Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (34 page)

Jade could not speak nor answer lest she say too much and one hear her. She sat a few minutes more, her head hanging down, and then she rose and went away.

Yet her rage was not full until she lifted her eyes and saw pasted upon the walls of a main street she chanced to enter a great sheet of paper, and on it were false pictures of the enemy smiling and holding out in their hands cakes and fruits to a group of kneeling vanquished, old men and young, and women and little children, who looked up at them thankfully. On this sheet were written in large letters these words: ‘The People Welcome Their Good Neighbor, Who Gives Them Food, Peace, Safety.”

When she had read these words Jade’s anger brimmed over and she went back to a certain shop she had passed, and there she asked for an ancient and well-known drug. The man behind the counter himself was as old and dried as a root. He smiled a melancholy smile as he measured out the white powder.

“There are many who buy this medicine these days,” he said, “and they are nearly all women.”

“Do they buy it for themselves, too?” Jade asked to deceive him.

“The women buy it for themselves, be sure,” the man said quietly, and though he looked at her very closely he asked her nothing. He measured out the stuff and he sold it cheap, and Jade put it in her bosom and went homeward.

Only that night did she tell those in her husband’s house what she planned, and tell she must, for she needed two ducks, and in spite of all Ling Tan had some ducks that he kept secretly for breeding. Without a word he rose and he went to where those ducks roosted and pulled down two and killed them, and Ling Sao and Jade cleaned them and plucked them and rubbed the poison into their flesh and inwards and then hung them for the night. The great power of that poison was that it was as tasteless as flour, or nearly so.

The next morning Jade took those ducks into the city and gave them to the fat cook. She said nothing until she was paid, and then she said in a low voice, “Make your sauce rich for the ducks and put in extra oils and wine. Our ducks feed on wild food these days, and sometimes the flesh is tainted.”

He made his little eyes wide at this and stared at her. She stared back at him full and strong and suddenly he saw she was no old woman, and he opened his mouth, but he shut it again and nodded. Then he locked the little back gate behind her and she went home by the shortest way.

Whether or not what she did bore its fruit, how could Jade know? The news of that which happened in the city did not easily come into a little village. She waited, and she thought, “If I succeed in this, I will do it again and again. It will be my way of making war on the devils.” At last news did leak back after a long time, and it came through the third cousin’s wife. She said one day innocently that her man had seen Wu Lien on the street and he was as thin as an old goat because he had nearly died and some of the enemy had died after a feast they had eaten.

Hardly could Ling Sao keep her eyes straight when she heard this, and she was glad that none other was there to hear it that day. For Jade had taken the child down into the secret room when the woman came as she did very often. But Ling Sao must know more and she pretended surprise, and asked:

“How many died and who were they?”

The cousin, wanting to make herself as knowing as she could, said solemnly, “They were all very big heads, and five of them died and all were sick. Wu Lien told my man that more than twenty were sick. Of them all he was the farthest from death, for he had eaten little of the meat.” She pursed her lips and wagged her head and went on in a whisper. “They blamed the cooks, but how could they tell which it was? Besides their usual cooks, they had in several from outside to help, and when they went to look for the ones who came in from outside, they had all fled.”

“Was there no meat left for the cooks to eat, and did they not fall ill?” Ling Sao asked.

“Those enemy heads were so eager for meat that they chewed up the very bones,” the cousin replied.

“Ah,” Ling Sao said. “Who does not know how the enemy loves meat!”

And indeed that enemy did love meat, for next to women and then wine what they always asked for was meat. Ling Tan had heard from his sons in the hills that there they had seen the enemy fall upon a rare fat buffalo as it grazed, and they cut the flesh from it living and ate it raw. Never had any seen or heard of this before, and whenever it was told those who heard it cried out, “Can these be men?” So it was easily to be believed that of ducks even the bones were eaten.

That night when Ling Sao told them all that Wu Lien had eaten the poison too, they listened in silence and her second son said, “I wish he had eaten more and ended himself.”

This Ling Sao knew was wrong for him to say, and though she was proud enough that she and Jade had used poison against the enemy, which is woman’s weapon, she said, “Still, he is your sister’s husband.”

Since she was his mother he turned his back on her, but Jade said for him in her quiet voice, “In these days, mother, there is a stronger duty than the duty to sister or brother. You must not speak against him.”

To this neither Ling Tan nor Ling Sao answered. Many things were said in their house now which they did not answer, for they knew these times were not their times, and the future belonged not to them but to those who carried the struggle after them.

But in the night in her bed Ling Sao wept a little, and she said to Ling Tan, “I doubt that anything can ever be the same again, even though peace comes.”

And Ling Tan said steadily, “Nothing can be the same and we old ones must know it. And the sign of the great change is this, that the young have cut themselves off from the old. They must cut themselves off even from us so that they may be free for their duty which is to drive out the enemy. Do not many in these days swear against their parents?”

“Yes, and it is an evil thing,” Ling Sao said passionately. “For where is the earth under our feet if the very children we bring to life deny what they owe us?”

“We cannot say it is an evil thing,” Ling Tan told her. “We old ones, we must see that they do this to declare their freedom for the new that lies ahead.”

But Ling Sao could not see this. All that she could see was that nothing was left to anyone if the old could no longer look to the young for obedience. Where was the order in life if this were to be?

But Ling Tan could see further than she. Though what he saw was as dim as a mist because he was not a man of learning, he understood now that when his sons no longer obeyed him, it was not because they hated him. It was because they must be free of all that was past, that they might be ready for what was now and to come. His sons had gone beyond him.

… “Do you hate me?” Jade whispered to her husband. Now that she had succeeded in what she had planned, she was afraid.

“How can I hate you?” Lao Er replied.

