Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

III

THIS LING TAN WAS a man who lived his life both wide and deep, though he seldom stepped off his own land. He did not need to wander, since where he was there was enough. Thus under the skin of the land which he tilled as his fathers had before him there was the body of the earth. He did not, as some do, own only the surface of the earth. No, to his family and to him belonged the earth under their land, and upon this possession Ling Tan used often to ponder. What, he would ask himself in the long pleasant days of lonely plowing, or longer tilling against weeds among the young crops, what lay beneath this soft black skin of the earth in which were held the roots of his seedlings?

He had once in his youth dug a well for his father and for the first time he had seen what lay under their fields. First there was the deep thick crust of the earth, fertile and loose with the tilling of his forefathers and with their waste which they poured back into it year after year. This earth was so rich that almost it was quick enough to spring into life of its own accord. Fed for growing and nurtured for harvest, it lay hungry for seed as a woman is, eager to be about its business.

This earth he knew. But under it was a hard yellow bottom of clay, as tightly packed as the bottom of a pan. How did that yellow bottom come there? He did not know nor did his father, but there it lay to catch and hold the rain for the roots that needed it. And beneath that yellow clay was a bed of rock, not solid, but splintered and split into thin pieces, and between these was grayish sand. And under this bed was still another, strangest of all, for here were pieces of tile and scraps of blue pottery and when Ling Tan dug the well, he even found an old silver coin of a sort he had never seen before and then a broken white pottery bowl and at last a deep brown jar, glazed and whole and full of a gray dust. He had taken these things to his father, and father and son they had looked at them.

“These were used by those from whom we sprang,” his father had said. “Let us put them into the tombs with your grandparents.” So they had done, and then Ling Tan went on digging and out of those depths clear water spouted forth one morning like a fountain, and never to this day had the well failed.

Yet beneath that river, he used often to muse, this earth of his went on. Others had owned it and lived on it and had become part of it themselves, for it was a common saying of the old men in the village that if a man could dig deeply enough in his own land or any land, he would find, five times over, the roots and ruins of what had once been great cities and palaces and temples. Ling Tan’s own father’s father in his time had once dug deep for a grave for his father, and had found a small dragon, made of gold, such as might have fallen from the roof of an emperor’s palace, and he had sold it for enough to buy himself a little concubine he craved. Ill luck it was, too, so the story had come down from generation to generation, for that woman was evil and robbed his house of peace and goods and he was helpless whatever she did because he loved her and through this love they all but lost the very land they had, and would have lost it if his old wife, seeing what havoc was about to fall upon them, had not given the concubine timely poison. Even then it was evil enough, for the man, when his concubine was dead, killed himself, but at least the land was still his sons’ possession. But after that it was always told that the concubine was somehow faery and that the dragon was no true dragon but a fox spirit that had entered into the body of the pretty girl the man loved too well.

Whether all this was true or not, there the land was, and it went deep down beyond fountain and river and rock and as long as he lived it belonged to Ling Tan as far as it went down and to his sons after him.

The whole earth, he had heard, was round. This at least a young man had told who came preaching of many curious things to the village one summer’s day. He came, he said, to help the common people and to do them a good deed by what he called teaching, and because the people in the Ling village were courteous and kind they were willing to listen, especially as it was a feast season and they were not working. So they listened to tales of the roundness of the earth and to the wickedness of flies and the young man showed them pictures of flies as large as tigers, which he held up for them to see. The women cried out when they saw flies so big but Ling Tan told them afterwards to calm themselves, since it was only in foreign countries that flies were like that. Here they were small harmless things that a man could pinch between thumb and finger if he wished, but who cared whether they lived or not, since they had no sting and did no hurt?

That the whole earth was round he found it hard to believe, and he often thought of that young man, a good young man and doubtless a pilgrim of some religion, doing a penance for his soul by walking from one village to another preaching his knowledge. Thus when Ling Tan found among his melons a round one he would think, “That is as the earth is.” But what he could not comprehend was how, if the earth were round, men on the bottom side could walk. Yet when he talked of this in the tea shop one evening, his third cousin said that it could be true because he had heard that the people on the other side of the earth did all the opposite of what it should be done. Thus, he said, their children were born with white hair that grew dark as they grew older, and they pushed a saw away instead of pulled it to them, and they put cloth on the floor instead of on their beds, and all they did was reasonless and mad. So, he said, it might be true that they even walked with their heads hanging down and liked it.

