Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

XVII

SHE AVOIDED PANSIAO FOR days and often, when by chance she met the young girl’s waiting eyes, she smiled quickly and turned her head away. What those eyes asked was impossible.

And yet upon that which was impossible certain powers worked. There was the power of the mountains, and she felt their wild power day and night, urging her away from the docile pattern of the days.

“I was never meant to be a school teacher,” she thought passionately. “I never can sing hymns!”

Yet what was she meant to be? She had now come to ask herself that constantly. What could a woman do alone? She played with her imagination. What if she sent for that pilot who had brought her here and told him to take her — anywhere?

But where could she go? To her mother’s family? They were scattered, the city occupied by the enemy. No, alone she could do nothing. She must ally herself. Ally herself with what? With an army, perhaps. There were the armies in the northwest. Women fought there beside men. But she did not want to fight as one of many. She was too proud for that. She wanted a place of power, or where she could create power. She thought of a certain woman known all over the world, a woman of her own race, educated abroad as she had been, a rich, beautiful wilful woman, who had married a warlord — a man such as she could imagine this brother was of whom Pansiao had told her. That woman had taken a raw strong ignorant man and as his wife she had shaped him into a ruler whose name the whole world knew now. Could not she do the same?

… “I shall have to do something,” Miss Freem thought day after day, staring at her through thick spectacles. “I feel as if this girl were turning into a tiger. O God, please let me find a way to get rid of her!”

… Alone in her room at night Mayli turned the radio to the voice. It came between two and three every night, that voice from the heart of her country, telling of victory and of hard-held losses. In the midst of the days patterned like a cage about her, she waited for the night. When she had heard the voice she always turned to the mountains, and however bitter the cold she opened the windows and stood there, and the mountains did their work.

“I must get out of this place,” she thought.

… But it was Miss Freem who set her free.

“God gave me strength,” Miss Freem said to the other teachers when it was done. “I had been praying for weeks that He would rid me of this burden. But I had not been shown the way. Then one day I heard her with my own ears. She was urging the girls to run away, these dear girls, committed to my care and keeping! I happened to go by her classroom, where she was supposed to be teaching American history, and she was saying, ‘It is despicable that we stay here in these caves studying what other nations have done. We ought all to be out and fighting our own war. Come — if I go, who will go with me?’ That is what I heard. I opened the door and God gave me strength. ‘Miss Wei,’ I said, ‘Miss Wei, I consider that your contract is broken.’ ”

The docile teachers murmured their horror. Most of them had once been Miss Freem’s pupils and they knew how she felt.

Mayli, hearing later through some of them how God had helped Miss Freem, laughed her too loud laugh. “Does she know how God used her for me? He used her to set me free!”

She scornfully demanded of Miss Freem her full salary and bade the gateman call a mountain messenger and when he had gone she sent him with a telegram to the nearest city. That telegram called the pilot to take her away. She went away without seeing Pansiao again.

As for Pansiao, when she found her goddess gone she wept secretly and long. Where was that goddess, and had she made her go, because she had besought her to be the wife of so human a creature as her third brother? Who could say? There was none to answer.

… Mayli settled herself in the small narrow seat of the plane.

“I go back to the coast,” she told the pilot.

They had met in a village at the foot of the mountains. He was there this morning when her sedan was let down before the inn, and he came forward, smiling because he was afraid of her, his old cap in his hand and his blue cotton uniform more faded even than it had been. He was not surprised when a few days before this one he had her message telling him to be here on a certain day. He had not thought when he left her that such a young woman would stay long in the mountains.

“I shall be ready in half an hour,” had been her only greeting.

Then she went into the inn, and after she had told the innkeeper that his was the filthiest inn in the two halves of the world and after she had eaten a bowl of noodles, she came out again, her fur robe wrapped around her, and she stepped into the plane.

She twisted in her seat for one last look at the mountains as they soared upward. Then she set her face toward the sea, and her mind she put on what she wanted to do. She had never let Pansiao know what she thought as she had listened to her tell of her father and his house, and when Pansiao pressed her with shy questions, she had only laughed. To anyone she would have said that it was folly to think of an ignorant man she had never seen. And yet what Pansiao had told her had nevertheless directed her thoughts and her imagination. Now with the whole world to choose from and no one knowing where she was, she felt as free as a wind-cloud. Never had she had such whole freedom. The man with her was nothing to her. He was part of the machine. She did not once speak to him, and when he looked at her he saw her face set toward the sky, motionless and gazing ahead.

