“There are none, doubtless,” Jade said, “but if we can find the one he thinks is one, it will do as well.” She looked at her husband and laughed and he met her laughter with smiling eyes, but the mother would not laugh at such a serious thing as a wife for any of her sons.
“A woman of any kind is scarce enough now,” she said, “and I see no young woman hereabouts who has not been fouled by the enemy, and I know my son would not have one of those, however cheap she can be had.”
“He would not,” Ling Tan said sternly.
“Then we must find one somehow in the free land,” Jade said, and though they all saw this was a clever wish, how could they make it come about?
Now for many months and nearly a year they had heard nothing from Pansiao.
And Ling Sao fretted in herself because she could not go to her daughter or see to her marriage or bring her home. “It is very well for her to be safe now but what will be the end of it?” she said. “She cannot go on forever in caves learning to read and write. What of her betrothal and what of her woman’s life?”
“You must be content that in these times she is beyond the reach of the enemy,” Ling Tan told her when he found out why she was pettish and restless one day. “Do you forget Orchid?”
At that Ling Sao kept quiet and said no more, but she longed for her daughter and puzzled how to get her married safely though she was so far away. She planned how she could get a letter to someone there to see if a good marriage could not be made somehow for her daughter. If a woman were not married she had better die, for why should she live?
Now with her mind always running on marriage for her children, because this she knew was her duty and she often thought that she could not end her own life in peace until it was done, Ling Sao suddenly thought of her younger daughter and she said:
“If we could write to Pansiao we could ask her to see what she can find for her brother there in the free lands. A school is full of virgins and she knows her brother, and what could be better than this? And it would do her good to think of marriage and to speak for her brother. It would set her mind on such things and make her more ready for her own time and we must arrange that too.”
At first they could only think of Pansiao as a small quiet creature sitting at the loom, and how could she do such a large thing as this? Besides, they did not know where to send such a letter. More than once Ling Sao had told her husband that he ought to go to that white woman and get the name of the school where Pansiao was and the name of the place. He always said he would go, but he had put it off in the many troubles he had, knowing the girl was safe, at least. Now Ling Sao turned on him and cried:
“I have said and said that you ought to go to that white woman and find out where she has put Pansiao. It is a sorry thing when I do not know where my own child is!”
“Do not heat yourself, old woman,” he told her, “I will go tomorrow.”
So he did, winding his way over the country to the old water gate and he went into the city and through the empty land about those high walls where the white woman lived. The gate was locked when he stood before it, and he beat upon it, and none came and he waited a long time, hearing nothing but the thickest silence. Then he took up a stone and beat without stop until the gate opened. There was that old gateman, but now very fearful and downcast, and he opened the gate only enough to let his own face through the crack.
“What do you want now?” he asked Ling Tan, for he knew him when he saw him.
“I must speak with the white woman,” Ling Tan said, and he felt in his girdle for a coin he had put there lest he need it.
But that gateman said, “Can money buy your way to her now? Have you not heard?”
“What?” Ling Tan asked.
“She is dead,” the gateman told him.
Ling Tan could only gape, and the gateman opened the gate further and came out, and he sat down on the high stone threshold. And he sighed and took off his felt cap and scratched his head and put his cap on again. “Yes, and she died of her own will,” he said sadly, “and it was I who found her. I went into the chapel to open the windows early one morning as I am paid to do on a worship day. There she was, dead before the altar. Oh, her blood! She had cut her wrists and the blood was flowing down the aisle. The stain is there forever. With all their washing it is still there.”
“But why—” Ling Tan faltered. “She was safe—she had food—”
The gateman wiped his eyes with the end of his coat. “Is it not enough? But not for her—she left a letter, they said. I cannot read. Besides, she wrote it in her own tongue and only our old virgin can read that. She wrote it to those in her home on the other side of the sea. She said, ‘I have failed.’ ”
“Failed!” Ling Tan said, not understanding. “Failed where?”
“Who knows her meaning?” the gateman replied sadly. “But so she wrote.”
Ling Tan stayed silent awhile, sitting on his heels to rest himself, and what he felt was half pity at the white woman’s end and half distress for himself, for now how would he find where his daughter was? So he told his distress to the gateman and that one said:
“I will fetch our old virgin, and she knows what I do not. Come in and ask her.”
So Ling Tan went inside the gate and waited while the gate-man went away. Soon there came out a thin, half-old woman with spectacles on her nose as though she were a scholar like a man. When she heard what Ling Tan wanted she said:
“That school is in the caves of a great mountain in free land, and all are safe and well, and another white woman is at their head. You need not worry.”
“Still, I would like to send my daughter a letter,” Ling Tan said. “Will you write down the name of that place?”
So the woman tore a white piece of paper from a book she had under her arm, and watching he marvelled that she could write as easily as though she were a man, and she gave the paper to him and went away again.
