Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (41 page)

She went through a winding dark passage and back to the point where the servant had told her was the office. Without shyness she opened the door and went in. At the table sat a stern, large white woman whose look was nevertheless not unkind, though more than usually plain.

“Are you Miss Freem?”

Miss Freem thought it was a foreigner who spoke and she looked up astonished. She was the only foreigner in hundreds of miles and none of her girls were able to put more than four foreign words together. But the moment she looked up she knew who this was.

“I won’t like this woman,” Mayli thought.

“If I am not careful, I shall have trouble with this bold-looking girl,” Miss Freem thought.

In this mood their life together began.

… In the main cave where the girls ate their meals, Pansiao looking up saw the new teacher with love instant in her heart. The new teacher had come in with the foreign principal to whom Pansiao had never yet dared to say a word, and she was talking to the foreigner as easily as though she had lived with her in childhood. Pansiao put down her chopsticks and stared.

Whispering rippled over the crowd of girls, “It is the new teacher—the new teacher.” They rose as they always did when the principal entered and remained standing until she sat down. But as for Pansiao, she rose only for the new teacher. They were all staring at her now, at her color, at her height, at her ease, at her quick foreign movements and at the foreign stuff of her gown. Yet she was one of them, for her hair was black and her skin, though fair, was still their skin. Pansiao was dazed with her beauty. Under the bare board table her small chilblained hands were clasped together. She felt the sweet hot love from nowhere rush into her bosom.

And then with simplicity that could only be in one so simple as she, Pansiao thought, “Heaven has sent me one for my brother!”

This was a strange return. Mayli, rising in the mornings from her bed, looked from her window over the wild and tempestuous country. Mountains tossed together as far as eye could reach. All that was human was contained in one village, clinging to a creviced valley, a village at this distance so small that the palm of a hand might have held it.

From this outer vastness she turned to a pattern of days within so minutely planned, so empty of present meaning that she wanted to tear it apart like a cobweb in which she had been caught. “In these great times in our country,” she thought with waxing anger, “to teach these girls exactly as though they lived in some small American town!” Impatience came to be her constant mood. Thus one morning coming early to the class room she found Pansiao, bent over a book, murmuring to herself, her little face twisted with effort.

“What do you study, child?” Mayli asked carelessly. She had not yet learned to know one of these faces from another, but she thought, surely this is one of the smallest girls in the school.

Pansiao had of her own intent come to this room early. Here in a little while her adored would teach her the mystery of numbers. If she came early she might be the first to see her. But she had barely hoped for such fortune as this, to be alone with her. Meanwhile she must learn her English, which Miss Freem taught. Now with this beautiful face over her, this voice asking her the question, she was speechless. She could only hold up the book.

“ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’!” Mayli said with scorn. “I cannot believe it!” She took the book. “Yes, it is so! You have to memorize this?”

Pansiao nodded. “It is very difficult,” she murmured. She was confounded when her beloved threw the book down on the floor.

“What trash—what nonsense,” Mayli cried out. “ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’—when every day our own guerrillas fight like heroes!”

Pansiao stooped to pick up the book, understanding nothing of this fiery English. But Mayli forbade it. She put her not too small foot on the book and stamped on it. Then she stooped and picked up the book and strode from the room.

Behind her Pansiao trembled. “Now I have made her angry,” she whispered. Her heart caught in her breast and she wanted to weep. “Of all things I wish not to make her angry,” she thought, and was bewildered by her ignorance.

But Mayli went straight to Miss Freem’s office and without knocking entered. Miss Freem was reading her Bible for the morning, but Mayli gave no attention to that. Upon the Bible she put the book she had taken from Pansiao. The floors of the caves were damp and the imprint of her own foot was still upon “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Miss Freem sat back and looked at her. Within a month she and Mayli had quarrelled at least ten times. Both of them were frank and fearless on opposite sides of every question.

“See this!” Mayli said without respect for Miss Freem’s position. “I found one of the girls learning this thing by heart!”

Miss Freem straightened her spectacles and bent to see what it was. “That is the lesson assigned for English today,” she said. “They have been learning it for a fortnight and today the whole is to be finished.”

