Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

XIV

MEANWHILE THE WHOLE VILLAGE had to wonder where Ling Tan’s third cousin was and why he did not come home. Be sure his wife blamed Ling Tan for it somehow, and she came to his house every day and wept and besought him to find out whether or not her husband were dead. In his heart he more than half guessed that his old cousin had of his own will decided not to come home any more, but how could he tell a woman so? He could only listen to her and scratch his head and think what he could do to find the old scholar in a city where men disappeared every day and there was nowhere to ask questions.

The cousin’s wife was more than half afraid that her husband had fallen by an enemy’s hand in coming and going to Wu Lien. She did not dare to go therefore to Wu Lien herself, nor did she dare to tell Ling Tan that she and her husband were ears for Wu Lien. So she begged Ling Tan to go or to send one of his sons to Wu Lien to see what he could do to speak for her husband to those now above him.

“My man was your senior,” she said, “and all the laws of the family compel you to bestir yourself for him.”

This was true and Ling Tan took counsel with his second son, and his son said, “I will go, for I have long wanted to see Wu Lien and to talk with him and know if any use could be made of him.”

“I am afraid for you to go,” his father said and his mother wanted to forbid him, but this could no longer be done. Lao Er and Jade now did as they pleased, though always with courtesy.

So it came about that one day in the ninth month of that autumn Lao Er went boldly to Wu Lien’s house as he was, for once without disguise. He safely presented himself there as Wu Lien’s brother-in-law, and he was let into the enemy gate and then led into Wu Lien’s house. There in a room he was told to wait and while he waited he stared around him in astonishment at what he saw.

“How rich this is!” he thought, wondering at the carpet on the floor and the satin-covered chairs and all such things as he had never seen. Yet what were these to Wu Lien himself when he came in wearing a brocaded satin gown and on his hair fragrant oil and on his fat forefinger a gold ring.

Lao Er smiled at him coldly. “Well, brother-in-law,” he said. “How fine you are!”

“I am very well,” Wu Lien replied in his same smooth way, and he overlooked all inward meanings as he had long since learned to do. He made courteous inquiry of his wife’s family and then he waited to see what was wanted of him.

So Lao Er told him how the old cousin had disappeared and what a burden the wife was and asked him if anything could be done. At this Wu Lien smiled, and rising he opened a door suddenly to see if any were listening and when no one was there he came back and in a small whisper he told Lao Er the whole truth of how the third cousin and his wife had been his ears in the village and how one day the cousin had come in and seen the foreign box and had stolen it.

“I have my ears in the city, too,” Wu Lien said smiling, “and after these listened a while they found the old man,” and he told Lao Er everything of where the old cousin was and how he did.

Lao Er could not but admire the cleverness of this man who now had risen so high with the enemy that they trusted him wholly and yet he did not belong to them, but kept his own ears everywhere.

“I thought you were against us,” he told Wu Lien, “and there was a time when I wished you dead.”

“I am against no one,” Wu Lien said, smiling his peaceful smile.

“Are you for us?” Lao Er asked.

“As far as it is sensible at such a time,” Wu Lien said.

And then he told Lao Er where he could find the old cousin and he said, “At this hour he will be dead in opium. Go late to the inner room of the Willow Tea House and there he will be.”

And then he asked Lao Er to wait until he called his household in, and he did, and Lao Er saw his sister and by now she was delivered of her third child, a fat little girl, and they all looked so fat and fed that Lao Er could scarcely believe what he saw.

“Are you as well as you look?” he asked his sister, and she laughed and said she was. Then she looked grave and said that she only wished she could see her parents sometimes, and she would be content.

“But you,” Lao Er said to Wu Lien, “are you content?”

But Wu Lien only said, “Who in this world is all content?” and he smiled his steady smile.

And there were the children prattling half in the enemy tongue and half in their own. After Lao Er had looked at all, he went away feeling very strange that these, too, could be of his own blood.

He did not go straight to the Willow Tea House, for he thought he must first bring his father and he went home by the quiet inner streets he knew. When he reached home he told his father secretly what Wu Lien had said and Ling Tan thought he had never heard so strange a tale. But when he heard that his third cousin and the cousin’s wife had been ears for Wu Lien, he grew very grave and silent and he sat a long time pulling at his lip and thinking what this news meant and wondering how much Wu Lien knew and whether it were safe for him to know. He asked close questions of his son, and his son could only answer:

“Whether the man is true or false I cannot tell. It may be he is true only to himself. If that is so, we are more safe, because he will not tell the enemy too much, so that on the day when they are driven out, he can say he played the traitor honestly and so save himself.”

“But does he know of our secret room?” Ling Tan asked.

“Who can tell?” his son replied, “and how dare we ask him?”

