Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

X

IN THE MIDST OF all their trouble here was their joy, and the next day as soon as they had washed and eaten they went to his third cousin’s house and Ling Tan drew his second son’s letter out of his bosom and asked his cousin to read it.

Now a letter was no small thing in the village even in good times and there had been no letter here since the enemy came, and so it was not right to read it carelessly. First the cousin must wash his face and hands and rinse his mouth before he sat down, and his wife left the bedside of her son to come and listen and she told her neighbor and that neighbor another until by the time the cousin had read the letter to himself and mused over it awhile to be sure he had it, and was ready to read it aloud, there were some ten or twelve men gathered to hear it.

So at last all was ready and Ling Tan and his wife waited patiently, but this was not easy for by now that young man who had been wounded had begun to rot and the stench in the house was hard to bear, but still they bore it, so eager were they to have news of their son and grandson and even Jade. The cousin scraped his throat clear and spat and took a mouthful of tea and swallowed it and held the letter up and then looking sternly on all around because he was the only one who could read and all at this moment depended on him, he lifted his voice high and clear and began:

“Our father and mother, honored ones! We hope you are well and that all is safe and as usual with you and to our elder brother and his household our respects and to all others our good wish and we hope all is well with them as usual.”

Here Ling Sao wiped her eyes and cried out, “How little use their good wishes are!” but Ling Tan motioned to her to be still and the cousin went on:

“Since we left our good home and last saw your faces we have traveled well on to a thousand miles and we are now here where we paused for the birth of the child but we dare not stay for rumor is in every mouth that the enemy will press on. Yet if you, our honored father, can tell us how it is when the enemy comes and if it is not too bad, we may stay, because there is work to be had here and I, your lesser son, can pull a ricksha every day and make twice even what a teacher in a school used to make, because it is now the laborers who make high wages.”

At this the cousin’s wife bawled out to her husband, “I ever said learning was no use! See now, old man, if you had been strong enough to pull a ricksha what we might be doing, but no, your belly is full of ink, and I always swear that is why you smell so foul!”

The cousin could not bear this spoiling of his pride and he said, “But who would now read this letter to tell the news if it were not I?” He looked around at his fellows and they nodded to agree with him that he had the best of her there, and so he went on again:

“Your grandson was born on the last day of the thirteenth month, a little before his time because his mother had walked so far. But the child is well and strong and set your hearts free about him. When the times are good we will return with him and show him to you.”

“When will that be?” Ling Sao asked.

But the cousin went on: “If the times are worse we will then go on to the upper river reaches and from there I will write again. If you send us a letter, send it to the care of one named Liu, the eighth brother in the shop on the corner of the two streets Fish Market and Needle.” Here the cousin ended.

“Is that all?” Ling Tan asked.

“There is only his name and the farewell,” the cousin replied.

Now that the letter was over and their minds free again they all smelled the stench once more and Ling Sao asked her cousin’s wife how her son did, and at that the woman sighed and said he was already full of worms and the outlook was not good. She asked the company to come in and see what they thought and if there was any advice they had to give her, and so they all rose and went into the room where that young man lay, and there the stench was beyond bearing and they must hold their hands over their noses.

None could go close to the young man, now thin and yellow as though he had smoked opium for a lifetime, and they all sighed as the young man turned his dying eyes toward them and they made haste to go out again. Now the mother saw that none had any hope and she began to weep and while they went away she hid her face against the wall and wept. Nor would she be comforted when Ling Tan and his wife stayed to beg her not to weep at least until her son was truly dead, but she only sobbed:

“If I must weep I will weep, and he is as good as dead for his belly is full of maggots and next they will gnaw his heart, and what can I do?” And she refused comfort and so they left her.

As for the young man the little will he had clung to for living failed him when he heard her say this, and it was no more than an hour after that he turned his face to the wall and gave up his will and when next his mother went in to see him, all that was living in the body of her son were those maggots.

When Ling Tan heard of it he sighed and told his wife, “I think no good would have come from that young man, and doubtless he would have turned bandit with the other refuse, who rob us these days, and yet why should he die when there are other evil men alive? He had his life to live, too, and the enemy took it from him, and now day by day there is rising in me such a hatred for this enemy and for all men who bring war down on good and innocent people like us that I swear I cannot bear it if my hate does not come out of me somehow.”

Ling Sao was afraid when she heard this, and she begged him, “Do not be full of hate for if you are your blood will turn to poison and you will fall ill, and then what have I left?”

And he knew she was right, and he promised to turn his mind to such things as the plowing of the ground for spring again and so he did, thankful that the land was here still, and that he could feel the soothing round of work that land demands of the seasons.

What he did not know was that from the moment of her son’s death his third cousin’s wife hated not the enemy but him, for she still believed that had their son wed Jade he would now be alive, and she would mutter through the night to her husband, “Had Jade been his wife, she would not have let him go to the city that day, no, and he would not have wanted to leave home at all because of her, or at least I would have had a grandson by now, and that child Jade has would have been ours and not Ling Tan’s. It is by rights our grandchild and not Ling Tan’s, before the gods, and he has robbed us in the worst way a man can rob another, for he has robbed us of our flesh and blood, and now we have no one to worship our bones when we are gone, and so he has cursed us forever.”

Her husband twisted in the bed when he heard such words, for he knew that at bottom there was no reason in them and yet he was a man of peace and he did not want to bring her wrath down upon him, so he only sighed out that his head ached and he wished she would let him sleep, and with that she kicked him in the small of his back, and he was goaded beyond his own courage at this and he kicked her too, but a lesser kick, and he asked:

“Was I not his father and do I not sorrow? I sorrow more than you do because he was the only child you ever bore me, but I could have had a hundred sons in these years with all my wasted seed.”

At this his wife was so full of fury that she rained her kicks on him with both feet, for what he said was true enough. She was barren from a fever that fell upon her after her only son was born, and with her evil temper she would not have allowed a concubine to her husband even had he had the money for one, which he never had. And though now he kicked back once or twice she was too much for him and so he rose at last and went and laid himself down on a bench in their one other room and wondered to himself why women were as they were and he envied monks and hermits and all those men who need not a woman, and dreamed an old dream of his that one day he would walk away and be a monk himself.

