Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

V

WHEN ALL COULD SEE that now death was to come every day except when it rained, then those who lived inside the city walls did two things. They filled the temples and prayed the gods for rain until they dared pray no more lest there be a flood, and then they went out of the city to find rooms in small country inns or a corner in a farmer’s house or they slept on the gravelands or somewhere under a tree. Never had Ling Tan seen such piteous sights as he now saw, women and little children and old people with all they could save tied up in bundles they carried and most of them on foot, for only a few of the rich could ride these days. He had seen people come down from the North in times of famine, but they were the poor and the farming people whom the land had failed for a little while, but it could not fail them every year and they always went back to it.

These now were rich and poor together and they did not know if ever they could go back. Sometimes he felt more sorry for the rich than the poor because the rich were so helpless and delicate and knew little of where to find food. All their lives food had been served to them by others and they did not need to ask where it was found or how it was made, and the poor did better than the rich in these days, used as they were to too little always. And best of all those bold poor did who risked their lives to stay in the city and to go into the emptied houses of the rich and take what they liked from them.

These people poured like a flooding river out from the city over the countryside. And the stream of people from the city was joined by a greater stream from the east. For as the enemy toward the east took the land foot by foot people fell back from before them and joined themselves to others like them and the great river of moving people began to flow inland toward the west, not knowing where they went and sure only of death if they stayed.

At first Ling Tan let his house be open to these people, and the women spent themselves in cooking for them and feeding them and crying out in pity for their sufferings. There were the wounded and the little children too who could go no further and must be left behind, and these had to be put with those willing to take them, and many died. But this was what saved Ling Tan, that none of these people thought his house was far enough from the enemy as they gained the land foot by foot. They were restless until they had pushed on beyond river and lake and mountain, into the inlands behind the high mountains where the enemy dared not go lest they be cut off.

Now here was the chance for Lao Er to go, too, and so he and Jade waited until there came by those with whom they wished to share travel, those who were not old or sick or burdened with too many little children. Day after day they waited to find whom they wanted and one day there came by a party of forty or more young men and women. The women had feet as free as men, which had never been bound, and Jade liked them as soon as she saw them. Their hair was cut short like hers and in their little bundles they all had books.

“We are students of a certain school,” they told her, “and our eyes are on the mountains a thousand miles from here where our teachers are gone already and there in caves we will go on with our learning and when this war is over we will come back ready to shape the peace well.”

Not one of these men and women talked of wasting himself in war, and this pleased Ling Tan very much. They stopped at his house not for a night, but only at a midday to ask for tea to drink with the bread they had with them, and so he heard them talk and he praised them:

“Those who have no learning have only their bodies and they are the ones who ought to fight if there must be fighting. But you who have wisdom stored in your skulls, you have a treasure which ought not to be spilled like blood, and it ought to be kept for the day when we must have wisdom to tell us how we ought to live. In times like these wisdom is useless because nothing can save us except the chance that we are saved. But when the folly of war is ended, then we must have wisdom.”

And in the shade of the willows outside his gate, for the court was too small for so large a crowd, Ling Tan put many questions to these young men and even to the women, for to his amazement one answered as well as the other, and after a while he forgot whether it was man or woman who answered him. And from them he found out for the first time what had happened at the coast and why the enemy had attacked them at all, and long was their talk together.

This Ling Tan was a man who though he lived as his ancestors had in this valley was still acute enough. Life, he always told his sons, did not change. Men ate with different tools in different times, but food was food. They slept upon different beds, but sleep was the same. So now he believed that it was only men’s times that were changed and not men. When he inquired therefore of these young men and women he asked what weapons the enemy had rather than what the enemy was. When he heard that the enemy envied his nation the land, he understood at once the whole war and its cause.

“Land,” he said looking about on the many young faces and filling his water pipe as he spoke, “land is at the bottom of what men want. If one has too much land and the other too little, there will be wars, for from land come food and shelter, and if land is too little food is poor and shelter small, and when this is so, then man’s mind and his heart are kept small too.”

They listened to him with respect but unbelieving, for to them Ling Tan was only an old farmer who could not read or write and what did he know of all that they learned in books? But since they had not yet lost all the courtesy taught them by their parents, they made haste to seem to agree with him.

“It is true, old father,” they said, not believing him in their hearts.

But he was content with them whether they believed him or not, and so when his second son came to him in the middle of the afternoon and told him that he and Jade wanted to go with these young men and women who were all strong on their feet and full of courage he thought it over for a short space and then as his habit was before he decided anything he went and talked with his wife.

Now she had never liked it that her second son and Jade wanted to leave this house, and she spoke out her discontent now while she washed the clothes at the edge of the pond where Ling Tan found her. She had a pair of his old blue trousers in her hand, folded on a smooth stone and full of water, and she beat the garment with her stick to drive out the dirt with the water and while she talked she went on beating.

“I do not see why Jade should go off like this,” she said. “Who will look after her when her time comes and why should our grandchild be born somewhere out in a field like a wild hare? If our son wants to go, he will go, but I say she should stay here and have our grandchild decently.”