“If he knows, our lives he in his hand,” Ling Tan said, and he cursed that cousin’s wife, and for a while he thought he would find and take her by the throat and choke the truth out of her. And then more wisdom came to him, for how would the woman know what the man had told?

“It will be better if I tell her nothing,” he thought. “Then her fear of what I know or do not know will give me power over her, and if my cousin is dead I am bound to care for her and I must have some power over her.”

So Ling Tan put the woman aside for the time, though had he hated her before, how well he hated her now! Still, she was nothing but a woman, and at last he threw her out of his thoughts and to his son he said: “I will go with you tomorrow myself to hear my cousin.” The next day, late toward evening, telling Ling Sao no more than that he had business in the city, Ling Tan and his second son walked through the city gates and toward the Willow Tea House. On every street they saw change in the city. Everywhere the enemy advertised their wares, of medicine and courtesans and sometimes he thought drugs and courtesans were all they had to sell. “Benevolent Pills,” and “University Eyewash”—such medicines, the enemy said, could cure all ills. And then there were the numberless houses for opium and for brothels. Upon the streets there were opening new shops with little enemy keepers, and on the streets he saw enemy wives and children, and he thought for the first time how strange it was that these small fierce wild men had wives and children, too. It troubled him, because in their way women and children were more dangerous than the soldiers, for soldiers easily keep hate alive, but could hate persist when enemy families came and made their homes?

In these days there was one very great evil in the tea houses of the city, and it was here as in others. The decent men waiters were gone and in their places were bold young women. As Ling Tan chose his seat one of these women came up to him to see what he wanted. At first he would not speak to her, for her look was too evil for a good man. Then his son whispered to him that it was like this everywhere, and he said aloud:

“Do you tell her, then, to bring us only tea.”

The woman smiled scornfully and went away and brought back two bowls and a pot of tea at a price which made Ling Tan all but cry out, and he could scarcely drink it.

“If I had a way to save the stuff I would,” he told his son.

At this the woman lifted her thin shoulders and turned down her painted mouth and she said:

“If it frightens you, old man, what would you say to this?”

She took out of her bosom a small silver box and in it was a white powder.

“It is three hundred silver dollars an ounce,” she said proudly, “but a dollar a day will buy you pleasure and end your care.”

She put it before them half-secretly, but Ling Tan pretended within not to see it nor to understand what she said, and after a moment she put the box back in her bosom.

“It is a devil drug,” Lao Er whispered when she had gone again. “Worse, it is said, than opium!”

“I do not know,” Ling Tan said. “For me it is not,” and he sat looking about him, as though he were too stupid to understand what he saw, though very well he understood what that evil powder was. Who did not know it? Even the children in the city streets were tempted with it, hidden in sweets the enemy made, and once any had tasted it the hunger for it was fire in the veins. Yet Ling Tan put the knowledge away now. It was only one more of the monstrous evils of these times, and he drank his tea as best he could and what made the tea most bitter to him was that the one who had brought it was no foreign devil but a woman of his own people, spoiled forever by the enemy.

The room in which they sat had once been very fine, but now it was not, for the enemy had torn the paintings from the walls, and the wood had been stripped from the walls, and fire had blackened the painted beams of the roof. What was left were the walls and the floors and there were enough common tables and benches. Ling Tan and his son sat in a back corner looking about them. In the old days they would never have come to so fine a tea shop, for there would not have been another farmer in such a place, but war had brought all men to the same poverty and they looked no worse than others around them. So they drank their tea, being careful not to drink beyond the price they had paid, and at last watching those around them they saw one man and another and another rise quietly, and they rose too and with about ten others they entered a small inner room, and waited. In that room there was no window, and it must once have been a kitchen, for there were the ruins of a brick cooking stove, but nothing else except some benches and a chair set a little apart.

Ling Tan and his son hid themselves among the other men, for Ling Tan had told his son:

“Whether or not I will make myself known to my cousin I do not know. I will judge when I see him.”

In a little while an inner door, made very narrow, opened, and by the light of a candle set on a ledge of the wall, Ling Tan, scarcely believing what he saw did see his old cousin come in. But how changed the man was in this short time! He had bought himself, doubtless from some pawnshop, a dirty satin robe of plum color and a pair of big horn spectacles to set on his nose. The robe was too wide for him, because he had grown dried and yellow, and now Ling Tan knew the moment he looked at him that his cousin had turned to opium, for so his own mother had looked in her time. He leaned to his son and whispered:

“I know where he has found his courage!” And he made a sign of opium smoking and his son nodded.

But they said no more and the cousin did not see them. He walked in, swaying his robes as any old scholar loves to do, and he sat down on his chair as though he were the teacher and all these his pupils, and he gave his greeting and pulled his little beard and in a low solemn voice he began to speak.

“You who hear me,” he said, “today there is good news and bad from the outside. Evil is the news of our capital in the inlands, for there the enemy flying ships labor to do their worst before the year ends and our people are exhausted and their homes are in flames. But our great leader is dauntless and though he shares the sorrow of the people, he says all must resist until the end.”

