Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (12 page)

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.