Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

I

LING TAN LIFTED HIS head. Over the rice field in which he stood to his knees in water he heard his wife’s high loud voice. Why should the woman call him now in mid-afternoon when it was not time to eat or to sleep? In the further corner of the field his two sons were bending over the water, their two right arms thrusting together like the arms of one man as they planted the rice seedlings.

“Ho!” he shouted. As one man they stood at the sound of their father’s voice.

“Is that your mother?” he inquired.

They listened, two sturdy young men. He felt his belly move with pride at the sight of them. They were both already married, and the eldest, Lao Ta, had two sons, the youngest now only a month old. Lao Er, the second, had been married four months and his wife was beginning to fret. Besides these two, Ling Tan had his youngest son, Lao San, who at this moment was sitting on the water buffalo grazing somewhere on the round grassy foothills along this valley. There were also two daughters in his house, only one of whom was left to be wed. The elder he had given to a merchant’s son in the city whose walls could be clearly seen from behind his house.

At this moment his wife’s voice came too clearly for any mistaking. She bawled at him heartily over the fields.

“You old bone, where are you? You deaf-and-dumb!”

“It is our mother,” Lao Ta exclaimed. All three men grinned at one another, and Ling Tan put into the water the sheaf of rice seedlings he was holding in his left hand.

“It is throwing away money to stop in the middle of the afternoon like this,” he said. “You two, do not stop!”

“Free your heart about that,” his eldest son replied.

The young men bent again to their work and with each swift thrust of their hands into the muddy tepid water they planted a green seedling. Their feet sank into the rich mud under the water, and upon their dark bare backs the sun was warm. Beneath the wide woven bamboo hats upon their heads they talked.

These two sons of Ling Tan’s were good friends and had always been from the moment they could remember themselves. There was less than a year between their births, and they had always told each other everything. Even marriage to two separate women had not separated them. These women they had been discussing when their father called, and to them they returned when he went away. They were still so young, these two men, that their own bodies and what they ate and drank and what came into the day and the night were all stuff for wonder and talk. So far as their thoughts yet went, the world was bounded by the green hills around the valley where their father’s land was, which was to be their land, and the center of the world was the Ling village, wherein all who lived and died were their kin and had been for hundreds of years. Even that great city was only their marketplace. When there was a harvest of grain or vegetable or fruit they went there and sold their harvest, and that was all they knew of the city or cared to know. Since their sister, born just after them, was now married to a small merchant in the city, they sometimes blamed themselves and said they ought to go and see their brother-in-law, but they seldom went. There was enough to busy them on the land.

Under their hats they now talked, without abating one whit of swiftness in the thrust of seedling into mud. Behind them was the watery empty field and in front of them the even rows of green seedlings standing firmly upright.

“Can a man tell when what he plants in a woman takes root?” Lao Er asked his brother.

“It is blind planting,” Lao Ta said, laughing, “and so it must be done over and over again. It is not like this planting we do in the light of the sun. Does she struggle against you?”

“At first, but now never,” Lao Er said.

“Leave her alone for three days and then behave as though it were the fir.st planting,” Lao Ta told his brother. He went on in manner of the elder to the younger. “When a man plants his seed, the soil must be prepared. That is to say, the seed must not be thrown down anyhow. All must be made ready and only when it is ready may the seed be cast. Nor must the seed be scattered as the wind blows weeds. It must be thrust deep into the earth, so — and so — and so—”

Each time that he repeated this word he thrust his bare dark arm down into the wet earth and planted a sturdy seedling.

Lao Er listened to this with all his heart.

“I am an impatient man,” he said, half ashamed.

“Then it is your own fault if you have no son,” his elder brother replied. He threw a sly look at his brother, whom he loved, and his full mouth twisted into a smile. “When you are a year married, you will find the son more important than the mother.”

“But how she frets,” Lao Er said. “Every month when her flux comes she curses it.”

They laughed again, seeing, both of them, the young high-tempered girl who was Lao Er’s wife. The elder brother’s wife was quiet and plump and if she had a temper, she kept it secret. But Lao Er’s wife was like a western wind. Wherever she was she stirred all around her. Lao Er had loved her the moment he saw her.

Lao Ta loved his wife too, but not, he knew, with his whole being. That is, he could delay his going to bed until other and older men had yawned and stretched their muscles and given over their loitering at the tea shop in the village or about the square in front of the small temple. When he came home if his father were still awake he could stand gossiping on the threshing floor in front of the house. There was no haste in the way he loved his wife. She would be there asleep in his bed where she had early lain herself down, and he had only to go to her.