But out of the freedom her mind was shaping its plan. Why should she not go and see for herself if that brother were as handsome as Pansiao had said he was? For Pansiao with a woman’s cunning had told her again and again of her brother’s great beauty. Tall, she had said, “much taller than you are,” she had said, and his eyes were long and the black so black and the white so white that whomever he looked upon felt the god in him. So she had said.

Now Mayli was one of those women who had never seen a man she thought her own equal. She was scornful of men and yet she was passionate, and since she had been a child of thirteen she had dreamed of a man whom she could not flout as she flouted every one who came near her and her own father too. Learning in a man she did not value, and by now it even added something to this man of whom she had been told that he could not read and write. If without learning he had such power, what would he be when he had learning too? She imagined him her dragon, stronger than she was and yet dependent on her for learning. She wanted him untamed and untameable, and yet she wanted a way to shape him. It would be sweet to have her own power over a wild and powerful man, a man such as she had never seen in palaces and cities and seats of government where suave smooth men gather together. So through all the long day, high above the earth, she plotted how she would get near enough to this man to see him and know whether or not he was anything like the one of whom she dreamed but whom she had never seen.

It was not too hard. She could see a way very clear if she cared to take it. Pansiao had told her of her elder sister’s husband, who was working with the enemy in the city, and his name Wu Lien. From the coast she could write to the puppet ruler in that city of her mother’s birth, and ask merely that she be allowed to come there with his safeguard so that she might visit her mother’s birthplace and her grave. The puppet had been her father’s friend once, and she had known him in the days when the country was free and there had been no puppets. A rebel always, not from strength but from weakness, because he had never been given as much as he wanted, this man, now a puppet, had quarrelled with his own government and had spent years abroad, an exile, though with some faint honor, because he had strength of family and wealth to support him. Mayli had seen him more than once in her father’s house, for there the man went as he went to many places to make secret complaint of what went on at home and how he was never listened to and how he had been put aside, and in his way he plotted weakly in foreign capitals and among any whom he thought had any power. Nor could her father put him wholly aside, for the man was his townsman and they had been schoolmates in childhood. When the enemy came conquering, who should be a better puppet than this discontented man?

And yet so eager would he be to justify himself in the eyes of those who had once been his friends, that if Mayli wrote him asking him to safeguard her while she went to her mother’s home in that now captured city, he would give it and urge her to come and stay at his house, and he would show her fawning honor, so that he could prove to the enemy what friends he had, and how the daughter of an honored man came to seek his protection. Well she knew how angry her father would be, but had she ever told him anything she wanted to do if she knew he would not like it?

Thus her plan shaped itself more and more clear. Yes, and after she was in the puppet’s house, she could easily have him find for her that brother-in-law Wu Lien, and go into the countryside to the burial ground, since she knew from Pansiao where Ling Tan’s house was and his village. She could go and see for herself all in that house and perhaps the one whom she most wanted to see. All was plain before her, and she would follow it without telling anyone. If she found the man what Pansiao had said, why, then, who could tell what would happen? If the man was only a hind, she had but to go away again and call it adventure and pleasure. She took no risk on herself, whatever came about.

Thus she planned. They came down and spent the night at a small town on the border, at an inn dirty as all inns are dirty, and she was bitten by bedbugs besides. This made her angry and she told the innkeeper so before she left in the morning. The innkeeper only grinned, but his wife was not so kind and she cursed the tall foreign-looking girl and said:

“Be sure it is not you I am sorry for but the bedbugs! If they drank your black blood, you have poisoned them. And whoever heard of good honest folk who have no bedbugs and no lice? When such small creatures leave a house luck goes with them.”

“You are an ignorant fool,” Mayli said, “and the enemy is welcome to such as you. What good is it to our country to have such old images as you?”

In the end the pilot besought her to come away and the innkeeper held his hand over his wife’s mouth and so the men parted the two women. And the pilot made the more haste that day so that he could be rid of his charge before night and so brought her to the coast.

Mayli did as she planned and sent by telegraph her message to the puppet. Within a few hours there was his message back again, as she knew it would be, begging her to come and saying that he would prepare a special place for her on the train and that she would be met with his own car. He himself would give her protection and he signed his name plain and openly as the ruler of the land. She smiled sidewise when she saw this, remembering his weak face.

She waited for two days, seeming only a handsome and proud young woman who had money in her hand. She came and went alone and bought herself some new garments and some fine pearls and if she saw anything hateful about this coastal city she did not say so to any of the strangers about her. But she saw, nevertheless, much that was very hateful. There were ruins in many parts and the city was crowded with the beggared and the homeless, not only from her own people but from other parts of the world as well. She saw hungry white faces, the faces of Jews driven out and desperate, and seeking shelter here in this sad place. Half the world was homeless and ruined. But this great and rich city had belonged to her people and why need it have fallen? Alone and knowing no one and refusing the friendly looks of all who wished to know who she was, she brooded on what she saw, and all her passion gathered into anger against the enemy.