Of such things Ling Tan mused as he tilled his earth and it moved him to laughter to think that somewhere very far below the spot where he stood his land went on and on until at last foreigners stood on it and doubtless planted seed on it and took their harvests from it as though it were their own.

“I ought to ask them for my rent,” he would think and grin until one of his sons seeing him grinning under his big bamboo hat called out to know why he was merry, and then Ling Tan said:

“I have just thought that on the bottom of this land of mine somewhere a foreigner reaps his grain without asking me and I could have the law on him if I knew how to tell him so.”

His little black eyes sparkled and his sons laughed with him. Not one of them had ever seen a foreigner close, though in the city there were some scores of them living peacefully and doing their business. Ling Tan had once asked a man who served in a foreign house and who had come into the country to search for fresh hen’s eggs if his master walked head down or up, and the man had said, up, as he did, and Ling Tan respected the foreigner the more for learning wisdom when he came here. But the foreigner on the other side of his land grew to be a joke in Ling Tan’s household, and if the soil grew dry he would pretend to grumble that the foreigner on the other side had drained it, or if his turnips came up smaller than they should, he said the foreigner was pulling at the roots. By this means all the household came to have a friendly merry feeling toward foreigners everywhere, though truly they knew none except in this merry fashion. And yet because of it, if a strange man had come to the house and said he was a foreigner, Ling Tan would have asked him to come in and sit down and drink tea and eat a meal with them.

But Ling Tan owned not only the earth as deep as it went beneath his feet but he owned the air above his land as far as it went up. The stars over his land were his stars and beyond them whatever there was was his. Of them he knew nothing for none could tell him of the heavens. To him the stars were a handful of lights, lanterns, jewels perhaps, toys and decorations, things for beauty rather than use, like a woman’s earrings. They did no harm and what their good was he did not know except that he was glad they were there, else the sky would have been too black above his head at night.

But sometimes he thought they followed the moon, perhaps, or splintered themselves from the sun. For that there was enmity between sun and moon in the sky everybody knew. Two or three times in his lifetime this enmity had blazed into battle and sun would try to swallow moon or moon would swallow sun, and then everywhere people were frightened and shouted and cried and screamed into the sky and beat gongs and hollow drums and empty rice cauldrons or whatever they had at hand to make a noise. After the noise grew great enough the sun and moon would give heed to it and slowly they drew apart and went back to their own ways again. But if they had not heard the commotion from the earth, they would have fought until one had downed the other somehow, and then half the light from heaven would have perished, and worse if the sun had lost and been swallowed by the moon. But whatever the stars were, they were his, Ling Tan thought, if they were above his land, and he used to wonder if in another life his would be the power to reach up and pull a star down and hold it in the palm of his hand, and if he did would it burn there?

Such were Ling Tan’s thoughts and they were mingled with others that had to do with the cost of grain and the measure of his harvest and whether or not he ought to divide the land among his three sons when his time came to go into earth himself, or ought he to let the eldest have it and the second help him. But if he did this then would there be food enough for the third one when he married and begat his own sons and then would they not quarrel because their bellies were not full? For Ling Tan knew out of his common wisdom that when men have land enough to give them food they have nothing to quarrel about beyond the small things that a night’s sleep can change. But when land is the cause of quarrel men will quarrel to killing each other.

He put the matter to his eldest son one day, not because he felt himself old and beyond work, but a man’s years are lived when they are lived and there is a time for everything, and now was the time to plan and to think while his mind was strong in his strong body.

“Can this land feed three men and their wives and children after I am gone?” he asked his eldest son.

Lao Ta was at that moment drawing water out of the well by rope and bucket and he drew it up and drank first and then splashed what was left over his bare shoulders and arms.

“It can, if you ask me if I am willing to have it so,” he said. “For I will eat less meat if my brothers will and live in peace with them.”

More than this Ling Tan did not ask because he was satisfied with the answer and with his eldest son’s honest looks. He could leave the land to him and know that whatever it bore this eldest son would divide equally among all, and if the others did not like it, they could go elsewhere and Ling Tan’s dust would not stir in its sleep, because he had done well enough in his time.

… To such things as stars and sun and moon Ling Sao gave no thought. What, she would have said, had they to do with her? The house was full of matters she must think about and manage and mend, and its lives all looked to her. Thus her smallest grandson as month followed month did not know which was his true mother, the one from whose soft breast he drank, or the strong big woman who took him often and carried him astride her hip while she came and went, and fed him with sweetened rice from her lips. Mother and grandmother were one to him. And her sons, though Ling Sao wanted them married and married early so that there need be no foolishness in the house, still she knew that no young woman could be to her sons what she was, and she loved to hear their voices, now the voices of men, call to her as once they had called in little childish piping, “M-ma!”

