Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

XII

NOW SECRET WAR IS not open war, and of the two secret war is the harder to wage. As the winter passed, Ling Tan had to keep his face smooth and his eyes dull, and yet his mind had to be working and quick to spring to every advantage large and small. While his sons and those who were with them came and went by night and used the secret room as a fortress for their weapons, he had to seem to be an old farmer who knew nothing and saw nothing if the enemy came to inquire. And be sure they did come, for in the spring there began to be so many of the enemy found dead that a great anger rose among the enemy rulers. Guards were found shot upon the city wall, though the city gates were locked at night, and the wall was eighty feet high and how could any climb it?

Yet Ling Tan’s youngest son, and others like him, climbed that wall somewhere many a night. He thrust his bare strong feet into the crevices of the great old bricks and into vines and into the roots of small trees, and thus in darkness pulling and feeling he scaled that wall and crept along the shadows of the crenellated edge until he came to an enemy guard somewhere and then he shot him. The next moment he was hiding in the vines again and there he clung until if there were noise and clamor it had died away and then he climbed down and went home and before dawn he was back in the hills.

And the enemy who came to the countryside to search for food and goods found themselves surrounded by innocent dull villagers, men and old women together, fearful and timid, and then suddenly these same people brought out guns and knives and fell upon them and there was not one left even to tell what village it was, and all the enemy in the city knew was that too many times those who went out did not come back. Yet the villagers were wise enough not to fall upon any who came too strong for them. No, wherever they were, they waited for a sign from one they chose to be their leader and if the sign was made they moved in swiftness and in silence.

In the secret room under Ling Tan’s court there were strange weapons now, some guns new and bright and with foreign letters on them of the countries where they were made, and also some weapons so ancient that it was a marvel to think where they had first been made and where used. These came always from the men in the hills, many of whom in other times had been bandits and so had kept weapons they had from generation to generation of bandits under the many different warlords who had led them. Of all these weapons Ling Tan chose for himself a very strange old gun that had a wooden handle like a club at one end and at the other end it was set into iron, and the iron shaped into four tubes like the four fingers of a man’s hand, and at the base of each tube was a hole for the fire to be set to the powder. So simple was this weapon that Ling Tan could use for a missile any piece of iron he found, the heads of nails or the fragments of hinges and such things, and with four small charges of powder and a little cotton, he could fire four times at once. The wound thus made was very grievous.

Now in his village Ling Tan was the man chosen to give the sign of death to the enemy and this he did whenever the enemy came, and he did not mistake the power of the villagers. Twice in the winter and once in the spring he gave the sign and each time they were able to kill all the enemy so that not once did any escape to give a bad report of the village and so they were safe.

The anger of enemy rulers rose very high when month after month their loss grew more severe, especially in the hill villages that were far from the city. How could they rule the countryside if they did not dare to go out to it, and yet how could they send an army everywhere to gather in the food and goods they took? At last in the middle of the summer the enemy in great rage began to burn all those villages where they found men of the hills. Ling Tan’s village was not burned, for though at the very hour that the enemy searched it there were in the secret room some men of the hills, they did not find them, and so though they threatened they did not destroy.

But there were villages far in the hills where innocent people were burned in their houses by night and this for no cause except that the villages were in the hills and the enemy reasoned that there must be hillmen in them. And yet as mid-summer came on, Ling Tan’s sons told him, from somewhere there came out piteous creatures even from the burned villages, a few men and women, to till the blackened earth that was still theirs.

Under such cruelty the temper of the people could not but change. In the old days when men had been free, the very faces of men and women had been open and free and laughter was ready and quick and voices were merry and there was loud cheerful talking and cursing in every house, and none had need to hide anything from anyone. But now the villages were silent, and the faces of the people in the whole countryside grew grim and hard, because of the hardships of their life under this enemy and the bitterness of their hatred which they could not vent except by secret killing. This secret anger and this constant search for ways to kill could not but change men’s very hearts, and Ling Tan felt this change even in himself.

This enemy having always burned wood and wood only to cook their food, they knew no other fuel and so they cut down trees and they took out beams from people’s houses and lifted gates from their hinges, and whenever there was a need for wood they went out and took it where they saw it.

And they felled with all other trees in that spring the great old willow tree near Ling Tan’s house under which Lao Er and Jade had used to meet in the first year of their marriage. When Lao Er came and saw the huge beheaded stump he felt sorrow and he went back and said to Jade:

“They have cut down our tree, my heart.”

And she said sadly, “Were there once such peaceful days that we could meet beneath a tree?”