Then Ling Tan answered her by grave words. “It may be better that we have very few young women in our house, and the fewer the better, and Jade is too beautiful for what may lie ahead of us.” For he was troubled by a thing he had heard, and one young man had taken him aside and told him in private what had happened to some women at the hands of the enemy. So now he was eager to have the women out of his house, all except his wife who was brown and wrinkled enough for no man to see what he saw in her face, the girl she had once been.

She let her stick rest a moment to look at him.

“What do you say now when you talk?” she asked. “Is there any place safer for a young wife than her husband’s home, and can any eye be sharper than mine on her? When he goes I will not let her foot stir beyond the door. I tell you it is he who makes her able to disobey me and he encourages her to her own way, so that I do not tell half of what I would tell her if he were not here. Let him go and I will say at once that her foot is not to go beyond the gate until his enters it again.”

“There may come times when strange feet will enter our gate,” Ling Tan said.

She went to beating again. “I fear no man,” she said loudly. “Let a strange man’s foot touch the threshold and see whether I or the dog is at him first!”

“Nevertheless, a woman should go with her man,” Ling Tan argued, “and who will look to our son if his wife does not go with him?”

“No one would say you are right quicker than I,” she replied, “if Jade were not carrying in her your own grandchild, and her duty to you comes first.”

“I think it does not,” he said gently, and went away before she could argue him into doing what he did not want to do. And she, knowing why he went, could only beat the trousers, and she did this without thinking what she was doing until when she lifted them up they were beaten to holes and then she called aloud to the gods to see what she had done and how it was no fault of hers but of these times that set one’s mind awry.

As for Ling Tan he went into his house and told his son quietly that he had better go and take Jade with him, for he knew from what the young men had told him that the second hundred miles of land had been lost to the enemy and within the third hundred miles this house stood.

“But send me a word somehow when the child is born,” he said, “and if it is a boy send me a red cord in the envelope and if it is a girl let it be a blue one.” He wished now that he had let his son read and write so that he could have had a letter that he could take to his third cousin and ask him to read it to him. But who would have dreamed it would ever be well for a son to leave his father’s house?

“I will do better than that,” Lao Er replied proudly. “Jade can write enough to tell you.”

Ling Tan was astonished enough at this, and he cried out, “Can she, then? But the matchmaker did not tell us!”

“Doubtless she thought it no added value to her,” Lao Er said, and grinned.

“I would never have said either that it was needful for a woman to read and write,” Ling Tan said, “but it only proves how strange our times are that it can be so.” And he sat in the court smoking and thinking while his second son went in to tell Jade they were going.

Now Jade herself had been the one to say first that these young men and women were the ones to walk with, and so she had already tied into two bundles the few things they must have if they went. There she sat on the bed’s edge waiting for Lao Er and she lifted her great eyes at him when he came in.

“Are we to go?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then he sat down beside her and put his arm on her shoulder. “Now that we go, I wonder if it is not too hard for you,” he said tenderly. “I wish I could carry the child for you.”

“One of these days you shall,” she replied.

She rose as she spoke, and he saw that she had even shod herself for the long walk, for she had tied over her cloth shoes a pair of straw sandals such as he wore in the field, and she had put on her strongest plainest blue garments, such as country women wear, coat and trousers and not the long robe, that was her best and therefore made after the city fashion.

“I am ready,” she said and took up her bundle. But he lingered. “I never thought a child of mine would be born anywhere except where I was born,” he said, sadly.

“He will find a place of his own to be born in,” she said.

“Yes, but we must mark the place,” he said. “It is very meaningful to a man where he is born, and we must remember whether it is among mountains or in a valley or in a town, and whether it is night or day and if there is water near by, and whether the sky is clear or dark, and what the province is and how the people there speak, so that we can tell him everything.”

“Oh,” she said restlessly, “let us go, if we are to go!”

But still he lingered. “It seems to me I can remember the very moment I was born in this house,” he said. “I seem to remember such darkness as I have never since known, and then light that was like a pain so that I cried out. And then I felt arms beneath me.”

“Will you come with me or not?” she cried. “I hate to say I go then not go.”

He heard the fear in her voice of a woman seeking safety for her young, and he rose and they went out and bowed to his father together and to the elder brother and they called farewell to all the others. But the mother they could not find anywhere, and since the young men and women were anxious to be gone and at another place for night they could only leave without seeing her.

“Tell my mother we searched for her everywhere,” Lao Er said. “Tell her it is bad luck that we cannot find her before we go.”

“I will,” his father said. He would not tell his son what he now felt to see him go out of this house to a place unknown and the time of his return unknown and perhaps never, for who could say what would happen before they met again and whether or not they would meet? He followed his son and Jade out of the gate and stood on the threshing floor to see them go, and with him were all his house except his son’s mother. It was an afternoon like any other in midsummer, hot and quiet and the sky blue except for the piles of silver thunder clouds resting upon the green mountains. Still none could say whether or not the clouds would do more than lie there. Sometimes they made a storm and sometimes they did not.

