Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

XI

IN THAT YEAR WHEN the rice harvest was ripe to be cut and while the grain stood yellow in the fields, the enemy sent men everywhere to see to the harvest and to make guess of what the yield would be and to command the farmers that rice was to be sold at a fixed price. The price was so low that it scarcely paid to sell the grain at all. Though Ling Tan and the men he knew took the commands in silence, as they had schooled themselves always to do, for anger was too dear if it gave the enemy a cause to kill one of them, yet their hatred of these small bandy-legged men who were the enemy grew until their skins were tight. For a farmer is a man who will bear much until it comes to the matter of his land and his harvest that he takes from it. The harvests are his life, and if they be taken from him what has he to show for his life?

With their heads bowed Ling Tan and his fellows stood sullen before the enemy, and when the enemy were gone they met together and planned how they would hide the grain. They cut their grain all together and quickly so that it was not possible for the enemy to be everywhere at once, and secretly they threshed at night behind the doors and the windows they covered with cloth to hide the one small light they threshed by, and such grain they hid. There were those who dug under their houses as Ling Tan had and made holes for the hiding of the grain and some had relatives living in villages in the hills, and these took loads away by night. And yet so evil were these times that many such loads were seized by the robbers and the bandits who hid themselves wherever the enemy was not, and robbed their own people. There were such men, even in these times.

In the daytime Ling Tan and his fellows threshed what was left in the open and on the threshing floors and the enemy wondered that so much standing grain could bring so little rice. That year the yield was only half what it had been the year before, and the farmers told the enemy that some years it was so with them that the straw grew very thick and strong but there was little grain in the heads, and could they help it if now Heaven had sent such a year?

Then what could the enemy do? If they believed the farmers lied and killed them who would till the land next year? They could only take the rice that was left. What made Ling Tan’s gall come up in his throat bitter and hard to swallow was that the enemy not only took their rice at the price set, but they sold it again in the city at their own price after they had what they wanted for themselves, and the price they sold it for then was three and four times what they had paid the farmers, and in this way, too, did the enemy pillage the land and the people.

Now the law against fish was enforced, that in all the land only the enemy should have the right to eat fish, and Ling Tan caught no more fish in his pond by day, but he used a seine by night if he wanted fish. Every bone of a fish they ate must be hid and the scales and the fins and any offal must be buried, and they ate fish only at night behind their locked doors, and so did all the village. And yet a show must be kept too, and so once in a while a man walked into the city with a little fish in his hand to give to the enemy. Sometimes the enemy came out and ordered them to catch fish, and then only did Ling Tan and the others have to catch some good fish to save their lives.

Ducks and fowl of all kinds, and pigs and cows, all were taken by the enemy at their own price and meat grew so scarce that men did not think of meat any more. Ling Tan was glad he had killed his own meat early, and he kept his old water buffalo thin and tough so that even the enemy looking at that stringy frame did not ask its death yet.

It was after his son had gone to the hills that they came to bid him deliver his pigs and his fowl which they had registered. He saw them coming one morning, but now he was used to looking up from his work and seeing little bandy-legged men coming toward him. He gave no heed until he saw their feet before him and he could always tell the foot of an enemy because the great toe is forced apart from the others.

When he saw these feet he made his face stupid and his eyes dull and he let his mouth hang and slowly he rose and stared at them. And one who spoke to him shouted loudly:

“We have registered for you two pigs and some ducks and hens and it is required that you sell them to us.”

“Pigs!” Ling Tan said stupidly, “I have no pigs.”

“You have!” the little man bellowed. “It is written down here that you have two pigs.”

“My pigs died,” Ling Tan said.

“If you killed them you will be killed,” the little man said severely.

“They died of sickness,” Ling Tan said, “and I dared not bring their carcasses for fear you would say I killed them.”

“Where are the bones?”

“The dog gnawed them and we cracked them and pounded them to meal and put them in the land,” Ling Tan said.

Now Ling Tan had kept the eleven young pigs in the loom room until it was taken down, and then he had killed them all except two and Ling Sao had salted them. Only the two had he kept alive to breed more and these two he had driven far behind the village and tied them to stakes, and if they were found they were found.