But Lao Er’s wife was restless and full of mischief, and Lao Er never knew where she was until he had her safely beside him. Every evening he was torn between the watchful eyes of the other men, ready to laugh at him if he were the first to break away from them, and the desire in him to know where she was. Jade, he called her, though her full name was longer than that. “Jade!” he called the moment he came into their room. Sometimes she was there and oftener not. He seldom found her twice in the same place in the house or out of the house and never waiting for him in his bed. He longed to know if she loved him, but he had not dared to ask her, lest she laugh at him, she whose laughter, like her anger, was always too ready and too clear. He fell silent, wondering where at this moment she was in the house. In the morning she had come out into the fields and she helped him to plant rice, but after the noon meal she would not come.

“I want to sleep,” she had told him, and threw herself on the bed in their room and went to sleep before his eyes. He longed to lay himself beside her and dared not, because his father would upbraid him for lying with his wife in the daytime, when rice seedlings were waiting to be planted. So he had gone off leaving her sleeping, her high-cheeked little face as pretty as a child’s. But how long did she sleep and then what did she do? He cast a glance at the sun. It was still too high. He sighed, and went on with the planting.

… Under the matting roof which he always put over his courtyard in summer Ling Tan was listening to a stranger. He was a peddler of Shantung silks and grass cloth, one of those men who make their living by travelling south with their goods in spring and selling them to Southerners and then carrying back with them in early summer the thin silks of the South such as are not woven in the North. He had now from the North only a few pieces of grass cloth so coarse that he knew none but a farmer’s wife would buy them and so he had left the city to go out among the villages. Thus he had come to this house because it was bigger than most farmhouses and because he saw at the gate a pretty young woman idling.

She seemed unwatched but she was not, for the moment he came up to her and spoke, the mother, Ling Sao, came out from behind the gate and said to him sharply:

“If you must speak to a woman, speak to me and not to my second son’s wife.”

“I was only going to ask her where her man’s mother was,” the peddler said hastily. He perceived in one glance of his eyes that this elderly woman was a strong managing mother, and the head of her house. “I am on my way north to my home,” he said, “and I have left only a few feet of good grass cloth for summer wear and they told me in the village that you were the most discerning woman in these parts—”

“Put out your cloth and put in your tongue,” the wife said.

He hastened to obey her, though he laughed politely when she said this, and in a few minutes they were quarreling heartily over the price of the grass cloth.

“I have put the price at a gift,” he argued at last, “because there is to be war this summer in the North.”

The cloth fell from her hand.

“What war now?” she asked.

“No war of ours,” the man replied. “It is the little dwarfs from the East Ocean, who always like to fight.”

“Will they come here?” she asked.

“Who knows?” he replied.

It was then that she went to the door and called for her husband to come.

Now Ling Tan listened to the peddler as they sat at the table under the matting roof of the court. Under his feet the stones were cool. It was a pleasant court, warm with sun in the winter and in the summer cool. An ancestor of his had sunk a small pool in its center and had planted a lotus in a jar. This lotus now bloomed with six flowers, deep red in the center where the yellow hearts were. The table was set here in the summer and here they ate even when it rained, for the matting held off the water. At the table he sat with the peddler while his wife poured them tea and then took her seat on a bench a little to one side. She was making shoes. The sole was thick but she had a long iron needle. When it held fast in the cloth she seized it in her strong white teeth and jerked it through and pulled the hempen thread after it. Ling Tan always turned his eyes away when he saw this for it set his own teeth on edge, though, because he did not know why, he had never told her so.

“You say the East-Ocean dwarfs have killed some of our people?” he now asked the peddler.

“In the North they have killed men, women and children,” the peddler said.

He lifted his bowl and drank the tea and stood up. “I must reach Pengpu tomorrow and so I part from you,” he said. He was a common looking fellow as peddlers are, his talk worn smooth with much use in many places.

Ling Tan did not stir. “What is the outlook?” he murmured to himself.

But since he asked no one, no one answered him. The peddler shouldered his pack and bowed and went away, and Ling Tan was left alone with his wife in the court. She went on sewing and he sat there looking around at his house. The walls were of ancient brick and the roofs were low and tiled. Inside the house the partitions were of brick laid single between beams of wood and first plastered with earth and then washed white with lime. Here his ancestors had lived and died and he had been born, the only son of his parents, and here his three sons lived and his grandson.

