Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (19 page)

So she kept her own around her and out of the end of her eye she watched those sleepers.

When the sun was well up there were serving women who brought rice in great buckets and some salt fish and vegetables, and chopsticks and bowls and Ling Sao cried, “How can we eat when we have not money enough to pay for it?” For now she remembered that in their distress yesterday she had forgotten to ask her husband for money in her pocket, and to eat and not pay for it was shameful.

But the women who carried in the buckets laughed and told her to eat with the others, for there were those who gave the rice as a good deed to buy them into heaven. “Eat, good mother,” they said, “for by eating you do a good deed yourself when you help our foreigner mistress into heaven.”

“Is this why she comes here to help us?” Ling Sao said, wondering, and so she ate with the others and felt better after her belly was full.

Only when all were nearly finished did those seven sleepers get up out of their beds at last and smooth back their perfumed hair and wash themselves in the basins that were on a table there with water in jars to fill the basins, and it could be told from the way these washed themselves what they were, for they made themselves clean beyond what any honest woman needs to do. Then they went together to get their rice and stood eating it apart from the others. These young women did not look at the others but among all the good and honest mothers and wives there was not one who did not look secretly to see what such women were, and who did not draw her child aside if one of them came near by chance.

So began this strange day, and it was not too evil, for outside of the great house full of women, so full that there must have been a hundred or more, not counting the children, there were fields of smooth short grass soft to the foot when it was walked. The grass was not green now, but still it was soft, and when the sun came warmer they all walked out with their children and then woman spoke to woman. And many spoke to Ling Sao, for she had a kind round face and bright eyes, and her black hair was mixed with gray, and she was the sort to whom all spoke easily and whom easily they called “good mother.”

From one and then another she heard such things as had never gone into her ears before and the more she heard the more frightened she grew. For it seemed that though many in the city had hoped for the quick coming of the enemy, if the enemy must come, so that there could be peace, yet when that enemy did come it was with such madness, such cruelty, so fiercely and savagely, that all were dazed and put out of their minds. This was what she heard, that into this great rich city which was the center of the nation, the enemy had come like wild beasts, no, and worse, for beasts would have eaten men and women, and these killed only the men and took the women. Whether a woman was old or young was nothing. Young were taken first and then old.

“My sister’s baby cried,” one girl said, whose eyes were swollen nearly closed with weeping, “he was but five months old, and he was so hearty and strong and cried so loud, because they snatched him from her breast, and then the enemy who had hold of her was angry and strangled the little thing with her own garments, and she lay bound and not able even to cry out, and when he and thirty others were done with her she was dead, too.”

“Did you see this?” Ling Sao whispered.

“No, but my father told me,” the girl said. “I am not wed yet, and he brought me here early, but she was a married woman and who could have thought that she would have died like that?”

Yes, though all knew what any soldiers will do in their triumph when a city is taken, and all knew that young women must be hidden for a few days until there are calm and order again, and this certainly if women are beautiful, yet none had ever heard of such evil as had now come. Other soldiers had taken this city in other times, but none who were foreigners until these came in, and the people had been deceived and told that these foreigners were better than their own soldiers, and so not all had done as much for safety as they might have done in ordinary wars.

Many were the innocent and unknowing men who died, for these women told Ling Sao what they had seen with their own eyes, that if a man turned and ran when he saw the enemy he was shot where he ran and there fell thousands like that in one day. And if a man seemed at all a soldier or as though he had been a soldier, he was killed, and there fell more thousands like that in one day. And if any man was slow to move when he was given a piece of work, or if he was too young and not strong enough for a great burden on his back, or if he were an old man or a scholar who had never done hard work, then he too, was killed, and so fell yet more thousands in a day.

All through that morning Ling Sao heard these things so that by noon when the food was served again, even though the rice was dry and tenderly cooked, she could not eat it with ease, and by night when the supper was brought, though it was good rice and cabbage and the cabbage cooked with bean oil and nearly as well as she could have done it, she could eat nothing because of all she had heard, and that which had befallen Ling Tan and her, which had seemed so great and evil, now had shrunk into one small evil among others much greater. Many of the women who talked to her had seen those of their own blood killed before their eyes, or raped or beaten, and there were many who said nothing to any one because what they had suffered was beyond telling.

So when night came Ling Sao was dazed with sickness and weariness, and more than either of these, with the fear she had never known before. For what was ahead of them if the land was to be held by such an enemy as this, and what would they do with these rulers who were not men? Evil rulers all peoples knew and all had to suffer them sometimes, but these were more than evil. There was no human heart in them.

Thus night fell again, Ling Sao’s second night out of her home, and it came to her with grief that she had scarcely thought of her husband all day, so busy had her ears been with what she heard. Yet now when she had seen her grandchildren in bed and one by one mothers were lying down beside children, she lay down, and there beside her again were the seven courtesans. It had been her plan in the morning when she rose that somehow during the day she would move her sleeping place and those of her children, but she had forgotten it and now she could not. She lay down silent, therefore, and she drew herself back from the young courtesan nearest at her side.

“Why are you here?” she asked that young woman somewhat angrily after a while. “Women like you ought not to be here.”

That young woman smiled sadly. “Even we are women,” she said quietly in her pretty voice, “and we fear beasts, too.” And she drew back also from Ling Sao, as though she knew what she was and would keep herself apart. She spoke no more to Ling Sao, but only to her companions who slept on the other side, and what they said Ling Sao could not understand, for they were from another city than this and they had their own language when they spoke together, though they spoke many languages since they must please many men, and they spoke even some foreign languages so that they could please the men who came in on foreign ships, and all this Ling Sao knew, because everybody knows such things.