Now there chanced to come to Ling Tan’s village one day in the first month of the summer, a band of the enemy looking for wood. They were a band of some eight or nine men, but Ling Tan’s sharp eye, veiled with pretended dullness, saw that there were only five with guns and the others had no weapons. The villagers came to their doors as they always did, and their old women or their old men stood ready inside to hand them their weapons if Ling Tan gave the sign. This day, after considering the enemy, Ling Tan did give the sign, and in one body the villagers sprang out and fell upon the enemy and killed them all except one who was wounded by Ling Tan’s four-muzzled gun. He was able to crawl away into the bamboos at the south of Ling Tan’s own house. Here Ling Tan followed him, and the man rose on his hands and knees like a dog, and he turned a beseeching face to Ling Tan and in language that Ling Tan could understand he begged for his life. He was a man near to Ling Tan’s age and he said, gasping, “Let me live, I beg you, let me live! I have a wife and children. See, here they are!” He tried to find something in his bosom and could not.

But Ling Tan reached into the man’s own belt and took out a short knife he carried and without waiting a moment or indeed taking thought more than he could have for a snake or a fox he thrust it into the man’s belly. The man turned a dark sad look on him and died.

Then Ling Tan, who had killed an enemy three times before this, stood looking down on the man’s face and he thought:

“He has not an evil face, this devil.” He thought of what the man had told him, and the stain of his blood had not yet reached his bosom, and Ling Tan stooped and put his hand into the man’s pocket and took out a small silk case. He opened it and there were the pictures of a pretty woman and four children between eight and fourteen years of age. Ling Tan stared at them for a while and thought how they would never see again the man to whom they belonged.

At this moment Ling Tan knew how changed he too was, for he could think about this and could look at these faces and feel no sorrow. There was neither sorrow nor joy in him. What he had done he had done and he did not wish it undone, and if the chance came to him he would take it again tomorrow.

He had once been so soft at heart that he did not want to see fowls killed and Ling Sao had always to wring their necks behind the house where he could not see. “I do not like to kill,” he thought now, “and even today I would not kill for pleasure. But how is it I am able to kill at all?”

He went back to his house, pausing only to tell the villagers who were burying the dead that there was a dead body in the bamboos, for it was needful always to bury quickly lest these bodies be discovered. With the silk case in his hand he went into his house and put the case into his room. Yes, he was changed. Tonight he would eat as well as ever, and it would be nothing to him that because of him a man for whom a woman and children waited somewhere was now buried in the earth. There had been others, and the people in the village and he among them had often made jokes about these dead men and how they enriched the soil or poisoned it, and had wondered whether or not the same crops would come up next year. They were all changed. Before the enemy came it was never heard of that anyone was killed in this village, except perhaps a girl child too many and then only when it was new born and had not drawn the breath of life. Now they killed the enemy like lice in winter coats and thought no more of it.

“When the devils are gone can we get our old selves back?” Ling Tan asked himself and could not answer. He began to think of each one in his house, and he thought of Ling Sao who with all the other men and women ran out with her spade and her hoe and dug the ground to bury the enemy in, and came back as though they had buried offal, and then went into the kitchen or took up the child. He thought of Jade who held a gun and fired it from a doorway as cleverly as her husband did, and then nursed her son, and what did that child drink into himself with her milk? But of them all, none were so changed as he and his three sons were. For Ling Tan knew that women are more able to kill and do hard deeds than men are. They shed their blood each month, and they pour it out when they give birth, and so they are not afraid of blood. But when a man’s blood flows, he knows his life goes out with it, and so he is more squeamish than a woman is and to learn to shed blood easily moves him and stirs his being and changes him.

Thus it was with Ling Tan’s eldest son. He had been a simple tender-hearted man, and at first when he had to kill he went against his nature, and then when he did kill his nature was changed. Now Ling Tan seeing his eldest son come and go from his house to the hills saw a man who had been laughing and child-like even when he had children of his own, grow into a man who laughed no more, but went about his daily work of death as easily as once he had tilled the land.

This eldest son laid a trap so well that none could tell there was a pit under the dust. He did the thing over and over on many roadsides, and he went to his traps night and morning. If an innocent man were there he pulled him out and let him go free but if it were an enemy he thrust his knife into him as easily as though he had caught a little fox in his trap. He would not waste a bullet on an enemy who had no gun, and he put his knife into him where the heart lay and then tossed the man into a thicket and laid the trap fresh again. Ling Tan saw this eldest son, one day when he was home and eating his food, get up quickly from the table and go out. There was a solitary enemy at the gate who had come to write something down on his little book, and the eldest son killed him and then came back to his meal.

“Do you not even wash your hands?” Ling Tan asked in a wonder. “Why should I?” his son answered simply, “I did not touch him — I only pushed him with my foot into the bamboo thicket.”

In this same fearful simpleness he ate his food heartily and only when he had finished did he bury the enemy he had hidden in the thicket. But Ling Tan could not eat his own meal then with heartiness, not because any had been killed, but because of the change in his son.

“Can he change back?” Ling Tan asked himself. “When peace comes, will my son be gentle again as he once was?”