And Ling Tan, feeling all around him seem so the same, as though there were no war, wondered if it were not folly indeed to let his good young son leave the safety of this house and with him his young wife, now precious to them all for what she carried in her, and he wondered whether or not these young men had spoken the truth in all they had said. It did not seem true to him now that less than a hundred miles away the armies of the enemy marched toward this place. A bird sang in a peach tree near his door where the peaches had but just finished their ripening, and his grain stood motionless under the hot sun. Its greenness was changing to a paler green and it would not be many days before the paleness turned to yellow.

When he cut the rice he would miss sorely enough this strong son, and now it seemed to him that this second son of his had good in him which none of the others had. He was quicker than the eldest and sharper in his thoughts and he laughed more wisely and kept his laughter for what was funny and did not waste it on courtesy and placating as his eldest sometimes did, and beside him the third son was fit for nothing except to herd the buffalo. And in spite of all Ling Sao said, Ling Tan knew that Jade was the best of the young women in his house. He looked at her now and for the second time since she had come here he spoke to her directly for he was a man of dignity and he obeyed the customs between the generations. The first time he spoke had been when she came as a bride and he must greet her, and now this time he bade her farewell.

“Do your duty, child,” he said. “Remember that he is my son and his child my grandchild, and that all rests on you. Where the woman is faithful no evil can befall. The woman is the root and the man the tree. The tree grows only as high as the root is strong.”

She did not answer, but she let her lovely mouth, always straight and grave, move a little in a smile. Whether or not she believed what he said, that smile did not tell him.

And so he let them go, and he stood looking after them a long time, as long as he could see them, until their two figures were lost among the crowd.

When he came in he saw smoke rising out of the kitchen and he went and looked behind the stove and there sat his wife, feeding grass into its belly.

“Where were you?” he cried. “We looked for you everywhere.”

“I would not come to see him go,” she said. “If he must go let me not see it.”

“But you have been weeping,” he said, staring at her. Her eyes were red and down her brown cheeks her tears had left a silvery skin as they dried.

“I have not,” she said. “The smoke makes my eyes red.”

He let her say this, seeing the tears well up into her eyes again, and he stood there helpless before her. It had always been that if she wept, who wept so seldom, he felt himself turned to stone and not able to move.

… Out of a house it seemed strange that two could be so missed as Ling Tan and his wife now missed their second son and Jade. There were all these others left and the same number of children ran about the court and teased the chickens and ducks and pulled the dog’s tail until he howled with misery, and it was easier for all to sleep for Wu Lien and the eldest daughter and their children slept in the empty room, and they could put the old woman who was Wu Lien’s mother in the third son’s bed, and him out in the court on a bamboo couch, and yet they missed those two. Some sort of strength had left the house with their going, and the eldest son without his younger brother seemed too gentle and docile and he agreed too quickly with what his father and mother said, and Ling Tan felt that in the time of trouble this docile man would do what he was told well enough but would not know what to do if there were no one there to tell him, and Ling Tan felt the care was all his. Now he saw that his second son was a man of his own mind, though so young, just as Jade, though wilful, was a woman who knew what to do next without asking.

Even Ling Sao missed Jade more than she would say and yet because she was a just woman she laughed with shame after a few days and told her husband so.

“I would have said that only peace could be here after that Jade went, and I will not say I want her back again, if it were not for our son. But still I do grow weary with Orchid who does nothing if I do not tell her, and with our elder daughter who cries at me like a sheep from morning until night, ‘M-ma, what shall I do next?’ I tell her to look and see whether the floor is clean and whether the court needs sprinkling for dust or is there fuel enough for the next meal, or are the clothes to be washed or do the drying fish need turning, or if there is nothing else, then slice carrots to salt down for the winter but no, then she says, ‘Which comes first, M-ma?’ ”

Ling Tan’s little eyes twinkled at his wife as she sat combing out her long hair before she slept. “She is your own daughter,” he said, “and she still asks you what she is to do because you always told her. Jade, now, she did not grow up at your side, and so she is used to seeing with her own eyes and not yours.”

“Is this my fault?” she asked, and held the comb, ready to be grieved. For these two were so close after all the years that she could not bear a word from him if he thought her wrong. To hear anyone else curse her and curse her mother and call her father a turtle did not touch her anywhere. She would only laugh or grow angry and curse back the bigger mouthful. But let her husband say she should have done other than she did, and though she would try to muster up her anger to flout him with, still she never could, and his words, though only two or three, would sink into her heart like a dagger, and she would carry it in her for days. So Ling Tan had learned never to speak to her to say she was wrong unless he must and he let many a small thing pass, knowing how warm and impetuous this woman of his was and how eagerly she secretly wished to do what he liked, though she would have denied she was so, and would have said what she so loved to say, that she feared no man, and not him either.

“You are the best mother in the province,” he said, “and where is there one like you beyond the seas? I would not have you a cool thin soul. I like you hot and gusty and I like your quick tongue even when it is turned on me.”