The afternoon was still and hot. The hearts of the lotus flowers quivered. In the silence he heard his grandson cry. Ling Sao rose and went into the house and he sat alone. He had a good life, he thought. He was lucky that his share of the earth was near a great city, near the big river, in a valley set under hills from which the water ran down even in dry weather. There was nothing that he desired that he did not have. He was neither rich nor poor. In his house his only dead child was a girl. He himself had never been ill. At fifty-six his body was thin and strong as it had been in his youth. He could beget sons as well as ever if it had not been that his wife was past it. An old woman in the village teased him often to buy a concubine through her but he would not.

“I have my sons,” he had told the greedy old woman only yesterday.

“A man cannot have too many sons in these times,” she had said. “What with wars and guns and all these foreign things, who can have sons enough?”

But he had only laughed. Except that she bore no child, his woman was as good as ever and better because she knew him to the core of his being. He was satisfied and he had no wish to begin over again with a young girl. Besides, peace flew out of the house when a second woman walked into the door.

He struck the table with his hand, swallowed the tea that was left in his bowl and stood up and tightened the strip of blue cloth that was the girdle about his waist.

“I go back to my work!” he shouted. No one answered him, but he expected no answer, since they were only women who heard him, and he went his way.

In the field he was pleased to see how near his sons were to the end at which he had been working. Another good hour and by sunset the field would be done. This was the last field and with it all his rice would be planted and his family fed for another year. He bent his back again and saw his own face dimly in the brown water, a thin face square at the cheeks and the jaws. He could always keep his hat on easily because the string caught firmly under his square chin. There were men in the village who had to hold a hat string between their teeth because their chins were slopes. But he was not one of them. And he could close his mouth over his teeth decently and need not always be agape as his third cousin was, who was nevertheless a good man and even a little learned, with sense enough to read the meaning out of the magistrate’s proclamations on the city wall.

Ling Tan himself could not read a word. He had never needed to read. Sooner or later, he always said, a man heard everything. If it were good news he heard it quickly, and the more slowly he heard bad news the better. He had not sent his sons to school, either, and for this he had not yet been sorry, no, not even when from the schools in the city the young men and women students came into the villages to preach that today every man and woman should read and write. Looking at those pale students, he still thought to himself that he saw no reason to believe what they said. He had his own ways and he kept them.

Now in the field he did not speak to his sons nor they to him until the work was done and they met at the last seedling thrust down. Then they straightened themselves, the three of them, and pushed their hats off their heads to hang down their backs.

“What did our mother want?” Lao Ta asked.

“There was a peddler from the North and he brought news of a war,” the father said. It had been an hour since he had thought of the matter and by now it seemed of no importance to him. The North was far from here. He measured with his sharp eye the lines of the seedlings, green against the brown water. The shadows they cast made a straight black line. His sons’ right hands were as steady as his own. He wiped his face with the end of his girdle and said to his second son:

“Go and buy a little pork at your eighth cousin’s shop. We will have it tonight with cabbage.”

“Let me go for him,” his elder son said mischievously.

Ling Tan gazed at his two sons and he saw that Lao Er’s face was crimson. “Now what is between you?” he asked. Lao Ta laughed and would not speak, and the younger grinned like a silly boy. Their father smiled. They were still children, these two!

“Keep your cursed secrets,” he said, laughing. “Do I care what you do?”

He turned homeward, very content, and a moment later saw his second son slip into the gate of the courtyard before him. Whatever it was that made him hasten from work at least it was in these walls, Ling Tan thought. It did not occur to him that it was his son’s own wife that made him so quick.

… Lao Er went into the room that was his with Jade. She was not there.

“Jade!” he called. There was no answer. “Jade” he called again. He made his voice low. Perhaps she was hiding. Sometimes she hid and came out only when he was distracted, to laugh at him. But though he called yet again, she did not come out. The room was empty.

He felt the fear he always did when he could not find her at once. Had she run away from him? He went into the court to find his mother. She was not there and he went into the kitchen. The wooden lid of the cauldron was steaming with the evening’s rice and so he looked behind the great earthen stove. There his mother was crouched, feeding the dried grass into the firebox. He could not for shame ask his mother where his wife was, and so in pretense he made his voice angry.

“My mother, why do you feed the fire? My worthless one ought to do it for you.”

“Worthless indeed,” his mother replied. “I have not seen her since the sun was in the middle of the sky. These young women! The matchmaker cheated us. It comes of having their feet free. When I was a girl our feet were bound and we stayed at home. Now they run around like goats.”

“I will find her and bring her home and beat her,” he said and felt so angry that if he had had Jade before his eyes at this moment he would have beaten her.