The enemy was angry enough and yet what could they do? If they took Ling Tan who would tend the land? So all they could do was to threaten him and say that if they found him lying it would go ill with him indeed and he listened as though he understood nothing and so they went away, complaining that the people of this country were so stupid that it made the lives of those who conquered them a burden.

When they were gone Ling Tan squatted down again and hidden under his wide bamboo hat he smiled and took a little comfort for the moment because even in a small way he had harassed the enemy. And thus did all the other men on the land, each as skilfully as he could but few were as skilful as Ling Tan.

But Ling Tan’s eighth cousin, who had been the village butcher, as his father was before him, and his father’s father very far back, could no longer live. The loss of all his business filled his belly and his grief was a load in him that would neither come up nor go down, and he could not eat. One day his neighbors saw the boards of his shop still not opened at noon, and since his wife had gone into refuge and his two sons had escaped to the hills, they knew he was alone. They called Ling Tan, therefore, and he opened the boards. There in the empty butchery Ling Tan found his eighth cousin hung by his own girdle from an iron meat hook. The man had cleaned his shop before he died and had cleaned himself and put on his blue coat and trousers freshly washed, and now he hung there, a good and decent man dead.

“This one, too, the devils have killed,” Ling Tan said sorrowfully and he lifted his cousin down and the next night buried him. Even for the funeral his wife dared not come home and his sons came only because it was night.

All the life of Ling Tan’s house now was shaped day by day to the sight of the little bandy-legged men coming down the road—“The devils,” men called them now. Ling Sao in every waking moment of her life watched from door and window and she sat spinning or she worked near the house and when they came she went and told Jade and Jade took the child instantly and went behind the stove and down the ladder and Ling Sao closed the hole and spread earth and straw over the wooden cover and no one could have dreamed what was there in the dark kitchen. When the men had gone Jade came out again and took up her work, but she never went outside the gate, nor did Ling Sao take the child out until night fell.

But the fame of the child leaked out and one by one all the women of the village came to see him and praise him. The third cousin’s wife came too, and she praised him somewhat, but she could not praise him much because of her envy. When she saw that boy, how he was beyond any other child that she had ever seen, her belly knotted in the middle and for a day or two she could not eat and sleep. By some evil chance she saw him first when Jade was nursing him at her breast and the sight of the young mother and her full bosom and the greedy handsome boy turned her blood to gall. She could scarcely get out the words she must speak for even scanty courtesy, and she followed these words by other mournful ones.

“It is no good sign to have so fine a child as this,” she said sadly. “It is always such children who die young. My son was like that when he was that age.”

This Ling Sao could not bear and she burst out, “Why, cousin, how can you say so? I was with you when you gave birth to your son, and he came out so small and green that I swear I thought he would not draw breath and I dared not wash him but I rolled him up as he was in your man’s old trousers and let him be until you could wash him. And do you not remember how he had the flux and stayed like a little starved cat until he was nearly three? Only when he was ten or eleven did I draw my own breath easily when I saw him.”

But the cousin said angrily, “I think I can remember my own child better than you can, cousin, and you have always liked to help children to be born and you have helped so many you have mixed another with mine.”

Then she could not forbear saying to Jade, “Yes, such a child mine was and he could have fathered this child of yours and ought to have if the will of the gods had been heeded, and we have been punished enough that it was not heeded, for had he wed you as he ought to have done, he would now be alive and this would be his son.”

Now Jade was angry and she covered up her bosom and said proudly, “I am content with my life, though I grieve that you have lost your only son.”

When at last the cousin went away Ling Sao and Jade were angry together for this child they loved, and it was a bond between them that they did not like this cousin’s wife, and they agreed that she should not be allowed to take the child in her arms before he walked lest her venom poison him when she breathed upon him.

As for the cousin’s wife she went home and cursed her husband that her son had not wed Jade and that this was not their grandchild and that their son had died and that they had no more children and that when they died they would be dead indeed with no son to live after them. She worked herself into such a misery and fury that the poor old scholar was crazed and went and beat his head against the outer wall of his own house, where Ling Tan happened to see him and ran to save him. When he found out what was the matter he laughed the laugh of a man who has no trouble with the women in his own house, and he took his cousin to the tea shop and let him tell his woe and ease himself over tea and small fried rice cakes. Then Ling Tan advised him to tell his woman next time she was so evil in her temper that he would take a concubine.