He laughed as he spoke, and she grew red with pleasure and began to comb her hair again, and to hide her pleasure she tried to be surly while she smiled.

“You old turnip,” she said, and searched for something she could do for him. “Come here, old man, and let me see that spot on your cheek and see if you are to have a boil after all these years.”

He came near to her and bent over her to humor her, knowing very well why she wanted to touch him and to do something for him.

“It is only where a flea bit me,” he said.

“Do not tell me what it is,” she said, “I can see for myself.”

She felt it and saw that it was nothing and so she gave him a small blow on his bare shoulder because she loved him so well.

“And can you not catch a flea any more, and must you be bitten like a child, you bone?” she said.

They both laughed then, and he thought to himself that if this woman died before he did, even then he would not marry another, for after her any would be like a carrot dried without salt.

“Do you know why you do not like Jade?” he asked, to tease her.

“I know all I want to know,” she said, beginning to comb her hair again, and making her eyes mischievous.

“You do not know this,” he said. “It is because she is so much like you.”

“That Jade!” she cried, trying to be angry. But secretly in her heart she was pleased for Jade was beautiful and she knew against her wish that the girl was no ordinary one.

“Both of you are stubborn wilful women and it is the only sort I like,” he said. He put his hand on her neck and she felt it there as she had felt it when they were both young. But because she was long past forty she knew that to another it would have seemed shameful that two middle-aged people should be like two young ones, and so she tossed her head and pulled away and he knew what she was thinking and laughed and when she saw his brown face above her and his white teeth she forgot that he was the father of her children, the man she had lived with all these years, and she put her arms around his waist and held him hard against her and felt his heart against her cheek, beating so steadily and so strong that all her blood ran to the measure of that beat.

“Ought we not to understand our son and Jade?” he asked. “They are like us.”

“I always did say our second son was more like you than any of the others,” she answered. Then she let him go and went on binding up her hair, and so the moment was over, and both of them the better for it.

Yet as day followed day, they grew used to the two gone, and the rent in the house was mended and the work went on. But Ling Tan moved his third son up and let him work in the fields with him instead of herding the buffalo and in his place he hired a small lad for a penny a day to sit on the beast’s back on the days it was not needed for work.

As for Orchid, she was happier with Jade gone, for now there was no one to reproach her for too little work done, and no one to have smooth hair when hers was rough because she had not had time to comb it or thought she had not. Hers was easily the highest place among the younger women now that Jade was not there to do everything better than she did.

But Pansiao was sorry Jade was gone, for in the last few weeks Jade had taken a while in the evening to teach her to read a few characters. To the others it had seemed nothing more than a game but Jade knew what it was to the silent young girl who moved in such accustomed ways through the house that they all forgot her easily. Only Jade had seen how seldom the child spoke and to how few, for she, too, had been a silent child in her own father’s household and one of many in the women’s courts. Her father had been richer than most men, an owner of land he rented as well as farmed, and he had a concubine and so Jade grew up among two women’s children and they numbered seventeen in all. Among so many she was alone and she was always drawn to the silent rather than to the talkative. In this household where both Ling Tan and Ling Sao spoke freely and Lao Er talked easily and Orchid talked as easily as she breathed and the third son was away all day she saw the quiet gentle girl and wondered if she were lonely. And so out of this wonder one day, not knowing what else to say to the child, she had asked:

“Would you like to learn a few characters? Then you could read my book instead of sitting alone.”

“Oh, I am not able,” Pansiao had answered quickly. “How can I remember the letters when I forget what my mother tells me so easily?”

“It is easy to remember the characters because they tell you something you want to know,” Jade said, and so she persuaded Pansiao and it was true that the young girl did remember and Jade had never to say a character’s name twice, for every character spoke for itself to her.

Now that was over again, and Jade was gone, and Pansiao could only go over and over the characters she knew, until one day in her great hunger to know what others said, she drew near to one of the women students who passed by so often and asked her for a letter or two, and by this means she learned to read a little. Then one day a kind student gave her a book out of the few she carried.

“Take care of it,” she said, “for in these times books are dearer than food.”

Pansiao thanked her and took the book, and though she could not read enough yet to know what it said, it stood to her a goal to be reached some day, and she went through the book with a bit of charcoal and marked every character that she knew. But they were not near enough together to speak to her.

… As for Ling Tan, his only wonder was how quickly they all grew used to what was now their daily life. Day after day the flying ships came over, and they grew used to them, having said that they would stay where they were, though the enemy took the very city itself. Half of the city went away and then another third of what was left until only those stayed who had nowhere to go, or they were those who had no money at all, or those who said it made no difference to them who ruled the city so long as there was peace in it and they waited for any peace that was an end to war and these flying ships. Some end was near, all knew, for mile by mile the enemy armies drew closer and city after city fell into their grasp. There was no news of what happened in those cities because those who fled first knew nothing and after a city fell and the enemy had the land, there was only silence. None knew whether the enemy was cruel or good, and all waited.