Yet nothing was so fearful to Ling Tan as the joy of his younger son in these days whenever he killed an enemy. This son, only now a young man, had come out of his dreaming silence, and he grew into a beauty more terrible with every day. He was far taller than most men are and his face was such that man and woman turned to look at it, and he went disguised except among his own because his was a face not to be forgotten. His brow was square and his eyebrows were black and clear, and his eyes shone with his will. His nose was straight and high and his lips still fresh as a child’s and yet everything he had was bigger than another man had. He had known no women but they looked at him and yearned for him, though he turned his head away from them. For what the enemy had done to this son was to turn his being away from nature, and all that passion which he could have put into loving a woman he put now into one deep will, and it was the will to kill, and it became his joy to kill.

Now Ling Tan saw before his own eyes that this son had become the sort of man he feared and hated most, a man who loved to make war and found it his pleasure and his life. There was no way to hide this knowledge that the youngest son was full of zest for war and that he liked everything that had to do with war. The men in the hills knew it and he had easily risen to be a leader of a division of them and he, so much younger than them all, devised schemes and plans as though he were playing a game. He became a master of ambush and secret attack, and he was the boldest of all the hillmen of that region, and the enemy came to know when an attack was his rather than another’s, because the plan was so masterly and the escape difficult, though who he was they did not know.

This youngest son did not often come home, either, but when he came it was always to tell of some success he had had, and he told of it, laughing and proud, and he grew vain of his success and his luck, and he came to believe that luck was his because he had some favor of Heaven. He would boast, “Heaven chose me to that work,” or he said, “To that place Heaven led me” or he said “Heaven put power in my hand,” until one day Ling Tan burst out, “Do not say Heaven this and Heaven that! I tell you what happens on earth now is not the will of Heaven. It is not Heaven’s will that men kill each other, for Heaven created us. If we must kill, then let us not say it is Heaven who bids it.” This he said as a father may speak to a son, and he was not pleased when he saw his handsome son lift his lip at him and sneer at him and say, “This is old doctrine and by such doctrine we are come to the place where we now are. We have lain dead with our ancestors instead of living in the world and while we slept others prepared weapons and came to attack us. We who are young know better!”

Now this was such impudence as Ling Tan could not bear and he let fly his right hand and slapped his son full on his red mouth. “Talk to me like that!” he roared at him. “By the doctrines of our ancestors we have lived for thousands of years and longer than any people on this earth! By peace men live, but by war they die, and when men live the nation lives and when men die the nation dies!”

But Ling Tan did not know this son of his now. For the son stepped forward and raised his hand against his father, and he said in a bitter voice, “These are other times! You may not strike me! I can kill you as well as another!”

This Ling Tan heard with his own ears, and his hands fell limp at his side. He stared at that handsome angry face which he himself had begotten and at last he turned away and sat down and hid his own face with his hand.

“I think you can kill me,” he whispered. “I think you can kill anyone now.”

The young man did not answer but he did not change his proud and sullen look. He left the house and went away and Ling Tan did not see him for many days.

They were not good days for Ling Tan and the nights were sleepless and he thought to himself, “Is this not the end of our people when we become like other war-like people in the world?” And he wished that this younger son of his would die rather than live beyond this war.

“A man who kills because he loves to kill ought to die for the good of the people, though he is my own son,” Ling Tan thought heavily. “Such men are always tyrants and we who are the people are ever at their mercy.”

“I do feel our youngest son is dead,” he told Ling Sao one night. “He is so changed that I feel that tender boy we had is now no more — he who retched with horror when he saw the dead, even!”

He had thought that she would not know what he meant and he was surprised when he heard her sigh into the darkness.

“Are we not all changed?” she asked.

“Are you changed?” he asked in his surprise.

“Am I not?” she replied. “Can I ever go back to the old ways? Even when I hold the child on my knee I do not forget what we have done and must do.”

“Can we do differently?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He pondered a while and then he said, “And yet in these days we must remember that peace is good. The young cannot remember, and it is we who must remember and teach them again that peace is man’s great food.”

“If they can be taught anything except what they have now learned,” she said sadly. “I wish it were not so easy to kill people! Our sons grow used to this swift and easy way of ending all. I sometimes think that if you and I oppose them, old man, they will kill us as easily, if they have no other enemy, or they will fall upon each other.”

He could not answer this, but he lay sleepless long after that and so did she, for he did not hear her steady snore that always told him when she slept. And he made up his mind then that though he would oppress the enemy as bitterly as ever, he would not let it be his life. Each day, whatever he did, he would take a little time to remember what peace was, and what the life here in this house once had been.

And the more he remembered the more he knew that for him to kill a man was evil.

“Let others kill,” he thought. “I will kill no more.”

Thereafter he reasoned to himself that in his own way he served, because he kept alive in himself the knowledge that peace was right. Without excuse he gave no more the sign of death in his own village, and if any wondered, he let them wonder, and he made amends by putting poisons in his pond and killing all the fish so that the enemy gained nothing from it, and when the rice was ready for harvest, he threshed by night inside the court and hid more than half of what he had, and when that crop was reaped, what the enemy took was scarcely worth their fetching, and to their anger he gave only silence and he made silence his weapon.