“But can I?” the poor scholar groaned. “I have not for months tried myself.”

At this Ling Tan was angry indeed at his cousin’s wife, and he said, “Can it be that she denies you everything?”

“I ask only for peace,” the man said, mumbling in his scanty beard.

“But peace is not to be had for asking,” Ling Tan answered back. “It must be sought and fought for and sometimes brought by force, in a house or a nation.”

The old scholar sighed at this and looked humbly at his cousin.

“I am a man of learning,” he said, “and how can I be as strong as a woman is? The strongest thing on earth is a woman, and our father Confucius spoke well when he said that a woman should not, by law, be allowed a will of her own, and I tell you, cousin, let us even be glad the enemy are men and not women, for when women conquer then men are lost indeed.”

Ling Tan could scarcely hold back his laughter at this and he said, “Doubtless you are right, cousin, but I swear that if I were you I would beat that woman until she leaned against the wall to keep from falling.”

“Would you?” the poor cousin murmured wistfully. “Oh, if you only would, cousin!”

“No — no,” Ling Tan said, laughing more than ever, “not for you, cousin! Two things a man must do for himself, sleep with his own woman and beat her if she needs it.”

He rose as he spoke and the cousin rose dolefully, too, and Ling Tan watching him walk slowly home shook his head and had no hope that by anything he had said he had given his cousin greater strength.

… So those autumn days went on until Ling Tan’s fields were bare of grain and he had stored food enough to feed his house. He was beginning to wonder if any ill had happened to his second son when one night at midnight he heard a knock upon his door, and it was a knock he knew, because his son and he had agreed upon it when he went away. He rose, for his wife was asleep, and he went to the door and opened it a crack, ready to shut it if he had been wrong. But when he opened it he heard his second son whisper:

“It is I, my father,” and he let him in, and not him only for with him came two others. One by one in the darkness they spoke, and Ling Tan heard the voices of his two other sons.

“Oh, Heaven and earth are good,” he whispered and he led them into the windowless kitchen and there he lit the lamp and saw before him, all alive and well, his three sons, and he knew as soon as he saw his third son, that he was not a robber.

“What more can I, who am a man, ask, than the sight of you three?” he said. Indeed they were a sight to make a man proud, for the months in the hills had changed those two, his eldest and his third son. Never had he seen them look so strong and sunbrowned, so fearless in the eyes. That was the greatest change, that the two who had left his house sad and weakened by their grief, were now fearless and they had forgotten what their grief was. “You went to the good hillmen,” he said to his third son.

“I am only with those who make war on the devils,” his third son answered and then he said, “Tell my mother I am hungry and I want some of her good food before we leave.”

“But must you leave soon?” Ling Tan asked.

“Before the darkness changes we must be at the foothills again,” the eldest said.

“Even though we hide you?” Ling Tan asked.

“Yes, this time,” the eldest said, and seemed to want to say no more. So the father led them down into the secret room, and each soon took off his back a load he carried there and when they were unrolled he saw that each had carried a dozen guns. There were such guns as he had never seen, short strong guns of a foreign sort. He took up one and looked at it.

“Where did you get these guns?” he asked.

The youngest son laughed. “We take them from the enemy,” he said.

Then Ling Tan when he had admired the guns awhile remembered his last son was hungry and he put the gun down and went and waked Ling Sao. She rose and had the fire going in a few minutes and Lao Er waked Jade and she brought the child and there in that secret room they all gathered and ate the noodles and salt pork that Ling Sao soon had ready. They had a table there and benches and they dared to have the light, and as long as the two sons stayed they talked and told each other everything and Ling Sao could not have enough of looking at her sons. Ling Tan had warned her to mention no sorrowful thing and not to bring to their minds again anything that had happened of evil. Still she was a mother first and she could not forbear whispering to her eldest son as they were about to leave again:

“Son, have you found anyone yet to take to be the mother of more children to you?”

He smiled down at her but he did not shake his head.

“Is this a time to think of it?” he asked.

“It is always a time to think of more children,” she said sturdily. “Who will take up the work after you if you have no sons?”

