Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

XVIII

NOW ON THAT DAY Ling Tan sat on a bench on his threshing floor and mended the yoke of his buffalo. The beast had become like his own father to him because he had so many times saved it from the enemy. They had looked at it often and weighed it for meat, and each time Ling Tan had told the enemy how aged it was and showed them how its bones almost pierced its dark hide, and he bade them look at the sores on its back. Ling Tan rubbed these sores secretly with lime to keep them raw, though when he did he begged the beast’s pardon.

“It is to save your life,” he always said into its hairy ear, and though the buffalo moaned he bore it at Ling Tan’s hands.

But this morning as Ling Tan was plowing the yoke broke, and so he had sat down to mend it. He was weary because he had been sleepless most of the night. There had been two days and nights full of danger. His eldest son had come to warn him six or seven days ago that there was to be an attack on a village in the foothills which was the village nearest here, and the enemy garrison there was to be wiped out. This had been done three times before and the enemy had made the garrison stronger each time until now it was a very bold thing to attack them, and it was to be asked whether or not the hillmen could win.

They had won, and at this very moment Ling Tan’s two sons lay sleeping in his house, weary with what they had been through, and the third son had a small wound, too, in his arm, so that he had to hold it bent and bound against his breast.

Thus, although on this morning Ling Tan looked only a peaceful old farmer, he was very uneasy and he watched all who came and went near him. He was afraid lest his two sons be found, and this the more since his wilful third son said he could not sleep in the secret room because the air was heavy and so he slept boldly in another room. If any one came to the gate and he had to hasten to the kitchen to gain the secret place, he would be seen. But what word of his father did that third son ever obey now?

“What will I do with him if this war ever stops?” Ling Tan thought again and thus thinking he sat frowning over his work. “How will my house hold this third son of mine in times of peace, when there is no use for such heroes?” he asked himself once more and could not answer.

At this moment his eyes, lifted often to search the road, fell upon Wu Lien and his daughter coming near with their children. When they saw him they came down out of the horse carriage in which they were riding and drew near on foot. By now Wu Lien had risen to such a place that he was no longer afraid of the enemy guard and so he bade them wait by the carriage and they did. But when they had come near enough Ling Tan saw that they had a stranger with them, a woman young and tall and so foreign in her looks to any woman he had ever seen that he took her to be one of the enemy women, and he was little pleased.

He did not rise as they came near but called from where he sat, not stopping his work, “Are you come?”

“We are,” Wu Lien said, pleasantly, “and we hope we find you all in health.”

“We are as well as we can be, in such times,” Ling Tan grunted. He had no wish to show himself a friend of Wu Lien’s and yet he knew it was folly to seem his enemy.

“Here we are, my father, and here are the children,” his daughter said. “And this is a friend who visits those above us, and she is come to look for her mother’s grave in the Mohammedan burial ground.”

At this Ling Tan knew that here was no enemy woman, and so he rose and said to Mayli, “I thought you were an enemy, because you look foreign, but if you are a Mohammedan, that is why you have your look.”

She smiled and made a courteous answer, “I trouble you by coming.”

“No, you do not,” he said, but he was troubled because his sons were hidden in his house. He thought to himself that it was like Wu Lien to choose this day of all others to come here and he wondered too if Wu Lien had some secret knowledge and he was afraid he had. He tried to think of some quick way whereby he could go in the house before them and warn his sons. If there had been no guest he could have done it, but how could he show himself so ill mannered as that now? For his eye could see that this was no ordinary woman who stood here. She was a woman of great place somewhere.

Now while he hesitated, trying what to think, he saw to his fright that third son of his come to the gate and he was pulling at his girdle to loosen his trousers ready to make his water outside as all men do to spare the filth inside the house.

“Hold yourself!” Ling Tan roared. “There is a strange woman here!”