“Do it,” his mother replied. Then her small shrewd eyes lit with laughter. “Only make sure first, my son, that you are able! Women are not so easily beaten, now-a-days!”

She laughed a dry silent laugh and spread the grass sparsely over the flame. Ling Tan was not a poor farmer, and her own father had had rich soil to till, but she had been well taught that, rich or poor, in any house there should be no waste of food and fuel and cloth. When she wove a piece of cloth and cut a garment from it, the scraps of the cloth could lie in the palm of her hand. This the matchmaker had guaranteed and it was true. But it was hard to find such young women now. Orchid, her elder son’s wife, had feet bound in childhood, but the revolution had come before the work had been finished and her father had commanded her feet to be unbound, even as Ling Tan had refused to allow his own two daughters to have their feet bound.

She sat feeding the grass into the stove, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, a twig or two, a stalk, while she meditated upon her sons’ wives. Good or bad, sons’ wives could make the home happy or miserable and upon them depended the old. Sons could not be trusted, because in a house women were stronger than men. Thus, she thought, who could believe that her second son would beat Jade when he found her?

“He will not beat her,” she muttered into the flame. Her husband had beaten her twice in her youth, once in anger and once in jealousy, but he was stronger than his sons. Nor had she suffered the beatings calmly. She had pounded him with her fists and clawed his cheeks and bitten the lobe of his right ear so deeply that the marks of it were there still.

“Who bit you there?” people asked him even now.

“A hill tiger,” he always said and always laughed. She had come from a village in the hills.

But Jade — could any man beat Jade? She sighed and let the fire die and rose. Her knees were aching but she paid no heed to it. She lifted the lid of the cauldron and sniffed the rice. It was fragrant and nearly done. She fitted the lid firmly. There was no need for more fire — the steam would finish the cooking. She yawned and reached for the rice bowls that stood on a shelf in the earthen chimney. Part of a fish left from the noon meal would make meat, and the cabbage left she would stir into the rice. Fish cost nothing, for they had fish in their own pond and it was only needful to drop the net into the water.

She set the bowls on the table in the court, put down the chopsticks, and then went into the room where she and her husband slept. He was there, washing himself in a bowl full of cold water. They did not speak, but over the face of each of them came a look of peace. She sat down and taking the silver toothpick from her hair she picked her teeth slowly, gazing at him as he washed. She thought calmly that his body was as good now as it had been the first time she looked at it, hard and thin and brown. He moved quickly and with full strength, washing himself, wringing the cotton towel, which she wove as she had woven nearly all the cloth they used, and wiping himself dry. He was a clean man. There was never a smell nor a stink about him. When he opened his mouth to laugh in her face sometimes his teeth were sound and his breath came sweet. There was his third cousin whose breath was like a camel’s.

“How do you sleep at his side?” she had asked the cousin’s wife only the other day.

“Do not all men stink?” the woman had replied.

“Not mine,” she had said proudly.

“Now I will have my supper,” Ling Tan said suddenly. He drew on his loose blue cotton trousers and knotted a clean girdle about his waist. Then he remembered the pork. “I sent the eldest for pork,” he said. She opened her eyes wide. “We had half a fish left from noon.”

“I will have the pork,” he said loudly.

“Have it, then,” she replied and rose to go out to prepare it. When she entered the kitchen she saw the pork already there on the table, lying upon a dried lotus leaf. She seized it and examined it, always ready to be cheated by their eighth cousin, the butcher, though she never had been. The man was afraid of her and respected Ling Tan, and though he had his poor meats, as any butcher has, he knew where to sell them. This pound of pork was as good as could be had anywhere, the red and white in layers under the soft thick white skin, and she could find no fault with it. She chopped it quickly with garlic and salt and rolled it into small round balls and dropped them into boiling water. She had a deft hand at cooking and Ling Tan had not smoked more than two pipes before she was ready,

From the kitchen door she shouted to her eldest son, “Your father is ready to eat!”

Lao Ta came out of his family room, washed and clean, his child in his arms.

“We are here,” he said.

Ling Tan coming out of his door shouted for his second son.

“He will not hear,” his wife bawled from the kitchen. She was stirring the cold cabbage into the boiling rice. “He is looking for his woman.”

From the court came laughter, the laughter of two men whose wives never ran away. The mother dipped the rice into bowls and brought them out and laughed with them, and at the door the eldest son’s wife came and stood buttoning her jacket.

“Let me, mother,” she begged for courtesy, since she did not move. Then she laughed because they were all laughing, though she had not heard why. But this household was always laughing at something and being an easy kindly creature Orchid laughed without stopping to find the cause for their laughter.