“Well, mother, perhaps you are right, and I must look and see what can be found,” he said.

And the father laughed and said, “What would come to us all if the women did not keep us breeding?”

And Ling Sao emboldened by their laughter said loudly, “What would happen to you if you had no women would be that none of you would be born at all.”

“No man can deny that, old woman,” he said.

And she went on:

“And I shall not be satisfied until you, too, my little son, are wed, and I want grandsons from you all before I die.”

“You are a woman never satisfied,” Ling Tan exclaimed and in the laughter of all this the two went away and to the hills again. Ling Tan shut the door and barred it behind them, well content once more within his house.

But all through these weeks and months he had heard nothing of his elder daughter nor of Wu Lien. Then one day at about noon, when they had just eaten their food, and Ling Sao was dipping the bowls and chopsticks into water to wash them, there was a noise at the gate. By now when such a sound was heard at the gate Lao Er, if he were there, and Jade and the child went into the secret room before the bar was drawn and so they were about to do now. But Ling Sao heard her eldest daughter’s voice at the gate and she called out joyfully.

“Wait, it is only my daughter and your sister!” and she was about to draw the bar from the gate when Lao Er seized her arm.

“Mother,” he whispered, “you are not to say that we are here. Tell nothing, mother!”

With that he hastened to the secret room and he lifted the child out of Jade’s arms and bade her make haste too, as though those who came were enemies. Ling Sao stood staring after him as though he had lost his wits.

“Well, this is a strange day when brothers and sisters must hide from each other,” she told Ling Tan who had watched all this.

“All days are strange now,” he said, quietly.

He rose and went to the gate as he spoke, for they could hear their eldest daughter bawling over the wall:

“Are my old ones sleeping or what? Here am I and my children and their father!”

He opened the gate and saw before his eyes Wu Lien and his household. It had been many a month since he had seen anything like these. He did not know how used his eyes had grown to the miserable, to people afraid and hungry and wounded and fleeing, until now he saw at his gate Wu Lien, fatter than he had ever been and his flesh the color and smoothness of mutton fat, and his daughter fat and about to have another child, and the two children fat and dressed in red silk coats, and they had all come in rickshas. But what made him grave was the sight of two enemy soldiers behind them, and he made up his mind that he would not have these two in his court. So he closed the gate enough except for his own face to look through and he said in a cool voice:

“You are welcome, daughter’s husband and daughter and little children, but I cannot let others into my house.”

Wu Lien let his laugh roll out of him at this, and he said:

“You need not fear, my wife’s father. These two only came to guard me.”

“What guard do you need in my house?” Ling Tan asked. Though he would not have said he was afraid, yet the very sight of those low-browed enemy men with their drawn guns made his belly quiver and he wished he had not eaten his noon meal.

“It is a discourtesy to leave them outside the gate,” Wu Lien urged.

“Whoever heard of being courteous to guards?” Ling Tan asked.

And he stood firm and would not open the gate and when Wu Lien saw how stubborn he was he yielded and turned to the guards and tried to laugh and say that the man was old and they must forgive him if he was afraid of them.

“I am not afraid of them,” Ling Tan said in a loud voice. “But I will not have them in my house.”

The upshot of it was that the women went into the house and Ling Tan brought out two stools and a bench and gave the bench to the guards and he sat on one stool and Wu Lien on the other and they stayed outside the gate, and since the day was warm for late autumn it was hardship to none and all pride was saved.

Now Ling Tan did not like what he saw of his daughter’s husband and the more he looked at him the more he smelled out evil. He filled his pipe, and smoked it slowly, never taking his eyes from that fat round face before him.

“How is it you are so fat?” he asked.

“My business is good,” Wu Lien replied in a small modest voice.

“How can your business be good when no one else has good business?” Ling Tan asked.

Wu Lien broke into a gentle sweat and took out a silk handkerchief and wiped himself, even the palms of his plump smooth hands, and always smiling, and with an eye to the guards, he leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “You must know that what I do is done only for the best.”

But Ling Tan said in a loud voice, “I do not know what you do.”

