Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

II

NOW LAO ER HAD often bought goods for his father, because of all three sons he was the one who was most at his ease in the city. The father never entered the city gates if he could help it for he said his breath would not come in and out evenly once he was there, and his wife would not go often because she said the city people all had a stink to them. This Ling Tan himself would not wholly allow, because he said each kind of human flesh had its own smell, and then she said that if this were so, she would stay with her own kind of flesh that lived in the fields and ate its meats and vegetables fresh and not decayed from long lying in markets. The eldest son was too trusting a man for the city and he believed what city folk told him, and the youngest was too young and Ling Tan would not often allow him inside the city gates, lest he learn evil. So it came about that Lao Er was the son who did the city business, who took eggs to the corner shop at the Bridge of the South Gate, and who weighed the pig’s meat when they killed, who carried to the rice shops their surplus rice after each harvest.

This he had done for years enough so that now when he came through the great gate he did not feel frightened or abashed or trip one foot over the other for staring as most countrymen did. He walked in with his head up and his face clean and a decent blue coat and trousers covering his body. He did not wear socks because it was summer but he put on a fresh pair of straw sandals that he and his brothers wove out of rice straw in the long winter evenings, and he smoothed down his short black hair as he came into the first busy street. He knew where to go for his business, and when he talked to the men in the city he did it with sharp cool sense and yet with good country courtesy. If he were given a bad penny by the eggman who bought his eggs, he took it and said nothing to the man’s face but he took care the next time he brought in his eggs to have all very fresh except three rotten ones. Since three eggs were anywhere bought for a penny when the man found these three rotten he perfectly knew why they were there, and knew that Lao Er could discern a bad penny as well as he a bad egg, and so the two understood each other as well as though they had spoken, and there had been no need for anger between them. By such means Lao Er had come to be respected among the people he knew in the city, and so he respected himself there.

But today when it came to buying a book he knew no more than a child. He went to a certain street where booksellers had their wares out on boards set on benches and stared awhile at them. Except that some were large and some were small each book looked like every other. Seeing how long he stood there, one bookseller after another asked him what book he wanted and he had always to say he did not know. He was ashamed to say he wanted a book for his wife, because this would make her seem strange and unlike other women, so he pretended it was for himself.

Now without exception these booksellers were small old weazened men who had once been scholars or teachers in little schools, men who had not succeeded well, and so had sunk to the selling of books for merchandise. But none of them so much as imagined that Lao Er could not read. One by one they put out their wares saying, “Here is a good one full of laughter about the foreign devils,” or “There is a pleasant dirty tale of a nun and her lover,” or they said, “Here is the Three Kingdoms if you have not already read it and who has not?” They tossed the books before him and still they looked alike to him. He picked up by chance one that had a bright pink cover and said, “What is this one?”

“Why, what you see,” the bookseller said carelessly, pointing to the letters on the back.

Lao Er laughed, shamefaced. “The truth is I cannot read.”

That man could not believe what he heard. “Why then do you buy a book?” he inquired. “Why do you not buy sweet stuff or a toy or a piece of cloth for a new coat or a silver earpick or anything except a book?”

His voice was so full of scorn that Lao Er was angry. “I will buy a book, but it shall not be yours,” he said sharply and turned away. He would go to his elder sister’s house and if her husband were at home he would ask him what was a good book and then he would come back and buy it from the table next to this old man’s and before his very eyes.

He strode off down the crowded street and across three others and came to the shop where his sister’s husband was the master. It was a shop for foreign stuff, full of all sorts of wares, foreign flashlights and rubber shoes and bottles of all kinds, cakes and foods in tin boxes, and garments of knitted yarns in all colors and pens and pencils and dishes and framed pictures of fat white women with round blue eyes. Usually Lao Er could spend all the time he had looking at one thing after another in the cases locked under glass tops, but today he went straight through the shop to the court behind where his sister lived, and the two clerks knowing him let him pass.

There he found his sister’s husband holding his last child on his knee as he leaned back in a rattan chair fanning himself. The man was fat for his age and he was now naked to the waist, his body soft and pale as a woman’s. Around his pale smooth wrists were rings of flesh and his fingers were fat and pointed. All his friends cried that he was getting rich since he ate and drank so well, and he laughed and let them think it.

“Ah, my wife’s brother,” he cried when Lao Er came in. “Sit down — sit down!”

He raised himself a little, but not more than he needed to do for the younger brother of his wife, and he bellowed for her to come.

“Here is your second brother, mother of my son!” he bawled.

She came running out, her coat loose at the neck and her round face cheerful as it always was.

“There you are, brother,” she shouted at Lao Er, though he was only a few feet away, “and how are the old ones and all the others? And why does my sister-in-law never come to see me? Is she with child yet? Why, what a puny man you are!”