And as they sat down the third son came quietly into the gate, leading the water buffalo by a rope through its nostrils. He was a tall silent boy not yet quite sixteen years of age, and nobody spoke to him when he came nor did he expect it. But he caught the quick careful look of his mother’s eyes and his father’s glance. Both looked at him to see if all was well, and Lao San knew what they did not, that he was the son they loved best though most uneasily, because of his temper. In many small ways he took a child’s advantage of his two older brothers, but they allowed him, doing no more than cuff him over his shorn head if he teased them. But toward his parents he was often wilful and ready to be sulky, and as little as possible did they command him to do anything, and Ling Tan purposely let him take the buffalo to the hills that he might have the rebellious boy away from him. Thus he was spared the need of dealing with his waywardness.

All of this was because Lao San’s face was so beautiful. This third son indeed was so beautiful that his parents had from his birth prepared themselves for his death at any moment, for how could the gods not be jealous of such beauty? He had long eyes whose pupils were black as onyx under water, and the whites were clear. His face was square and his mouth full and the lips cut square and full as a god’s are. His great fault was his dreaming indolence, but they forgave him this as they forgave him everything, and it was true that in the last two years he had grown as fast as in any other four. Now he dipped up water out of a jar and into a wooden bucket, and standing just outside the court among the bamboos there he washed himself and then came in and took his place at the table.

It was a sight to make a man’s heart strong, the father thought to himself, looking at his sons. Lao Er’s place was still empty, but he would come sooner or later, and then the table would be full. Upon his knee Lao Ta held his baby son and now and again he put into the child’s little mouth, pink as a lotus bud, a morsel of rice he had chewed fine and soft. The evening air was growing cool and the lotus flowers were closing for the night. There was silence everywhere except for the sound of the loom in the weaving room, where Lao Tan’s younger daughter was still at work and would work until she was called to her meal.

The mother threw down an armful of straw for the buffalo to eat. The yellow dog came in fawning and humble in the hope of food. This dog was as bold as a wolf before strangers from whom it expected nothing, but now before its master it was mild as a kitten, and it crawled under the table to wait for scraps. Ling Tan put his feet upon it for a footstool and felt the beast’s stiff hairs against his bare skin and its body warm beneath his soles. He bent and threw down a good lump of fish in sudden kindness to this one who was also of his household.

… In the fields about the house Lao Er was still searching for Jade. The sun had not yet gone down, and its long yellow rays lay like honey on the green. If she were there he could easily see her blue coat. The wheat was cut and the rice still short and there was nothing to hide her. But she was not there. Then she must be somewhere in the village. He cast his mind quickly over the places where she went — not the tea shop, because only men were there, and not to his third cousin’s house, for the son of that house was of his own age and had wanted Jade for his wife in the days when the old woman who was matchmaker for her was searching out the best husband for her. This fourth cousin had seen Jade one day as she stood at her father’s door in another village, and had loved her then. But so had Lao Er already seen her and loved her, too, and between the two young men there had grown a great anger and they hated each other, and took every excuse for quarreling. The thing came to be known in the village so that everybody kept their eyes on the two, ready to shout out and leap forward to part them if they flew at each other.

Nor would Jade say nor did she yet say which of the two she wanted. She shrugged her thin shoulders and would not speak when her mother asked her, or if she spoke she said:

“If they both have two legs and two arms and all their fingers and toes, and if they are not cross-eyed or scabby-headed, what is the difference between them?”

So her father put the whole choice upon which man’s father gave the best price for Jade and the two young men begged and harried their own fathers and threatened to kill themselves if they could not have her, and so destroyed the whole peace of the two households that Ling Tan met his third cousin one day at the tea shop and took him aside and said:

“Since I am a richer man than you, let me give you thirty silver dollars for yourself and then I beg you to tell your son that my son is to have this girl, otherwise we cannot find peace.”

The cousin was willing, for thirty dollars was as much as he could earn as a scholar in half a year and so the thing was settled and Lao Er was betrothed to Jade and as quickly as he could bring it about, he married her. But the strange thing was that he could not forgive her in the most secret part of his heart because she had not chosen him against the other, and he had not yet dared to ask her why she had not. Sometimes in the night when he lay beside her he planned that when he knew her better, when she had opened to him her heart, he would ask her:

“Why was it that you would not choose me when the choice was put to you?”

But he had not asked her yet. Though he knew her body so well, her he did not know, and so there was no peace in his love for her, and all his love was still quick and full of possible pain.

