A House Divided (45 page)

There remained therefore only his work, and into this he would have poured his strength, but even here the year did him evil. For the discontent of the times spread among the schools, and the students quarreled with the laws laid down for them, and they felt too much the rights their youth gave them, and they quarreled with their rulers and their teachers and refused to work and stayed out of school, so that often when Yuan went to his windy classroom, it was empty and there was no one for him to teach and he must go home again and sit and read his old books he knew before, for he dared not spend money for new ones, since steadfastly he sent half of all he earned to his uncle for his debt. In these long dark nights the end of that debt seemed as hopeless to him as the dream he once had had of Mei-ling.

One day in despair at his own idleness, for seven days on end he had gone only to find his schoolroom empty, he walked through mud and drifting rain out to the land where he had planted the foreign wheat that day. But even here there was to be no harvest, for whether the foreign wheat was not used to such long rains, or whether the black and heavy clay held the water beyond what the roots could bear, or what the wrong was, the foreign wheat lay rotting on the mucky earth. It had sprung up quick and tall and every seed had been alive and swift and eager to put forth. But the earth and skies were not native to it, and it took no deep natural root, and so it lay spoiled and rotted.

Even while Yuan stood and looked sorrowfully at this hope gone, too, a farmer saw him, and ran out in all the rain to cry out with malice and pleasure, “You see the foreign wheat is not good, after all! It sprang up very tall and fair, but it has no staying strength! I said at the time, it is not in nature to have such large pale seeds—look at my wheat—too wet, to be sure, but it will not die!”

In silence Yuan looked. It was true enough; in the next field the small strong wheat stood sturdily even in all the mud, scanty and short, but not dead. … He could not answer. He could not bear the man’s common face and pleased stupid laughter. For one swift moment he saw why Meng struck the ricksha puller. But Yuan could never strike. He only turned in silence and went his own way again.

Now what would have been the end of Yuan’s despair in this dull spring he did not know. That night he lay and sobbed on his bed he was so melancholy, although he wept for no one single cause. It seemed to him as he sobbed that he grieved because the times were so hopeless, the poor still poor, the new city unfinished and drab and dreary in the rains, the wheat rotted, the revolution weakened and new wars threatening, his work delayed by the strife of the students. There was nothing not awry to Yuan that night, but deepest awry of all was this, that for forty days there was no letter from Mei-ling and her last words still were as clear in his mind as the moment she spoke them, and he had not seen her again after she had cried, “Oh, I hate you!”

Once the lady wrote him, it is true, and Yuan seized the letter eagerly to see if perhaps Mei-ling’s name was there, but it was not. The lady spoke only now of Ai-lan’s little son, and how rejoiced she was because though Ai-lan was gone home again to her husband, she left the child with her mother to be cared for, since she felt the child too much trouble for her, and the lady said gratefully, “I am weak enough almost to be glad Ai-lan so loves her freedom and her pleasures, for it leaves this child to me. I know it is wrong in her. … But I sit and hold him all day long.”

Now thinking of this letter as he lay in his dark and lonely room it added one more small sadness to him. The new little son seemed to have taken all the lady’s heart so even she needed Yuan no more. In a great rush of pity for himself he thought, “I am not needed anywhere, it seems!” And so he wept himself at last to sleep.

Soon the discontents of these times were everywhere very widespread, and much more widely spread than Yuan could know, bound as he was by his solitary life in the new city. It was true he wrote dutifully once in every month to his father, and every other month the Tiger answered his son’s letter. But Yuan had not been home again to visit him, partly because he wished to be steadfast to his work, the more because there were not many steadfast in these changing times, and partly because in the little holiday he had he longed most to see Mei-ling.

Nor could he have perceived clearly how the times were from the Tiger’s letters, for the old man wrote only the same thing again and again without knowing he did, and always he wrote bravely of how in the spring he planned a great attack against the robber chieftain in those parts, for that robber was growing too bold by half, but he, the Tiger, vowed he would put him down yet with his loyal men, and for the sake of all good people.