But that third son was outside the gate already and his sudden look of shame was so strong and Ling Tan’s dismay so great that Mayli laughed, as no woman less free than she would have done, but what did she not dare? And so the first moment Ling Tan’s third son put his eyes on her she was laughing and the sunlight fell on her and he saw her like this, her hair shining black and her cheeks red and her lips red and her teeth white and her head thrown back in laughter, and he was struck as though a sword had fallen across his heart. By now how shamed he was! He hung down his head like a sulky boy and frowned and turned and ran into the house.

“Was that not my third brother?” Wu Lien’s wife called out.

Then Ling Tan did what he would never have dreamed he could. He fell on his knees before Wu Lien because he knew their lives were in his hand and he put his forehead in the dust and well Wu Lien knew why he did. He made haste to raise Ling Tan up and he looked at his wife and said, “I did not see anyone.”

By this Ling Tan knew that Wu Lien promised he would not betray his sons, and he stood before him, his heart changing to him in this moment, and he said, humbly:

“Never will I judge again. Let only Heaven judge!”

Now he could dare to ask them to come into his house, and he made haste to invite them, and they all came in and he called his wife and told her to set out tea.

Before her eyes Mayli saw this family gather before her of whom Pansiao had told her, and she learned to know them every one. She listened to them and looked at them, smiling and silent, and she saw Jade come out, heavy now with child, and Mayli liked her, because Jade was not shy, and she liked them all. Only the two hidden did not come out.

But Ling Tan had shut the gate and now they were all locked in the court and safe and so he said to his second son:

“Tell your two brothers to come out. There are none here except friends.”

At this the eldest son came, a shy and quiet man, plain of face as Mayli saw. But that third one would not come out. He sat inside the room where he had been sleeping and he cursed himself that he had been so loutish and such a fool as to rush out like any common man who wakes out of his sleep with a need, and then at that moment to see a woman such as he had seen! He was prouder than ever for he had grown used to himself as one above his fellows now and he thought himself shamed, because she had laughed at him. He sat there on his bed glowering and frowning and biting his red lips. When his second brother came to call him he did not answer but he picked up the wooden pillow from the bed and threw it at him, and the second brother had to stoop and shut the door quickly to save himself.

“My third brother will not come,” he told his father, laughing.

“Why, what now?” the mother shouted. “When I have not had my three sons together all these months, will he not come?”

And she bounced off her bench and rushed in and took her son by his ear and led him out, he protesting and hanging back and yet he always obeyed his mother better than he did his father. But he pulled her hand off at the door.

“Let me go,” he muttered, “I am not a child.”

“You bone!” she said laughing.

But here they were now in the court and to save his own blood Lao San could not keep from looking full at Mayli and she looked at him.

And he thought, “I never dreamed to see a woman like this.”

And she thought, “He is exactly what Pansiao said he was.”

“I must go on,” she told Wu Lien hastily, and Wu Lien rose at her voice. And then each pulled their eyes away from the other. He turned to his wife. “Stay here, mother of my children, and when we come back be ready for us.”

She rose when he thus commanded her, and Mayli rose, too, then, and with a small smile and movement of her head she took her farewell of them for a little while, and they all watched her wrap her cloak about herself and they stood for courtesy while she went, and Ling Tan and Ling Sao went to the door with her.

Now when Ling Tan came back to his seat, he soon saw that his third son wanted to speak with him, for the young man jerked his head to the inner room and he strode into that inner room and the father followed him, his bowl of tea in his hand. It was the room where Lao San had been sleeping and now he sat on the bed again and put his hands on his knees and leaned forward while his Father sat on a bench.

“What now?” Ling Tan asked. He wondered to see his son’s face so red and hot and to see him frowning so heavily.

“That woman,” Lao San muttered through his teeth.

“What woman?”

“The one in the cloak—” Lao San said. He flung his hand out and toward the gate.

“Well, what of her?” Ling Tan asked. He prepared himself to hear his son say that she was a spy and ought not to have been let in, and indeed he had some such secret fears himself, but he had been so overcome with Wu Lien’s kindness that he had let himself forget wisdom.