… But Ling Tan’s second son was not like the other two. He killed when he must, but not because it was the easiest thing as the eldest son did, nor because it was his pleasure as it was the third son’s pleasure. This second son laid his schemes far and wide, and if in carrying them through he had to kill, he killed, but he thought of the end and not of the moment. And in this scheming no woman could have helped him more than Jade did.

“We ought to use Wu Lien as a gate into the enemy’s fortress,” she told Lao one day. “It is idle to be angry and hate such persons. They are not to be loved or hated, but only to be used. But how can we do it?”

“You speak wisely,” Lao Er said.

At this moment they were in the secret room and they oiled and cleaned the weapons that were hid there, for word had come from the men in the hills that a sortie would be made some time within the next three days upon an enemy garrison in a certain town in the region, and the weapons here were to be ready.

“How can we seem friends with them again?” Jade mused. As she spoke she peered into the bright barrel of the gun she held. It was a new gun taken not long ago from some enemy and placed here with the others. She put a rod into it and moved it slowly up and down. Upon the beaten earth of the floor her son sat playing with some empty cartridges. They made good toys, safe and clean to bite upon. One little empty shell he loved especially because it was slender and fitted into his gums, and upon the brass were the marks of his first teeth. Jade watched where he dropped it, because when he was tired of it she planned to put it in a box she had of his first things, his little first shoes that she had made, with tiger faces on them, and his baby cap with Buddhas sewed upon it, and all those things that mothers love to keep.

Now though these two did not dream of it, Wu Lien knew of their hiding in the farmhouse. For he had ears and eyes in the village, and who could this be but that one who was jealous of Jade and her little son? The third cousin’s wife knew, as all the village did, that Wu Lien and his wife had come to Ling Tan’s house rich and well fed. And so one day she took some fresh fish she had caught and with the pretext that she must turn them over to the enemy since fish was forbidden for others to eat, she went to the house where Wu Lien lived. There she gave his name to the soldier at the gate and the soldier let her in, and with her fish still wrapped in lotus leaves she came easily into Wu Lien’s very presence as his wife’s kinswoman.

He greeted her with courtesy as he greeted all and bade her sit, and sent for his wife, and to these two the cousin’s wife, pretending only old friendship, told of Ling Tan and his sons.

“Your brothers are well,” she told Wu Lien’s wife, “I saw the second one not many days ago.”

“My second brother!” that one cried, “and is he here?”

“Yes, and Jade, too, and they have a fine child. Still I would not wish him mine, that child, for he is marked for an early death. Death sits on his eyebrows, I say whenever I look at him.”

She sighed and cast up her eyes and marked the secret look that passed between Wu Lien and his wife. So she went on, “And your other two brothers are very well, cousin,” she said, “and I see them sometimes when they come in from the hills.”

“Do they live in the hills?” Ling Tan’s eldest daughter cried.

“Yes, they live there now,” the cousin’s wife said. She meditated whether or not she ought to tell of the secret room under Ling Tan’s house and how from that fortress the men went out to make their secret attacks. But after she had thought a minute she decided against it. “I ought not to tell everything at once,” she thought. “I had better keep something in my belly for the future, lest I need it.”

So she smiled, and then she sighed and said, “You have heard doubtless that my own son died. Yes, the enemy struck him and he was lost. Now I have no one. He was doing no evil, either. He had only come to the city to look and see what went on, and he had no weapon in his hand. I always said that if your father had not put the notion into his belly he would never have come. Yes, when I see Jade I know that all our evil came from the day your father bought Jade from my son. Because we are poor we lost all. But that is what it is to be so poor.” She wiped her eyes, and Wu Lien coughed and tried to comfort her.

“Is your son’s father well?” he asked.

“How can he be well when we have not enough to eat?” the cousin’s wife replied. Then an idea came up out of her vitals into that witless brain of hers. She turned to Wu Lien, her eyes suddenly dry.

“Wu Lien, you are a kind good man,” she said. “I never look into that smooth face of yours without seeing goodness there. A man does not grow so fat as you unless he has an easy heart and a liver without gall in it. Can you not find my old man a worthless little piece of work here in these walls that would pay us something?”

She looked about her as she spoke and thought how fine it would be to live here in this safe place. There were easy chairs to sit on and the beds were as good doubtless, and the food plenty, and who cared what rulers paid for them?

“But will my father let him come?” Wu Lien’s wife asked. “He is angry with us, and will he not be angry if his cousin follows us here?”

Now nothing made the cousin’s wife more vexed than this. By rights her husband should have had more power in the village than Ling Tan, for he was older, but no one remembered that he was, and Ling Tan had easily taken his place as the head over his cousin, who was a small weak man with a piping voice and the little goat’s beard that quivered as he talked.

“Your father ought not to tell us what to do,” the cousin’s wife said. “And my man always thinks as I do, and what I think is that we must first get food, for who will feed us if we do not feed ourselves?” It was running off her tongue to tell these two that Ling Tan had half his grain in secret stores and that he had told them all to kill their pigs and fowls and salt them down, but she hesitated, for she had done this, too, and then what would she say if it were found out?