“I suppose they are from Soochow,” she thought, and only that she must prove herself right, she asked the young courtesan one more tiling.

“Are you from Soochow?”

“Yes, we are,” the courtesan said.

“Then why are you in this city?” Ling Sao asked. In her bosom she thought that if they had come here to profit from the soldiers, then why were they not outside these walls doing their work and so making the city safer for the good women who were wives and mothers?

“We were in Soochow when it fell,” the young courtesan said, “and in our house there were twenty-three courtesans and of those there are only us left, and we are only seven. We escaped but not whole, and because we cannot forget what happened to us, we fled here, and then we could go no further for we had no more money. When we heard the white people could offer safety to women inside this wall, we came too, for we hate this enemy. Oh, they are not men—men we know, but not these!”

She turned her back then and they spoke no more but after a while Ling Sao heard her crying almost silently. Only an ear as close as Ling Sao’s could hear it, so quiet was the weeping. And Ling Sao’s warm heart moved after a while longer to ask herself if she ought not somehow to comfort this creature who was still young and beautiful, and yet the strong dislike in her for such women kept her as she was. Ling Tan in all his life had never looked at a courtesan and she knew it, and yet as much as though he had she feared and disliked these women whom until now she had only heard of and never seen. And so she let the weeping go on until at last it was still and then in her great weariness she slept.

Deep in the middle of that night she woke, and then they were all wakened out of their sleep by the noise of thundering upon the gates and of shots of guns fired over the wall. They woke and every woman lay quaking in the darkness, fearful of what was to come. Soon they heard loud voices, the voices of men speaking a language they could not understand, and they knew that the enemy had come even to this gate.

Women rose then and in the darkness each put on any garment she had laid aside when she slept and each waited where she was, and not a word was spoken, and when a child cried, his cry was smothered somehow. Then after a while there was a light and into the hall there came that white woman, and she had a lantern in her hand and this she held high, so that the light fell over their faces.

“I have bad news,” she said. “The enemy is at the gate. There are a hundred armed men there, and they say they will come in and I have no more power to keep them out. I have no arms, and I have only the power of my God and my country to hold them back. They do not fear my God, but they do fear a little my country, which is a great nation. Because of this they have not yet come in, and so I have been able to buy them with a price.”

She looked out over their faces and they saw her narrow mouth quiver in her pale face. “It is such a price,” she said, “that I am ashamed to tell you what it is and yet I must tell you that you may save yourselves. They say they will not come in if we give to them a few women who will go away with them, perhaps five or six, even—”

This she said, and was silent, and all of them were silent. Where were there women who would go with such men, even to save the others? None could speak.

That white woman waited, and there was the noise again, the shouting and the beating upon the gate. So the white woman went away and they sat there. Still no one spoke, but each woman said in her bosom, “It cannot be I—how can it be I?”

And after the space of about as long as one could have counted two hundred pennies, that white woman came back again and held up her lantern, and now she spoke in great haste:

“I cannot hold them back,” she gasped. “They say that if I do not give them the women at once, then they will come in. Oh, my sisters!” She stopped a moment and looked down at them from the raised door where she stood. “Who am I to tell any woman she must go out of my gate for such a cause, and yet it comes into my mind that God may have prepared in this room those who—who would—would save the—the good women. I do not ask it—I only say, if there are such, if they feel they can do it—or perhaps it is better to—to—” She could not speak more, and in the strong yellow light of the lantern they saw her bite her lips, and in her hand the lantern trembled.

Then Ling Sao saw that which she was never to forget so long as she lived, a thing which until she died kept her heart soft and tender toward all women called evil. For at her side that beautiful young woman rose and smoothed back her hair and straightened her garments.

“Come, my little sisters,” she said in the weariest and saddest voice, “come, get up and smooth your hair and put on your smiles again. We must go back to our work.”

None spoke, while these others rose at the sound of her voice. None spoke while the seven stepped across the room between the pallets on the floor and moved toward the door.

Then that one who had called the others stopped before the white woman.

“We are ready,” she said in her pretty voice.

“God give you blessing,” that white woman said, “God take you into heaven for this!”

But the beautiful courtesan shook her head.

“Your God does not know us,” she said, and quietly and with her body held very straight she led the way to the gate and the others followed her, and behind them the white woman lifted the lantern so that they might see the way.

In the room they had left there was darkness and not a woman spoke. But mothers lay down again beside their children, and Ling Sao beside hers, and now the place on the other side of her was empty. And she lay there, her heart crumbling inside her with pity and sorrow and tears came to her eyes and as soon as she wiped them away they came again.

There was no more noise at the gate then and the white woman did not come back, and the next dawn came as it always had and Ling Sao rose, and the day went on and not a woman there but thought of what had happened in the night, and yet not Ling Sao and not any other could speak a word of it. Each mother fed her children and tended to her little work, and it was a day of silence, and the white woman did not once come near them, and then night fell again.

I
N HIS SHOP ALONE
Wu Lien worked. For the first three days of his return he did not go out on the street, but he opened the boards of the front, and he began to put in order the confusion he found inside, so far as he was able. And yet there was one thing he did before anything else. Before even he found food after he had put his wife and his children into the white woman’s gates he took soot from the kitchen chimney and he mixed it with water and when he searched for a brush and could not find one in all the disorder of his goods, he tied a rag to a stick and dipped it into the inky water he had made and he wrote in large black letters upon the whitewashed outer walls of his shop these words.