Such words Yuan read scarcely heeding them any more. It did not make him angry now to hear his old father boast, and if he answered anything it was only to smile somewhat sadly because such boasting had once a power to frighten him, and now he knew it was only poor empty words. Sometimes he thought to himself, “My father grows old indeed. I must go to him in the summer and see how he does.” And once he thought moodily, “I might as well have gone this holiday for all the good it did me.” And he sighed and fell to reckoning how much of his debt could be paid by the summer, at the rate he could pay it, and hoping his wage would not be delayed or held back as it now was often in these troubled times which were not wholly old or wholly new and full of many uncertainties.

So there was nothing in the Tiger’s letters to prepare his son for what befell him.

One day when Yuan had only just risen from his bed and stood half washed beside his little stove, where every morning he laid his own fire and lighted it for warmth against the cold wet air, there was at his door a knock, timorous and yet persistent. He cried out, “Enter!” and there entered the last man he would have said could stand there, and it was his country cousin, the eldest son of his uncle, Wang the Merchant.

Yuan could see at once that some evil had befallen this little careworn man, for there were black bruises on his skinny yellow throat, and deep bloody scratches on his small withered face, and he had a finger gone from his right hand, and a foul rag dark with blood was red about the stub.

All these violent marks Yuan saw, and he stood speechless, not knowing what to say or think, he was so surprised. This little man, when he saw Yuan, began to sob but he held his sobs noiseless under his breath and Yuan saw he had some terrible tale to tell. He drew his garments quickly about him, therefore, and he made his cousin sit down, and he fetched some tea leaves in a pot, and poured water from the boiling kettle in the little stove and then he said, “Speak when you can and tell me what has happened. I can see it is some very fearful thing.” And he waited.

Then the man caught his breath and he began, but in a low small voice, looking often at the closed door to see it did not move, and he said, “Nine days ago and one night the robber bands came against our town. It was your father’s fault. He came to spend a while at my father’s house and wait for the old moon year to pass and he would not be still as an old man ought to be. Time and again we besought him to be silent, but he would boast everywhere how he planned to go out to war against this robber chieftain as soon as spring was come and how he would down him as he had before. And we have enemies enough upon the land, for tenants hate their landlords always, and be sure those somehow told the robbers to incite them. At last the chieftain grew angry and he sent men out to cry everywhere in scorn that he feared no old toothless Tiger, and he would not wait for spring, but he would begin war now against the Tiger and all his house. … Even so, my cousin, we might have stayed him, for hearing this, my father and I, we made haste to send him a great sum of money and twenty head of oxen and fifty head of sheep for his men to kill and eat, and we made amends for your father’s insult, and besought the chieftain not to heed an old man’s talk. So I say it might have passed except for a trouble in our own town.”

Here the man paused and fell into a fit of trembling and Yuan steadied him and said, “Do not hurry yourself. Drink the hot tea. You need not be afraid. I will do all I can. Tell on when you are able.”

So at last the man could go on, subduing his shivering somewhat, and he said, his voice still strained low and half whispering, “Well, and the troubles in these new times I do not understand. But there is a new revolutionary school in our town nowadays, and all the young men go there and they sing songs and bow their heads before some new god whose picture they have hanging on the wall and they hate the old gods. Well, and even that would not matter much, except they enticed one who was once our cousin before he took vows—a hunchback—you never saw him, doubtless.” Here the man paused to make his question, and Yuan answered gravely, “I have seen him once, long ago,” and he remembered now that hunchbacked lad, and he remembered his father had told him he believed the boy had a soldier’s heart in him because once when the Tiger passed by the earthen house the hunchback would have his foreign gun and he took the weapon and looked at its every part as fondly as though it were his own, and the Tiger always said, musing, “If it were not for that hump of his, I would ask my brother for him.”—Yes, Yuan remembered him, and he nodded and said, “Go on—go on!”