Here a murmur went over the crowd, and a voice called:

“But does he say how we shall resist? Is our army growing strong?”

“Doubtless that I shall be told another day,” the cousin said, and he went on, rolling his eyes and making his voice a big whisper. “As for the news from across the seas, it is also good and bad. Still we have no clear aid and our friends are still not our friends. They send us money for food and medicines for our wounds, but to the enemy they send oil and fuel for the flying ships which destroy us. In the west the western enemy destroys also the great cities of the Ying country. Night after night the Ying country people must hide in the earth and their palaces are destroyed over their heads and the dead mount up to the sky.”

All listened and wondered where this old man learned such things and yet they took it as truth and they waited for what was next to come. Then the old man coughed and he said, “The most evil news I have kept until now. There is to be set up here in this very city a puppet who will rule for the enemy but in the name of our own people, and we are all to obey him, and to pretend that he is our choice. Who is he? He is that Three Drops of Water King. Has he the spirit to defend us? He weeps easily, but the day will come when all the pebbles from western mountains cannot fill the seas of his regret.”

At this a great mutter rose from those who listened. The old cousin nodded and said, “A very great evil, and tomorrow at this same hour I shall have more to tell you.”

When he had thus told all he knew the old cousin took a small bowl out of his bosom and he rose and set the bowl on the chair and he stood with his back to it and them, to avoid shame, and those listening knew that it was time for them to go out and let others take their place and so each man went forward and put a few pennies in the bowl or what he was able, and so did Ling Tan for himself and his son.

Then they went out and home, and Ling Tan could not marvel enough at what he had seen and heard and he laughed at his cousin and cursed him, too, for an old rascal.

“How he stopped like a story teller at the point to make men want more and come back tomorrow!” he said. “Still, he looked happier than ever I saw him, and let him be. We will tell no one what we know. Heaven uses the useless.”

Thus having put aside the matter of his old cousin, Ling Tan fell to thinking of what he had heard told, how in this city there was to be set up a puppet, a man well-known among their own people. His gorge rose at that weak and handsome man who had so betrayed his nation, and for a long time he did not speak. Was it betrayal or had the man a trick in his mind?

“Who knows the heart of any man now?” Ling Tan thought.

All around them as they walked was the wide good countryside, the land still good though many villages were ruined and many were blackened with fire. The people were scattered, so that where once this road would have been busy with farmers going to sell in the city, with donkeys carrying bags of rice crossed upon their back, and peddlers coming from the city to sell in the villages, and people riding on wheelbarrows, now there were almost none. A rare sight now was a farmer with full baskets of food. But the land was here and what it had done once could be done again, if the land too were not betrayed. He looked down at the brown dust of the road where his sandalled feet went and he said to his son:

“We who are on the land, we must not betray it. Let those above betray us, if they are so evil, but let us not betray the land.”

His son did not know out of what thoughts his father spoke but he could see they were grave, and so he said heartily, “Be sure we will not.”

… The next morning when the cousin’s wife came to inquire Ling Tan told her a lie and made his face calm and stern while he told it.

“Woman,” he said, “what you feared is true. Your man is dead and you will never see him again, and you must count yourself a widow.”

With that she fell into loud weeping.

“How did he die?” she screamed, “and where are his pieces?”

“Do not ask me,” Ling Tan said, “for I will never tell you. As for his body, there is no way to find it.”

She was silenced and for the first time in her life he saw her overcome with true misery and fear. After a while she went home to mourn and to consider her plight, for what is more evil for a woman than to be alone and have no man in her house? She feared lest Ling Tan knew she had been ears and eyes for Wu Lien, and feared the more because he did not tell her if he knew, and now her life was in the palm of his hand. At the end of two days she was humbled to the core of her heart and she went to him and made herself low before him and said:

“I have now no one in this world but you, and I can only look to you.”

Then he replied to her coldly, “Be sure I shall always see that you are fed so long as I have food.”

And Ling Tan and his son kept their secret, and Ling Tan did not tell even his wife. The burden of the extra woman he took and counted it one more thing that he did against the enemy because it left his third cousin free.

But Lao Er told Jade everything, and he told her this, too, and without fear, because he and Jade were one, and he trusted her as he trusted himself. It was like Jade to laugh at the old cousin but to be very grave at the news of the puppet. She was silent a long time when she heard this most evil news, and she said, “Such men as this puppet are our worst and our true enemies, for they have betrayed themselves and us in them. The enemy from outside is a disease but the puppets are our own weakness, and how shall we fight the disease if we are weak?”

“Those of us who are strong must only be more strong,” Lao Er said.

At this she lifted her head.

“You have said a true thing,” she told him, and from that day on these two were yet more steadfast against the enemy.