In such mood she took the train and found the place prepared for her, and like an angry princess who will not tell the cause of her anger, she went to the city which had been her mother’s childhood home, and by night was there.

… “I am very lonely,” the puppet ruler said, and she knew he wondered whether he could lean still closer toward her and touch her hand. She had grown into a woman since he had seen her last. She looked at him and he knew he could not touch her. He drew back and set his cup down on the table.

“Naturally you are lonely,” she said calmly. “What you have done has cut you off.”

They spoke in the English which both knew equally well.

“But you understand me?” His handsome, weak face besought her understanding. “I am not a traitor. I am a realist. If we recognize the truth, that these East-Ocean people have conquered half our country, the only hope for our future is to work with them. Besides, what I am doing is thoroughly Chinese. History tells us again and again that we have always seemed to yield to our conquerors, but actually we have ruled and our conquerors have died.”

“But in those times we were stronger than our conquerors,” she said. “Are we now?”

She did not say what she thought, that among the company of high enemy officials with whom she had dined she had been terrified by the dark concentrated power in their faces and by the weak and placating good nature in this puppet’s face.

He did not answer. Someone had come into the room, and he turned in instant peevishness, because he had given command that he was not to be disturbed while he was alone with his guest. But when he saw who it was he held back his fretfulness.

“Ah, Wu Lien,” he said, and to Mayli he said, “this is my secretary, a man very faithful to me, who understands me.”

So that brother-in-law had risen as high as this among the enemy, and so it was all even easier than she had planned!

Wu Lien bowed, without looking directly at the handsome woman. He was trained in courtesy by his father, who had been used to selling his goods to rich ladies. Then he said to his master:

“Sir, I grieve to disturb you, but there is bad news.”

The puppet rose at once and they went out and Mayli sat alone thinking of this Wu Lien.

When her host came back, his face was disturbed. “I must excuse myself,” he said. “A frightful thing has happened. A band of men has swept down from the hills and killed the garrison stationed at the foothills. There is not one left.”

“But will you be blamed for it?” Mayli asked him.

“Naturally, somewhat,” he replied. “They know I cannot help such savagery from my own people, and yet I feel its effects.”

Wu Lien had followed him in, and now he turned, wanting to have her gone.

“Take my guest to her rooms,” he said.

Wu Lien bowed and waited for Mayli to follow him.

“Good night,” the puppet said, “tomorrow we will find something to amuse you.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” she said. “I can amuse myself.”

When she was alone with Wu Lien she said, “Is it possible to go about the city tomorrow?”

“With escort, it can be done,” Wu Lien replied.

“And outside the city — may one go?”

“With escort,” he replied again.

She paused. “Need it be soldiers?”

His face was as smooth as a stone.

“You understand,” she said, “it is hard for me to have — enemy soldiers. This city was my mother’s birthplace and mine.”

Thus she tried him, but that face did not change. “I hope to go and visit my mother’s grave,” she said, “for I am her only child.”

He would understand the necessity before Heaven of this, she thought.

He nodded. “I will see whether I cannot go with you myself,” he said. “Then we can leave the guards at least at a distance.”

All she had said was true. Her mother’s grave was in the burial place of her religion, but where she did not know. Yet it seemed to her that if she heard the name of the village she would know it.

“How shall I thank you?” she murmured.

“I need no thanks,” he said bowing.

“But I will find a way to thank you,” she said, and smiled.

Thus they parted, for they were now at the door of her room and she went in. They were rich and comfortable rooms and it was like her that she could enjoy them, though they belonged to the enemy, and she slept well.

… When one has a plan, is it not easy to follow it? She went out the next day, and her host understood too her wish to visit her mother’s grave and he was eager to help her remember the name of the village, and Wu Lien was called in. When he heard that for which he was wanted he said:

“Let me send for my wife, for she grew up in this countryside and her family still lives here, and she knows the names of villages better than I do.”

So without effort Mayli saw Wu Lien’s wife come in, and she knew at once that this was a sister to Pansiao, for the two looked alike, except that the elder had a face more stupid and less pretty than Pansiao had. When Wu Lien’s wife heard what was wanted she thought a while and she said:

“That burial ground must be to the west of my father’s village and I know it well, for it is the only Mohammedan burial place in these parts.”

Then she turned to her husband. “And why should I not go with you today and take the children and we could stop at my father’s house and while you went on with this one I could ease myself of my long wish to see them and know how they are?”

Thus simply was the thing done, by Heaven’s will.