Yet even this little dream of his was now spoiled, for many temples were emptied of their priests these days and soldiers filled them and he feared soldiers as he feared his wife, and so he lay on that narrow bench and felt how evil his life was, and he a quiet man who asked only a little peace around him. But there was no peace now anywhere, and none for him either, in his small life.

… In her own house Ling Sao felt the emptiness too great. She had been used to every room full of her children and grandchildren and at night sleepers in every room and at meals the table crowded, and she herself busy and managing, and now here were only the men and the two little children. And even these little children were silent and full of fear of what they did not know, but they would not stir outside the house and there they would sit hand in hand, the elder like a little old man, and they were thin and yellow and shrank if any noise fell upon their ears.

As to their father, he who used to be so easy and cheerful now seldom spoke a word to anyone, for the truth was this eldest son of Ling Tan’s was a man ill suited for these times. He was one who would have thrived in the good life they used to have and he would have grown into a quiet gentle older man, respected in the village for his wisdom, and the father of many children who would have loved him for his kindness, but in these times when nothing went well, he did not know what to do, and he fell into stillness so deep that it seemed almost witlessness sometimes. There was no hope of finding one to take Orchid’s place yet, and if sometimes he wished there were such a one there were other times when he was glad there was not, for fear of more children and more trouble, and so he went on as dully in his ways as the water buffalo did, doing what he was told and plodding back and forth upon the land.

Ling Tan looked at him often and he thought, “There is one whose life is spoiled by war as surely as any other’s has been,” and then Ling Tan would fall into one of his deep rages that he had now-a-days against all men on the earth who make war. As he plowed back and forth across his fields he raged within, looking at the half-ruined houses of his village and his own house that he dared not mend lest it tempt the roaming soldiers of the enemy, and all about him in the valley the villages were so. And on the other side of the city, where he had not seen it but only heard, the land was itself ruined, scorched and barren, that good fertile land which centuries of peace had made rich for food. Never had their own little wars despoiled the land except through taxes made too high and the land urged to greater bearing. And yet even so for this fruitage there must be more ordure put in and more enrichment, and so the land still held its good.

Back and forth all through that spring while Ling Sao fretted in the house Ling Tan raged in his heart against the men who made wars, wherever they were, and he knew from hearsay that such men were in other countries too, and he thought of the foreigners on the other side of his land and wondered if they suffered as he was suffering, and he thought:

“We men of peace and sense, whether here on top of the earth or hanging downward from it on the other side, we ought to band together and forbid life to all who would make war. Yes, when we see a child like that we ought to keep him locked, if he will not be taught.”

And the more he thought the more sure he was that only a certain kind of man made war, and if these men were somehow done away with, then there could be peace. Such were his thoughts these days, but what could he do, one man upon his land? And yet he said to himself, “Are there not others like me?”

This was a joyless spring, and one festival passed another and Ling Sao made no feasts, and none were made anywhere for how can a people rejoice when an enemy rules over them? The house was so silent that she grew full of fretfulness so that her very skin itched with it, and she would sit scratching herself in the evening because of her fretfulness. At last Ling Tan himself noticed it and he asked her one night in the third month of that luckless year:

“Why do you sit scratching yourself and rubbing your nose and jerking your arms like that?”

And she burst out with words as though a lid had been taken from a jar:

“Our house is like a grave and now I know we ought never to have let our second son and Jade go away from it. Our eldest son is helpless and what will these two poor children do if anything happens to you and me and we already old?”

He listened to this and marveled that for all their years together he could never know what would come out of this woman.

“Would you ask our second son and Jade to come back here?” he asked her gravely, “and shall we tell them to bring our grandchild back from free land to this land that is the enemy’s?”

“It is not the enemy’s so long as we live upon it,” she told him. “That is where you are wrong, old man. It is not ours only if we give up and go away and leave it. But that we will not do, and our sons should not either, because if we should die, how would the land be held?”

Now there was sense in what she said, and Ling Tan was too just to deny sense even to a woman when he heard it from her, and so he said:

“Speak on, old woman, and let me hear more,” and he lit his pipe to keep him calm, though tobacco was precious these days and would be until he had his own small crop cut.

“What I say is that our son ought to come back here and live as he used to do,” she said, “for we ought not to yield to the enemy. We are yielding when we let our sons go out and the enemy will think we are afraid if all the young men go out and only the old are left.”

There was truth in this again and he smoked a while and then he said, “But the outlook is so ill. It is true that women are more safe these days than they were before the new year since courtesans are plentiful, they say, and the worst of the enemy soldiers have gone on, but there are other ills ahead.”

“What ills?” she asked. Not once had she ever said again that she feared no man and never would as long as she lived, but what ill was worse than men?

“There are rumors that we farmers are to have bitter laws put on us,” he said, “and how can we refuse to obey the enemy when we have no guns?”

“If there are such ills ahead our sons should be here to help us bear them,” she told him, “and when you write the letter back to our second son, you tell him I said so.”

“Hah,” he said, and nothing more than that, but he sat a long time that night with the thought that his wife had put into his head. It was but a seed she dropped in that wilful half-childish way that women have, a truth she chanced upon not for itself but out of some simple wish she had doubtless to see her grandson. But his man’s mind could take the seed and fertilize it with his thought and bring it up to fruit and so he did.

“If it be true that this enemy will spread over the land like an evil plague,” he thought, “is it well that we all flee before it and let them have the land? Some flee because they dare not stay but there are those strong enough to stay and am I not one? She is wrong to say all my sons must be here, but she is right when she says this eldest son cannot live here alone, and he cannot. But my youngest son cannot be here for he will do better elsewhere, but is not my second son like me? If he is like me he ought to be here to hold the land with me. He and I and others like us, we must stay where we belong and hold as best we can what is ours and harry the enemy like fleas in a dog’s tail so that the beast can make no headway for stopping to gnaw his rear.”

He laughed silently at his own small joke and Ling Sao cried, “Why are you sitting there laughing to yourself like an old idiot in such days as these?”

“I am not ready to tell you yet,” he said and would not tell her, but the seed had sprouted in his mind and was putting out its leaves.