But Wu Lien had been thinking while she spoke and now he said, “It will be best if we help you in the village. That is to say, come here sometimes and we will give you food and a little money and whatever you need, and then you can give us the news. We always like to hear how you do, and my wife’s father and her mother and all her brothers.”

This he said innocently but what was behind it was plain enough, and the cousin’s wife saw it and smiled. Soon she rose and said she must be going. Wu Lien put his hand in his bosom and brought out some money and gave it to her, and said, “Take this for your trouble in bringing the fish, and next time, eat the fish yourself. If anyone condemns you, then I will speak for you to those higher than I.” She bowed herself double in thanks and Wu Lien waved his hand to wave her courtesy away.

“I have a little power,” he said modestly, “and where can I use it better than for old friends?”

And his wife looked at him proudly and thought what a noble figure was his in the wine-red robe of satin he wore, and she said earnestly to the cousin’s wife, “Cousin, do us yet one more kindness. When you can, speak for my children’s father to my parents. They do not give him his due. They cannot see his wisdom in seeming to agree here, and—”

But Wu Lien put up his hand for silence. “I do agree,” he said loudly. “I believe that what Heaven brings to pass is best, if we can see it so.”

“What wisdom that is!” the cousin’s wife cried. “Be sure I will speak all good for you whenever I can. It is what I say myself — it is only folly to deny what is here, and I tell my old man that every day.”

So she bowed herself away and went out. In the city streets she bought a few things she wanted, a needle and some inches of cloth for shoes, and a small piece of meat, though she had to walk far to find even these, and the prices she paid made her all but put her money back again. Yet she did spend it, for she walked far and passed many empty shops, and a doleful man who waited on her at last said, “Buy or not as you will, woman. You will not find better anywhere. We are all ruined together here.”

But she was smelling the meat. “What is this meat?” she asked. “Is it dog meat? If it is I will not eat it. I can kill my own dog.”

“If it is not dog it is ass,” he said. “They keep all other meat for themselves.”

She considered a while, holding the meat in her hand, and then she took it. It was meat, whatever it was, and she did not want to kill her own dog.

But as she went homeward through the barren silent streets and saw the ruin everywhere, and how the half-starved people crept along from door to door, and how few were the rickshas even, since so many men had been killed and those left were too weak to pull a load, she grew frightened, and she thought, “Certainly we must make some sort of use of Wu Lien in that good place. We must get our fingers into fat, too, my old man and me. What use is it if we starve?”

And she walked homeward, sure that she would do whatever Wu Lien asked and she determined to keep her ears close to Ling Tan’s door, for in that house the center of the village was.

“I shall tell that man of mine what we must do,” she thought, and she planned how she would feed him well tonight and then even perhaps grant him some of her favor when they went to bed. Then when he was well content she would tell him how their fortunes could be made.

This she did, and the poor man was too innocent to know why that night he had one good after another given him, and only after he had partaken of all did he see why she was so unusual in her temper. Then when he had heard, he groaned and said:

“I ought to have known that you had made up your mind to something,” and he felt he was between two grindstones, the one his wife and the other his deep fear of Ling Tan, and something more than fear, too, for he respected the man who was his younger cousin. In his heart he thought Ling Tan more powerful than Wu Lien sitting in the midst of enemies, and he told his wife, “If Ling Tan or his sons should find out that you and I had betrayed them, do you think our lives would not end at that moment? Why, those men kill as easily as they breathe nowadays, and if they saw us their enemies, down we would go with all the rest!”

At this his wife reviled him and she said, “Of all the men on earth you are least like a man, and why am I tied to you? Will you do what I say or not?”

“But what do you say?” he urged, trembling at her side.

“We are Ling Tan’s enemies,” she said, “and I have always hated him.”

“But I do not,” he muttered, “he has been good to us, and fed us often and when he had the loom he gave us all his short pieces, or nearly all, such as he did not need in his own house, and once a year he gave me enough for a robe, too, or a coat. It is hard for me to forget all this.”

“It is not hard for me to forget it,” his wife said. “Do you think this meant anything to him? He likes to give us his short pieces and his small gifts of food. It makes him bigger in his own eyes. Do people give anything away unless it makes them better to themselves? Shall we thank him for his own pride?”

Thus she twisted the poor wretch at her side and he listened and groaned and shut his eyes and tried to sleep, and she pulled him awake again until in his weariness he cried:

“Oh, do what you will, for you will do it anyway, and I am no stronger than another man that I should defy a woman!”

Thus Ling Tan’s cousin and his wife became ears and eyes in the village for Wu Lien, though the cousin was always unwilling and kept as much as he could to himself. Yet how could he keep all? That woman had her ways of torture, and to keep peace in his house and himself from misery, bit by bit he yielded to her the news he heard when Ling Tan called the men together to tell them what they must do, and faithfully the woman went to Wu Lien and told him, and took her reward. But Wu Lien never told the things she told him, and he kept them only for his own knowledge.