“Why have they had such a stupid assignment?” Mayli demanded. “In these days, in these times, in a war infinitely greater than any that has ever been fought for freedom, here in her own country, why should a Chinese girl learn by heart ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’?”

Miss Freem was now shocked and somewhat frightened. There were times when she wondered if this girl had her right mind.

“But it is in the curriculum,” she said firmly.

Mayli shouted laughter. Then she told herself she would be reasonable. “Listen, Miss Freem, do we have to go by an American grade-school curriculum, here in these mountains? Think, Miss Freem, where we are! We are two thousand miles in the interior of China, in caves, hiding from the bombs of the invaders. We have a handful of Chinese girls here educating them for who knows what? But not for this!”

She seized the book and tore it in half and threw the pieces in the waste basket beside the desk.

Miss Freem did not move. Long ago as a little girl her father had warned her about her temper. “If you are not careful, Ellen,” he had said, “some day you will kill someone. You must ask God to keep you from sin.”

All her life since then she had been frightened, because she knew that what he had said was true, and every day she had asked God to help her to control her temper. That was why she kept always on her table the very Bible her father had given her. When she felt the hot thick rush of rage to her head she reached out her hand and put it on the Bible. She did so now, her hand pressing its pages, seeking for help. When she felt she could speak she did so, her voice rough and choked.

“I am the principal of this school. I decide what the pupils are to learn.”

“I am a fool,” Mayli thought. She sat down on the chair opposite Miss Freem and leaned on the table, her beautiful impetuous face much too near Miss Freem’s. How could she know that nothing frightened and repelled Miss Freem so much as too pretty a face, a face like this one?

“See, Miss Freem,” Mayli began, “I am only saying—do not rob us of our own greatness! This is our fight for freedom—you had yours! We ought to be teaching our girls our own poems, our own songs. Why do we always sing hymns? We ought to sing the songs of our own people, the new songs—Can’t you see how wrong it seems to me to come home in the midst of this”—she swept a long powerful arm toward the window, full of craggy mountains—“and singing—what? Oh, well, ‘Abide with Me,’ and—and ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’—” She began to laugh loudly. “Can you see what I mean, Miss Freem?”

Miss Freem rose to get away from that strong, too beautiful face. There was passion in it of some sort and she was terrified of passion. “I think of this place as a refuge,” she said solemnly, “God has made us a refuge.”

“We want no refuge!” Mayli cried. “We are in the midst of war!”

She rose, and between the two women there mounted every barrier, though neither spoke. Then Mayli turned and left the room and Miss Freem stooped and picked the torn book from the wastepaper basket. Books were precious and this one could be mended.

But Mayli was tramping in full fury back to the classroom. “I cannot stay here,” she muttered. “I will not be paid to stay here. I must get out.”

She had forgotten the girl she had left in the classroom and she burst in, frowning and muttering to herself. Then she saw the girl sitting there exactly as she had left her, but her face was pale and her brown eyes frightened.

“What is the matter?” Mayli asked.

“I have made you angry,” Pansiao whispered. The tears filled her eyes. “I, who would have died before I made you angry with me!” Her adoration shone like a candle through her tears. She put out a timid hand and took the edge of Mayli’s robe.

“Why, you are only a child,” Mayli said. “How did they let you come so far from home?”

“I am nearly sixteen,” Pansiao said. “That is not to be a child. I worked on the loom for three years. Then the enemy came and my father sent me out.”

And in her simple way she told Mayli the story of her home and near what city it was and she told even of her sister’s husband, Wu Lien, who had gone over to the enemy and lived in a rich house in the city where the enemy had showed themselves so evil. Before she was finished other girls came in and so Mayli said, “I must hear this for my mother was born in that city. Come to my room, child, this evening, before you sleep.”

Pansiao nodded, worshipping. She went through that day in a daze. Once or twice Mayli caught her eyes and smiled at her. Then Pansiao stopped breathing without knowing she did, until she was almost faint.

“How can that child have suffered so much?” Mayli thought.