Yet so evil was that spring that his courage might have failed him to call back his second son had not the summer brought its own disaster to his house, and this disaster was worse than the new taxes the enemy put down upon the land and worse than the laws they made about the price of rice or what they said a man must plant and all such tyranny as Ling Tan had never thought could be upon the earth. And this was the disaster. In that year so many people had been killed that to bury all was not possible, and to rid the streets of bodies, such as could not be buried were thrown into the canals and into the river and when the river rose with spring and swelled into the canals, those bodies were thrown up again or brought down from other cities and left upon the banks, and sickness came upon the people from all this rotting flesh, and among the poor it came from eating crabs that fed on flesh, and so when the heat of summer came fluxes and fevers spread everywhere.

Where should it spread but to Ling Tan’s house? There it fell upon the youngest and the weakest most heavily. All were ill for ten days and more, but those two grave little children went down first, and though the three grown ones tended them with all their care, and their own flux and vomit poured from them like water, so that even as the children died, Ling Sao had to turn aside to vomit while she held the little one to ease his dying. They died, those two, and with them died such hopes as Ling Tan did not know he had, and Ling Sao wept as she had never wept. These grandparents had been so troubled and distraught that they had let the children do as best they could day in and out, because all had to suffer now, and yet when the little creatures ceased living, the old ones felt their own lives gone.

“What have we left now?” Ling Sao moaned. “What is a house where no children are?”

As for the eldest son, the children’s father, he did not weep or moan, but he crept about the house like his own shadow, and when the two little ones were buried and his parents better and his own flux stayed, one day he begged his parents to forgive him if he went away a while.

“But where will you go?” his mother cried.

“I do not know, except I must go,” he said in his dull voice.

Then Ling Tan cast about and thought of somewhere his eldest son could go, at least so that they might have hope of seeing him again, and so he put his wits to work quickly and said:

“If you must go I wish you would turn to the hills and see if you can find your younger brother and tell us how he does. I always fear he went to the robbers and not to the good hill men. Find him and if he is with those wicked men, lead him to the good.”

This, he said, would give the man a task and better a task he must do than to go out idle in despair, and at the same time to put to an end his secret doubt on his third son.

“Do you so command me?” the eldest son asked.

“I do,” Ling Tan replied.

“Then I must obey,” his son replied.

So within the next few days when Ling Sao had washed his clothes and had sewed into his coat some money Ling Tan had still, they watched him go, a bed quilt rolled upon his back and in his hand food for a day or two, and new sandals on his feet.

“How will you do all the work upon the land now?” Ling Sao asked her husband.

“I do not know,” he said, “but I had not the heart to hold him.”

“There is only one thing to do,” she said, “Heaven has shown its will. You must write our second son and call him home.”

Ling Tan turned to her then, a small smile on his face.

“Are you sure it is only Heaven’s will, old woman? I did not hear you try to keep our eldest son.”

But she replied, “Could it be my will to let the children die?” and there was no smile on her face.

The smile went from his face then and he said sadly, “Well I know that was not your will.”

They watched their son go down the road and toward the hills until he too was lost and then they were alone indeed. Into the quiet house they went, and never had they been alone in it, because before Ling Tan’s old parents died his own first sons were born, and so what was now had never been. In such quiet Ling Sao could not live and she kept begging him, “Will you not write that letter now? Why will you not write that letter today? It may take them a month and more to come.”

“Wait,” he told her, and on another day still, “wait.”

And she had to wait until the thought was fully ripe in his own mind so that he was sure of its wisdom, and that day came. For the more he pondered this wickedness of war the more sure he was that it could only be overcome by such men as he, determined to live out their lives in spite of it, and his second son was more like him than any of the others and there must be one like him after him to go on living. For this war he saw would be no short struggle. This enemy would not easily let go its gains, and the war might go on to son’s son and even after, and their strength must be that they could live, whatever came.

When Ling Tan had been seven days alone upon the land, such thoughts shaped in him to one strong end, and he told his wife the eighth morning when he rose:

“This day I send the letter to our second son.”

Then she was overjoyed and she bustled herself about food and she said, “You must have an egg fresh to give you strength,” and she took out of her basket her newest egg and broke it into a bowl and she made him drink it down now before he ate his morning meal and when he had eaten he went to his third cousin’s house.

Now Ling Tan as he sat in his cousin’s house telling him what to write to his second son well knew what a burden he took upon himself. Ling Sao saw only that now she was to have her son back and a little grandson she had never seen and the more precious because of the two who had died. If she were secretly uneasy she comforted herself by thinking that at least the worst of disorder was over, and the soldiers who had been most vile were checked or else sent on to new cities to conquer, and though the times were very bad if the people kept their heads low under the enemy perhaps they could live.

But Ling Tan saw further than she did and more clearly, and he knew his own temper and the temper of his second son, and that they were not men who could obey slavishly all that was commanded in these days. The outlook was not good for free men and he knew it, and so he made long pauses in the letter, thinking and rubbing his shorn head over what he ought to say to his son, and the cousin waited with the brush moist in his hand, and sometimes the brush dried before Ling Tan was ready, and then the cousin had to wet it again in his mouth until his mouth was full of ink he had rubbed from the inkstone onto the brush.

“Tell my son,” Ling Tan said at last, “that he must understand he does not come back for peace, for there can be no peace. What has been was bad enough but what lies ahead may be worse. Who can tell? He and I must tighten our hearts to endure what can scarcely be endured.”

This the cousin wrote down and waited and sucked his brush and after a while Ling Tan went on.

“Tell him that I and his mother are alone, that my other sons are gone to the hills, that my eldest son’s wife and his two children are dead and our youngest daughter gone with the white woman. But he is not to come at risk only because we are alone. Tell him his mother wants him to come because the house is empty but I want him to come only if he feels as I feel, that, curse the enemy, I will hold this land as long as I live, and he with me, and when I die he is to hold it after me with his son until such time as the enemy leaves our country.”

The cousin paused on this to say, “If this letter falls into the hands of the enemy will they not come to this village and destroy us all?”

“I will send this letter by no usual way but by a messenger until he reaches the border,” Ling Tan said to give him courage to go on.

There were such men who came and went across the border from the free land into this enemy-taken country, and they made a business of coming and going, and they dressed themselves like beggars or farmers or old blind men who go about clanging their little bells and stopping to tell stories and sing songs among the people, and by such a one his son’s letter had come to Ling Tan.