“Get her for my wife,” Lao San said.

Now Ling Tan was the most saving and careful of men, and in this house it was a cause for mourning if so much as a small dish were broken, but when he heard this, in his astonishment his hand opened itself and his good tea bowl, which he had had from his father, fell to the ground and was broken to useless pieces.

He was so vexed that his anger spurted out of him at his son. “See this!” he cried. He stooped to pick up the pieces but they were too many and too small. Even the best dish-mender could not put them together, and Ling Tan cursed his son heartily. “You bone!” he cried, “you big turnip!”

Now Ling Sao heard the noise and she came running in to see what was wrong, and she cried out in her turn at the sight of a good bowl gone, and then Ling Tan shouted at her. “This turtle to which you gave birth!”

“What now?” she shouted back, and made herself ready to take her son’s part against the father, as she always did for any son. Only when there was a daughter in the wrong could Ling Tan hope for justice from her.

“He made me do this,” Ling Tan said.

“What is a dish?” she answered him.

“It is not the cursed dish,” he said. “It is this son of yours — he wants to swallow the sun and the moon. He has forgotten he is a man and a younger son. No, this one, he thinks he made heaven and earth!”

“You yourself are only an old bone,” she said. “What are you talking about? I had rather get sense out of the ducks quacking. Whose son is he if he is not yours?”

By now both were angry and the eldest son and their daughter came in to cool their anger, and the daughter said:

“Since none but you knows why you are angry, father, we will keep silence until you can speak.”

So they waited until he had his breath and his daughter brought him a fresh bowl of tea and his eldest son lit his pipe for him, but the youngest son only sat there and said nothing.

At last Ling Tan was near to himself again, and drawing on his pipe he said, while the smoke puffed out of his mouth:

“This thing who is my third son — he who will not marry any woman, now he says, ‘get her for my wife.’ ” He swallowed smoke and coughed.

“What her?” Ling Sao asked and was amazed and overjoyed. Marriage talk was perfume in her nostrils and food in her belly, and especially if it were for this son.

“What her?” Ling Tan repeated. “Why, that foreigner in the cloak!”

Now they were stricken too. When Ling Tan said this none said one word, and in that silence Lao San stole a sulky look at one face and another from under his handsome brows, and the more he looked at them the angrier he grew. He flung up his head and leaped to his feet.

“Not one of you knows what I am,” he said. “To you I am a child. I am no child. Mother, I have forgotten that I ever fed at your breast. Father, I do not eat your food. As for the others, who are you? I have no parents and no brothers and no sisters. I swear myself away from this house!”

He strode toward the door, but his mother ran and hung on his coat and twisted the tail of it in her strong hand.

“Where are you going?” she screamed. “What do you do?”

He jerked away, but so strong a hand did his mother have that his coat tore and he went on with his coat hanging from his bare shoulder.

“At least let me mend the rent!” she shrieked, after him, but he would not stay.

“When you give me what I want I will come home again,” he said over his shoulder, and he strode from the gate and into the full sunlight with all its danger to him. They ran to the gate after him and saw him walking swiftly down the road toward the hills.

Then Ling Tan sat down and put his head in his hands and groaned to his wife, “How is it such a one came out of your womb?”

“How was it you put such a one in me?” she cried back.

“Out of you or me he was not born,” he said heavily. “He is born out of these times, and what will we do with him when these times are gone?”

And he sat trying to ease himself with great groans and yet feeling no easier, for he knew it was his duty as a father to see his son married, and his duty, too, to the generations before and after. But how could this marriage be made? Looking at it from all the four directions, east and west, south and north, he saw no way by which the thing could be done. How could he, a farmer and his son a farmer’s son, make proposal for such a woman? His gall was not so big, nor his liver so bitter.