“Yes, my meat dumpling!” she always answered, and no one thought it strange that so she answered even to her eldest son, himself a father, when he came to her to get a button mended or the thong of a sandal secured. For Orchid was one of those women who when they have given birth are in a daze at what they have done and she could think of nothing but her last child and she would sit idle staring at him and listening to him breathe while he slept and think that she was busy and too busy to tidy their room or to sew a rent in her husband’s coat or to make a shoe sole. For this the mother cursed her secretly and complained about her to her husband.

“That Orchid,” she grumbled one night in bed, “she has this last child and now she has no time for anything else even the elder one. And if it were not for me our son himself would starve and go in rags like a beggar. She can do nothing but sit and look at the child, though he is still so small that put him anywhere and there he lies. What when he crawls and walks and what when there is a third and a fourth? Why, when I had a child I counted it nothing. Do you remember how I tended the fields and cut the wheat and harvested it and bore the second child and how I put the two of them in a tub and did my work and no ill came to them? But she — oh, the last child’s breath will stop if she does not see it come in and out, and the child might swallow a mite of dust out of a beam of sun falling upon it!”

“There are not many women like you,” Ling Tan agreed, half asleep.

“And Jade,” Ling Sao mourned. “What use is Jade to me? Her mind is on that book our second son brought her. Yes, when her child comes—”

Ling Tan woke up. “Is Jade to have a child, too?”

She pursed her lips in the dark. “Her flux has stayed itself ten days beyond its usual coming,” she said solemnly, for, being a good mother to her sons, Ling Sao knew it was her duty to question her sons’ wives of such things. “And what she will do when the child comes if she has not finished reading that book I do not know.” She went on, “She will hold it in her hand, I swear, and let the child be born anyhow. It was an evil day when a book came into this house, and there is nothing so bad for a woman as reading. I had rather she took to opium.”

“No, not opium,” he said. “I saw that curse in my own old mother and never will an ounce of opium come into this house.”

“Well, then, not opium,” his wife agreed. For she knew what ill had befallen this house when Ling Tan’s mother in the forty-sixth year of her age had begun to smoke opium to soften a pain she had in her womb. Food and clothing, she cared nothing if she had neither, but the opium she must have, and she lay with her eyes half shut night and day, dreaming and sleeping and waking only if they tried to cure her of the habit. Nor had they heart to try very much, for the pain grew hard and strong in her and only with opium could she draw her breath. Seven years the thing had gone on and more money had been wasted in the buying of opium than had been spent in food or clothing, and worse than that, for in those years opium was made a forbidden thing by the magistrates and if any bought or sold or used the stuff he took his life into his hands. Ling Tan’s father knew this, and so he forbade his son to buy it and he himself went to secret places to get it, telling no one, and it came to be so dangerous a thing to do that each month or so when Ling Tan’s father knew he must go yet again to buy he arranged all his affairs with his son and warned him that if he did not come back he must not go out to search for him, because he would be in prison and beyond any hope of rescue and Ling Tan must behave him as though he were dead and remember that it was his duty to live on.

Time and again the two looked at each other knowing that it might be the last time, and not so long as he lived would Ling Tan forget that brave wrinkled face looking into his as his father risked himself yet once again for his old wife. He was glad at last when within three days a cholera carried both of them off and his mother first, so that his father could die in peace, knowing that his son had not to make the dangerous journeys in his place. So opium was for Ling Tan the destroyer of all peace, and he rejoiced when it grew yet more difficult and dangerous to buy and always more forbidden until now it was a thing scarcely ever heard of that any but the very rich could smoke an opium pipe.

But when Ling Sao took to brooding over her children she could not easily give over. Now her mind ran on in the peace and darkness. “And that little daughter of ours,” she said. “What will we do about the weaving when Pansiao is married? She is in her fifteenth year and it is time to be thinking of some one for her, and Jade ought to learn the loom in her place. Now it is your duty to tell our second son so, and you must tell the eldest son that his wife shall help me more in the house, for when I am gone she will have to take my place, and Jade ought to learn to tend the weaving, and when we find a wife for the last boy, we must find a good strong one to work in the fields with him, and so every part of our life will have the one to tend it when we are not here.”