So the cousin went on doubtfully to write, and when the letter was finished he read it again to Ling Tan to make sure all had been said that he meant, and Ling Tan, struggling to discern the meaning in the flowery learned things the cousin put in extra, heard enough to make him know that his son would see what he meant. He knew, too, that his son would know the letter was written by this cousin who could never put his brush to paper without letting the learned useless words flow out of him, ancient sayings from the classics and lines of poetry and all such foolishness which the tongues of sensible men left to themselves never speak.

“He will see what is cousin and what is me,” Ling Tan thought, “and I cannot offend the man because he loves to make his little show,” and so the letter was finished and Ling Tan stayed to see it sealed and then he took the letter himself, because if he left it the cousin might think of other things to say and add them and confuse the whole beyond what it already was, for besides the learned words the cousin had put in all his own news, how his son had died and how the village was half ruined, and Ling Tan could only trust to his second son’s shrewdness to pick out what was the real meaning of the letter.

With this letter wrapped up in a handkerchief and put safely away Ling Tan and his wife waited a few days until they were able to catch one coming and going, and to do this he went every day to the tea house and especially at night, for such men travelled by night and slept by day. On the fourth day he caught a young man who by his look signified what he did, and Ling Tan said to him in a low voice:

“If you are going to the border will you carry a letter to my son?”

The man nodded, and Ling Tan told him where he lived, and after nightfall he came to the house and Ling Tan brought him in and Ling Sao had a meal ready for him, and they ate together. While they ate the young man told of many things they had not known, how over the border in the free land a great army was gathering that would stand against the enemy like that wall which once emperors had built to the North, but this was a wall of living flesh to be two thousand miles long, and miles deep, sometimes ten but always one or two. And he told how in that free land there were schools and mines and mills and factories and though millions of people had fled there from land the enemy had taken, still they were determined to flee no further and they had taken their stand.

All this encouraged Ling Tan and though neither he nor Ling Sao felt a wish to go, for their own land was here and not there, he said, “I feel my heart take breath when you say these things, and when the day comes that the army drives forward I will be here and my son with me if he comes, and this piece of land will still be ours for we have never let it go.”

Then he gave the letter to the young man and he tried to tell him how he would know Lao Er when he saw him, but Ling Sao stopped him.

“You do not know him as I do,” she said, “for I carried him in my womb and he has a mole under his right eye, but very small so you must look for it and his eyes are bigger and blacker than another man’s and his face is square like his father’s, but his mouth is big like mine. His height is not above medium, but his shoulders are set square and the calves of his legs are round. On one great toe, that of the right foot, he has a deep cut, because when he was a child of twelve he stepped on a plowshare and I thought his toe was off, but I bound it on with a piece of my apron I tore off, a new apron it was, but I tore it, for was he not my son? And he had a boil once on his crown and it left a small bare place, but he keeps it covered with hair and you must look for it.”

Ling Tan burst out laughing at this and said, “Do you think he will search our son like that, old woman? Give no heed to her, young man — she is like all women. Her sons are like no other men on earth. I say he is a strong young man good enough to look at but not too good, and he is not our third son who is as pretty as a girl and I am glad he is not.”

Ling Sao’s face fell at that, and in the silence the young man rose and said he must be on his way.

“How long will it be before the letter is in my son’s hand?” Ling Tan asked him.

“I cannot say,” the young man replied. “If I am lucky it may be less than a month. But I am not always lucky.”

So they told him farewell, and Ling Tan gave him some money and Ling Sao gave him a package of bread with meat steamed inside, and they both told him to come here and sleep whenever he came and went, and he thanked them and was gone without ever having told them his name. Nor had they asked, because in these times it was better not to know a man by his name, so that on being asked by the enemy one could say, “I do not even know his name.”

With this letter gone, Ling Tan and his wife could only wait, and that year she alone helped Ling Tan on the land. The rice had been planted somehow in the early summer, and it was doing well, but they could not keep it so weedless as Ling Tan and his sons had in the other years, and the water buffalo had to go without its long days at grass for there was no one to take it to the low foothills for pasture, and yet as best they could these two, husband and wife, kept the land, and she let the house go and only cooked a meal quickly when they came in at night.

But they talked together much of how it would be when Jade and the little child were there and one day Ling Sao said they should have a hiding place into which they could put her, for never did she wish again to hide in the city with the white woman. They must have a place of their own to use if it were needful.

“But where?” Ling Tan asked. “Your thought is as good as an egg but go on and hatch the fowl.”

“I will sit on it awhile,” she said laughing.

So she thought and after a few days she said, “We could dig through the earthen floor of the kitchen behind the stove and then under the earthen wall of the house under the court yard. We have no time now for weaving and no place to sell the cloth if we did weave, and we could take the door frames and posts and beams from the weaving room and build a room under part of the court. Then we could cover the hole with a board and on that put straw.”

He was so full of praise for this thought that she grew shy, while he praised her.

“It took no great thought,” she said modestly.

“Yes, it did,” he said, “and many a woman would have let her mind lie idle while she worked in the fields, but I have ever seen this difference between you and other women, that your mind cannot be idle, and I say I never know what is coming out of you. And so I never tire of you, old woman.”

She covered her mouth with her hand while she smiled, for though usually she forgot the lack of two side front teeth which she had not had for many years, yet when her husband praised her she always remembered her gaps and covered her mouth until he forgot her again and she could know he did not see her when he looked at her.

That night those two began to dig their hole. It was a hot midsummer’s night and the ground behind the stove was beaten into a rocky hardness by the many women who had crouched there, generation after generation, to feed their households. With all their sweating and work until they could work no more Ling Tan and his wife only dug down six or seven inches.

“The young ones will have to help us finish it,” he said, panting and weary.

“But we can get it deep enough to hide in at least by the time they come,” she said.

Thereafter day after day, they did not count their day’s work complete until they had added a few inches to the hole. This hole became the great comfort of their lives while they waited for the coming of their son and grandson, and it gave them the hope of hiding not only themselves if it became a need, but the rice now growing in their fields.