He went swiftly now toward the village and without seeming to do so, kept his eyes wide for a slender girl in a blue cotton coat and trousers, whose hair was cut short about her neck. He had fallen into a fury that day not twenty days ago when he came home and found that Jade had cut off her long black hair.

“I was hot,” she said to his angry eyes.

“Your hair was mine,” he had cried to her, “You had no right to throw it away!”

She had not answered this and then when he saw that she would not speak he cried at her again, “What have you done with the long hair you cut off?”

Still without a word she went into their room and brought out the long loose stuff. She had tied the thick end of it with a red cord, and he took it from her hand and laid it across his knees. There it was, straight and smooth and black, a part of her which she had wilfully cut off from her life. He felt the tears suddenly come to his eyes, as though for something he had possessed which had been living and now was dead.

“What shall we do with it?” he had asked in a low voice. “It cannot be thrown away.”

“Sell it,” she had said. “It will buy me a pair of earrings.”

“Do you want earrings?” he had asked in surprise. “But your ears are not pierced.”

“I can pierce them,” she had said.

“I will buy you the earrings,” he had answered her, “but not with your own hair.”

He had taken the hair then and put it into his own small pigskin trunk where he kept his best clothes and the silver neck chain he had worn as a child and one or two more of his own things. When she was old and the hair on her head was white, when he was old and had forgotten how she looked now, he would take that long hair out of the trunk and remember.

He had not yet had time to buy the earrings. The rice planting had kept him busy from dawn to dark until today. Now as he pretended to saunter through the village, his eyes sharp and his wits flying ahead of his feet, he thought that if he found her doing no naughty thing, he would go tomorrow into the city and buy those earrings, and tonight he would find out what she wanted them to be. Still he did not see her. He began to be frightened because he did not see her anywhere and his thought took hold of that young man who was not yet married to any woman, because he was still peevish at having lost the one he wanted. He went toward his cousin’s house and there was his cousin’s wife at the door. She was a large pig-shaped woman and she stood with her bowl of food held to her face and she supped out of it as though it were a trough. He would not mention the name of Jade in her presence.

“Are you eating, my sister-cousin?” he asked politely.

“Come in and eat too,” she replied, taking the bowl from her face.

“I cannot, though I thank you,” he replied. “Are you alone at home, then?”

“Your cousin my lord is eating, but your cousin my son is not home yet.”

“Ah,” Lao Er said, “where is he?”

“He went toward the city, or said he was going there when the sun hung over that willow tree. I do not know where he is now,” she answered.

She put the bowl back to her face and he went on. By now his heart was beating wildly. If Jade were with this cousin of his, he would kill them both and lay their bodies in the open street for all to see. His blood came rushing up the veins of his throat and swelled into his cheeks and eyes and his right hand twitched.

At this moment he drew near to the open land before the village tea house and here a crowd had gathered, as there often was to see some passing show of actors or jugglers or travelling merchants with foreign goods. Today it was not any of these, but a band of four or five young men and women, city people he could see at once, who were showing some magic pictures upon a sheet of white cloth they had hung between two bamboos. The pictures he did not see, for at this moment his eyes fell upon his cousin, sitting on a wooden bench where the crowd parted. He was so sure that Jade was with him somehow that he looked to see if she were at his side but she was not. For a moment he was taken aback, and all his hot blood turned cold and he felt faint with weariness and hunger. When he found her, he thought, he would beat her anyway even if she were doing no wrong, because she was not where a woman should be, at home and waiting for her husband.

At this moment the voice of a young man who had all along been speaking now came into his ears and he heard it.

“We must burn our houses and our fields, we must not leave so much as a mouthful for the enemy to keep him from starving. Are you able for this?”

No one in that crowd spoke or moved. They did not understand his meaning. They could only stare at the picture upon the white cloth. Now Lao Er looked at it, too. It was of a city somewhere of many houses, and out of the houses came great flames and black smoke. The people looked and said nothing. And then before his eyes Lao Er saw one move and leap up and it was Jade. She flung back her short hair from her face.

“We are able!” she cried.

Before all these people she cried out and he was afraid. What were these words and what did they mean? And what right had she to speak so when he was not there?

“Come home!” he shouted at her. “I am hungry!”

She turned and looked at him and seemed not to see him. But his shout had brought the crowd back to their village and to their even life. They stirred and yawned, and then stretched themselves and muttered that they were hungry, too, and had forgotten it. One by one they rose and began to saunter home and Lao Er nodded to his cousin, though he was still angry because he could not find fault with him and he waited for Jade. He would not be mild with her, he thought, watching her out of the end of his eye because he was ashamed to look full at his wife in the presence of others.