“Is there only this old virgin in this great place?” Ling Tan asked, folding the paper into his girdle.
“Only she, and a few women servants,” the gateman answered. “And it would make your eyes run tears if you knew how many years that white woman worked and spent herself to raise these houses and gather pupils from the provinces. I swear those pupils came here from all the directions under heaven. This was once a very famous school.”
“Here, too, is the work of the devils,” Ling Tan said looking at the wide wasted gardens and the hollow buildings, and went away.
When he was come home he told them what had happened and they all listened and Ling Sao was sorry that she had seemed less grateful to that white woman than she might have been.
“If I could have known that she would kill her own body I would have been better,” she said half sorrowfully. She sighed and took her earpick out of her knot of hair and scratched her ears a while, wishing she had been more kind. “Poor foreign heart,” she said at last, “I wonder why she came so far from home to do her good deeds? Now she cannot even be buried in her own earth.” And then she said, “It is not well when women study too much and do not marry. What can they be then but nuns? Let us write to Pansiao and hasten all our marriages.”
“Write to her,” Ling Tan said to Jade, “and tell her what the business is, and tell her what we want her to do, and that her mother and her father bid her do it.”
Then he said a thing which never in the old days could he have said, “And tell her that her brother needs someone like that goddess. A common woman will not do for him. Write it down according to your own mind, child, for you know such things well enough, what with all your reading and story-making and your disguises and what not. I often think you should have been one of these actresses that we used to see in the foreign pictures before the city fell.”
He went red as he so spoke, for it was not natural to any man to say so much to his son’s wife and on such a matter. Then he rose and with all his dignity he left the room, and behind his back Lao Er and Jade loo
ked at each other again with secret laughter. How these two loved each other in their laughter!
But Jade did write that letter out of all she was and knew, and she wrote it out of her own love for her husband, and she wrote it out of her knowledge of his young brother, and so she wrote, “And do not choose a fool only because she has a pretty face. Some day he might kill a woman like that out of anger at her witlessness. He has a quick right arm now. He does not dream any more. Kwan-yin is no fool.”
When she had finished she read it to her husband and he said to tease her: “Why, you have written so well that I am ready to love that goddess myself, and you should be jealous!”
She dropped her lids at that and fluttered them once or twice and then leaned over to him and put out her red tongue.
“There is no such woman,” she said pouting at him.
And he laughed again with pleasure in her.
XVI
IN HER OWN SMALL part of the cave Pansiao sat with her back to the others and read the letter which Jade had written. She read it easily and yet it was so new to her to be able to read that she still read with pride in what she did.
Two thousand miles away Jade had written the letter, and it had come here through the air and over the land and water, and carried by many hands, and the miracle was that there were those who did their duty thus in the midst of war and fires and flood. Here by the time the letter reached Pansiao it was winter again, and the caves were chill and the water stood in drops on the rocks and would have frozen had there not been a fire burning in the middle of the cave on the rocky floor. A hole through the rock roof led the smoke up, but the draught from the door when it was opened led the smoke often away from the hole, and there was the smell of smoke everywhere. But Pansiao did not notice this. In the kitchen of her home if the wind blew from the northwest as it often did in winter the smoke came back from the chimney. So it had done since the time of her ancestors, and knowing that Heaven sent the winds they had always borne the smoke.
She folded the letter slowly when she had read it and put each fold in its place. The paper was thin and fragile but all paper was hard now to come by and very precious and no one would have thought of throwing away paper. And how great was the duty this paper put upon her!
“How can I find a wife for my brother, and this brother among the others?” she thought.
For Pansiao of all her father’s family was able to separate one from the other and she knew better than her mother did the inward secret differences between them. In those long days when she had sat at her loom there had been little to put in her mind, and once the pattern she wove was clear, what else had she had to think about except that house which was all she knew? Therefore she had dwelled upon each of the family, and especially upon her brothers, for she had always sighed that she was a daughter instead of a son. From the moment she had been born even in Ling Tan’s house she had known that walls are close around a woman but the gate is open to a man. Yet here she was, made free by the chance of war, and the only one in her family to be living in free land, beyond the reach even of the flying ships of the enemy. Was there one among her fellows who would give up such freedom?
She put the letter in her bosom and she turned about. In the cave were twelve others who had their beds there with her. They were all there, for it was an hour when each could do as she liked, and some read and some talked and there was laughter and pleasure. But which one of these twelve could be a wife to that brother of hers? Some were pretty, some were plain; careless and careful, small and tall, there was not one whom she could see as her brother’s wife. Yet these were the ones she knew best, and if she could not choose among them how could she choose among the nearly hundred others whom she did not know except that she saw their faces when they learned their lessons together or when they ate together in the central cave? It was a very heavy task that her father had put upon her. A goddess! She had seen no goddess here.