For one day to Ling Tan’s terror when he was working in his fields, he saw like an evil shadow upon the land a band of the enemy coming toward him from the city. He stood as they drew near, sure that his life was at an end, for among them were soldiers with guns, but no, when one began to speak he listened and perceived that they had not come to kill him. That enemy had a little book and a pen and he asked questions of Ling Tan, what his name was and how long he had lived here and how much land he had and how much rice he would have from the grain here standing. In his fear Ling Tan told more of the truth than he wished, but he made his harvest smaller by far than he knew he would have, because he was used to tax gatherers, and the enemy who questioned him knew no better and he put down what Ling Tan told him. Then he said in a loud voice:

“Farmer! This country now belongs to us who have conquered it and you must produce on your land as we say and the harvest is to come to us at the price we tell you it shall be. There is to be no more buying and selling as you wish, for we will establish law and order and all is to be done according to law.”

Now Ling Tan was a good farmer and a shrewd man and he knew that prices must vary with each year, depending upon the weather and the harvest and the number of people buying and selling and how much is sent out to other parts and brought in from other parts, and never can it be said early what the price of rice or meat is to be. So he said, making his voice quiet and courteous:

“Sirs, how can it be decided thus early what the price of grain is to be? In our country Heaven decides such things.”

Then that little enemy man puffed himself up and scowled and drew down his mouth and shouted at Ling Tan.

“We decide all now, farmer, and those who disobey us need their land no longer.”

Ling Tan said no more, but he bent his head and fixed his eyes upon the rich dark earth on which he stood and he answered their questions and told them that he had one water buffalo and two pigs and eight chickens, a pond with fish and some ducks, and that in his household there were only himself and his old wife.

“Had you no children?” the man asked.

Then Ling Tan lifted his head and told his first full lie. “We are childless,” he said.

This the little enemy man put down too, and then he pursed his mouth and said one more thing.

“Beginning with the first of the month there is to be control of all fish, and only we shall eat fish. You, farmer, if you catch a fish in your waters you must not eat it but bring it to us.”

“But the pond is mine,” Ling Tan said without thinking, for all the years of his life since he was a child he had drawn fish from this pond and fish was their chief meat.

“Nothing is yours!” the man bellowed. “Will you village men never learn that you are conquered?”

Ling Tan lifted his head again. He shut his lips over his teeth to save his life, but he looked that little man in the eyes. “No,” his eyes said, “we will never learn that we are conquered,” and “No” his lifted head said, and “No” the look of his whole being said before those men. But his voice did not speak, because he knew that living he could hold all his land, while dead he could hold only so much as he was buried in.

The little enemy man looked away and said in a loud voice, “Now you are registered, farmer, and you and your wife and your pigs and fowls and fish and buffalo and your land, all that is yours. Do as we tell you and you shall live in peace.” Still Ling Tan did not speak, and he stood there with his head lifted up and his whole body still, while those men went away and he saw them stopping at every house and at every field where a man worked. Few were working this year compared to last for the young men were gone and some were dead, and the ones who worked were like him, those who believed that they must hold the land at whatever cost.

He would not go into the house as long as those enemy men were in sight. He took up his hoe again and went on with his work as though all else were nothing to him, but the heart with which he worked was sad. When they were gone from the valley to another place he looked around him and he saw that everywhere men were going toward the village and so he put his hoe on his shoulders and went too. There in the half-ruined tea house they gathered, between thirty and forty men, and each talked of what the enemy meant. Their rice was to be sold at a low price to the enemy, and they could eat no fish, even if one leaped into their hands from their own ponds.

“Such tyranny we have never known,” they said, and there was little talk that day, for none knew what was ahead and there was no use in talk and anger until they knew.

“If we can bear it we must bear it,” Ling Tan said at last, summing up their minds, “and if we cannot bear it we must find means not to bear it. But the land comes first.”

To this they all agreed and they parted. They were of one mind and there was not a traitor among them.

Going toward his house for his noon meal Ling Tan thought to himself that he was glad his second son was coming, for how could he endure through these times alone? The men in the village looked to him as their leader yet how would he know to lead them if what lay ahead could not be borne? They needed a leader young and strong and able to think what to do in these times which were so different from any he had known.

At the table in the quiet empty court yard he and his wife ate together, now that there were only the two of them, and he told her what had befallen them. And when she had heard she rolled up her sleeves and bade him go to a village bigger than theirs and see if he could buy as much salt as he could.

“But why, old woman?” he asked amazed.

“Those pigs must die,” she said, “and half of the fowls will die, and you shall have salt fish to eat if you cannot eat fresh.”

“They will kill us if they find out,” he cried. But she twisted her face at him. “Can we help it if a sickness carries off our beasts?” she asked. “I will go through the village and tell the women that all beasts are to be sick, and do you tell it as you go to buy salt, and the word will fly from mouth to mouth, among those who have not already thought of it, and be sure every quick-witted soul will think of it anyway.”

He grinned and said no more, and he did go and buy salt, but it was too scarce to buy all in one place and he had to go to several. Then stealthily and by night, they killed and dried and salted their fowls and their pigs. But they left the sow until she littered and Ling Tan let her into the room where the loom used to be so that the piglets would not be seen.

“They at least are not registered,” he thought.

For days thereafter they worked and whenever Ling Sao saw anyone like an enemy coming she hid the meats in the hole behind the stove that was daily getting deeper. And never had Ling Tan eaten so much meat as he did that summer, for there were the small parts that could not be easily salted and the blood to make puddings. And so it was done throughout that whole region, and the village dogs grew fat on entrails and offal. The only trouble was the scarceness of salt. Then suddenly salt came in from sources they did not know, but it was brought somehow by unknown hands into the villages and left at shops and people took it and were glad and did not ask whence it came. They knew it came from the hills.

The summer was long that year while Ling Tan and his wife waited for their son and grandson, and yet there was the hole to dig. Every day they looked down the roads and at night they woke and listened and thus the days followed on each other. Most of all was Ling Tan harassed with little enemy men coming to the village, sometimes with soldiers and sometimes without, to tell him what he must do and what he must not do, and to smell out his crops and sometimes only to stare and see. Now that he could draw his breath in their presence he was able to see that though all were evil not all were equal in their evil, and he learned to hear them and to hold himself in silence.

“I will wait until my son comes,” he always thought. “I will do nothing but keep silence until my son comes.”