“Do not forget that what I have shown you are true things!” the young man called but no one heard him. There Lao Er stood until Jade came near and then he began to walk away, seeing out of his eye’s end that she was following him. He did not speak to her until they were well away from the village and then he made his voice surly.

“Why do you shame me by showing yourself off to everybody?”

She did not answer this. He heard her steady tread in the dusty path behind him. He went on, his voice as loud as he could make it.

“I come home my belly roaring like a hungry lion,” he cried.

“Why did you not eat, then?”

He heard her voice behind him, clear and mild.

“How can I eat when you are not in your proper place?” he shouted at her without turning his head. “How can I ask where you are? I am ashamed before my own parents not to know where my wife is.”

This she did not answer at all, and at last he could not bear not to know what she was thinking, so against his own will he turned his head and met her eyes full, ready and waiting for that head of his to turn. She was laughing. The moment their eyes met the laughter burst out of her and all the strength of his anger went out of him like wind from his bowels. She took two steps forward and caught his hand and he could not pull it from her grasp though he still did not want to forgive her.

“You use me very ill,” he said, his voice now as feeble as an old man’s voice.

“Oh, you look so pale and so thin and so ill-used,” she said, her voice rich with her laughter. “Oh, you are so to be pitied, you big turnip!”

He did not want her laughter and he did not know what he wanted but it was not her teasing laughter. The moon that had been a shape of white cloud was turning gold in the darkness and the fields of water were full of frogs’ voices. In his hand her hand lay like a little beating heart and he put it to his neck and held it against the hollow of his throat. He wanted some huge great thing for which he had no words. His words were always too few for his need, enough for the things of his usual life but not enough for this.

“I wish I were a man of learning,” he said thickly, “I wish I knew words.”

“Why do you want words?” she asked.

“To ease myself,” he answered, “so that I could tell you what I feel in me.”

“What do you feel?” she asked him.

“I know,” he said. “But I have not the words.”

They stood facing each other in the narrow path between the rice fields, for the moment out of sight of any house. A great willow hung its long green strands about them. Lao Er put his hands upon her shoulders and drew her slowly until she was against him. There he held her for a moment and she did not move. They stood alone in the quiet evening and closer for this moment than they had ever been.

“But I, too, am not very learned,” she said in a whisper.

“Is that why you do not often speak to me?” he asked her.

“But how can I, when you are always so silent?” she asked in return. “Two must speak, for understanding.”

He pondered this for another moment, his arms loosening their hold upon her. Were they both waiting for each other, expecting each other, and neither knew what to say until the other spoke first?

“Will you tell me everything in you if I tell you all that is in me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

His arms dropped. Without touching her he felt nearer to her than he ever had.

“Then tonight we will speak together,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Her voice was so soft that it was not like Jade’s voice, but he heard it. She put her hand into his and they walked on and came toward the house. Only when they came to the gate did she take her place behind him again.

In the court the men had finished their food and at the table his mother and his elder brother’s wife were eating and with them his younger sister.

“You were a long time gone,” his mother cried. “We could wait no longer.”

“I want no waiting,” he replied. And to his wife he said roughly so that none might think them shamefully in love, “Fetch me my food in a bowl and I will eat it where my father and brother are.”

And like any proper wife Jade filled his bowl and gave it to him before she took her place among the women. She too had forgotten what the young man had said at the temple, though while he was speaking she had thought that she could never forget it. She took up her bowl dreamily, her heart too quick for hunger. This man to whom she was married, tonight would she know what he was?

Ling Sao spoke to Jade as she rose from the table.

“Since you did not cook the meal, you may clean after it.”

Jade rose at her mother-in-law’s voice.

“I will, my mother,” she said.

So rare was it for her to rise thus, so soft her voice was, that the mother stared at her in the twilight and said nothing as she went toward the gate of the court.

“My son must have beaten her after all,” she thought, and stepped through the gate.

Outside upon the threshing floor Ling Tan sat on a bench and his sons sat near him upon the hard beaten earth. The youngest was curled on a bundle of wheat straw asleep. She stared hard at her second son. He was eating with great joy in his food. There was no sign on him of anything except joy.

“He did beat her,” she thought and was glad to think he had. The best marriage was where the man could beat the woman, and she was proud of her son.

… Who could have believed, Lao Er asked himself, that a man and a woman could come closer together through speech than through flesh? Yet so it was with them that night, with Jade, his wife, and with him.