The little man went on then, and he cried, “This priest cousin of ours was seized by this madness, too, and we heard it said he was restless and not like himself for these last two years, ever since his foster mother, who was a nun nearby, died of a cough she had for long. When she lived she used to sew his robes and bring him some sweetmeats sometimes she made which had no beast’s fat in them, and then he lived quiet. But once she died he grew rebellious in the temple and at last he ran away one day and joined a band of a new sort I do not understand, except they entice the farming folk to seize the land for their own. Well, and this band joined with the old robbers and filled our whole town and countryside with confusion beyond any we have ever had, and their talk is so vile I cannot tell you what they say except they hate their parents and their brothers, and when they kill they kill first their own households. And then such rains as never were have fallen on the lands this year, and the people knowing flood sure and famine after, and made more fearless by the weak new times, have thrown aside their decency—”

Now the man grew so long at his tale and began trembling so again that Yuan could not bear it and he grew impatient and forced him on, saying, “Yes, yes, I know—we have had the same rains—but what has happened?”

At this the little man said solemnly, “This—they all joined together, robbers old and new and farming folk, and they fell on our town and sacked it clean, and my father and my brothers and our wives and children escaped with nothing but the little we could hide about us—and we fled to my eldest brother’s house, who is a sort of governor in a city for your father—but your father would not flee—no, he still boasted like an old fool, and the most he would do was to go to the earthen house on the land which was our grandfather’s—”

Here the man paused and then shivering more violently he said breathlessly, “But they were soon there—the chieftain and his men—and they seized your father and tied him by his thumbs to a beam in the middle room where he sat, and they robbed him clean and they took especially his sword which he loved, and left not one of his soldiers except his old hare-lipped servant who saved himself by hiding in a well—and when I heard and went secretly to his aid, they came back before I knew it and they caught me, and cut my finger off, and I did not tell them who I was or they would have killed me, and they thought me a serving man and they said, ‘Go and tell his son he hangs here.’ So I am come.”

And the man began to sob very bitterly and he made haste and unwrapped from his finger the bloody rag, and showed Yuan the splintered bone and ragged flesh, and the stump began to bleed again before his eyes.

Now Yuan was beside himself indeed and he sat down and held his head, trying to think most swiftly what he must do. First he must go to his father. But if his father were already dead—well, he must have hope somehow since the trusty man was there. “Are the robbers gone?” he asked, lifting up his head suddenly.

“Yes, they went away when they had everything,” the man replied, and then he wept again and said, “But the great house—the great house—it is burned and empty! The tenants did it—they helped the robbers, the tenants, who ought to have joined to save us—they have taken it all from us—the good house our grandfather—they say they will take back the land, too, and divide it—I heard it said—but who dares go to see what the truth is?”

When Yuan heard this it smote him almost more than what his father suffered. Now would they be robbed indeed, he and his house, if they had no land left. He rose heavily, dazed by what was come about.

“I will go at once to my father,” he said—and then after further thought he said, “As for you, you are to go to the coastal city and to this house whose directions I will write for you, and there find my father’s lady and tell her I am gone ahead, and let her come if she will to her lord.”

So Yuan decided and when the man had eaten and was on his way Yuan started the same day for his father.

All the two days and nights upon the train it seemed this must be only an evil story out of some old ancient book. It was not possible, Yuan told himself, in these new times, that such an ancient evil thing had happened. He thought of the great ordered peaceful coastal city where Sheng lived out his idle pleasant days, where Ai-lan lived secure and careless and full of her pretty laughter and ignorant—yes, as ignorant of such tales as these as that white woman was who lived ten thousand miles away. … He sighed heavily and stared out of the window.

Before he left the new city he had gone and found Meng and took him aside into a teahouse corner, and told him what had happened, and this he did in some faint hope that Meng would be angry for his family’s sake and cry he would come too, and help his cousin.