Then Jade, not knowing, planned how it could come about that through Wu Lien a gate might be found into the enemy. She made up her mind one day that she herself would carry food into the city and sell it if she could at Wu Lien’s door. She told no one what she did, for this young woman could be as cool and bold as any robber. She chose a day when her husband was in the hills, and waited until her child was sleeping and then she put on a wig of gray hair, which she had from a wandering troupe of actors that she and Lao Er had met when they went west, and Lao Er had bought it for her so that she might hide her youth and beauty with it. Now she put it on and smeared her face with dye, and lifted up her lip with putty and dyed that, and blacked her teeth and put a false hump on her back, and old shoes to hide her young feet. She slipped out of the little back door while Ling Sao slept and went to a secret field behind the bamboos where Ling Tan raised some winter cabbage out of the eye of the enemy, and there she plucked a basket full. He was working on the front land and did not see her. Then winding her way among the grave lands, she went toward the city.

She knew where Wu Lien was and to that gate she went, but she could not have had a better key, though she did not know it, than a basket of fresh cabbages. For the markets had no green things in them and the very soldier at the gate let his mouth water at her cabbages, and she did not need to use even the name of Wu Lien.

“Go to the kitchen, old woman,” he said, in broken words, “the cook will pay you.”

“Where is the kitchen?” she lisped as though her teeth were bad and she made her voice cracked. For it was one of Jade’s ways that she could make herself seem anyone she chose. When she was dressed like an old woman, she took on, scarcely knowing that she did, all an old woman’s ways. She could have deceived Lao Er himself had he not seen her in this guise and in many another, too, so that he used to be amazed at all her different ways.

“Come with me,” the soldier said. He led her through many courts, she limping behind him and snuffling through her nose, and seeing nothing except the two feet on the ground before her, and so they came to the kitchen.

There the soldier shouted to the cook, “Here is an old woman with a basket full of something better than gold, and all I ask is a taste of the dish when it is done!”

He laughed and went away, and there Jade was at the kitchen door. A cross fat cook came out, and it was not an enemy but a man from some kitchen of an inn or eating place now ruined. He lifted the towel from her cabbages and cursed beneath his breath, but she could not hear what he said.

“Two pieces of silver,” he said aloud.

She shook her head. “You know what cabbages cost now,” she told him.

“Three, then,” he said carelessly. “It is not my cursed money that buys them and I have no time to argue. There is to be a great feast here. A feast again, they tell me — they are always feasting, and where can I get food to make a feast? Have you any meat, woman? Can you get any pork? Fish I have — fish — fish — but what is a feast without pork, or even a duck?”

She stared at him steadfastly. Was this man a traitor?

“If I bring you two ducks, will you pay me ten silver pieces for them?” she asked.

“Bring them and see,” he said.

He took the silver out of his belt to give her for the cabbages, and she asked him, “What day is this feast?”

“Two days from now,” he said, and then the bitterness leaked out of him. “A year ago two days they had their first great victory over us. So they tell me to make a mighty feast, and all the heads will gather together to eat it.”

She leaned toward him. “You are one of us,” she whispered.

That fat cook looked quickly round the court. Behind him the kitchen was empty, but still he did not answer her.

“What a place of power is yours,” she whispered. “By accident you can put anything you like into their food! How many cooks are there?”

“Three,” he said.

“Three!” she said after him. “Are three enough for a great feast? Ought you not to ask for help at such a time? There should be ten cooks. Are you to do all, or does a restaurant come in?”

“They trust no one from outside,” he said. “They guard themselves.”

“Ah,” she said.

He lifted the cabbages out. “Will you bring the ducks tomorrow?” he asked.

“I will,” she said, “at this same hour.”

“The money will be ready when you come,” he said.

He showed her a back gate, and she went through it and so into the empty streets again.

Now Jade had put the thought of poison into the cook’s mind as she might have cast a seed into the ground, though beyond it she herself had no clear thought. But as she went through these ruined streets, she stopped here and there as though to rest and she talked in small quiet places with men and women who whispered to her the fearful evil in which they now lived. In one such place where she stopped, a peddler of old clothes had newly opened his shop again, and she went in to pretend that she looked for a coat, and she asked him how his business did, and the tears came to his eyes and he said, “Can anything be well with me again? I have lost my only son and my three daughters are worse than lost.”

“How did you lose your son?” she asked.

“Will you believe me if I tell you?” he said. “Yet this is the truth. He was only fourteen years old, because he was the youngest of our children. The gods gave us nothing but daughters until the last, and he was the best. When the enemy passed this door one day he liked the bright show of so many guns and uniforms and he gave them a salute — a child’s trick it was, to show himself clever. But the moment he did it, one of the enemy stepped out of their ranks and shot him here at my door and I stood beside him and caught him as he fell dead.”

“Can this be?” Jade asked sadly.

“It can be, for it was,” the man sighed.

Jade went on, and she stopped next at a half-burned house. There were many such in the city where the people lived as best they could in what was left of their homes. She sat down on the doorstep to rest, and the aged woman in that house came out to ask if she would have a drink of well water, for they had no tea, and Jade said she would only rest. But the old woman saw her looking at the ruins, and she made her voice low and said:

“Do not seem to notice too much, for who knows who watches us? We are more lucky than the many who had all burned to ashes around them, or those who died in the ashes of their houses.”