Sometimes the enemy came even to the house, but Ling Sao had learned to be wary, and she had hiding places for meat and rice, and if the hole was not big enough she thrust what was left up into the thatch of the darker rooms where if dust fell it would not be seen. She sat there seeming a dull and silent old woman who stared at the strangers and did not stop her spindle while she twisted her white cotton thread, and if they spoke and she saw their lips move she pretended she was deaf and pointed to her ears and shook her head, and so they let her alone. She took care not to brush her hair smooth or wash her face clean these days and the sun made her brown skin nearly black and she let it.

“The uglier I am the safer I am,” she thought, and she took heart that the hole was now big enough to hide Jade and the child at least.

Thus passed the summer and then the heat broke, and then they thought that any day surely their son would come, and Ling Tan only hoped he would come in time for harvest.

“Yet we must hide him too from the enemy,” he said, “for the enemy compels the young men to labor for them, and our son must not be lost to us,” and so they devised ways of constant watchfulness and how they would tell their son he must learn to work by night and sleep by day, and they would watch.

At last one night the hour came for which they had waited. Nearly at midnight they were waked from their sleep and they ran into the court. There was a low knocking at the gate, and Ling Tan leaped toward it and was about to throw the gate open, certain of who was there, but his wife who held the lamp, called, “Wait. I must first put out the light, so that if it is not they we will have time to escape, and if it is they none will see them coming.”

He was struck again with her quick wits, and so he waited while she put out the little lamp, and then he threw open the gate. In the dim starlight they saw two figures.

“Father!”

It was their second son’s voice, and Ling Tan and his wife heard it, and then how they pulled those two in! They led them to the kitchen through the darkness for in the kitchen there was no window and then they closed the door and Ling Sao lit the lamp again and so they saw each other. There they were, Lao Er and Jade, but they looked like two men, for Jade had her hair cut off short and she wore men’s garments and her feet were bare and thrust into men’s straw sandals, and her face was so thin and brown that even one who had known her could have passed her on the road and thought her a farmer. But Ling Sao was famished and starving for the child.

“Where is my grandson?” she cried. “Where is my little meat dumpling?”

Then Jade smiling took the load from her back, and there cleverly hidden under a basket was that little boy for whom Ling Sao had been waiting. She thought of no one and of nothing else as she took him in her arms, her face all trembling and broken with weeping, and she unwrapped him and looked at him all over.

“He is exactly as I thought he would be,” she whispered, and she lifted him and held him against her shoulder and rocked him back and forth. “Oh, how it eases me,” she whispered. “Oh, how I am comforted to hold him like this!”

And the others stood about her, saying nothing, but tears were in their eyes because of the agony of her joy, for such joy is made up partly of sorrow and none can know that deep joy who has not had sorrow first. As for Jade, when she saw it she was for the first time willing for all the danger through which she had carried the child. She had not wanted to come back, but to go forward further to the West, and she and Lao Er had argued bitterly as to whether they ought to obey the letter which had come to their hands through many another. For that young man who had first taken it from Ling Tan was shot by an enemy gun and he had died. But all that he carried he gave to another before he breathed his end, not only Ling Tan’s letter but other letters and first of all the secret messages that were his real duty, the messages between those who ruled the free lands and those who were in the hills, and thus by one way and another Ling Tan’s letter had reached his son.

When they had read it, Jade had shaken her head. “We who are young, we ought to go on and not go back,” she said. “We left that place because of the child and shall we take him there now?”

But Lao Er said, “When we left, my elder brother was at home and my father had two sons besides me, and we could think first of our own. But now those sons are gone, and the old ones are alone, and will our son care for us in our time if now we leave my parents? We cannot expect good in our time if now we do evil.”

So at last she had been willing and they began their journey. Yet every step she took had been unwilling, and now for the first time she felt herself knit to this family of her husband, for she perceived that not unto one is a child born, but to all who go before him in the house. And so she did not, as some women would have done, put out her arms jealously to the child. She let Ling Sao have her fill of him and she stood there enjoying this worship of the child whom she worshiped.

As for that little boy, he had seen so many strange faces since he was born that he was afraid of none, and surely none had looked down on him so kindly as this wrinkled brown face. Since he had slept most of the day on his mother’s back and was full of mother’s milk besides, for Jade had taken care to nurse him well before they reached the house so that he would not fret the first moment, he was very gay and smiling. When Ling Sao set him on her knee at last and told Ling Tan to hold the light so that she could see, the child laughed and pulled the button on her coat and then she laughed, still weeping, and between laughter and tears she could not speak and Ling Tan thought she would choke. He grew frightened and gave the lamp to his son to hold and cried out to her:

“Guard your heart, my old woman! It has broken away from its anchor in you and you will lose your wits in a moment more. Too much joy is as bad as too much sorrow.”

He took the child from her as he spoke, and bade Jade pour a little tea out of the pot for her husband’s mother, and Jade did, and Ling Sao drank it and wiped her eyes and so brought her heart back again to its place. Only then would Ling Tan give the child back to her, and the truth was he, too, liked this little grandson in his arms, for the child’s body was firm and hard and his thighs were fat and strong, and his little breast broad and his shoulders square.

“This is no usual child,” he said to his son. “Look at his face, how square it is, and he has a square mouth.”

Then he saw his son look proudly at Jade and she as proudly at him, and he took pleasure in their mutual pride.

“What can the enemy do to us when our family goes on like this?” he exclaimed, and indeed this sturdy boy of the generation to come after them put heart into them all and the house came to life again with him.

So at last they were able to bestir themselves. Ling Sao got up, the child across her hip, and how good it was to feel him there, and Jade helped her and she heated food, and Ling Tan sat down and lit his pipe and told his son to sit down and tell them all that had happened since they met. Thus over food and tea, and the two women sat with the men and Ling Sao still held the child and laughed silently at all he did while the talk went on, they made known to each other something at least of what had come to all since they last met.

There was only one moment’s small cloud over their joy, for Ling Sao as she had always done for her own children and for her grandchildren chewed some rice soft and leaned to put it into the little boy’s mouth, but Jade spoke against it.

“I beg you not to be angry with me, mother,” she said, “but do not put food from your mouth into the child’s.”

She said this softly and prettily but still she said it, and Ling Sao was astonished, first that she should speak so to one older, and then that there could be any harm in feeding a little child soft chewed rice.