At first he felt so strange when he lay down beside her that he was abashed. “It is only Jade,” he told himself and yet it seemed to him that she was more strange to him than she had been on their wedding night. The flesh he could see and comprehend but what was hidden behind her pretty face and her smooth body? He had never known. Now he did not want to touch her, only to listen, to hear. He waited and she lay silent.

“Are you waiting, too?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” she said.

“Who will speak first, then?”

“You,” she said. “Ask me what you will.”

What he would? There it was in his mind, and it ran out to the end of his tongue.

“Do you ever think of my cousin who wanted you, too?” He blurted these words.

“Is that what you want to know?” she cried. She sat up in bed and drew up her legs and sat on them crosswise. “Oh, you are silly! Is that what has been curdling in you? Then no— no— no— and however you ask me I will say no!”

His head swirled as though it were full of a whirlpool of water.

“Then what are you thinking all day when you go about so silent, and what do you think of at night when you do not speak all night long?” he cried.

“I think of twenty things and thirty things at a time,” she said. “My thoughts are like a chain and one is fast to the other. So, if I begin thinking of a bird, why, then, I think how it flies, and why it can lift itself above the earth and I cannot, and then I think of the foreign flying ships and how they are made and is there any magic in them or is it only that foreigners know what we do not know, and now at this moment when I think of that I think of what the young man said before the tea house, how those ships fly over the cities in the North and crush them down and how the people run and hide.”

He broke this chain of her thinking. The cities of the North were far away.

“Why did you go there today?”

“I sat and sewed on your blue coat. Then I had no more thread and your mother had only white. So then I went out to buy some of the blue thread. When I went to the village there the people were.”

He broke in again.

“I wish you would not go on the street alone.”

“Why?”

“Other men will see you.”

“I do not look at them.”

“I do not want them to look at you. You are pretty and you are my wife.”

“But how can I stay always in the courtyard? These are not ancient times.”

“I wish it were those times. I would like to lock you up.”

“If you locked me up I would not eat and then I should die.”

“I would not let you die.”

She laughed. “But still these are the new times and I will come and go.”

“Does any man ever speak to you?”

“Not more than to another he knows.”

They fell silent again and then he began. “Tell me what you thought of me when you first saw me.”

She plucked at the blue and white flowered cotton cover of the bed. “The first time I saw you I cannot remember.”

“No, I mean when — after we were married.”

She turned her head away. In the moonlight he could see her forehead and small straight nose, her lips, the lower one a little behind the upper, and her full chin.

“I was glad you are taller than I am. For a woman I am too tall,” she said.

“No, you are not.”

She let him say this and did not answer.

“And then what did you think?” he asked her.

Now she hung her head. “Then I wondered what you thought about me.”

“But you knew I wanted you,” he said.

She lifted her head suddenly. “And then I wondered — if we should ever talk together. Were we to be to each other only what others married are? Yes, and would you care what I am or only that I gave you children and made your food? And was I to be yours or only belong to your house? Will you learn to read? There are things in books to know. Will you buy me a book? … There — that is my secret. Instead of the earrings, buy me a book! It is why I cut my hair off. I was going to sell it to buy a book. Then I was afraid to tell you, so I said earrings. It is a book I want.”

She leaned over him in her anxiety for him to hear her.

“A book!” he said. “But what have people like us to do with books?”

“I want only a book,” she said.

“But if you cannot read?”

“I can read,” she said.

Now if she had told him that she could fly like a bird, she could not so have astonished him.

“How can you read?” he cried. “Women like you never read!”

“I learned,” she said, “a word at a time. My father sent one of my brothers to school, and from him I learned a little every day. But I have no book of my own.”

He thought about this a moment.

“If this is what you want,” he said slowly, “I will give it to you. But I never thought to see a woman read in this house.”

So they talked on, half the night through, until they were drowsy with weariness.

“We must sleep,” he said at last. “Tomorrow’s work must be done. And if I am to go to the city, too, to buy the book—”

He stopped and held his breath. For now she curled down beside him as he spoke, and put herself close to him as she never had. It was so sweet, this movement of her own will toward him, that he could not say another word. It was the sweetest instant of his life, better by far than the first time he had taken her on his wedding night, for this was the first time she had ever come to him of her own will. Why had he been such a fool, he asked himself, as not to know before how a woman’s heart was made? But none had told him. He had stumbled upon the knowledge out of his own discontent that even marriage had not given her to him. Now he possessed her because she gave herself to him.

When he slept that night he knew as surely as though a god had been in him that out of this night she would conceive a child. Out of this night a son would be born to him.