But Ling Sao thought her sons good enough for any woman, and after she had turned things over in herself awhile, she motioned to her daughter to come aside and so the daughter went into the kitchen with her and the mother said:

“You are there at the heart of affairs, and you can put out ears and hands and see what the outlook is. Find out whether the woman is wed already, and if she is not — well, a man is a man, and she could look very far and not find so much of a man to look at as my son!”

“She is a very learned woman,” her daughter said doubtfully.

“What is learning in bed?” Ling Sao replied. “Who wants reading and writing there?”

At this the daughter blushed, for she had lived long enough in the city to grow more delicate than her mother, and so she did not answer either by words or laughter.

“At least I can talk with my children’s father,” she said.

Ling Sao leaned over to her and now she was very grave and she whispered, “Arrange this for your brother, child, and I swear I will forget everything that ever I had against you and your man. Whatever comes in the future, I will say your duty toward your parents is done, if you will do this one thing.”

“What I can do I will do,” her daughter said, but she was still doubtful.

Thus it was left and Ling Sao told her husband what she had done, but he shook his head and was full of dolefulness.

“Do what you can, you women,” he said. “This is beyond a man. As for you, old woman, I know your power in mating two together — you could wed an eagle to a crow, I swear — but these are eagle and tiger and the one flies in heaven and the other walks on earth.”

“Leave it in my hands,” she said stoutly.

He sighed and gave it up to her.

… Now Lao San had not gone so straight as he pretended. Well he knew his father and mother and brother and sisters were all watching him and frightened by his temper, and so he made as if to go straight to the hills. But out of their sight he turned west and went toward the Mohammedan burial ground. When he came near he crept through the long new grass in the noiseless way hillmen learn from hill tigers, and he parted the tufted grasses and peered from between them. There he saw the woman he now loved so suddenly and powerfully. She stood at her mother’s grave, her head bowed, and her cloak wrapped about her, and he liked her the better that she did not kneel.

“She is very tall,” he thought, and he liked her tall. He liked the eagle beauty of her face, and the smooth amber of her skin, and her long hands holding her cloak together.

He was not a simple man such as his eldest brother was and even the second brother was more simple than he. The blood of his ancestors had brought up in him something that was very old. Once in the long past there had been another like him who had battled against an emperor and had all but won. So now when he looked at the woman he wanted it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself and besides he felt that in some ways she was like him, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.

Thus he stood steadfastly watching her and not once did she look up or see him there. But that pleased him, too. He was young enough to think, “I do not want her to see me again until I am at my best. I will get new garments and put them on and I will buckle on my sword, and have my hair cut and oiled.”

So he stood, his eyes and mind full of her until she turned at last and with Wu Lien went toward Ling Tan’s house again. Behind her the young man gazed at her until he could not see her, and then he let the grasses come together and he made his way to the hills.

… Now Lao Er and Jade had not been there to see all that had happened, for Jade, as soon as Wu Lien had gone, had plucked her husband’s sleeve and led him down into the secret room. There she turned on him a face brimming with triumph.

“Do you see?” she asked him.

“See what?” he asked, not having knowledge of what she meant so much as the mote in a sunbeam.

“Why, that is she!” Jade cried.

“What she?” he asked again.

“Oh, you bone!” she wailed, “oh, you lump of mud under my feet! Why has heaven made even the best of men in the shape of a fool? She is the goddess, your brother’s goddess!”

His jaw fell down as he perceived her meaning. “But she is so high,” he said, “how will she ever look down on one of us? And besides, what is she to the enemy?”

Jade looked grave then. “What indeed?” she said, “I had not thought of that. You are not such a fool.”

Her woman’s mind ran along the ground like a sniffing hound. “But I doubt she cares for the enemy,” she said. “No woman thinks first of who rules and what is above, if she sees the man she wants at her side.”

“He is not at her side,” he said. “He is very far from her. And will he think her fit for him if she is with the enemy? Men are not like women there.”

“Now you are wrong,” she said. “Men think a woman so little worth, and they think themselves so strong, that it does not matter what their women are.”

He laughed. “Are you and I to quarrel because of men and women?”