“But how did it come about with you?” Jade asked. “Were there bombs that fell on you?”

To this the old woman shook her head.

“No, we passed through that safely,” she said. “But afterwards the enemy sent their soldiers to live in our houses, and they did not care how they let fire start in our houses, and when a house caught fire they moved on to another, and my house was one of those. A soldier went to sleep smoking in that inner room, and when the bed caught fire he got up and walked out and let it burn and went elsewhere and said nothing, and we who were crowded to the other side of the house away from the enemy as far as we could go, we did not know until it was too late. So were many houses burned.” The old woman paused and shivered. “Oh, how they laugh when our houses burn!” she said,

Jade could not speak nor answer lest she say too much and one hear her. She sat a few minutes more, her head hanging down, and then she rose and went away.

Yet her rage was not full until she lifted her eyes and saw pasted upon the walls of a main street she chanced to enter a great sheet of paper, and on it were false pictures of the enemy smiling and holding out in their hands cakes and fruits to a group of kneeling vanquished, old men and young, and women and little children, who looked up at them thankfully. On this sheet were written in large letters these words: ‘The People Welcome Their Good Neighbor, Who Gives Them Food, Peace, Safety.”

When she had read these words Jade’s anger brimmed over and she went back to a certain shop she had passed, and there she asked for an ancient and well-known drug. The man behind the counter himself was as old and dried as a root. He smiled a melancholy smile as he measured out the white powder.

“There are many who buy this medicine these days,” he said, “and they are nearly all women.”

“Do they buy it for themselves, too?” Jade asked to deceive him.

“The women buy it for themselves, be sure,” the man said quietly, and though he looked at her very closely he asked her nothing. He measured out the stuff and he sold it cheap, and Jade put it in her bosom and went homeward.

Only that night did she tell those in her husband’s house what she planned, and tell she must, for she needed two ducks, and in spite of all Ling Tan had some ducks that he kept secretly for breeding. Without a word he rose and he went to where those ducks roosted and pulled down two and killed them, and Ling Sao and Jade cleaned them and plucked them and rubbed the poison into their flesh and inwards and then hung them for the night. The great power of that poison was that it was as tasteless as flour, or nearly so.

The next morning Jade took those ducks into the city and gave them to the fat cook. She said nothing until she was paid, and then she said in a low voice, “Make your sauce rich for the ducks and put in extra oils and wine. Our ducks feed on wild food these days, and sometimes the flesh is tainted.”

He made his little eyes wide at this and stared at her. She stared back at him full and strong and suddenly he saw she was no old woman, and he opened his mouth, but he shut it again and nodded. Then he locked the little back gate behind her and she went home by the shortest way.

Whether or not what she did bore its fruit, how could Jade know? The news of that which happened in the city did not easily come into a little village. She waited, and she thought, “If I succeed in this, I will do it again and again. It will be my way of making war on the devils.” At last news did leak back after a long time, and it came through the third cousin’s wife. She said one day innocently that her man had seen Wu Lien on the street and he was as thin as an old goat because he had nearly died and some of the enemy had died after a feast they had eaten.

Hardly could Ling Sao keep her eyes straight when she heard this, and she was glad that none other was there to hear it that day. For Jade had taken the child down into the secret room when the woman came as she did very often. But Ling Sao must know more and she pretended surprise, and asked:

“How many died and who were they?”

The cousin, wanting to make herself as knowing as she could, said solemnly, “They were all very big heads, and five of them died and all were sick. Wu Lien told my man that more than twenty were sick. Of them all he was the farthest from death, for he had eaten little of the meat.” She pursed her lips and wagged her head and went on in a whisper. “They blamed the cooks, but how could they tell which it was? Besides their usual cooks, they had in several from outside to help, and when they went to look for the ones who came in from outside, they had all fled.”

“Was there no meat left for the cooks to eat, and did they not fall ill?” Ling Sao asked.

“Those enemy heads were so eager for meat that they chewed up the very bones,” the cousin replied.

“Ah,” Ling Sao said. “Who does not know how the enemy loves meat!”

And indeed that enemy did love meat, for next to women and then wine what they always asked for was meat. Ling Tan had heard from his sons in the hills that there they had seen the enemy fall upon a rare fat buffalo as it grazed, and they cut the flesh from it living and ate it raw. Never had any seen or heard of this before, and whenever it was told those who heard it cried out, “Can these be men?” So it was easily to be believed that of ducks even the bones were eaten.

That night when Ling Sao told them all that Wu Lien had eaten the poison too, they listened in silence and her second son said, “I wish he had eaten more and ended himself.”

This Ling Sao knew was wrong for him to say, and though she was proud enough that she and Jade had used poison against the enemy, which is woman’s weapon, she said, “Still, he is your sister’s husband.”