Ling Tan waited, too, but while he waited the work had to be done, and he could not always be running into the bamboos because there were flying ships above his head, and yet he did not want to risk his head and stay alone in the fields and tempt the enemy above to see him there. So he went into the village tea shop one evening at a time when most men are glad to leave their wives awhile and sit together in peace without the noise of scolding women, and of crying children being put to bed, and at such a time he rose and spoke in the tea shop and said:

“My elder brothers, you and I are laboring men. War or no war, we must bring food out of the earth, and how can we do it sitting idle in a bamboo grove for a long while every day in the best part of the day when we are not yet tired?”

“You do not curse idleness more than we do,” a voice called out and a murmuring went over the crowd.

“Yes, but what will you say we ought to do?” another asked. “I saw a man shot beneath a flying ship, and he was dead and there is no idleness so great as death.”

This made them laugh wryly, and Ling Tan laughed too and went on.

“What I say is we ought none of us to go into the bamboos. Let us all stay in the fields and work and pretend we do not see the flying ships and if there are many of us they will decide it is not worth their while to take the time to cut off head by head and so they will go on.”

There was a clamor to agree with this, and thereafter Ling Tan and all his fellows worked in the fields without looking up when the flying ships went over them. They did only this one thing, they stopped every day about mid-morning and tied branches on their hats, so that looking down from above a man in a flying ship would see only green, for their big hats hid the blue of their trousers and the brown of their bare backs as they worked.

This village and the farms about it were now like an island in the steadily moving stream of people. Those who could go out of the city had gone, but every day brought fresh hundreds of fleeing people and how Ling Tan knew the enemy steadily came nearer was from asking these people where they came from, and day by day it was from places nearer and nearer to him, and at last cities that he knew, and this was how he knew that the armies of the enemy were winning the victory.

“Do our armies not oppose them?” he always asked, and the answer was more often rueful than not.

“Our men retreat to save themselves for a greater battle somewhere,” one man after another said, but none knew where.

And that this great battle would be beyond his land Ling Tan soon came to see, for none of these people were willing to stop here but had their eyes fixed on a far distant place, and he began to make himself and his house ready for the time when over them all the enemy would rule and under this rule they must somehow live.

Was the enemy good or evil? He could not discover, for there were more tales than he could fit together. There was Wu Lien in his own house who said that such East-Ocean merchants as he had once dealt with on the coast where he went to buy his goods were always courteous and kind. And yet there was the tale he heard of a great crowd of people fleeing from that same coast and they were not on foot but in a train, and though they flew white flags for mercy and innocence, upon them the flying ships let down their death so that hundreds were wounded and dead. How could there be anything but evil in such an enemy?

These things he pondered hour upon hour as he worked under the green branches tied to his hat and as the flying ships came and went over his head.

“I will do my own work as I always have,” he thought, and it seemed to him the greatest thing that a man could do in these days was to live and keep alive his own. … So the summer passed into autumn, and the harvests that year were all they had promised. The rice was heavier in the head than Ling Tan had seen it in ten years and the harvest so great that everywhere in that rich valley the people were hard-pressed to reap it. They could think of nothing but the harvest, and when those soldiers came to them who were to defend the city sometime, and asked for straw for beds, or they asked for help in digging trenches about the city, the farmers were surly and they said, “We are very weary of all who are soldiers, who earn nothing, and who feed from us. Do your work yourselves, for we have our own work to do.”

When Ling Tan heard soldiers so answered, he was pleased, for he too despised all who took part in war. And yet he had cause one day to heed, at least for a moment, what one of those soldiers said, for when the man was thus repulsed, he began suddenly to weep, and he looked around on the half-harvested grain, and upon the healthy busy people and he said, “If we are not able to defend this land, we dare not dream what will happen to you, for with our own eyes we have seen the sufferings of our countrymen on the coastlands taken by the enemy.”

But still the others gave this man no heed, and the harvest waited, and the soldiers went away again.

Now while the grain was to be cut and threshed Ling Tan pressed everyone in his house into the work except Wu Lien who could not learn, it seemed, how to hold a scythe. But the elder daughter remembered from her girlhood here, and she gave a great laugh for they were all happy with the harvest, and she said:

“Let my man stay in the house then and help with the children and I will go out to the fields as I used to do,” and so she did, and it was a pleasure to her to feel the stalks so smooth and firm in her grasp and she still cut as well as any man and was proud of herself.

But this thing was for a day or two a trouble in the house, for when she came that night she found Wu Lien very peevish, and when she inquired into the reason for his ill temper he sent her into their room and came in after her.

“Are you my wife or are you the old man’s daughter?” he asked her. “Am I to do your work? The next thing I will be asked to suckle the children.”

She gave one of her big laughs at this, for Wu Lien was so fat that he was ashamed sometimes to go bare above his waist even in summer, because men laughed and said he was made like a woman, and there was always a man somewhere to tell of a strange sight he had seen of a man who could suckle a child. Now the moment Wu Lien spoke thus to his wife he wished he had not, and in his peevishness when she laughed he struck her across the mouth so that her mouth bled, and worse than that, her teeth cut the back of his hand.

