Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (14 page)

“I take your side,” she told her daughter, “for a more helpless man than yours I never did see, though a mild temper, and that is something to be glad for, too. Yet he is a city man and out of the city he is like a cat in a pond, but for that you cannot blame him. He fed you well and was good to you when he had a house, and the day will come when he has one again, and a woman must put up with the man she gets, and who can tell what he is beforehand? You must remember that it is very hard for him to be in this house and it shames him, so you must make much of him and do not belittle him. There are worse than yours.”

So she taught her daughter and sent her out at last to ask her husband’s pardon which he gave to her gravely as though none of it had anything to do with him.

But to her husband Ling Sao told the whole story, relishing it as she went, and these two laughed together in the night over the city man who was their son-in-law, and they were proud of their daughter for laying her nails into his fat white cheeks, so that there were five red scratches on each. They did not hate Wu Lien at all, but here out of his place he made something for them to laugh at and it was a pleasure to find something for laughter these days.

Nevertheless Ling Tan knew that at bottom nothing must come between a man and his wife and so he forbade his elder daughter to come into the fields any more and thus Wu Lien was placated and Ling Sao gave him some mutton fat to put on his scratches and after seven days or so they healed. But until they did, he stayed inside the court.

The rice was harvested and all day long up and down the valley there was the sound of the flails beating out the grain upon the threshing floors. Grain fell upon the beaten earth and the oxen and the buffalo trod it out under stones they pulled over it and if a farmer had no beasts he pulled the stone himself, and the women winnowed the grain in the light winds of coming autumn.

And every day except when it rained the flying ships came from the eastern hills and flew to the city. There were few days of rain.

“We have prayed the gods so long for clear skies for harvest that now they send them anyhow because it is the ninth month,” the old man moaned who was ninety years old, and then he said, “and who can blame the gods if they do not know what to do? What can a man know to pray for these days, if sun brings the enemy and if rain spoils the harvest?”

This Ling Tan heard him say one day when the old man came out to see the harvest, though he himself was long past working on it. And Ling Tan answered stubbornly:

“I will pray for what I always have prayed when the harvest is ripe—sun to shine, so that I can thresh my grain and put it into its bins for our winter food.”

“It is true it is well to pray for what is known to be good,” the old man agreed.

But no farmer with so much land as Ling Tan had could store all his grain and some of it had to be sold. Besides, the people left in the city wanted food, too, and there were those who dug holes underground so that they would have a place safe from fire and destruction for their winter’s food. Then against his will Ling Tan had to go to the city to sell some of his harvest, and now he missed his second son the more, for he could send no one else and he had to go himself.

He waited therefore until a good rainy day and, putting on his coat of reed leaves laid upon each other so that the water ran off him as it runs from the feathers of a duck, he went to the city rice shops to sell his grain. It took him twice as long since he must walk through mud, but still his life was worth it and he took the time. It was a sad day. Since he had seen it last the ruins in the city had grown greatly worse and all the rich and those who make a city a merry place were gone, and those who were left were doleful to look at.

And yet there was something very brave about the city too, and those who were still there did not complain or talk of flight. When Ling Tan went to the great rice markets, though half of them were boarded up, still the merchants made their bargains with him, and they said nothing except that they would be there whatever happened, for people had to eat and what would they eat if not rice? And when Ling Tan asked for a higher price than he had ever asked they gave it to him, and so there was that good to the evil times. He went home pleased with the pocket full of silver which they had put down on his promise to bring them his rice.

Yet any news he heard was not good, and the worst of all was that at last even the white foreigners were leaving the city. Now Ling Tan knew none of these foreigners, but he had lived through evil times before, though all lighter far than these, and he knew that when the foreigners left the city it was as though rats leave a ship. So when he heard here and there that foreigners were going he knew the worst of something was near.

“They will not all go,” Wu Lien said that night when he told him. “There are always two or three or ten who stay because they have no homes elsewhere but the others go and it is bad news always, for they have ways of finding out what happens anywhere in the world. When we know nothing those foreigners know.”

“What is this magic?” Orchid asked.

“They catch news from the air and they run words along wires,” Wu Lien replied, and Orchid listened with her mouth wide.

“I hope I never see a foreigner,” she cried, “for if I did I would be so afraid I should die before him.”

But Wu Lien scorned this ignorance. “I had them in my shop two or three times,” he said. “They came to buy some foreign things, and they paid their money like any one else and they were two-legged as we are and they had all their features, and only their color and their smell were strange.”

“Could they speak?” Orchid asked.

“Yes, but brokenly as children do,” Wu Lien said, tolerant of her woman’s ignorance.

“Still I would rather never see them,” Orchid said.

“Well, you need not,” Wu Lien answered. Then he turned to Ling Tan. “Whatever is to come, it is better if it comes quickly. I have it in my mind that once the city falls, if it must fall, at least there will not be these flying ships, and I can go back and begin my shop again.”

Ling Tan did not say what he had in his mind, which was that many had their shops now and why did he not go back? He knew that there are men of little body courage and men of much and if Wu Lien were one born with small body courage, this was not a thing that could be discerned in a man until danger struck him.

“It will not be long now,” he said courteously. “So stay here until it comes.”

In those days to all who passed his house Ling Tan said, “I have a son and his wife in those parts to which you go, a tall young man, and you will know him because his eyes are very bright and black, and his wife is nearly as tall as he and she carries a child soon to be born. When you see them tell them we still live and all is as it was with us.”

Many were the people who promised Ling Tan to look for two such as his son and son’s wife, and Ling Tan wished that one would come back from there to bring him word from those two, but not one came back.