She threw out these words one after the other like bubbles from her full red mouth, laughing between them and with them until words and laughter were all mixed together. Then she ran back and brought out some foreign cakes such as came from the shop and she poured out fresh tea for him.

Then Lao Er told all the news and toyed with the child and listened to his sister’s husband tell how good business could be if only the students would not preach night and day against the buying and selling of foreign goods, since left to themselves people never asked where goods came from, and what had business to do with such matters as students and love of country. When all had been said then he could put the matter of the book to his brother-in-law.

Now this brother-in-law, Wu Lien by name, could read because he was a city man and his father and grandfather had been city men before him. But each in his generation had taken for his wife a woman from outside the city walls and this was because women in the city after a generation or two grow soft and sleep long in the day and sit late at night gambling with bamboo pieces, and will not suckle their own children and are too easily willing for their husbands to take concubines. And so Wu Lien had read plenty of books in his youth, and even now he read them often when the day was hot in summer or when in winter it was cold in the shop and the best place to sit was beside a brazier of coals in his own room. He put the child down from his knee and spoke gravely as a man ought when he speaks of letters.

“There are books for every need,” he said. “It must first be asked why the book is wanted and who is to read it. If a man wishes to read it secretly and for his own private pleasure there are books for that. If he is tied to his house and cannot travel and he longs to travel, there are books for that. If he likes to think of poison and murder and dares not commit such deeds himself there are books for that. For what is your book wanted?”

Lao Er grinned half in shame and then made up his mind to tell the truth.

“Why, here it is, brother,” he said. “I married my woman thinking her like any other one, and now I find out she can read and yearns after a book. She cut off her long hair to sell, even, that she might buy a book and without telling me why when she did it. So, instead of a pair of earrings I had promised her, I said I would buy a book for her, and that is why I am here today. But how can I tell one book from another?”

“You should have asked her what she wanted,” Wu Lien said and Lao Er agreed.

“But I never thought of such a difference in books,” he said.

Wu Lien pondered the matter a moment and then he turned to his own wife who sat there listening to all this with her mouth open. “You are only a woman, mother of my son,” he said, “and if you could read what would you like to read?”

The idea of reading set her to laughing behind the hand she always put in front of her face when she laughed because her teeth were black.

“I never thought of it,” she said. But when she saw her city husband look at her with impatience on his fat face she took her hand away and made herself grave and considered what he had asked.

“When I was a child in the village,” she said, “I used to hear the old one-eyed man who told stories tell about certain robbers who lived near a lake. When he told them, every one, man or woman or child, they all leaned forward to hear what would come next and when he paused at some point where a man lay caught in a trap or a battle was about to be fought and passed his basket for pennies, they rained into it like hail on a ripe rice field.”

Wu Lien looked at her proudly.

“You have hit on exactly the right book,” he said. “That is the one, my brother,” he said. “It has everything in it, and all the women who deceive their husbands are punished and the righteous prevail. It is a naughty book sometimes, but the naughty ones are always punished and go down in battle before the others. The name of the book is Shui Hu Chuan, and it is full of righteous robbers. Yes, I read that book when I was a small boy and I could read it again.”

He began to pull his fat underlip, smiling as he did so, and remembering the pleasure he had once had in the book. Lao Er rose and repeated the name of the book and thanked them and bade them good-bye and was making his way through the shop, now crowded with many customers, when he was stopped by the sound of quarreling voices. These voices shouted so loud and so suddenly that everybody stopped buying and turned their heads toward the wide door of the shop. Lao Er found himself held there by an army of young men with rocks and sticks in their hands.

In front of them was their leader, a tall young man who wore no hat and his long hair fell over his eyes. He brushed it away and shouted at a clerk to open a case. When the clerk delayed, he took up the rock in his hand and crashed it through the glass of the locked case.

“Enemy goods!” he cried in a high voice.

He put in both his hands and lifted out watches and pens and trinkets and threw them into the street, and the moment he did this all the young men rushed in and began to break the cases and to throw out the goods, and a great groan went up from the customers at such waste of good stuff, though there were some who seized what they could get and made off with it, and as fast as the stuff was thrown into the streets, the people there fell upon it. When the young men saw this they were twice as angry as before and they rushed out and beat the people with their sticks and cracked their heads with the rocks they held until the people fell back. Then some of the young men stood guard over the goods that the others threw out and set fire to them, and shirts and coats and blankets and knitted goods and hats and shoes went into the fire. All around the blaze the crowd stood, their hungry eyes fixed in horror upon such waste but no one dared to say a word. Lao Er stood there, his mouth hanging open at all he saw, but he, too, did not dare to say a word. His brother-in-law did not come nor was there any sign of a clerk left now in the shop, and who was he, one man, to speak if these did not? He watched until his heart was sickened and he went away.