Ling Tan did not answer, for by this time he was far gone in sleep. Nothing so soothed him to sleep as the sound of his wife’s voice talking of house and child. She went on, tempted the more by silence and no answer from him.

“And though I said we need not worry about our eldest daughter since she is no longer of our house, still I do worry, because after all I gave her birth and suckled her, and I wish I knew how she was and if her husband has his shop in order again and how it is with them all. Curse me that I cannot rid myself of worry even about her!”

Now Ling Tan snored and so told her that she could expect no answer from him, and she fell silent, and thought how when it came to the bottom of anything she had to do it herself and she could never understand why it was that men were children their lives long for all their windy talk. When a thing had to be done in the house a woman must do it, and she made up her mind that tomorrow, though the rest of them starved, she would walk into the city and see for herself how her daughter was and especially the two little children.

“And if I see any young new-fashioned students there spoiling my son-in-law’s shop, I am not afraid,” she thought. “I shall go after them myself and beat them and jerk their noses, and what can anybody do to me, who am only an old woman?”

Thus planning she comforted herself and fell asleep in peace.

… The moment Ling Sao woke she remembered what she had decided to do, and she rose long before any other awoke and began to set the house ready for her day’s absence. There was not a thread of daylight yet in any window and the stars shone as large and soft in the black sky as though it were midnight, but she knew by her inward measure what the hour was. By the time she was dressed and the house swept and the rice washed it would be near cockcrow.

So it was that just as she had given the rice its third washing and put it into the cauldron and covered it with water she heard the cocks calling from village to village to each other. Ling Tan would stir in his sleep at this noise and though he did not wake at cockcrow he never slept so deeply afterwards, knowing even though he was not awake that soon he must rise for the day.

It was too early still to light the fire, so Ling Sao went creeping into the bedroom and brought out the little box where she kept her combs, and she set this open beside the candle on the table in the court, and rubbing off the small mirror that she could see clearly she began to comb and oil her hair so she might enter decently her daughter’s house. She scarcely needed a mirror, for she had all her life smoothed her hair back in the same way, braiding it when she was a girl and wore a fringe over her forehead, and then rolling it into a knot when her mother had pulled out her fringe the day before her wedding. The hair went back of its own accord now and scarcely needed oil, it lay so smooth by habit. But she tied it with a strong red cord before she knotted it and then smoothed it back with the oil she made herself from the shavings of the slippery wood of a certain elm tree put into water. This done she twisted the knot over her long silver pin that had the blue enameled ends, the same pin she had as a part of her wedding goods, with two rings and a pair of earrings and an earpick with a toothpick on the other end and this she always thrust into her knot ready for use when she needed it.

When she had finished her hair and washed her face and rinsed her mouth she no longer needed the candle and it was time to cook the rice for the morning meal and set out the salt carrot and the salt fish to go with it to send it down. One by one they got up in the house and Jade and her second son were always last. She allowed this yet for a while, for the first year of their marriage was not finished yet, but when it was finished she would tell them that they too must rise with the others to work.

Not one of them but saw the moment they looked at her that she was ready for some unusual thing today. She had on her best undercoat of white cotton cloth, and her newest shoes with the heels turned down because they were still tight in the toes and she had put her gold earrings into her ears.

Ling Tan stared at her when he saw her.

“What now, mother of my sons?” he asked.

“I fell to thinking in the night,” she said, “and so I thought to go and see the elder girl after all and find out how she is and the children and their father.”

“How can you go into the city alone?” he asked.

Ling Sao tossed her head at this. “Do I fear any man?” she asked.

So she ate her food and called out to her daughter and her sons’ wives what they should do while she was gone. “Orchid, you must tie your smallest son to your back and get your hands free for once and you must prepare the food, and, Jade, you shall keep the fire going for her so that the smoke will not harm my grandson’s eyes, and as for Pansiao she must weave as she ever does, except that if your father wants anything, child, then you must answer his call, for the other two have their own husbands, and as for you, my third son, if you want anything ask your sister. The tea must be kept hot in the basket, and do not put any food by for me, for I will eat myself full at my daughter’s house and enough to last me until tomorrow. She always buys some extra meats for me, or sends out and fetches in sweets and dumplings. I shall eat enough for two days.”

They all listened to her, and Ling Tan went into his room and brought out some money for her to spend, which she made much show of refusing.

“Why should I waste our good silver? Be sure I will not take it! Keep it to buy seeds with in the autumn. Besides, I want nothing. If you give me a gift I cannot say I want anything.”