… The tenth month of that year came, and whether the tenth month or the ninth month were better to live in, who could say? The white geese went across the fields as ever they did in the autumn to find the grain left from the harvest, and the sky was blue above, and on the hillsides the long grass turned ruddy and dry ready for the scythe, and Ling Tan and all who could from his house went out to cut the grass for winter. All went except Wu Lien again, who could not hold a scythe, and Ling Tan told his eldest daughter to stay at home and take her mother’s place, for Ling Sao was as good with a scythe as he was. Day after day they worked together on the grassy hillsides, cutting and then binding together the great bundles of long grass, and they carried them down at evening hidden each of them under his bundle except for two legs and piled the grass against the house. Food they had and now fuel, and Ling Tan thought, “Whatever comes, I can feed my house.”

On the tenth day of the tenth month they took a rest, for it was a feast day, and on that day a few students came into the countryside, but only a few, and Ling Tan was amazed, for year after year on this day the students used to come as thick as locusts into the country, and on village streets and in village tea shops they used to preach to the people what they ought to do, and how they ought all to learn to read and how they ought to wash themselves every day and they ought to kill flies and mosquitoes and when one had smallpox others ought not to go near him. “Shall we leave the sick to die then?” Ling Sao once asked, when she heard this. The country people listened and laughed at all the students told them and believed them or did not believe, because the students were young and what they learned was what had not been tried by fathers and sons. But on the tenth of the tenth of this year, few were the students who came, and to the Ling village indeed came only two young men, and what they preached was not what they had preached in other years.

They were thin young men, yellow from reading books, and their hair was cut long and they wore foreign spectacles and blue students’ coats and trousers, and they seemed in haste to be gone.

“You men of the village,” they said, “our elder brothers, hear what we tell you. The enemy approaches and you ought all to know what will happen when they come here. Do not expect peace, for there will be none. They will rule over you and make you slaves, they will weaken you with opium and take from you all that you have. Where they have been they have looted houses and robbed the stores of food and they have violated many women.”

Now Ling Tan had wandered into the street since he was idle, and the day being fine, and the air very cool he had gone toward the tea house to see if there were wandering actors as there always were on feast days in other years. But there were none, and only the two pale young men, so he sat down to listen to them and there were others there and among them his third cousin and his wife and their only son, who had loved Jade.

“Soldiers always do these things,” Ling Tan called out to all when the young men said this, “and as for opium, in my grandfather’s time the magistrates of our own city compelled men to plant opium, too, for the tax they could take from it.”

This angered the young men and they said, “It is worse when the enemy does these things to us.”

Then Ling Tan’s third cousin called out of the crowd. “I saw an enemy once long ago and he had hair and eyes like ours and a skin, too, of our color, and except that he was short and bandy in the legs, he was more like us than not, and if he had been able to speak as we do, he would have done well enough for one of us, and much better than the white foreigners who have the devil’s own look upon them.”

For some reason that none could understand, this talk angered the two young men still more and they looked at each other.

“What use is it to waste our breath on such louts as these?” one asked the other. “They do not know what it is to love their country. If they can eat and sleep it is enough for them and they do not care who rules them.”

Now it was the village men’s turn to be angry and Ling Tan was the first.

“We have not been so well served by our own rulers,” he shouted. “They have taxed us and eaten our flesh, too, and what difference is it to a man whether he is eaten by tigers or lions if he is eaten?”

And so saying he stooped and took up a clod of earth and threw it at the young men and when the others saw it they did the same thing and, thus pelted, the young men ran away as fast as they could and that was the last that Ling Tan saw of students for many days and months, and so passed that feast day.

In the evening Ling Sao killed a fowl for their meal to mark the day and drained off the blood and thickened it for a pudding and the children ate it too freely and two of them were sick in the night and the next morning Ling Tan was glad that it was a usual day and that he could work instead of doing nothing.

But he thought a good deal of what the young men had accused him, that he did not love his country. Those were the days when he plowed the land again for winter wheat, and as he plowed he looked at the dark folds of earth. “Do I not love this earth?” he thought. “And is this earth not my country? The young have left the land and gone to save themselves as my son and Jade have, but I love my country too well to leave it. Though I die I will stay with it, and can a man love his country better than this?” But to no one could he say what he meant for even his wife was not able to understand such thoughts. There were things she knew and he could speak to her of them, but not of these deep thoughts he had now and again. He thought them and valued them and kept them inside himself and he never forgot what he had thought.

On every rainy day Ling Tan carried a load of his rice into the city according to his promise, and one day his two sons went with him to carry the more, and they heard in the city, breath from breath, the ill news that the enemy had vanquished all and now were marching straight upon this region, and they heard it first from the merchants in the rice shop where they went to sell.

These rice merchants were six brothers whose father and uncles had had the rice shop before them, and they were grave good men whose word must be taken.

“I do not know who will eat this rice,” the eldest said as he measured Ling Tan’s rice, “for it may be the enemy will be here before we can sell it. We are vanquished upon the coast and we ought all now to know our fate. Our rulers have gone and the capital that was here has been moved inland.”

In the shop that day all was confusion for these brothers had decided they ought not all to stay in one place in duty to their ancestors, lest the six of them die together and there be none to carry on the name. Two therefore were chosen by lot to go west and two more by lot to go south and only two, the youngest and the eldest, were to stay. The shop was full of bundles and packages and anxious women and crying children and the brothers were troubled for who knew whether or not they could ever meet again? None knew his fate in such times as these, and Ling Tan and his sons stood waiting while their rice was measured and to have their money put in their hands, and all the time they stood they watched and into their hearts came more fear than they had yet had. What indeed was this enemy and what would befall those who stayed behind and was it better to stay or to flee?