But Jade would not laugh. “No, but here is a thing,” she said stubbornly.

“It is a thing which we cannot decide because a strange woman happens to look like a goddess in a temple,” he said.

So after a while they came up again, and he helped her tenderly to mount the ladder that led upward, for she expected her second child any day. When they came up Lao San had gone and they found that while they had been talking underground, here on the top of the earth what they had been saying was not possible had already taken place.

“But how bring these two together?” Jade asked.

It was the question none could answer.

… But Mayli went straight to her own rooms when she returned to the puppet palace, and she took off her cloak and folded it very carefully and she washed herself and brushed her hair, and then she sat before a small table and looked at herself long in the mirror. The morning had made her bold heart strangely soft. There was the visit to her mother’s grave, and her mind was stirred with things she could not remember, and yet she felt she did remember them. Her mother had died when she was born and yet this morning standing at that grave among the summer grasses, she felt she did remember a lovely face, wilful enough to say that she would not go with her husband, and yet so sweet that it made him glad to stay where she was. For her father had told her through her childhood of her mother, and she knew the love between them, and to her it had made love the best thing in the world to be had if it could be love like that.

Upon her softened heart was now imprinted a young man’s face. Whatever he was, ignorant or not, he was brave and exceedingly beautiful and there was power in him and she could feel it, and were these three not enough? She had never seen them put together before in one man. And yet how would it be possible for her to become a part of that house? Ling Tan’s house was more foreign to her than any foreigner’s. She had not entered one like it in her life, and there she could not live.

“We would have to go away,” she thought. “He would have to forsake them all and cleave only to me, and I would forsake all I have known and cleave only to him. Well, would we not then be equal? We could make our own world.”

But where could such a world be made? She rose, most restless, and walked about the room as though she were on wings.

In the old times, now never to return, what she dreamed would have been impossible. There would have been no place for two like them to make a world. That old world was made and shaped, fixed and firm, and they would have been outcast had they not belonged to it. But now the old world was gone, old laws were broken, old customs dead. The young could do as they liked and tradition was no more.

“We could go into the free land,” she thought, “anywhere we liked. Why should his power not be joined to mine? What I know I would tell him. What he knows he would tell me. Oh, how sick I am of learned, smooth men! How strong his hands were! He was wounded in battle. It was victory.”

She remembered every look of his face and the proud way he walked, and all that was distasteful to her was the family from which he sprang. They were too humble for him.

“He ought to leave them,” she thought. “Men like him are born by chance into lowly families. They belong to no one.”

So she mused, and when she went down to meet her host at dinner he found her silent.

“Have I made you angry?” he urged her. He had had a morning full of suffering, for his rulers had not spared him. “Do not you be angry,” he said, trying to laugh. “I need a little comfort. I have been told that I must catch the leader of those men who murdered the whole garrison yesterday. How can I do it?”

“How can you?” she repeated coldly. She saw within her heart that bold young face. “You cannot,” she said.

… Thus its own way Heaven moves toward its end. Though Ling Tan and his wife were sleepless, and though Lao Er and Jade could see no way to bring their goddess down to earth, and though Wu Lien shook his head at what his wife told him and said the thing was impossible, and that her third brother must have drunk too much wine, and wisdom was to forget it all, yet Mayli alone, herself deciding nothing, but moving along the way of Heaven’s will, went back to Ling Tan’s house.

She waited for two days, and by then she knew that what she now felt she could not put aside. The only way to cure herself, if she could be cured, was to yield a little to her sudden love. Love she would not call it, for she was too shrewd not to see the folly in it. But at least she could go to Ling Tan’s house, and she would make no pretext. She would ask for Jade and tell Jade that she knew Pansiao and see what came of it.

So in her too fearless way, she left the puppet’s palace on the second day in the afternoon. As coolly as though there were no ruins anywhere made by the enemy and as though she saw nothing to make a young woman afraid, she hired an old horse carriage, and few there were, because by now the horses had been eaten for food, and she told the driver where she wanted to go and there she went.