What Pansiao had told her remained with her all day. She forgot that she had quarreled with Miss Freem again and spoke so pleasantly to her in passing that Miss Freem thought God had answered her prayer and had given Mayli a change of heart, and she let the day pass, thankful for peace. As soon as God showed her what to do she would do it. “O God,” she prayed silently that night at her bedside, “show me a way to get rid of this girl!”

… In the evening Mayli awaited her visitor with eagerness. She always read every paper she could find, she listened nightly on the forbidden radio which she had brought with her from abroad, escaping search because she traveled with a diplomatic passport, but the story that Pansiao had told her was one she had not yet known. When she heard a delicate cough at her door, she called, “Enter!” The door opened and she saw Pansiao and she smiled one of her lavish rich smiles, and welcomed the child.

“Sit here,” she said, pulling a stool to the brazier full of charcoal. “It is so cold. And see, I am going to give you a sweet I brought all the way across the sea. I have been saving it for a special hour, and I think this is the hour.”

Then Pansiao felt herself placed on a cushioned stool by the fire, a fire such as she never saw elsewhere, and then she found in her hand a sweet square of some sort of brown sugar.

“It comes from a tree far away,” Mayli told her. “Taste it—it is good.”

She tasted it, licking it with the end of her tongue, and Mayli laughed. “Your tongue looks like a kitten’s little tongue,” she said.

Then Pansiao laughed too. Mayli’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. She was so dizzy with happiness, so drunk with love, that there seemed to be a cloud about Mayli’s head.

“You do look like Kwan-yin,” she murmured.

Mayli opened her big eyes. “I? Ah, you do not know me! How my father would laugh! Why, child, I have a very bad temper. I am very fierce!”

“I cannot believe it,” Pansiao whispered. She had forgotten the sugar she held in her hand. She gazed at the lovely face now ruddy in the light of the coals.

“I beg you,” she said faintly, her love giving her strength. “Oh, I pray you—will you marry my brother?”

Now of all the things which Mayli might have heard from this young girl, here was the last she could have expected. She dropped her pretty lower jaw and stared at her.

“Do I hear what you say or not?” she asked.

Pansiao put down the sugar and dropped on her knees. “My third brother,” she faltered. “At home he is the captain among the hillmen. He looks for one like you. And my father wrote me a letter bidding me find a wife for my brother in the free lands, because there is no woman fit for him where the enemy is. But I could find no one—there was no one fit for him here, before you came.”

Then trembling with her boldness she brought out of her bosom Jade’s letter. She had put it in her pocket when she came tonight, thinking that if her own words failed her the written words would speak for her.

Still unbelieving, Mayli took the letter and read it and while she read Pansiao rose and dusted off her knees and nibbled her sugar and watched Mayli’s face. First there was laughter and then there was surprise, and then gravity crept about the beautiful full red mouth, and hung upon the edge of the straight black lashes.

These lashes she lifted when she had read the letter. Then she folded the letter and gave it back to Pansiao without speaking.

“Where else in the world could this happen?” she thought to herself. “Who could believe it who had not seen it? What shall I say to this child?”

Pansiao put the sugar down again and waited.

“It is a good letter,” Mayli said. “The writing is very clear and the style is simple. Does your brother write as well?”

“He?” Pansiao repeated. “He does not read or write.”

“You see,” Mayli said simply, “it would be difficult for me to marry a man who did not read or write.”

“Oh, he is very clever,” Pansiao cried. “He has not learned only because he saw no good in it. Nobody reads or writes in our village except one old cousin, and he is a fool.”

She examined Mayli’s face anxiously. “If you wished him to learn he would learn. If you taught him he would learn very quickly!”

Mayli said gently, “Could I marry a man I have never seen?”

“Who has seen the man she is to wed?” Pansiao asked in wonder.

“It is another world,” Mayli thought. “And yet, is it not mine? If I had not been taken from it young, so I would have answered.”

“Tell me all about your brother,” she said aloud. She had not the least thought of the man and what the child had said was absurd and only to be laughed at, and yet this was her world and here was her country.