He was halfway to the city gate before he remembered that he had forgotten to buy his book, and so he turned back to the street of booksellers and went to the table next to the little bitter man and asked for the book. The bookseller tossed it to him, a thick old book dirtied with many who had read it.

“A dirty book like this must be cheap,” Lao Er said, looking at the spots of grease and black.

“So it might have been a few days ago,” the bookseller said, “but in the past few days many of the students have come to buy this book who never read it before. Ask me why and I have no answer. I do not know why they do anything, those young ones. They are like drunk men and as for the women—” He spat on the stone on which he stood and rubbed it with his foot.

“What is the price?” Lao Er asked.

“Three silver small pieces,” the bookseller replied.

Lao Er stared in horror.

“For a book?” he shouted.

“Why not for a book?” the old man retorted. “You spend as much on a piece of pig’s meat and you eat it and it is gone and what is left is waste. But a book you put into your mind and there it lies and you can read it over when you forget it and think of it longer and out of it who knows what you will think? You might think yourself to fortune.”

So Lao Er reached into his girdle and took out the money and paid it, and then was angry because the old man next who had been watching all this time smiled sourly and said,

“If you knew the name of a book why did you not speak it? I have that book.” And he took it up, clean and whole, from his table.

In spite of his anger Lao Er could only go on, saying as he went, though he wished he had the clean one, “I had rather have the dirty one from him than a clean one from you after this morning, you turtle’s egg,” and so he went homeward.

And yet he had not left that street before he thought he ought to go and see his sister’s husband’s shop again and how they did and if the ruffians had gone or not. So he wound his way there once more and when he reached the place the shop was boarded up and only a heap of ashes lay in the street. A few beggars and children searched these ashes for buttons and bits of metal but the people came and went about their business as though they had seen this sight many times before.

He stood asking himself whether or not he should go in and see whether the ones within were well or not, but before he did so it came to him that he ought first to think of his own parents and their distress if he should be tangled in this trouble, and the more especially did he hesitate because upon the boards there were scrawled in white chalk some great fierce-looking letters. He stared at the letters a long time but nothing came from them to his mind, and at last he turned to an elderly, learned-looking man in a long black robe who happened at that moment to be passing.

“Sir, will you tell me what these letters say?” he asked.

The man paused and put on his horn-rimmed spectacles that he drew out of his bosom pocket and pursed his lips and read the words a few times to himself. Then he said:

“These letters say that what has happened to this house shall happen to every like house that sells enemy goods, and if it is not enough, life itself will be taken from those who sell or buy enemy goods.”

“Sir, thank you,” Lao Er said in alarm. The words were as fierce as they looked, and he knew that in duty to his parents he ought to leave this spot at once and hasten to the safety of his own home, and in no way let it be known that he had any kinship to this house. This he did, and under his arm he held the book for Jade, wrapped up in the strip of blue cotton which he wore otherwise around his neck to wipe the sweat from his face if he were hot. These were strange days, he thought to himself, when in a morning one could see what he had seen. He made haste to leave the city where such things could happen and he hurried home and he was glad for the peace of the fields and the clear calm sky.

When he came home he gave the book to Jade, but even the book was forgotten today in what he had to tell them all. There in the courtyard they all listened to him and Pansiao, his youngest sister, stopped her loom and came out too to hear. When he had heard all, Ling Tan drew on his water pipe a while. Then he spoke.

“Did you ask what was the name of this enemy?”

Lao Er’s face went slack at this question.

“Curse me for a fool,” he said, “I never did think to ask who the enemy was!”

And he was dazed for a while at his own stupidity.

… But all that happened in the city was very far from these who lived in this house. Night fell there as it always did and they ate and made ready for sleep as on any other night and each felt in his own way that here on the land nothing could be changed, whatever folly the city people committed against each other. Ling Tan and his wife talked together for a little while before they slept, anxious for their elder daughter, and Ling Tan said he wished that he had given her after all to a farmer with half the promises that Wu Lien had made. But his wife would not agree to this.

“She is no longer of our house,” she told her husband, “and what happens to her is her husband’s business now since she has given him two sons. Tomorrow if they are in trouble they will find a way to send us word and then we will see if there is need to worry.”

He listened to this and willingly put his worry aside, and soon over these two stole the quiet of the house in which they had lived so many years and the quiet of fields they had tended so long, to which they trusted for food and for all they needed. Whatever befell, the earth which they owned was theirs and would feed them.

And Lao Ta in his room where he lay on his bed with his wife while she suckled her child to sleep told her what he thought of the thing that had happened to his sister’s husband.

“Such things come of foreign learning,” he told her. “These students, nowadays, they do not know the ancient righteousness and they have no measure whereby to measure themselves. This seems right to them today and that tomorrow and they do not know that one man’s mind cannot say what is the true right for another. No, in their pride of a little learning they rush out to do evil like this.”