Now Jade that day was not at work of any sort, for she moved too clumsily to be at ease. She was large with this child and she wondered that it could be so large, but so it was. She was sitting alone in the court with her two-year-old son when there came a strong knock at the gate. She listened and it came again. It was not the noise the enemy made with guns beating there. Ought she to open the gate? Ling Sao was in the fields that day with Ling Tan and Lao Er was away at his work. The father had told him to see whether or not his youngest brother had reached the hills safely, since he had left home in anger. So Jade, being alone with the child made her voice cracked and old and she called out. “Who is there?”

“I!” Mayli called over the gate, and it was like her to forget to say her name and to think that all would know that I.

But Jade was quick and she did know it. So she rose and opened the gate.

“Oh,” she said, and then made haste to be more courteous. “I swear I am too loutish — but I am so — I did not expect you—”

“Why should you?” Mayli said.

She came in and Jade shut the gate and barred it and Mayli sat down. She looked so full of ease and calm that no one could have known how her heart twisted and beat inside her breast, and Jade did not know. And yet she told her husband afterward, “I knew it was no common day. I felt that I was being led along a road that had an end in some destiny.”

Yet to another these would have seemed only two women talking. Jade poured tea, and took up her shy small son, and Mayli praised the boy, and drank the tea, and then she said, after such little talk:

“I could not speak as freely as I wished when I was here two days ago. I had my duty to my mother in my mind. But today I am come back to tell you that I know your husband’s sister Pansiao, and I taught her for a while.”

Here was news, and Jade could hardly take it to be true. But Mayli went on to tell her how it had been, and Jade hearing it thought now it had all come about as though by nature, and yet who could say that Heaven had not shaped it all?

“So when I came here,” Mayli said, looking about the court, “I seemed to know what I saw. She had told me everything. The child was fond of me — how do I know why? But she chattered to me, and I was glad to hear her — I have been so long away in foreign lands and she told me of my own.”

“Did she tell you of us all?” Jade asked. A thought of cunning had come into her mind, and she crept toward a certain knowledge as a cat creeps to a mouse.

“She told me of each one,” Mayli said, “so when I saw you I knew your names.”

Jade made herself very busy with her child, and lifted him upon her lap and smoothed his hair and seemed to see a mote of dust in the corner of his eye. “Did she show you a certain letter that I wrote her?” She asked this and she looked full into Mayli’s eyes, and Mayli did not turn her head.

“I saw that letter,” she said clearly, and still she did not look away.

The fearlessness in her made Jade fearless too. Indeed they were not different, these women, except in where they had spent their lives and how.

“He loved you when he first saw you,” she said.

“Some men are so,” Mayli said, and tried to smile, and wondered at how stiff her lips were.

“He is not like any other man,” Jade said. She put the child down, “I must speak when Heaven bids me speak. What shall I tell him?”

Now both were caught together as though one wave swept them upward to its crest. Mayli gazed into Jade’s long eyes and thought how beautiful they were, and Jade gazed into Mayli’s black eyes and thought how clear they were and how brave, and each admired what the other was as lesser women cannot admire others.

“How tall you are,” Jade said. “You are taller than I am.”

“I am too tall,” Mayli said, smiling at her.

“He likes women tall,” Jade said, and then she put out her hand and touched Mayli’s hand with the tips of her fingers. “What shall I tell him?” she asked again, very softly.

Beneath that strong and gentle touch Mayli moved and she turned her head away.

Then she put her hand into her bosom and took out a small piece of bright folded silk and she shook it out, and Jade saw the flag of the free people — blue and red, the sun upon it white and pure. None could have that flag here for fear of death if the enemy found it, but some had it and hid it.

“Oh,” Jade whispered, “the free flag! You are as bold as this!”

But Mayli put it in Jade’s hands.

“Tell him I go to the free lands,” she said to Jade. “Tell him that I go to Kunming.”