Then Wu Lien wiped himself again and laughed and coughed and said, “Times are times and the wise man takes his time as he finds it and he bends himself to it as a sail to the wind. There is to be a government set up in the city and it is to be a government not of the enemy but of our people, of men like myself, who seeing that if for the time we must yield, then it is better to yield by compromise and to our own rather than to aliens. You see what I would say, my wife’s father.”

“I am a common man,” Ling Tan said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “I am so stupid I understand only when a thing is said to me and I hear it.”

He stared at Wu Lien with his eyes wide open and Wu Lien gave up and smiled in silence, for he saw that Ling Tan was determined not to understand him.

“Where do you live now?” Ling Tan asked after a while.

“At the tenth house of the North Gate Street.”

“That is a street of fine houses,” Ling Tan said. “How can you live there?”

“I am told to live there,” Wu Lien replied.

“And your shop?”

“It is open and I hire two clerks to keep it for me.”

“What are your goods?”

“Cloth and foreign goods of all kinds.”

“And you — what do you do?”

“I work for the new government,” Wu Lien said calmly.

“Do they pay you?”

“I am well paid,” Wu Lien replied.

“So you are content,” Ling Tan said bitterly.

Wu Lien did not answer this but he leaned forward and making his voice soft he began to plead with Ling Tan.

“My wife’s father, I am come here today to help you. Indeed I have no other wish. I warn you that the outlook is not good. Those who have friends are better off than those who have none. If you will do as I say, your life will be easier.”

It was on the edge of Ling Tan’s tongue to cut the man off and his hands twitched and longed to fly at that soft pale face, but Ling Tan was no child. He could hold back both tongue and hands when it paid him to do it, and so he sat looking as stupid as he could and smoking his pipe and listening.

“What must I do?” he asked.

“Do whatever is told you to do,” Wu Lien said, “and I will manage for you here and there as I am able.”

But Ling Tan paid no heed to his offer. “And what have you to do, son-in-law?” he asked.

“I am a controller of all incoming goods,” Wu Lien said. “It is part of my task to see that the rice and wheat, opium and fish and salt are taken in at a place and then made ready to send out again or sold—”

“Opium!” Ling Tan shouted in a terrible voice.

Wu Lien went the color of mutton fat again. That word had slipped over his lips of his own accord, for he was used to handling opium as part of his every-day goods. Opium was brought down from the North, and of all the goods, it alone was not sent to the East-Ocean people. No, opium was kept here and scattered everywhere in cities and villages and by every wile and trick the enemy were teaching the people to use it. It had been an ancient evil here, driven out with great pain and suffering once, and now it was brought back again, and the people who yielded to it were many.

Wu Lien coughed behind his fat white hand. “I am not my own master,” he said mildly.

But Ling Tan could endure no more. He spat on the ground twice and cursed. “P’ei!” he shouted at Wu Lien.

Wu Lien coughed again behind his hand and now his face grew very red with his coughing. He wished that for one moment Ling Tan would take his black eyes away from him, for he felt uneasy under this unchanging look. But Ling Tan did not move his eyes.

… Inside the gate Ling Sao questioned her daughter fiercely.

“But where do you get all this meat and rice to eat?”

“There is plenty of food,” her daughter said innocently. “Rice we have in great bins and meat is brought to us, cows’ meat and pigs’ meat and fish and eggs and fowl.”

“What I hear is that nobody has meat,” Ling Sao said, “and the enemy comes searching the villages about and none of us has anything left. Ducks and hens, pigs and cows, all are taken, and that we have our old buffalo is only because it is so thin and old, and yet the enemy stares at it, too, and your father says one of these days it will go.”

“If I had known I would have brought you some meat,” the daughter said, “and next time I will bring it.”

But Ling Sao gave no thanks for this. Instead she said sourly, “I do not like anyone of my blood to look so fat when others are lean. It is not well in a time of famine when all are starving for one to look fat.”

“But I only eat what I am given,” the daughter said.

“Who gives it to you?” Ling Sao asked.

“My husband.”

Then Ling Sao searched her daughter to know if she were innocent or not.

“How is he able to do this?” she asked.

The daughter began to weep. “I know you cannot understand how good he is,” she sobbed, “because he seems to yield for the time, you blame him. I told him it would be so. But he hates the enemy, too, and he says that each must resist in his own way and he says that he is able in a hundred ways to turn the advantage away from the enemy and to us, and he says what is the use of opposing what is already here? The enemy rules, and somehow we must live under that rule.”