She looked down at herself, and twisted her mouth into the least of a smile. She was naked, for she had just bathed herself.

“I see no beauty in me,” she said, and crossed her arms upon her bosom. “I am so thin, my flesh is so hard. Today when I was washing clothes I looked in the water and my face was dark and not like a woman’s face.”

She snatched up her garment as she spoke and wrapped it around herself.

Lao Er sat at the table in their room, drinking a little tea before he slept.

“You do not look as you did when I married you, it is true,” he said.

She threw him a look over her shoulder and drew on her cotton trousers. “Would you have married me then if I looked as I do now?”

“Doubtless I would not,” he said, beginning to smile. “But I myself was not then the same man that I am now, and what pleased me then would not please me now.”

She saw his smile and her heart lightened and she made her face mischievous at him, “Now that I look at you,” she said, “I see that you too are not so handsome as you were. How black the sun has burned you!”

“I am very black,” he agreed.

“And your hair is the color of rusty iron,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed again.

She seized a small mirror that stood on the table. “Still, what does it matter how a man looks?” she asked him.

“If it does not matter to you, it does not matter,” he said, laughing.

She stared at herself in the mirror and made her mouth pretty.

“Shall I ever wear paint and powder again and put earrings in my ears?” she asked.

“Who knows?” he said.

“You never did give me those earrings,” she said.

“You chose the book,” he said.

But she still looked at herself. “Perhaps I was wrong,” she said.

“Then some day I will buy you the earrings,” he said, and now he was laughing heartily. Between them was rising that sweet warmth that nothing could chill. So close they were, these two, that in weariness and danger and in all the evil of the present world still they could give themselves up to the love there was between them, and return to it, and it was there always.

And yet this night a little later he thought Jade hung back from him somewhat.

“Now what?” he asked her, and stayed himself to find out what was in her mind to hold her body back.

Then she hid her head under his arm in the old way she always did when she grew shy before him, and he had to pull her out and then she faltered, looking every way except into his face, “Are you sure that you do not think me less a woman—because of what I did?”

“Of which thing you did?” he asked. “You are always doing something!”

“The poison,” she whispered. “Sometimes when I wake up and think I did that—I hate myself.”

“But they were the devils,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But I mean—will there come a day when you will look at me—perhaps long after peace comes—and you will say to your heart, ‘She could put poison into food,’ and then think me less a woman than you like?”

At this moment it seemed to Lao Er that at last he had the true knowledge of Jade. She could be so full of courage, so seemingly strong, and yet now he knew hers was a shrinking tender heart, and he loved her more for this than for all her bravery. But he knew what would please her best and so he said it.

“What you did was brave. I wonder that a woman can be so brave as you.”

Then he took his place of command over her. “Now you have proved yourself,” he said, “and it is enough. There are many who can kill the devils and you have a greater duty.”

What could he say to make her know he loved her and would love her while he lived? What could he say to make her know that what he loved in her was not a woman, any woman, not woman even, but the creature that only she was?

He cast about and all the time his love grew and rose and was too big for words again. He held her hard, his hands upon her arms, and searched out every little line of face and hair and eyes and mouth and her two nostrils. If her face had a fault it was that those nostrils were the shadow of a shade too wide, and yet for him they were not, for they matched the fullness of her mouth and the liquid length of her eyes set shallow on her face like two dark leaves.

“It is time we had another child,” he said. “I want children out of you, and many children and if you would please me, make them all yourself—over and over again you and only you!”

W
U LIEN WAS WRITING
while the enemy told him what to write. He held his camel’s hair brush erect between his thumb and two fingers, and his third and fourth fingers were poised like the legs of a cricket. When he had finished writing the enemy would take the copy and print it out many times in large letters and paste the papers on the walls of houses and temples.

The room where he now sat with one of the enemy was full of fine foreign furniture which had been robbed from the houses of many people, and especially from white people in the city. There were three pianos, among other things, and on the floor carpets of blue and gold. These were waiting to be put into boxes and sent away to enemy houses across the ocean. But now in the midst of such luxury Wu Lien sat in perfect silence while the enemy read to him carefully and slowly what he should write. At every letter or two the enemy asked, “Have you written as I told you?”

“I have written,” Wu Lien always said mildly.

“Write on, then,” the enemy said.

So Wu Lien wrote on. At the top of his page in bold black letters were these words. “Star of Salvation! The New Order in East Asia!” Beneath were these words he had written in smaller letters. “Fellow Citizens! We have suffered the oppression and enchainment of the white peoples for more than a hundred years. Within this period of more than a century, although we have resisted earnestly, and have sought opportunities to cast off this yoke and to escape from bondage to the white race, yet there has been no result!”

Here the enemy paused. “Is this not true, you Chinaman?” he cried. He was a small angry-faced man, and because he was more than usually short he kept himself fierce. When he was alone he brushed up his eyebrows with a small toothbrush he hid in his pocket, and he was never seen without his uniform which was that of a captain in the enemy army, though his sole task was the composing of public papers to be pasted on walls. These papers he signed with three words, Great People’s Association. They were supposed to come not from the enemy but from the government they had made for the conquered people.

Wu Lien looked up as though surprised, and held his brush, “Is not what true, sir?” he inquired in his soft placating voice.

“What you have written, fool!” the little enemy shouted.

Wu Lien excused himself. “I have not heeded it,” he said, “and you must forgive me, for my head is still giddy from the poisoning and I cannot think.”

It was true he was still very pale. Nevertheless, he did not wish that he had not been poisoned, for because of it he had proved his seeming faithfulness to his masters. Had he alone come from the feast sound when all others were ill, how could he have escaped their suspicions? Never had he seen men so suspicious as these enemies. They knew that everywhere about them were those who wished them dead, and Wu Lien walked on a rope above a pit.