But Ling Tan pushed it toward her laughing, and so in the end she took it as she had planned to do from the beginning and as he knew she would. If he had not given it, she would have asked for it, but since he had been so courteous, she felt she too must reply with courtesy.

So at last she was ready to go and they all came with her to the door to wish her a good day, and she set off with a few presents tied into a white handkerchief to give her daughter, six hens’ eggs and a handful of ripe peaches and some dried persimmons.

The sun was well up over the mountain when she set out at her usual steady walk, but not high enough in the sky to be hot. It would be hot, though, for there was not a cloud to be seen, and no wind rippled the water in the rice fields. But she was eager for the day, hot or no, because she was hearty enough to like a day now and then different from others, and she liked to go into her daughter’s house and see what was new, and to feel the two servants respectful before her because she was the mother of their mistress. That what they gave her was anything like what they showed the mother of her son-in-law was not of course to be expected, yet it was enough to make her know that she was not a common visitor.

She was still so early that every now and again she passed a neighbor carrying his vegetables or straw to the city markets and every now and again one shouted to her to ask her how she did and how her old man was and where she was going. To every one she answered cheerfully and asked him of some small thing she knew of in his household, and all this made the walk seem quick to the city. Nevertheless, the sun was very hot when she entered the deep shadows of the city gate and she was glad of the coolness, and she sat down on a melon vendor’s little stool and ate an early melon, though afterwards it made her a little sorry, too, for it lay green for a while in her. But she stopped again and drank some hot tea at a small shop to send it down, and when it was down she felt well again and so at last she came to her daughter’s door.

The shop was open and the two clerks there, but not all the cases were full nor was all the glass mended. She went about looking for what used to be there and she saw that much of it was gone. What was left were such cloth and small goods as could be bought in any little village shop. All the bright things, the strange foreign things, the lamps and lights and toys and straw hats and rubber shoes, the cups and bowls and dishes with flowers on them of a foreign color were gone. She knew then that the loss here had been very great and that her daughter’s husband had not dared yet to make it right, and he must fear trouble to come.

So with her full lips pursed together she went back of the shop and found all worse than she had feared. Her daughter’s husband sat slack in his chair, his flesh so fallen away that with the fat gone he looked as though his skin were a garment too big for him. Never had she seen such once-fat jowls hang down in such dewlaps, or a belly once full so overhang itself like a windless bag. He lay asleep when she came in and her daughter sat beside him fanning him. When she saw her mother she made a sign for silence and dared not give over fanning.

Ling Sao bent to whisper in her daughter’s ear. “Is he ill that he looks so slack?”

“Ill with bad luck,” her daughter whispered back. “He cannot eat.”

Now Ling Sao knew very well that when a creature, man or woman or beast, cannot eat his food he is on his way toward the grave, and she was frightened at the thought of her daughter a widow so young, and so she stole into the house and without stopping to look at the children or to greet her son-in-law’s mother, she rolled up her sleeves and went into the kitchen and pushed aside the servant who stood at the stove.

“Mend the fire for me,” she told the woman with such will that the woman obeyed even without greeting. “Begin it small,” Ling Sao commanded her. “When I bid you, let it burn up quickly for the space of a hundred breaths. Then make it small again.”

Out of the eggs she had brought and with some bits of meat and onion she found in a bowl on the table she made a dish so fragrant with goodness that Wu Lien, waking a little to brush off a fly, smelled it and opened his eyes.

“What is that fine smell?” he asked.

“My mother has brought some new eggs from the country and she is cooking them,” his wife replied.

“I can eat them,” he said.

When his wife heard this she ran into the kitchen at the moment that Ling Sao was lifting the eggs into a bowl and she seized the bowl.

“He wants them,” she cried, and took up some chopsticks as she ran and she gave the bowl to Wu Lien.

Now Wu Lien had eaten nothing or as good as nothing since the day his shop was ruined, and because he was a man who filled himself full three times a day by habit, his hunger was gradually rising in him though he had not known it and thought himself as low as the first day. Here was this good food under his nostrils, eggs such as a city man does not know from birth to death, and he plunged in his two chopsticks and did not take the bowl from his face until it was empty. Ling Sao and her daughter stood watching him, and the two women’s eyes turned to look at each other in their pleasure and then back at him again. When he brought the bowl down empty they laughed, and then a great belch of wind came up out of him and they laughed again.

And Ling Sao cried, “I know why I felt I must come here today, and my old black hen who lays an egg once or twice a month laid an egg four days together and the yellow one two eggs, one day after another, and so the gods work their will. Now you are well.” She turned to her daughter, “Fetch him the hottest tea he can drink and he will be as good as the first day he was born.”