“Bite me, will you!” he shouted and he was so unjust that she who was nearly always humble suddenly went angry as he had never seen her, and she was bold because she was in her father’s house and she bawled at him as loudly as she could:

“Who feeds you if it is not my father, and why should I not harvest a little food to help him?”

With that she went at him with all her ten nails, and he went backward before her, never having seen her like this, and with the blood still dripping from her mouth she clawed at him. Upon them Ling Sao opened the door, hearing the noise of their voices, and she sprang between them and pulled her daughter away.

“You shame me!” she shouted. “When did I ever teach you to behave so to the man who is your husband? Wu Lien, she is not my daughter and if you do not want her any more I cannot blame you. I have cheated you with a wife not worthy of you.”

So Ling Sao soothed the astonished man and scolded her daughter and she brought him out of the room and put a fan in his hand and poured out a bowl of tea for him and she told Pansiao to take the children away from him. Then she went back into the room where her daughter was, who was now washing her mouth and binding up her hair, and the mother made her tell what had happened and when she heard she could not keep from laughing a little, now that Wu Lien was not here.

“I take your side,” she told her daughter, “for a more helpless man than yours I never did see, though a mild temper, and that is something to be glad for, too. Yet he is a city man and out of the city he is like a cat in a pond, but for that you cannot blame him. He fed you well and was good to you when he had a house, and the day will come when he has one again, and a woman must put up with the man she gets, and who can tell what he is beforehand? You must remember that it is very hard for him to be in this house and it shames him, so you must make much of him and do not belittle him. There are worse than yours.”

So she taught her daughter and sent her out at last to ask her husband’s pardon which he gave to her gravely as though none of it had anything to do with him.

But to her husband Ling Sao told the whole story, relishing it as she went, and these two laughed together in the night over the city man who was their son-in-law, and they were proud of their daughter for laying her nails into his fat white cheeks, so that there were five red scratches on each. They did not hate Wu Lien at all, but here out of his place he made something for them to laugh at and it was a pleasure to find something for laughter these days.

Nevertheless Ling Tan knew that at bottom nothing must come between a man and his wife and so he forbade his elder daughter to come into the fields any more and thus Wu Lien was placated and Ling Sao gave him some mutton fat to put on his scratches and after seven days or so they healed. But until they did, he stayed inside the court.

The rice was harvested and all day long up and down the valley there was the sound of the flails beating out the grain upon the threshing floors. Grain fell upon the beaten earth and the oxen and the buffalo trod it out under stones they pulled over it and if a farmer had no beasts he pulled the stone himself, and the women winnowed the grain in the light winds of coming autumn.

And every day except when it rained the flying ships came from the eastern hills and flew to the city. There were few days of rain.

“We have prayed the gods so long for clear skies for harvest that now they send them anyhow because it is the ninth month,” the old man moaned who was ninety years old, and then he said, “and who can blame the gods if they do not know what to do? What can a man know to pray for these days, if sun brings the enemy and if rain spoils the harvest?”

This Ling Tan heard him say one day when the old man came out to see the harvest, though he himself was long past working on it. And Ling Tan answered stubbornly:

“I will pray for what I always have prayed when the harvest is ripe — sun to shine, so that I can thresh my grain and put it into its bins for our winter food.”

“It is true it is well to pray for what is known to be good,” the old man agreed.

But no farmer with so much land as Ling Tan had could store all his grain and some of it had to be sold. Besides, the people left in the city wanted food, too, and there were those who dug holes underground so that they would have a place safe from fire and destruction for their winter’s food. Then against his will Ling Tan had to go to the city to sell some of his harvest, and now he missed his second son the more, for he could send no one else and he had to go himself.

He waited therefore until a good rainy day and, putting on his coat of reed leaves laid upon each other so that the water ran off him as it runs from the feathers of a duck, he went to the city rice shops to sell his grain. It took him twice as long since he must walk through mud, but still his life was worth it and he took the time. It was a sad day. Since he had seen it last the ruins in the city had grown greatly worse and all the rich and those who make a city a merry place were gone, and those who were left were doleful to look at.

And yet there was something very brave about the city too, and those who were still there did not complain or talk of flight. When Ling Tan went to the great rice markets, though half of them were boarded up, still the merchants made their bargains with him, and they said nothing except that they would be there whatever happened, for people had to eat and what would they eat if not rice? And when Ling Tan asked for a higher price than he had ever asked they gave it to him, and so there was that good to the evil times. He went home pleased with the pocket full of silver which they had put down on his promise to bring them his rice.

Yet any news he heard was not good, and the worst of all was that at last even the white foreigners were leaving the city. Now Ling Tan knew none of these foreigners, but he had lived through evil times before, though all lighter far than these, and he knew that when the foreigners left the city it was as though rats leave a ship. So when he heard here and there that foreigners were going he knew the worst of something was near.