“Why, I fed my sons so,” she said with anger, “and it did no harm to them, I swear.”

“But it is not thought good now,” Jade said bravely. “I bought a little book in that upper river city that told of how to care for children, and this it spoke against, that food should be put from one mouth to another.”

“Am I foul then?” Ling Sao said with more anger still.

“No, you are not,” Jade said pleadingly. “But, mother, I myself do not do this, and I beg you let us keep this little child the best we know.”

To this Ling Sao made no answer, and the men at first said nothing either, for this was not their quarrel.

“You had better take your child,” Ling Sao said to Jade. “Doubtless I pollute him when I hold him.”

“Oh, mother!” Jade said pleading with her. “For you I brought him home at all.”

“Cool your anger,” Ling Tan said suddenly to his wife. “Shall we quarrel this night of all nights and over the child who is the center of all our hearts?”

So Ling Sao let her anger cool but she never forgot what Jade said, and ever after she did not do that thing. Now as the others talked she sat brooding in herself about the book that Jade said she had and she thought with scorn, “Are children then to be reared and fed out of books? Did I ever have a book to feed my children and did I ever lose a son?”

But she kept these thoughts in herself and the innocent child was still precious to her, and after a while she forgot the matter in hearing the tale of all that her son and Jade had done, and in what they told of the free land.

When each knew all it was nearly dawn, and Ling Tan took his son and Jade and showed them the hole behind the stove.

“There you must hide if the enemy comes,” he told them. “You are not registered and they do not know you are alive.” And he told them how he had lied and said that he and his wife were childless.

“I am glad of that,” his son said, “for we came through the hills and with those in the hills we made our plans, and it is better if my name is nowhere.”

Ling Tan did not understand what he meant. But by now he was too weary and his mind too full of all he had heard to hear more, and he thought, “I will leave this until tomorrow to ask.” So they went to bed at last, though Ling Sao would have been glad to sit and hold the little boy all night and let him sleep in her arms, if Ling Tan had allowed, but he said:

“You must have your sleep too, old woman, and I shall not rest if you are not sleeping.”

So in the deep blackness before dawn they parted, and when Ling Tan lay down on his bed, though he was weary it was a good weariness, and all that his son had said was strong and full of hope and it had given him hope, too. For the first time since the enemy had come he turned toward his wife with his old self come back in him, and he felt clean again because of hope ahead and so he renewed himself with her and then he slept.

In their old room Lao Er and Jade lay side by side, too tired to sleep. The way home had been twice as hard as the going, because then they had gone toward freedom and now they came back to what they knew could not be freedom, and perhaps never in their time would they be free again.

“We must learn to live free within ourselves,” Lao Er said.

But he did not want to talk much tonight, even with Jade. He had seen death and trouble enough over all the land that he and Jade traveled, night after night, for they walked or rode by night and hid by day, once they had left the free land, and everywhere helped by the people in the hills, so that by now Lao Er knew those men and women and they him, and indeed they had been sorry to let him go.

But he told them that he must come home because his parents were alone and he promised to plan with them and see how he could help them. Yet now that he was here he knew that what the enemy had done in this city and the laws they made were worse than had been elsewhere.

“Then I must work the more,” he thought, “I must be more clever, keep my wits more sharp, be ready to die and yet sure I will not die.”

And he praised his parents that they had had the sense to dig the hole and he said to Jade before he slept, “We must work on that hole and dig it deep and strengthen it with posts and beams under the court and make it like a secret fortress. It must shelter more than us and hide more than our goods.”

“I will make it my work,” Jade said.

“And it shall be my first work,” Lao Er said. “Then as soon as we have it done, I will let the people in the hills know and then we will see what we can hatch between us.”

Jade slept at last, the child asleep already at her breast. But still Lao Er could not sleep. He heard again and again what his father had told him of the taking of the city and all that had been pillaged and burned and looted and what had befallen women, and the blood fevered in his veins and he grew so angry lying there in the night that he swore to himself that the rest of his life he would give to war against the enemy, and he would teach his children after him to carry on the war. Only then could he sleep.

… Not in one night could all be told, and the next day Ling Tan told his son all that he had forgotten. What made his son more angry than all else put together was when he heard that Wu Lien had gone over to the enemy.

“Such men are traitors and when we push the enemy into the sea, be sure that men like Wu Lien will go with them or be killed if they do not.”

“I had not thought of the man as a traitor,” Ling Tan said, considering. “It is more to his kind to be thinking only of himself and his profits, and he is the sort of man who smells out profits as a dog does a hare, and he follows as heedlessly.”

But his son would not allow this for an excuse. “Any man who thinks first of himself now is a traitor,” he said, and Ling Tan did not answer. He thought to himself, more humbly than usual, for he was not by nature a humble man, that perhaps the young must be right these days, since certainly he did not know what to do except to stay by any way he could upon the land.

Thus in humility he listened to his son rather than commanded him and then Lao Er said:

“Father, the first work to be done is the finishing of the hole and since I ought not to go out into the fields anyway until I see what the outlook is, then I will work at that hole and make a strong good room under the court where we can live if we must or where we can hide others.”

“What others?” Ling Tan asked surprised.

“We must ally ourselves to those in the hills,” Lao Er said, “and it may be that sometimes we must hide them.”

To this Ling Tan said not a word, and how could he when now two of his sons were in the hills?

So when they had eaten he went out alone to the land until such a time as Ling Sao could bear to leave the child, and his son went to work on the hole and Jade worked, too, as long as Ling Sao held the child, and worked as much as she dared without spoiling her milk for the child if she grew too weary.

“My legs are strong enough,” she said laughing, “for I have learned almost to walk in my sleep, but now my arms must take their turn.”

This Jade had in these hard months grown almost as strong as a man and her slender body was hard and all the softness of her face was gone. Anywhere she might have passed for a young man, if one did not take notice of her little bosom, which for all its smallness yet nourished the child well. What she ate seemed to go to the child and not to her, and Ling Sao rejoiced in this and she said:

“I wish that poor Orchid could see this, for she was so fat and yet when she had a child to nurse all she ate so heartily went to herself, and her big round breasts that you would have said were full of milk were empty and only fat.”

“She would have hated me the more,” Jade said sadly. “Oh, if she saw me reading a book and nursing my child at the same time how angry she would be!”

