“Doubtless that I shall be told another day,” the cousin said, and he went on, rolling his eyes and making his voice a big whisper. “As for the news from across the seas, it is also good and bad. Still we have no clear aid and our friends are still not our friends. They send us money for food and medicines for our wounds, but to the enemy they send oil and fuel for the flying ships which destroy us. In the west the western enemy destroys also the great cities of the Ying country. Night after night the Ying country people must hide in the earth and their palaces are destroyed over their heads and the dead mount up to the sky.”
All listened and wondered where this old man learned such things and yet they took it as truth and they waited for what was next to come. Then the old man coughed and he said, “The most evil news I have kept until now. There is to be set up here in this very city a puppet who will rule for the enemy but in the name of our own people, and we are all to obey him, and to pretend that he is our choice. Who is he? He is that Three Drops of Water King. Has he the spirit to defend us? He weeps easily, but the day will come when all the pebbles from western mountains cannot fill the seas of his regret.”
At this a great mutter rose from those who listened. The old cousin nodded and said, “A very great evil, and tomorrow at this same hour I shall have more to tell you.”
When he had thus told all he knew the old cousin took a small bowl out of his bosom and he rose and set the bowl on the chair and he stood with his back to it and them, to avoid shame, and those listening knew that it was time for them to go out and let others take their place and so each man went forward and put a few pennies in the bowl or what he was able, and so did Ling Tan for himself and his son.
Then they went out and home, and Ling Tan could not marvel enough at what he had seen and heard and he laughed at his cousin and cursed him, too, for an old rascal.
“How he stopped like a story teller at the point to make men want more and come back tomorrow!” he said. “Still, he looked happier than ever I saw him, and let him be. We will tell no one what we know. Heaven uses the useless.”
Thus having put aside the matter of his old cousin, Ling Tan fell to thinking of what he had heard told, how in this city there was to be set up a puppet, a man well-known among their own people. His gorge rose at that weak and handsome man who had so betrayed his nation, and for a long time he did not speak. Was it betrayal or had the man a trick in his mind?
“Who knows the heart of any man now?” Ling Tan thought.
All around them as they walked was the wide good countryside, the land still good though many villages were ruined and many were blackened with fire. The people were scattered, so that where once this road would have been busy with farmers going to sell in the city, with donkeys carrying bags of rice crossed upon their back, and peddlers coming from the city to sell in the villages, and people riding on wheelbarrows, now there were almost none. A rare sight now was a farmer with full baskets of food. But the land was here and what it had done once could be done again, if the land too were not betrayed. He looked down at the brown dust of the road where his sandalled feet went and he said to his son:
“We who are on the land, we must not betray it. Let those above betray us, if they are so evil, but let us not betray the land.”
His son did not know out of what thoughts his father spoke but he could see they were grave, and so he said heartily, “Be sure we will not.”
… The next morning when the cousin’s wife came to inquire Ling Tan told her a lie and made his face calm and stern while he told it.
“Woman,” he said, “what you feared is true. Your man is dead and you will never see him again, and you must count yourself a widow.”
With that she fell into loud weeping.
“How did he die?” she screamed, “and where are his pieces?”
“Do not ask me,” Ling Tan said, “for I will never tell you. As for his body, there is no way to find it.”
She was silenced and for the first time in her life he saw her overcome with true misery and fear. After a while she went home to mourn and to consider her plight, for what is more evil for a woman than to be alone and have no man in her house? She feared lest Ling Tan knew she had been ears and eyes for Wu Lien, and feared the more because he did not tell her if he knew, and now her life was in the palm of his hand. At the end of two days she was humbled to the core of her heart and she went to him and made herself low before him and said:
“I have now no one in this world but you, and I can only look to you.”
Then he replied to her coldly, “Be sure I shall always see that you are fed so long as I have food.”
And Ling Tan and his son kept their secret, and Ling Tan did not tell even his wife. The burden of the extra woman he took and counted it one more thing that he did against the enemy because it left his third cousin free.
But Lao Er told Jade everything, and he told her this, too, and without fear, because he and Jade were one, and he trusted her as he trusted himself. It was like Jade to laugh at the old cousin but to be very grave at the news of the puppet. She was silent a long time when she heard this most evil news, and she said, “Such men as this puppet are our worst and our true enemies, for they have betrayed themselves and us in them. The enemy from outside is a disease but the puppets are our own weakness, and how shall we fight the disease if we are weak?”
“Those of us who are strong must only be more strong,” Lao Er said.
At this she lifted her head.
“You have said a true thing,” she told him, and from that day on these two were yet more steadfast against the enemy.
XV
WHETHER OR NOT THE hillmen and young and old men everywhere could have held firm against the enemy year in and year out, who can tell? But certainly it was true that now they were determined to hold and never to yield when they knew that their war was fought elsewhere in the world. They could wage no great battles and what they did mounted small enough if one compared the enemy killed to the enemy left alive. Yet what they did was not small, for day by day they were learning to live in resistance to the enemy, and this is a greater thing than to the in resistance.