“But not grow too fat under it,” Ling Sao said.

“We had better be fat than the enemy,” the daughter said in sudden anger. “Is the enemy worsted when we refuse to eat?”

“If you can eat,” Ling Sao said bitterly.

And Ling Sao looked at the two little fat children and to her own surprise she took no joy in them. She who could never see a child without wanting to cuddle it and smell its flesh looked at these two and did not want to touch them. Their flesh was not hers, she thought. They had eaten foreign food. But her daughter only saw that her mother looked at the children and she said proudly, “Have they not grown?”

“Yes,” Ling Sao said. “They have grown.”

And then she looked at her daughter between the eyes. “What will they think some day when our land is free again and their father’s name is among the names of traitors?”

At this the daughter began to weep again and to wish that she had not come home.

“We came at great inconvenience,” she sobbed, “and we came only to help you and to see if you were safe, and whatever you think of us we think as we ever did of you, and you will see some day that perhaps we can save even your lives.”

Ling Sao rose. “If I had anything in the house to give you and your children for courtesy I would prepare it for you,” she said, “but indeed we have nothing. We are not given plenty of meat and rice. What we have is only enough to keep us from starving. I cannot treat you courteously, therefore.”

This was to say that she would talk no more, and her daughter knew it.

“How can you be so hard when there are only you two old people in the house and we are all you have!” she said.

“We can live,” Ling Sao said proudly.

So Ling Tan outside the court saw the gate opened and his daughter and the children come out and Ling Sao made a small show of courtesy and she and Ling Tan stood there until Wu Lien and his household were gone, and there were no words said of their return.

When they were gone they barred the gate again and then Ling Sao shouted down the hole and the others came up. They talked a while of the visit and the more Lao Er heard the angrier he was. He made up his mind to creep into the city in one way or another, and see for himself what was there, and see whether indeed all had yielded to the enemy.

Jade, out of her reading of books, devised a beggar’s garment for him and with red clay they made a wound on his face that twisted his mouth to one side and seemed to blind an eye and a few days after that Lao Er went into the city pretending he was a beggar. Avoiding the main streets, he came and went and said little and saw much. What he saw grieved him, for everywhere opium was being sold. The ruined houses he overlooked, and the hungry people, since war brings them everywhere. Yet they could scarcely be wholly overlooked in this city which had only so little while ago been beautiful and rich and full of pleasure. Now the streets were silent. Thousands upon thousands of those who had once walked there in full life were dead. Houses that had been homes were empty and burned. Shops were closed, except those like Wu Lien’s which flourished on such times. But like a new and evil growth there were other shops, some hovels, some gaudy with paper and paint, some openly brothels and some not, but all selling opium. By such a hovel Lao Er paused and made as though he would go in and was waiting to get his courage, when a wretched man crawled by on a crutch, his right leg gone. He was yellow and dried and Lao Er could see that he had come to this place many times before. He laid hold of him and spoke to him as a stranger speaks.

“Does this place sell — that?” he asked and pointed to the sign.

The man nodded and Lao Er asked again, “But ought we to go in if the enemy sells it?”

The man looked at him. “What does it matter what happens to men like me?” he asked. “Nothing can give me back what I have had. The best of times and all the enemy gone will not give me back my leg, no, nor my good inn and my wife and my sons, and all that was once mine. I do not care even for victory. What can victory do for me?”

And Lao Er groaned and thought that such as this one were indeed the vanquished. He limped home by night and there he told what he had seen and how the markets had no food in them and how the marketmen told him the prices were scraping heaven because food was being sent out, and the people in the city were starving, but the enemy did not care, and for food they were giving the people cheap opium and so forgetfulness.

Now such mournfulness fell upon Ling Tan’s house as they had not yet had, for Ling Tan knew from his own mother what opium could do and how a whole soul could be changed and made something else by it.

“What is our refuge from this?” he mourned. “We can hide from the flying ships and we can build up houses that are burned, but what can be done if our people forget what has befallen them?” And to Ling Tan this seemed the worst evil that the enemy had yet done to them.