While her daughter did this she sat down and shouted for the youngest child to be brought to her, for Ling Sao was a woman who never felt herself whole unless she had a child on her knees or across her hip, and so while she held her daughter’s youngest child naked except for his wetting cloth in her hand under him, she watched Wu Lien drink his hot tea and his last wind came up and while this was going on she talked to him for his good.

“Whatever the ill, you ought not to stop your food or to let your flesh waste away,” she said. “You must remember that you have parents and sons and no man belongs to himself but to these before him and after him. If he lets himself be destroyed, or if he destroys himself, the proper relationships are broken off and the nation will fall.”

Wu Lien opened his eyes heavily at her. “Who knows but that the nation must fall anyway, old mother?” he said sadly.

Ling Sao looked at her daughter, not understanding such talk.

“That is all he thinks about,” the young woman said. “Over and over again he says the nation will fall.”

Ling Sao fanned herself briskly. “The nation is nothing except the people and we are the people,” she said. “You, Wu Lien, ought not to consider that one day of ill luck can overthrow you. You must buy more goods and put in your foreign things again and call upon the city to protect you and so take heart.”

But Wu Lien only groaned. “I have bad news to tell,” he said, “I have saved it in myself for these three days — four days tomorrow, it will be.”

Ling Sao interrupted him. “There you have been wrong,” she said. “To keep ill news in your belly spoils the liver and dries the gall. Anger and sorrow and ill news — all must come out, for the body’s health.”

“It is not my private ill fortune,” Wu Lien said. “This is ill news for the nation. The East-Ocean enemies have sent their ships to the coast nearest us and their soldiers have stepped upon our land and our soldiers have met them but we are not strong enough for them.”

Now Wu Lien knew when he said this that the minds of the two women could not comprehend what he was saying. They had never been away from this city and the countryside around; and to them the two hundred or so miles that lay between here and the coast were like two thousand. They had never sat in a train nor even in a foreign spirit car nor had they been the seven miles to the river port to see a foreign ship. All they knew was that once, years before, these foreign ships had let their guns out against a wandering army in this city, because they held some foreigners, and in the country Ling Tan’s household had heard the distant guns like thunder and they had often talked of it, until they forgot it.

“Do you remember those guns you once heard?” Wu Lien now asked. “There are now such guns at the coast, laying waste that city there.”

“I remember them,” she said comfortably. “I was scraping out the rice cauldron with sand and it clattered in my hands and rang an echo. I cried out to my old man that it was an earthquake. But in the end no harm came of it.”

“Harm will come of this,” Wu Lien said, groaning. For he was a merchant and twice each year he went to the coast to buy his goods and he knew the city there very well, and he could see what was ahead of him now. The students who had destroyed his goods were only the forerunners of the evil to come. He dared not buy any more such goods, and if he did not, what had he to sell in his shop that could not be bought anywhere?

“Comfort yourself,” Ling Sao said. “The sea is very far away, and even the river is far enough. What can they do to us?”

“They have flying ships,” he said. It made him angry that these two women would not be afraid and he wanted to make them share his own fears. So he went on to sound as fearful as he could imagine. “Those flying ships can come up from the sea in two hours and let their eggs down on us and burst our house apart into dust and what can we do against them?”

“You shall all come to our village,” Ling Sao said stoutly, “I always did say a city is a place full of danger. I can see this little meat dumpling every day if you live in our house. … Oh, Heaven, I ought to die!” This she screamed forth suddenly because at this moment the little boy she held let out his water and she, listening to Wu Lien, had forgot to hold the cloth to him and down the water came upon her best coat. There was great commotion and her daughter leaped forward to take the child but Ling Sao would not give him up and they struggled over him.

“No, curse me,” she said laughing, “what do I care for his little water? He is not the first child that has used me so, and it will dry in a breath or two.”

In the midst of this commotion Wu Lien’s old mother came out from her room where she had been sleeping, and so Ling Sao must spring to her feet for that, because Wu Sao’s place was above hers, and so she gave her greeting.

“Here I am troubling your household again,” she said loudly, “but I heard of the shop and I came to see for myself. Now I tell your son that he is not to let himself be so disturbed. A man ought to eat for his parents’ sake, and he with no father, he ought to remember you, Elder Sister, and take care of himself, because his flesh is yours and not his own.”