But Ling Tan’s soul was often wearied with the difficulty of his days and with the steady evil force of the enemy who abated nothing of their greed and their oppression. It was the oppression of evil little men who work for themselves, and because they have a petty power they wield it to make themselves as rich as they can. Thus again when the harvest came this year Ling Tan had to sell his rice at the enemy’s fixed price, and again the enemy sold it elsewhere at great profit. Again Ling Tan had to eat meat secretly and twice his pig was discovered, once most unluckily when his sow had just farrowed and all were taken and Ling Tan dared not lift his voice and say they were his to the petty men who took them. He had doggedly to find another pig and again to try for his own meat. And there were many taxes, taxes on the land and on opium, on seed and on harvest, and on all that was sold, so that Ling Tan looked back on his old taxes with wonder that he ever complained of what had been in those days. Added to all the oppression was the gnawing constant anger that these were foreigners who oppressed him and his land and they were men who had no right to be here. It seemed to him that even the bandits were less hateful than the devils, only because they were not foreigners.
For besides all else, there were those wild-hearted men who cared only for themselves and still robbed and pillaged where they could, staying far from the enemy, and yet coming down by night upon any man rumored to have more than another, however little, so that honest men had to hide what they had not only from the enemy but from the evil of their own kind.
In the midst of this Jade went on with bearing her second child and Lao Er went on with his work between city and hill. He took his life in his hands often, but such danger must be, and day after day that autumn Jade bade him farewell in the night and each knew that this might be the time when they parted never to meet, and yet neither said so.
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“Care for yourself first,” she always told him.
“I will,” he always promised her, and yet they both knew that he could not. Had he cared for himself first he would not have done the work he did.
Now what Lao Er did was to come and go between the guerrillas in and about the city who were farmers by day and those men in the hills, so that upon a plan they could meet and strike together. And he was no common courier, for to each he brought news and all depended upon him. He was clever in passing through the enemy, sometimes a vendor, sometimes a beggar, sometimes an old man, but never himself and all these disguises Jade devised for him at home. When he was in the hills he often met with his two brothers, and between them and the ones at home he was a messenger, too, and more than a messenger because he kept them patient with each other.
For there had come a rift between Ling Tan and his two sons in the hills, ever since he had made up his mind that he would not kill another man as long as he lived, even an enemy.
“What would it be if all of us made such a rule for ourselves?” the youngest son asked angrily when Lao Er told him this. “Shall we allow the enemy to kill us and we not kill them? My father is growing too old for the good of all.”
This youngest son now wore a uniform such as soldiers wear and his mind was altogether on war and death. He still could not read a letter and for him books were evil and learning was evil and all was evil except the simple force in his right arm when it lifted a sword or shot a gun. He lived in these days in a temple in the hills, which he had made into a fortress, and with two hundred and fifty young men under him, he went out from there again and again to strike small garrisons of enemies and little companies sent out to sortie and to search for food. He had a circle of spies through that country so closely woven that he knew within an hour when an enemy band was within striking distance of him, and nothing would stay him when he knew.
Every look of the slender boy whom once the enemy had ravaged had now gone from him. He had grown still taller than he was then and his body had put on flesh and bone and muscle and his skin was golden, and his eyes were like a tiger’s, always restless and always fierce, and that he had not twenty wives was not his fault. Those women whom he and his men sometimes rescued and women who wanted him to stay and eat and rest in their houses and any woman with her womanhood yet alive in her could not let him pass her without making some sort of sign to him. The virtuous women did not know they did this, but still they did, and women who had no virtue were shameless and knew what they did.
What this young man had suffered had delayed his natural manhood, but still he was a man, and in this nineteenth year of his age he now felt returning to his blood his natural desires.
But by now so many women had invited him that he was scornful of them all, and though he learned to sleep here and there with a woman, he had never seen one whom he considered worthy of him. In his own mind he had a faint picture of what this one would be and he wanted someone who was more than a mere bedfellow.
Yet where was such a woman to be found?
There were days when his need for this woman grew keen, and then he let his temper out here and there and his men feared him greatly and nothing assuaged him unless by chance there happened to be an attack that day on the enemy. Only if he could be lucky and could himself kill some of the enemy, was he good humored again for awhile. But this could not always happen and there were whole days and many days when no such chance came, and then his temper was very hard to bear.
One day toward the end of the eleventh month of that year when Lao Er came to make his usual journey to the hills to bring news that he had heard from outside, his younger brother’s aide asked him to step aside into a room in that temple. It was a room where few came now, because it belonged to Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, whom only women worship, and now there were no women who came to this temple. Lao Er went with the man and there beneath that high goddess, the man told the trouble they suffered from their captain’s temper.