“We will never let a child of ours go to those schools,” his wife murmured, and fell asleep with the babe still tugging at her breast.

“We will not,” he agreed and lay thinking further. He thought slowly and with difficulty and sweated at it as though he were plowing a rough field behind the water buffalo. At last, having made a thought, he spoke it aloud for his wife to hear. “A man should stay in his own house,” he said, “if he stays in his own house and does the work he knows how to do and cares for his own, who can destroy him? If every man so behaves himself, what enemy can prevail against the nation?”

He waited for his wife to agree with this but first there was only silence and then came the sound of her gentle snore. He felt a little angry that his wisdom was so wasted but he was too good-hearted a man to wake her as some men would because she slept before he did, and so he let his hard thinking subside, and soon the quiet of the house stole over him too, and he slept.

And Pansiao, who spent her days at the loom, who never went to the city, she could not imagine the thing she had heard and it was so strange it went out of her mind like a dream told. In the house she had been kept a child. She was the last born and born indeed so late that her mother had been ashamed. To conceive, to bear a child when Ling Sao was more than forty years old had made everyone who heard of it smile, and in the village the women called out to her as she grew big:

“What vigor, old one!” and they laughed and said, “a good sow is not too old as long as she litters.”

This shame had put a cloud upon the child, and since in the village, nothing was hidden from anyone, Pansiao knew that her birth had brought mockery upon her mother. Her very name carried the mockery, though this had not been meant. Ling Tan’s old third cousin had chosen for her the name Pansiao, or Half-Smile, a pretty name, though one too bookish for a farmer’s daughter. But the cousin could not deny himself the pleasure of such a name and Ling Tan had let it pass, thinking the matter of small account since the child was a girl. But when the villagers heard the name they put their own meaning into it. “Half-Smile — Half-Smile,” they said with laughter, and thereafter the name could not be changed.

Now, as Pansiao grew, she had grown like her name, and she was a gentle, half-smiling, half-sad young girl, never feeling herself wholly welcome anywhere, and eager, therefore, to do all she could to win welcome. But she was often weary, not being as strong as her mother’s other children, and so tonight, though she had listened with wonder to what her second brother had to tell, once she had laid herself down to sleep, she slept.

And Lao Er and Jade, too, had already forgotten. For she had opened the book and by the small light of the bean-oil lamp on the table she began to read the characters slowly aloud and Lao Er listened and watched her pretty lips. It was magic, he thought, that her eyes could pick up these letters which to him were like bird marks on the paper and her eyes gave them to her voice and her voice spoke them to his ears so that he could perfectly understand them.

He understood them and yet what filled his mind was his delight in Jade and in watching her eyelids moving up and down the page and the little finger with which she pointed at one letter and another. She read softly, singing the words out as a story-teller does, and he was suffocated with his pride and his love and had to tell her so, lest he burst himself.

“I hope no evil lies ahead of me,” he said, “because I am so wicked I love you more than I love my parents, and if there were food enough only for them or for you, I would give it to you and let them starve, and let the gods forgive me if they can for it is the truth.”

She looked up from her page and then her face went red and white and her voice faltered and she put the book down.

“I cannot read when you keep watching me,” she said, and her smile trembled on her lips.

“But since I cannot look at the book and know what it says, I must look at you,” he said.

And she, to divert his mind from shaming her and making her shy with his love, took this moment to cry out. “Oh, and I forgot I was going to teach you to read, too,” and so she put the book on the table and made him bend over with her and repeat after her the characters at which she pointed. He was obedient and did as she said, but all the time his mind was out of his body and hovering about hers, and he learned nothing. When at last they went to bed together he had forgotten the day as though it had never been and this house in which he was born was his world.

Of all the ones who lay in that house only Lao San, the third son, was thinking of what his brother had seen. His bed was a bamboo couch in the main room of the house because there was no room for him to have for his own, though his father promised to add a room for him and his wife when he married. Upon this couch the boy lay restlessly turning and not able to sleep, imagining to himself the young men who had destroyed that fine shop. Who were they, and who was the enemy they cried against? It came to him that there were many things in the world that he did not know, and he wondered as he often did how he could learn them if he stayed on and on in his father’s house.

He grew tired of turning at last and he rose from his bed as he did sometimes when he could not sleep and went into the shed where the buffalo was tied. The great silent beast had lain himself down on the earth for the night and the boy pulled some straw out from under its muzzle and curled himself against the warm hairy body. This dull familiar presence calmed him and he too fell asleep.

By the time that the late summer dusk grew into darkness the house in the midst of the fields was as silent as one of the graves of the ancestors. But it was no grave. It stood full of life, sleeping but eternal. An aged and crooked moon shone down upon the water in the fields and upon the silent house, as hundred years upon hundred years the moon had so shone, when it was young and when it was old.