“They will not all go,” Wu Lien said that night when he told him. “There are always two or three or ten who stay because they have no homes elsewhere but the others go and it is bad news always, for they have ways of finding out what happens anywhere in the world. When we know nothing those foreigners know.”

“What is this magic?” Orchid asked.

“They catch news from the air and they run words along wires,” Wu Lien replied, and Orchid listened with her mouth wide.

“I hope I never see a foreigner,” she cried, “for if I did I would be so afraid I should die before him.”

But Wu Lien scorned this ignorance. “I had them in my shop two or three times,” he said. “They came to buy some foreign things, and they paid their money like any one else and they were two-legged as we are and they had all their features, and only their color and their smell were strange.”

“Could they speak?” Orchid asked.

“Yes, but brokenly as children do,” Wu Lien said, tolerant of her woman’s ignorance.

“Still I would rather never see them,” Orchid said.

“Well, you need not,” Wu Lien answered. Then he turned to Ling Tan. “Whatever is to come, it is better if it comes quickly. I have it in my mind that once the city falls, if it must fall, at least there will not be these flying ships, and I can go back and begin my shop again.”

Ling Tan did not say what he had in his mind, which was that many had their shops now and why did he not go back? He knew that there are men of little body courage and men of much and if Wu Lien were one born with small body courage, this was not a thing that could be discerned in a man until danger struck him.

“It will not be long now,” he said courteously. “So stay here until it comes.”

In those days to all who passed his house Ling Tan said, “I have a son and his wife in those parts to which you go, a tall young man, and you will know him because his eyes are very bright and black, and his wife is nearly as tall as he and she carries a child soon to be born. When you see them tell them we still live and all is as it was with us.”

Many were the people who promised Ling Tan to look for two such as his son and son’s wife, and Ling Tan wished that one would come back from there to bring him word from those two, but not one came back.

… The tenth month of that year came, and whether the tenth month or the ninth month were better to live in, who could say? The white geese went across the fields as ever they did in the autumn to find the grain left from the harvest, and the sky was blue above, and on the hillsides the long grass turned ruddy and dry ready for the scythe, and Ling Tan and all who could from his house went out to cut the grass for winter. All went except Wu Lien again, who could not hold a scythe, and Ling Tan told his eldest daughter to stay at home and take her mother’s place, for Ling Sao was as good with a scythe as he was. Day after day they worked together on the grassy hillsides, cutting and then binding together the great bundles of long grass, and they carried them down at evening hidden each of them under his bundle except for two legs and piled the grass against the house. Food they had and now fuel, and Ling Tan thought, “Whatever comes, I can feed my house.”

On the tenth day of the tenth month they took a rest, for it was a feast day, and on that day a few students came into the countryside, but only a few, and Ling Tan was amazed, for year after year on this day the students used to come as thick as locusts into the country, and on village streets and in village tea shops they used to preach to the people what they ought to do, and how they ought all to learn to read and how they ought to wash themselves every day and they ought to kill flies and mosquitoes and when one had smallpox others ought not to go near him. “Shall we leave the sick to die then?” Ling Sao once asked, when she heard this. The country people listened and laughed at all the students told them and believed them or did not believe, because the students were young and what they learned was what had not been tried by fathers and sons. But on the tenth of the tenth of this year, few were the students who came, and to the Ling village indeed came only two young men, and what they preached was not what they had preached in other years.

They were thin young men, yellow from reading books, and their hair was cut long and they wore foreign spectacles and blue students’ coats and trousers, and they seemed in haste to be gone.

“You men of the village,” they said, “our elder brothers, hear what we tell you. The enemy approaches and you ought all to know what will happen when they come here. Do not expect peace, for there will be none. They will rule over you and make you slaves, they will weaken you with opium and take from you all that you have. Where they have been they have looted houses and robbed the stores of food and they have violated many women.”

Now Ling Tan had wandered into the street since he was idle, and the day being fine, and the air very cool he had gone toward the tea house to see if there were wandering actors as there always were on feast days in other years. But there were none, and only the two pale young men, so he sat down to listen to them and there were others there and among them his third cousin and his wife and their only son, who had loved Jade.

“Soldiers always do these things,” Ling Tan called out to all when the young men said this, “and as for opium, in my grandfather’s time the magistrates of our own city compelled men to plant opium, too, for the tax they could take from it.”

This angered the young men and they said, “It is worse when the enemy does these things to us.”

Then Ling Tan’s third cousin called out of the crowd. “I saw an enemy once long ago and he had hair and eyes like ours and a skin, too, of our color, and except that he was short and bandy in the legs, he was more like us than not, and if he had been able to speak as we do, he would have done well enough for one of us, and much better than the white foreigners who have the devil’s own look upon them.”

For some reason that none could understand, this talk angered the two young men still more and they looked at each other.

“What use is it to waste our breath on such louts as these?” one asked the other. “They do not know what it is to love their country. If they can eat and sleep it is enough for them and they do not care who rules them.”

Now it was the village men’s turn to be angry and Ling Tan was the first.