But Ling Sao was grave about the book. “Are you sure you do well to read a book when you nurse the child?” she asked. “It seems to me a danger to do two such opposite things when you are a woman.”

But Jade only smiled. “Look at me when the child eats again,” she said.

And Ling Sao did look and while Jade read and held the child to nurse, the milk flowed out of her so rich and full that the child had to gulp to take it in, and out of the other breast it flowed, too, there was so much. Ling Sao could say no more, and she could forgive Jade anything because she had so much milk for the child.

In the morning how beautiful the child was, and how sweet his flesh smelled to her! She could do no work nor anything except sit and hold him and gaze at him and smell him and laugh at him, and her eyes were dazed with pleasure and she heard nothing anybody said and cared not whether a dish were washed or the floor swept or whether there was anything for the next meal.

“Leave your mother alone,” Ling Tan told his son, “and tell Jade to indulge her and let her hold the child to her heart’s wish. It will heal her for everything.”

They did as he told them, and now and again they looked at her and she did not see them. She was murmuring to the child, laughing because he wet her so often, and she carried him into the courtyard for the sun to fall upon him, and she rubbed oil into his little arms and legs, and once she cried out and they hurried in and she said to them:

“Look at his back! I swear I never saw a child under a year so strong and able to sit alone! Look at this back of his!” And her eyes were full of tears.

So they laughed and went back to their digging, and in that one day of digging Lao Er and Jade made the hole deeper than Ling Tan and Ling Sao had made it in seven.

Out in the fields at his own work Ling Tan thought whether or not he could keep his son hid and how, for others in the village must know he was there, and after a while it seemed to him that it would be best to hide nothing from the village, who were after all of his own blood. So when he came in to eat at noon he told his son so, and the son agreed with him, and that night after the day’s work was finished Ling Tan took his son to the tea shop openly with him. When all greetings had been given and taken, he rose and said:

“This son of mine has seen many things which if you are willing he will tell you, not because he has any merit in seeing them, but to hear will give you heart.”

They clapped their hands on the table at this and so Lao Er stood up and in his clear and quiet voice without any pride or bombast he told his kinsmen how he had traveled westward to a city a thousand miles away until his father’s letter found him and he turned back again, and how everywhere the people were of one mind that the enemy must be resisted, openly where the land was free and secretly where the land was lost, but always resisted.

“There are only two kinds of men who are not of this will,” he said, “and they are the ones who think of their own profit first and the others are the weak and the evil, the ones who can be bought with opium and with drugs, who are less than nothing anyway and now dangerous only because they can be spies on others. These are the traitors.”

“Good!” they shouted back to him, and they looked at each other and nodded that he was right, and Lao Er looked about on these brown dark faces that he had known all his life, and his heart rose in him.

“Uncles and cousins,” he said, “we must join ourselves to those in the free land who make war on the enemy, and how shall we join? Only by working in secret with the nine thousand men in the hills.”

Now when he said this he well knew that he invited those men of his blood to be ready to die, for if the enemy knew that the hill men had anything to do with a village their anger knew no reason and they burned that village down.

But man by man in that room held up his thumb and his forefinger to signify that he agreed to what Lao Er said, and of them all there was only the third cousin who hesitated, and then out of shame he too put up his thumb and finger. Yet no one blamed him for this, knowing that learning makes a man weak and a learned man can never be so brave as one unlettered. Lao Er waited until every hand was up and then he said:

“What does this mean? It means that we must hide our rice and wheat harvests and give to the enemy the least we can to save our lives. It means that where we had cotton fields our land now will not grow cotton. It means that as often as can be done an enemy or a few enemies suddenly die from unseen guns.” To this they all listened with uttermost silence.

“But we have no guns,” a voice now said.

“I know where to get guns,” Lao Er said, “and every man shall have his gun.”

A great sigh went over those men like a wind of joy and they murmured and said aloud,

“If we have guns what can we not do! It is our bare hands that have kept us back, or having nothing but pitchforks and old swords, when the enemy has such weapons as we have never seen.”

As for Ling Tan he sat ready to burst with pride in his son and he thought, “The wisest thing I ever did was to call this son home.”

When they were in his house again he said so to Lao Er and he said, “I only wish you had not gone away at all.”

But his son said, “No, I am glad I went and saw the free land and the people there, so that I know what they are, and I know that they and we together will push this enemy into the sea if we are steadfast. Yet I well know their way of fighting in the free land and ours here must be different. They can fight openly but we secretly. Ours is a harder war than theirs, for we live in the midst of the enemy, and we have nowhere to go.”

Thereafter the people in that village waited for Lao Er to bring them guns, and he waited until he had finished the room under the court. But he worked no longer alone. Seeing how loyal the villagers were to each other, and how they were all the same clan, he chose a few to whom to tell of the room, and he called them to work with him, and then how quickly was that room finished! Four strong men working together hewed the clay out, and they set up poles and beams and door frames and they made another secret entrance. Lao Er dug all deeper than had been planned, because in the free land he had seen the shelters against the fighting ships and he went very deep, only praying not to find a river. In this he was lucky, for he found only a small stream which he drained off into the well through a tube he made from bamboos joined and their joints knocked through.

But now and again those diggers came upon strange things, an old bowl or two, some jars full of something now dust, a broken skeleton of a child long dead, and some bones of a man’s leg, and deepest of all a small brass box all green which when they forced it open held a few jeweled pins and a pair of heavy gold earrings, such as none of them had ever seen.

“These belonged to our ancestors,” Ling Tan said reverently, “and we are not worthy to touch them.” He took them and he buried them again in the wall of the room, and left them there.

They made the secret room strong and deep and bigger than Ling Tan had ever thought it could be. They put beams across the top to keep earth from falling in and these beams were held up by pillars of brick they took from the walls of the loom room, for Ling Tan’s house was not earth but brick, and when there was not enough brick, men from the village who had brick houses took down inner walls and by night they carried the brick into Ling Tan’s house. So in less than two months after Lao Er came home that secret room was finished.

Now Lao Er said, “We have a place to put our guns.”

The morning of the day after the secret room was finished he left the house before dawn, food in his hand and two pairs of extra sandals tied to his belt, and he went toward the hills.