Now this mother of Wu Lien was a woman so fat that she could not walk more than the three or four steps from one place to another and she was too fat to try to talk, because her voice had grown into a whisper, so she nodded and smiled and sat down. As soon as she sat down she began to cough, not as a person ought to cough, but with a deep shaking rumble that made her eyes stand out like fish bladders and her face turn purple. When this began Ling Sao’s daughter ran for red sugar and Wu Lien leaped to pour tea for his mother and the maid servant came running out of the kitchen to rub her back and her neck, and what with the child and this old woman by the time quiet was come again, that which Wu Lien was saying had been forgotten, and he did not say it again in his mother’s presence.

Instead he excused himself, telling them that he must go into the shop, for suddenly it seemed to him in his anxiety that he could not bear the presence of women. This Wu Lien was not a stupid man. He read a newspaper once or twice a month and he went to the largest tea shop in the city and he listened to all that was said there of what happened everywhere. He knew, therefore, what it might mean if the things he had heard were true. He felt the more fearful for he himself did not hate the East-Ocean people and he saw no good in war at any time, for his business would be ruined and many others with him. Only in peace could men be prosperous, for in war all was lost. This country of his was not like some others he had heard of, where only in war was there work enough to be done. He had often sat listening in the tea shop to those who talked of things they had seen in foreign countries, and this he held was a main difference, that in foreign countries war was a business, but here it had never been.

Now, suddenly weary of all the women’s commotion in his house, he made up his mind that he would go to the tea shop for awhile, where for shame he had not been since his shop was ruined, and so he dressed himself in his room, seeing with grief how loose his trousers were around his belly and how long was the tie to his girdle. When he went out he took another way than through the room where the women sat and he went by a side street instead of the main one, and when he came to the tea shop he sat at a small side table instead of the one in the center where he usually sat with his friends. All of them, he knew, must have heard of his shop, and none had come near him, and so he did not know how he stood with them, whether he could still be called a good merchant, or whether he was a traitor. So he waited to find out what he was.

It was not long before he heard. For a little while it seemed good to him to be back here in the place where all were men and where there were no children and women to disturb the talk. But today it was not as usual. The place, though full of men, was silent. In silence men sat and drank their tea, or if they spoke it was only to exchange a few words, and then to fall silent again. Little meat was eaten and there were no full tables of noisy sweating men gorging themselves on good foods and emptying their wine cups to each other. They were all dressed neatly and quietly and none laid aside his coat because he was hot and to let his sweat flow. Instead it seemed as though they were cold with fear.

In his place he sat waiting to see if any would greet him. He ordered some green tea and when a careless small waiter brought it to him and wiped out the bowl with a foul black cloth he had not the courage to reprove him. Instead he blew in it and rinsed it out with the hot tea and drank a bowlful slowly, watching for an eye to catch his. If he were greeted, all would be well. If he were not, then he must know his name had been put up for a traitor. For these students had their revenge not only in destruction but they would print in newspapers and post on walls and on the city gates all those whose goods they had destroyed and call them traitors.

At the moment that he filled his bowl for the second time he did catch the eye of a man he knew, one of his own guild, with whom he had often feasted and drunk tea in this very place. Had all been well, the man would have shouted to him and Wu Lien would have bade him come to his table. But the man’s eye slipped over him as though he were a stone.

“I am a traitor,” Wu Lien thought heavily. So quickly had the world about him changed that what a few weeks ago was good business today was traitordom.

The tea in his mouth changed to salt water and he put down his copper coins and got up and went away. Down the street at the same book stalls where Lao Er had bought his book he stopped and bought a newspaper, and stood there reading it. That city on the coast, he read, was set afire and in the blaze the armies now fought. He read and groaned aloud to read the name of one good shop after another gone and ruin everywhere. Why it need be so he had no idea. A bare month ago there had been a small trouble in the North. For years there had been headlong talk by students against the East-Ocean, people, but what good business man had listened to them? He and his kind prospered and once in a year or so he met an East-Ocean merchant or two who were full of courtesy and kindness, though their tongues were stiff when they spoke any language except their own, and in courtesy he had learned enough of their language to do his business with them. He had no quarrel with them then or now, and what was their quarrel with him?

He felt so bewildered standing there that the old bookseller asked him if his belly pained him or if something were wrong with his vitals. He shook his head at that and folded his paper and went a roundabout way to his house and entered again by the way he had come.

There through the opened window he heard the women’s voices still clacking and he shouted for his wife and when she came running he bade her bring his food here that he might eat in peace and when he had eaten he would go into his shop and take inventory of what was there.

