THE DIMNESS OF that night Ling Sao looked at the white woman. The gate had shut behind her and her son was gone. She was now locked in this strange place, with this strange woman. The woman had hair as yellow as cat’s fur, and it did not lie smooth about her head as hair does, but it stood out like lamb’s wool. The eyes in this white face were pale yellow, too, or so they looked in the light from the lantern that the woman held.
“Come with me and I will show you where your daughters are,” the woman said, and Ling Sao was frightened that she could understand a foreigner.
“Is there magic put on me here that I can understand you?” she said.
The white woman laughed a small laugh. “I have spent twenty years in this city,” she said, “and I study every day to speak your language, so that I may tell you of the one true religion, and is it strange that you understand me?”
She led Ling Sao along a narrow brick wall, and on both sides of the walk grass grew, and in the near distance were great trees hanging down their branches. Never had Ling Sao been in such a place as this. Then they came to a great house and into this house the woman led Ling Sao, and into a hall which, though long and wide, was full of people. A low light burned in the ceiling and she could see upon the floor many people lying on pallets.
“Women and children,” the white woman said, “and your daughters and their children are there in that corner.”
She picked her way between the sleepers and in a corner near a high table Ling Sao found Orchid and her two daughters and all their children. The children did not waken and at first Orchid too did not, but Pansiao was lying awake and sobbing, and when she saw her mother she sat up and put out both her hands and her face was all twisted as a child’s is when it sees its mother.
“M-ma, have you come?” she whispered.
“Yes, I am here, my meat dumpling,” Ling Sao said, and she sat down on the floor beside the young girl. Not since she was a small child had the girl heard herself so called, and it was the most comforting word Ling Sao could have spoken.
“And where is my father?” she whispered, her hand holding to her mother’s.
“He is at home and so are your two brothers,” Ling Sao whispered back. “Are you all unharmed here?”
“We are thus far,” the girl replied, “but I could not eat I was so frightened and now I am faint.”
“Lie down, then,” Ling Sao said. “In the morning I will find you food.”
“Oh, they feed us here,” the girl replied, but she lay down, and now the elder daughter lifted up her head.
“Where is my husband’s mother, M-ma?” she asked. “Did she not come with you?”
Now it is right for a wife to ask first after her husband’s mother because she belongs to her husband’s house, and after her marriage his mother must be more to her than her own, and Ling Sao knew the question was a proper one, and yet she wished for once her daughter had not done her duty, for how could she tell her what had happened to that poor witless old soul? She made up her mind to a good lie, and she said:
“She is so old she is safe at home.” And then she asked, “Where is your children’s father, child?”
“He led us here,” her daughter replied, “and then he said he was going back to the shop. He said he was not afraid now that the city was fallen, for the next thing must be peace and he would leave us here until he saw what the pattern of the city was to be and how the outlook, and then he would take us home.”
This whispering had begun to waken those who slept near and one woman after another sat up to see who the newcomer was and if she had any news. Now the woman who slept next to the elder daughter was a woman young and so exceedingly beautiful that Ling Sao did not like her looks the moment she put her eyes to her. No woman, she thought within herself, could look like this one and be a faithful wife and a good mother and all that a woman should be, and so to try her she said:
“Do we wake your child, good soul?”
“I have no child,” the beautiful young woman said quietly.
“Are you here alone?” Ling Sao asked, to try her again.
“I am here with six others like me,” the beautiful woman said.
By this Ling Sao knew that she was a courtesan and being herself a good woman she would speak to her no more and she stretched herself between that one and her own daughters, so that if there were any evil disease anywhere it must go over her before it reached her daughters and her grandchildren.
But at her side the beautiful woman still did not lie down.
“Good mother,” she said, and Ling Sao wondered that she had so sweet a voice, “since you came in here after us, will you tell me how the city now is?”
“I did not come through the city,” Ling Sao said shortly.
“Did you not?” the other said. “Are
you from the country, good mother?”
“Yes,” Ling Sao said again and more shortly still.
“Oh,” the sweet voice sighed. “Then you do not know what we have had in the city this day,” and she bent her head upon her knees. “Oh, this day!” she sighed.
But before Ling Sao had time to ask her what she meant Orchid woke and saw Ling Sao and sat up, dazed with sleep.
“Are you here too, my mother?” she cried. “How did you come here and who takes care of the house, and what happened there after we left?”
She said this so loudly that others cried out to her to be quiet and little children woke and wept, and Ling Sao to show that she took the part of the public against her own silly daughter-in-law, shouted out more loudly still:
“Heaven look down on me that I have such an unmannerly wife for my eldest son, that she calls out in the middle of the night when she sees me and puts all of you to such trouble! Do not open your mouth again, silly child!”
So Orchid lay down again and after that there was some silence and all tried to get a little sleep after the sorrows of the day.
But Ling Sao had slept in only two beds in her life, the little narrow one where she slept in her father’s house as a girl, and after that the wide bed where she slept with her husband, and she could not sleep now with a stranger on one side of her, and her own daughter breathing into her ear on the other, and from all over the great hall the sound of sighing sleepers and some who snored and some who moaned, and so she lay awake thinking of the day which had ended like this, and who knew how many more there must be like it before she could go home again, and what was her old man doing there without her? Many times in that midnight she thought that when dawn came she would dirty her face and tear her garments and make herself old and ugly and go home again, and yet when dawn came she could not do it, because whatever she did to herself, she could not be more old or ugly than Wu Sao had been.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 14