A clangor rose through the rocks and they rose in a confusion, crying out and screaming with laughter and pushing each other and in pretty disorder they ran out of the cave along a wide ledge of rock and into another cave where their teachers waited for them. There the whole hundred and twelve assembled. There were not seats for them and they sat on straw mats on the floor, such as Buddhist priests use to keep their knees from the dampness of the tiles when they pray. Pansiao looked at every face and saw no goddess, and that day it was hard to listen to her teacher.
For days whatever she did, coming and going, she thought of what she had to do. She dared not write she could not obey her father, and yet dared not write she could. After much worry and doubt, it came to her that she was wrong to think of the girl and she ought to think of her brother first. Let her remember all she knew about him and when she was full of memory so that he seemed living and with her again, she would look at the girls once more and see if one seemed his.
So thereafter whenever she had a little chance, and sometimes in hours when she sat before her teachers, she thought about her brother, and he came back to her, that tall slender boy with the beautiful face. She knew things about him which none other in her father’s house knew, for she was the only one younger than he, and upon her he had wreaked small vengeances sometimes and his secret cruelties when they were children. If their father had reproached him for anything he did and he could not answer, being son, then she had learned afterwards to keep away from him, for without warning he would seize the soft skin on her under-arm between his thumb and finger and twist it, and then his beautiful face would lower at her.
“But what did I do?” she had wailed at him, and never did he answer.
“He was a child then,” she thought now in her soft heart. And yet she thought, “Still, he must not have a wife too gentle—not someone like me. I would not want such a husband, ” she thought.
And there had been the times when he fell into dark silence, and the elders did not notice, for it is right for the young to be silent before the elders, but she knew. Then when she had spoken to him as a sister may speak to a brother he would not answer, or he spat at her, and then if she asked him, “Why are you angry?” still he would not speak to her.
“She must be able to laugh,” Pansiao thought now, “and she must not be like me because if anyone is sad near me, then I am sad.”
And yet there were times when he had been only kind and good, and when he had taken half a day to make her a small flute from a willow branch, pulling the wood so skilfully from the bark that the pipe was left whole, and then so delicately shaping the mouthpiece that she could pipe a melody on the flute. He would do this for her, wanting nothing in return and only pleased with her pleasure. On such good days they had talked together as neither talked with any other, they being nearer in their age than any other two, and in such talk she had learned how he longed to leave his father’s house and go out to places he had never seen.
“But what would you do in strange places?” she had always asked, “and when night came where would you sleep and who would give you food?”
“I do not care where I sleep,” he would say, “and as for food, I can beg or steal!”
“Steal!” she had whispered. “You would not steal?”
“I would if I liked,” he had said wilfully.
But even now she could not tell whether he said that to make himself big before her, or whether that was his nature.
“She must be very clever,” she thought, “wise enough to tell whether or not he is lying, for I could never tell.”
And of course she must be beautiful, for all know it is evil for a woman to have a husband more beautiful than she, and the more beautiful the man is the more beautiful the woman must be.
Did she love her brother or hate him when she thought thus of him? Some of both, she thought, for he was both lovable and hateful. Perhaps any woman, even the one sought, would love and hate him, and she must be one in whom these two did not quarrel, so that when hate came love was not killed by it, and when
love waxed, hate stayed for self-defense.
This was as far as Pansiao could think, and in her own way she had come near enough to this, that the woman must be stronger than her brother was or else she was not strong enough.
But when she saw this clear she looked again among the hundred and twelve, and not one of them was she.
… Yet at this moment there was coming nearer hour by hour to the mountains a woman of whom Pansiao had never heard. This woman had come many thousands of miles from a foreign country to this country of her own which she did not remember. Years ago she had been taken away by her father, and there alone with her father, for her mother was dead, she had grown to womanhood. She was not nineteen and she had quarreled with her father, that is, as far as he would allow a quarrel. He did not wish her to leave her school and her home abroad where they had lived so many years in safety and return at such an hour to the country they had left many years before.
He himself had never wished to return, because leaving his country was mingled in his memory with the sorrow of the death of his beautiful young wife on her first childbed. She had been of a Mohammedan family, and the strain of early Arab blood had given the arch to her brows, and a high delicacy to her nose, a dark luster to her eyes, and height beyond what is usual for a woman. He had loved her for the differences, and then had lost her in an hour, and all that was left was the small, strong crying girl. He had named the child Mayli for her mother and then had taken willingly a post abroad which he had steadfastly refused for two years because his young wife had not wished to leave her home in her own province. Now she would never leave the city where she was born, for she lay buried outside its walls with her ancestors and he wanted to flee from it as quickly as he could, nor could he bear even to think of return. He had by now lived abroad so long that he knew he would the there. Only his bones would be sent back to lie beside his wife. When she died, he had taken her faith so that when he died, he might be buried beside her.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 31