“We have not been so well served by our own rulers,” he shouted. “They have taxed us and eaten our flesh, too, and what difference is it to a man whether he is eaten by tigers or lions if he is eaten?”

And so saying he stooped and took up a clod of earth and threw it at the young men and when the others saw it they did the same thing and, thus pelted, the young men ran away as fast as they could and that was the last that Ling Tan saw of students for many days and months, and so passed that feast day.

In the evening Ling Sao killed a fowl for their meal to mark the day and drained off the blood and thickened it for a pudding and the children ate it too freely and two of them were sick in the night and the next morning Ling Tan was glad that it was a usual day and that he could work instead of doing nothing.

But he thought a good deal of what the young men had accused him, that he did not love his country. Those were the days when he plowed the land again for winter wheat, and as he plowed he looked at the dark folds of earth. “Do I not love this earth?” he thought. “And is this earth not my country? The young have left the land and gone to save themselves as my son and Jade have, but I love my country too well to leave it. Though I die I will stay with it, and can a man love his country better than this?” But to no one could he say what he meant for even his wife was not able to understand such thoughts. There were things she knew and he could speak to her of them, but not of these deep thoughts he had now and again. He thought them and valued them and kept them inside himself and he never forgot what he had thought.

On every rainy day Ling Tan carried a load of his rice into the city according to his promise, and one day his two sons went with him to carry the more, and they heard in the city, breath from breath, the ill news that the enemy had vanquished all and now were marching straight upon this region, and they heard it first from the merchants in the rice shop where they went to sell.

These rice merchants were six brothers whose father and uncles had had the rice shop before them, and they were grave good men whose word must be taken.

“I do not know who will eat this rice,” the eldest said as he measured Ling Tan’s rice, “for it may be the enemy will be here before we can sell it. We are vanquished upon the coast and we ought all now to know our fate. Our rulers have gone and the capital that was here has been moved inland.”

In the shop that day all was confusion for these brothers had decided they ought not all to stay in one place in duty to their ancestors, lest the six of them die together and there be none to carry on the name. Two therefore were chosen by lot to go west and two more by lot to go south and only two, the youngest and the eldest, were to stay. The shop was full of bundles and packages and anxious women and crying children and the brothers were troubled for who knew whether or not they could ever meet again? None knew his fate in such times as these, and Ling Tan and his sons stood waiting while their rice was measured and to have their money put in their hands, and all the time they stood they watched and into their hearts came more fear than they had yet had. What indeed was this enemy and what would befall those who stayed behind and was it better to stay or to flee?

Not one word did they say until their rice was all measured and the money in their hands that day, and then Ling Tan asked:

“When must we expect this enemy?”

“In less than a month if they are not somehow hindered,” the eldest merchant replied.

“And do our rulers nowhere hinder their coming?” Ling Tan asked.

“The enemy has guns that we have not,” the merchant replied. “While we have been building all these new schools everywhere and making new roads the enemy has been making great guns and ships on sea and in the air and what have we to fight them with except our bare bodies?”

Ling Tan did not answer, but he led his sons home through the chill air of the late year and pondered all the way what the merchant had told him. Yes, their ancients had taught them that no good man would be a soldier and that the warlike man was the least of men and not to be respected, and so they had all believed.

“And so I do believe still,” Ling Tan thought to himself. “It is better to live than to die, and peace is better than war, and though there are some who deny this as robbers do, the truth remains what it is.”

But that day he began to look to the strength of his gate and to the fastening of its hinges, and he mended the holes in his wall, and he closed a small window in the kitchen that gave to the outside, and he made up his mind that if the enemy came, he would put all his family inside the gate and he would be the only one to show himself if one must come to the gate. He had a deep new fear of the unknown that was to come, and never were days so precious as these few days before the enemy drew near. He counted every hour of them as a man might count the last hours of his life, and saw more clearly than ever before the beauty of the hills and the dearness of his land. Even the faces of those in the house were more dear to him than they had ever been and he bought Pansiao a new coat of blue silk, and for Ling Sao ten feet of fine white cotton such as their own loom could not weave, and to his sons he gave ten silver dollars apiece and to each of his grandchildren he gave a silver coin, and to his eldest daughter some good linen cloth for herself. None of them knew what to make of these presents out of time, but he wanted them to feel his goodwill toward them and toward all in these last days of peace.

“I can do this for you now,” he said when they looked surprised, “and I cannot say whether or not I shall always be able to give you such tokens.”

They took the gifts gladly and yet they felt uneasy too, and as if somehow Ling Tan felt himself about to die.

“Are you well?” his wife asked him anxiously in the night. “It seems to me you do not eat so heartily as once you did and I feel a difference in you.”

“I am not changed,” he said, gravely, “I shall never change. The man I am now I shall be until I die, and I will not die soon.”

But he said this so strangely that she stared at him and made ready to say something and then shut her mouth. She knew that he was a man who knew what he did and why he did it, and before such a man a woman may keep silence and know that it will be well with her.