“I shall buy no more new goods,” he thought sadly. “I am ruined, I and my house, and as long as I live I shall not know why, or why what I have done honorably all my life is now held against me for a crime.”

Of this Ling Sao knew nothing. She ate heartily of her daughter’s meats and she examined the children from head to foot, and when the old woman went to sleep again and she was alone with her daughter she inquired concerning all her affairs so that she could gauge the measure of her daughter’s happiness and success in this house.

“Does your husband like you as well as ever?” she asked her daughter.

“If anything, more,” her daughter replied laughing. “He calls for me whenever he wants anything, and it is I who serve him. He gave me a new piece of silk for a coat before the shop was looted and now he says he wishes he had taken much more from the shop and given it to me. He says I am such a woman as he would have asked for had he had the chance to ask.”

“But does he go out at night?” Ling Sao asked again, pursing her lips. She did not tell her daughter so, but she knew that if a man speaks too well to his wife she must take care also, lest he speak out of an ill conscience of some sort and praise her to make amends.

“Never,” the daughter replied with pride, and so the mother’s heart was set at rest. For she never forgot that there were in the city women of a very different kind from her daughter. This daughter was an honest hearty woman who could never even put paint on her face without getting it askew so that anyone could see it, and she was already growing plump and her bosom was full for her last child, and Ling Sao knew that city women keep their bodies thin as snakes, and they have no breasts, and so daintily do they spread their paint and powder that they look almost as though they grew themselves like that except that all know there are no such women.

So at last the end came to a very pleasant day for Ling Sao and she made ready for the walk home again, and in her handkerchief she tied some cake her daughter gave her and she took a last swallow of tea and smelled the two children’s cheeks and squeezed their small bodies once more and called farewell to Wu Sao who had spoken only twice all day, once for food and once for tea, and nodded to her daughter, and so passed through the shop where Wu Lien was. But since there were other men there, too, she only bowed to show she knew her manners and then went down the streets.

Never, it seemed to her, had the city looked so prosperous as it did this evening. The shops were full and busy and the streets noisy with vendors and the people came and went laughing and talking. The wind had died down and the night was hotter than the day had been and already there were those who had moved their beds out on the street to sleep there and were now eating their evening meals where they could watch all that went past them. There was laughter everywhere and loud calling back and forth and no one stopped to ask if he knew another’s name, but he called anyway and made a joke and to Ling Sao it seemed that all were as merry as though they were of one blood.

“So we are of one blood,” she thought in comfort. “People of Han we are, and if these people in the city have their own smell, why, we have ours who live outside the city wall, but still we are all of one flesh.”

And so walking homeward and smiling to herself she fell to thinking of a thing she had heard, how foreigners have hair and eyes of any color they happen to be born with.

“I do pity them,” she thought, “for if it were I and I could not be sure if what I gave birth to would have black hair and eyes as humans do, how could I give birth? I would cast the child too soon, I know.”

So she went on home, and saw how all the fields were fertile. The rice fields were dried and the young rice was beginning to head and there was the promise of fine harvest. All was well with the land and when all was well with the land then everything was well.

At home she found them waiting for her, and each one had done as she had bid. The day away had made her glad to come home again and as she looked from one face to the other, each seemed better than she had remembered. Even Jade seemed better and she looked at that pretty young face and thought, “How can I blame my second son for loving her too well?” And of Orchid she thought, “A soft good soul and I must not be so hard on her.” And she took her own little daughter’s hand and looked at the calluses that the threads had made and said, “Tomorrow you shall not weave. Let the loom be idle a day, and rub some oil into these hands.”

When Ling Sao was mellow and kind the whole house seemed full of health and they all sat enjoying it like heat from a gentle fire or like sunshine that is not too hot or like wind that is not too cold. And thus while they sat and while they ate together, peace filled them, and they listened to all she had to tell and she talked and talked and yet with all her talking she forgot to tell them what Wu Lien had said.

One by one they went to bed until there were left only Ling Tan and she, and when they had made the home right for the night, the dog outside the gate and the third son’s bed made and he asleep in it, and the buffalo tied, they too went to bed. Not a sound was over the land except the quiet croaking of the frogs in the ponds. Side by side they lay, and since she had been away from him for a whole day Ling Tan felt his belly move with warmth toward her and he reached out his arms toward her.

“My good old woman,” he whispered. “You are the best old woman in the world.”

And so even to him she forgot to speak of war.