Since she was his mother he turned his back on her, but Jade said for him in her quiet voice, “In these days, mother, there is a stronger duty than the duty to sister or brother. You must not speak against him.”

To this neither Ling Tan nor Ling Sao answered. Many things were said in their house now which they did not answer, for they knew these times were not their times, and the future belonged not to them but to those who carried the struggle after them.

But in the night in her bed Ling Sao wept a little, and she said to Ling Tan, “I doubt that anything can ever be the same again, even though peace comes.”

And Ling Tan said steadily, “Nothing can be the same and we old ones must know it. And the sign of the great change is this, that the young have cut themselves off from the old. They must cut themselves off even from us so that they may be free for their duty which is to drive out the enemy. Do not many in these days swear against their parents?”

“Yes, and it is an evil thing,” Ling Sao said passionately. “For where is the earth under our feet if the very children we bring to life deny what they owe us?”

“We cannot say it is an evil thing,” Ling Tan told her. “We old ones, we must see that they do this to declare their freedom for the new that lies ahead.”

But Ling Sao could not see this. All that she could see was that nothing was left to anyone if the old could no longer look to the young for obedience. Where was the order in life if this were to be?

But Ling Tan could see further than she. Though what he saw was as dim as a mist because he was not a man of learning, he understood now that when his sons no longer obeyed him, it was not because they hated him. It was because they must be free of all that was past, that they might be ready for what was now and to come. His sons had gone beyond him.

… “Do you hate me?” Jade whispered to her husband. Now that she had succeeded in what she had planned, she was afraid.

“How can I hate you?” Lao Er replied.

She looked down at herself, and twisted her mouth into the least of a smile. She was naked, for she had just bathed herself.

“I see no beauty in me,” she said, and crossed her arms upon her bosom. “I am so thin, my flesh is so hard. Today when I was washing clothes I looked in the water and my face was dark and not like a woman’s face.”

She snatched up her garment as she spoke and wrapped it around herself.

Lao Er sat at the table in their room, drinking a little tea before he slept.

“You do not look as you did when I married you, it is true,” he said.

She threw him a look over her shoulder and drew on her cotton trousers. “Would you have married me then if I looked as I do now?”

“Doubtless I would not,” he said, beginning to smile. “But I myself was not then the same man that I am now, and what pleased me then would not please me now.”

She saw his smile and her heart lightened and she made her face mischievous at him, “Now that I look at you,” she said, “I see that you too are not so handsome as you were. How black the sun has burned you!”

“I am very black,” he agreed.

“And your hair is the color of rusty iron,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed again.

She seized a small mirror that stood on the table. “Still, what does it matter how a man looks?” she asked him.

“If it does not matter to you, it does not matter,” he said, laughing.

She stared at herself in the mirror and made her mouth pretty.

“Shall I ever wear paint and powder again and put earrings in my ears?” she asked.

“Who knows?” he said.

“You never did give me those earrings,” she said.

“You chose the book,” he said.

But she still looked at herself. “Perhaps I was wrong,” she said.

“Then some day I will buy you the earrings,” he said, and now he was laughing heartily. Between them was rising that sweet warmth that nothing could chill. So close they were, these two, that in weariness and danger and in all the evil of the present world still they could give themselves up to the love there was between them, and return to it, and it was there always.

And yet this night a little later he thought Jade hung back from him somewhat.

“Now what?” he asked her, and stayed himself to find out what was in her mind to hold her body back.

Then she hid her head under his arm in the old way she always did when she grew shy before him, and he had to pull her out and then she faltered, looking every way except into his face, “Are you sure that you do not think me less a woman — because of what I did?”

“Of which thing you did?” he asked. “You are always doing something!”

“The poison,” she whispered. “Sometimes when I wake up and think I did that — I hate myself.”

“But they were the devils,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But I mean — will there come a day when you will look at me — perhaps long after peace comes — and you will say to your heart, ‘She could put poison into food,’ and then think me less a woman than you like?”

At this moment it seemed to Lao Er that at last he had the true knowledge of Jade. She could be so full of courage, so seemingly strong, and yet now he knew hers was a shrinking tender heart, and he loved her more for this than for all her bravery. But he knew what would please her best and so he said it.

“What you did was brave. I wonder that a woman can be so brave as you.”

Then he took his place of command over her. “Now you have proved yourself,” he said, “and it is enough. There are many who can kill the devils and you have a greater duty.”

What could he say to make her know he loved her and would love her while he lived? What could he say to make her know that what he loved in her was not a woman, any woman, not woman even, but the creature that only she was?

He cast about and all the time his love grew and rose and was too big for words again. He held her hard, his hands upon her arms, and searched out every little line of face and hair and eyes and mouth and her two nostrils. If her face had a fault it was that those nostrils were the shadow of a shade too wide, and yet for him they were not, for they matched the fullness of her mouth and the liquid length of her eyes set shallow on her face like two dark leaves.

“It is time we had another child,” he said. “I want children out of you, and many children and if you would please me, make them all yourself — over and over again you and only you!”