“I would not mind it for myself,” the man said, “for I know now that his heart is not evil, but only his temper, and I have learned how to jump to save myself. When he lifts his foot I jump high, when he lifts his hand to pick up a stone or his sword, I stoop low.”
“Is my brother as evil-tempered as this?” Lao Er asked.
“On days,” the man said patiently, “and we forgive it, for what he needs, sir, is a woman of his own. Therefore I was chosen by lot from these two hundred and fifty men to beg your father to find this son a good wife somewhere who will calm him and make him a whole man, and so we will all be better.”
Lao Er could scarcely keep his face from laughter, but he promised the man he would do this. Then he said:
“But I have no thought of what sort of wife my brother needs.”
The man looked grave at this. “It is no easy task to choose a wife for such a man as he,” he said. “She must be strong in body, for he is strong, and she must have a temper able to bear his temper, and yet it must not be like his. When he is hot she must be cool, and when he is dark she must be light, and when he is wilful she must be full of reason.”
“There are few women as wise as that,” Lao Er said, and he thought of Jade, and even Jade was not so wise.
“I know it,” the man said sadly.
They stood silent a moment, each thinking of the difficulties, and then the man said, “Here is a strange thing, but that captain of mine comes here often and stares at this goddess and frowns at her.”
“Does he?” Lao Er asked.
“We have seen him,” the man said, “and it is what put it into our minds first that he wants a wife.”
“Well, I will speak to my father,” Lao Er said, “and I will tell him all you have told me, and then we will see what the future brings.”
The man bowed and went away and Lao Er was alone. He went up to that goddess and looked at her closely for the first time in his life. He had never been a worshipper in temples, and his father was not, for men left such things to women. But Ling Sao had always been too busy to go more than once a year and she had not had the need that some women have because she had sons enough. So Lao Er had never been taken to the temple often as a child and even when he did go with his mother, she had not worshipped the goddess who gives sons to women since she was fertile, but she had worshipped the god who gives riches and fertility to the land.
Now he stood alone in front of this goddess. Her little feet were upon the coils of a gilded dragon and she was shaped in such smooth grace from clay and gilt and paint that as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had a sort of life because she was so beautiful. Somehow that ancient idol-maker, being a man, had put into this goddess the thing that makes a woman female to a man. Though he had made a goddess, he had secretly and with great cunning made a woman too, and it could be seen in the tender curve of her proud lips, and in the corners of her long knowing eyes, and in the fullness of her limbs hidden beneath her robes and yet not hidden, and in her bosom covered and yet plain. The more Lao Er looked at the goddess, the more he felt the woman.
At this moment who should come in but his own youngest brother, and he said very peevishly, “I have looked for you everywhere and only chanced to hear from my aide that you are here. What are you doing?”
Lao Er pointed with his chin to the goddess. “I never saw her close before,” he said.
“Clay,” his brother said, “clay and paint, like any other woman,” and in his youth he looked very scornfully at the goddess.
“There is something more than that here,” Lao Er said cunningly to draw his brother further. “The man who made this goddess loved her.”
His brother came before the goddess then and frowned up at her.
“There are no such women,” he said at last.
“Have you seen all the women there are?” Lao Er asked with a small smile.
“I have never seen one like this,” his brother said.
“Were there one, wou
ld you want her for your wife?” Lao Er said laughing. “Come, I will make a bargain with you—if such a woman comes will you take her to be your wife?”
As he spoke he turned to look at his brother and there he surprised upon his brother’s face so moved a look, all mixed with a struggle for anger and scorn, that he roared his laughter.
“I want no wife,” Lao San said. “What would I do with her when I go out to fight?”
“Leave her at home where she belongs,” Lao Er said.
“Yes, and have her cry and whine and beg me not to go!”
“This goddess would not cry and whine,” Lao Er said looking at her again.
“I do not like a joke,” Lao San said angrily.
“Wait and see if it is a joke,” his elder brother said.
Then he knew that he had said enough, so he drew his brother away from the room and they talked no more except of war.
But the next night when he was in his home again, he told his father what the man had said about his younger brother. Ling Sao and Jade were there and they all heard, and the father said:
“Though you made a joke of it, nevertheless there is something here that is very grave.” And he told them how he had been troubled because his youngest son had learned to love war and killing and how such men would not allow peace to come in the world anywhere, and from them war always sprang as fire will spring from secret tinder. “So troubled have I been,” he said, looking around on them all, “that I have told myself I would not grieve on the day when one came to tell me that my third son is dead, for such men must all die in the same way they have made others die.” He paused and went on. “And I have seen these men like my son, and they are always evil with women and they do not make good husbands and they are not good fathers.” He paused again, and then went on again. “And yet this man is my son and I do not forget it.”
“But where can we find a woman like Kwan-yin who is a goddess?” Ling Sao said. This youngest son of hers was now so far away from all she knew and understood, that she could not be surprised and she was only dismayed. “I never saw a woman who was like a goddess,” she said.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 30
