Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (40 page)

She folded the letter slowly when she had read it and put each fold in its place. The paper was thin and fragile but all paper was hard now to come by and very precious and no one would have thought of throwing away paper. And how great was the duty this paper put upon her!

“How can I find a wife for my brother, and this brother among the others?” she thought.

For Pansiao of all her father’s family was able to separate one from the other and she knew better than her mother did the inward secret differences between them. In those long days when she had sat at her loom there had been little to put in her mind, and once the pattern she wove was clear, what else had she had to think about except that house which was all she knew? Therefore she had dwelled upon each of the family, and especially upon her brothers, for she had always sighed that she was a daughter instead of a son. From the moment she had been born even in Ling Tan’s house she had known that walls are close around a woman but the gate is open to a man. Yet here she was, made free by the chance of war, and the only one in her family to be living in free land, beyond the reach even of the flying ships of the enemy. Was there one among her fellows who would give up such freedom?

She put the letter in her bosom and she turned about. In the cave were twelve others who had their beds there with her. They were all there, for it was an hour when each could do as she liked, and some read and some talked and there was laughter and pleasure. But which one of these twelve could be a wife to that brother of hers? Some were pretty, some were plain; careless and careful, small and tall, there was not one whom she could see as her brother’s wife. Yet these were the ones she knew best, and if she could not choose among them how could she choose among the nearly hundred others whom she did not know except that she saw their faces when they learned their lessons together or when they ate together in the central cave? It was a very heavy task that her father had put upon her. A goddess! She had seen no goddess here.

A clangor rose through the rocks and they rose in a confusion, crying out and screaming with laughter and pushing each other and in pretty disorder they ran out of the cave along a wide ledge of rock and into another cave where their teachers waited for them. There the whole hundred and twelve assembled. There were not seats for them and they sat on straw mats on the floor, such as Buddhist priests use to keep their knees from the dampness of the tiles when they pray. Pansiao looked at every face and saw no goddess, and that day it was hard to listen to her teacher.

For days whatever she did, coming and going, she thought of what she had to do. She dared not write she could not obey her father, and yet dared not write she could. After much worry and doubt, it came to her that she was wrong to think of the girl and she ought to think of her brother first. Let her remember all she knew about him and when she was full of memory so that he seemed living and with her again, she would look at the girls once more and see if one seemed his.

So thereafter whenever she had a little chance, and sometimes in hours when she sat before her teachers, she thought about her brother, and he came back to her, that tall slender boy with the beautiful face. She knew things about him which none other in her father’s house knew, for she was the only one younger than he, and upon her he had wreaked small vengeances sometimes and his secret cruelties when they were children. If their father had reproached him for anything he did and he could not answer, being son, then she had learned afterwards to keep away from him, for without warning he would seize the soft skin on her under-arm between his thumb and finger and twist it, and then his beautiful face would lower at her.

“But what did I do?” she had wailed at him, and never did he answer.

“He was a child then,” she thought now in her soft heart. And yet she thought, “Still, he must not have a wife too gentle—not someone like me. I would not want such a husband, ” she thought.

And there had been the times when he fell into dark silence, and the elders did not notice, for it is right for the young to be silent before the elders, but she knew. Then when she had spoken to him as a sister may speak to a brother he would not answer, or he spat at her, and then if she asked him, “Why are you angry?” still he would not speak to her.

“She must be able to laugh,” Pansiao thought now, “and she must not be like me because if anyone is sad near me, then I am sad.”

And yet there were times when he had been only kind and good, and when he had taken half a day to make her a small flute from a willow branch, pulling the wood so skilfully from the bark that the pipe was left whole, and then so delicately shaping the mouthpiece that she could pipe a melody on the flute. He would do this for her, wanting nothing in return and only pleased with her pleasure. On such good days they had talked together as neither talked with any other, they being nearer in their age than any other two, and in such talk she had learned how he longed to leave his father’s house and go out to places he had never seen.

“But what would you do in strange places?” she had always asked, “and when night came where would you sleep and who would give you food?”

“I do not care where I sleep,” he would say, “and as for food, I can beg or steal!”

“Steal!” she had whispered. “You would not steal?”

“I would if I liked,” he had said wilfully.

But even now she could not tell whether he said that to make himself big before her, or whether that was his nature.

“She must be very clever,” she thought, “wise enough to tell whether or not he is lying, for I could never tell.”

And of course she must be beautiful, for all know it is evil for a woman to have a husband more beautiful than she, and the more beautiful the man is the more beautiful the woman must be.

Did she love her brother or hate him when she thought thus of him? Some of both, she thought, for he was both lovable and hateful. Perhaps any woman, even the one sought, would love and hate him, and she must be one in whom these two did not quarrel, so that when hate came love was not killed by it, and when love waxed, hate stayed for self-defense.

This was as far as Pansiao could think, and in her own way she had come near enough to this, that the woman must be stronger than her brother was or else she was not strong enough.

But when she saw this clear she looked again among the hundred and twelve, and not one of them was she.

… Yet at this moment there was coming nearer hour by hour to the mountains a woman of whom Pansiao had never heard. This woman had come many thousands of miles from a foreign country to this country of her own which she did not remember. Years ago she had been taken away by her father, and there alone with her father, for her mother was dead, she had grown to womanhood. She was not nineteen and she had quarreled with her father, that is, as far as he would allow a quarrel. He did not wish her to leave her school and her home abroad where they had lived so many years in safety and return at such an hour to the country they had left many years before.

He himself had never wished to return, because leaving his country was mingled in his memory with the sorrow of the death of his beautiful young wife on her first childbed. She had been of a Mohammedan family, and the strain of early Arab blood had given the arch to her brows, and a high delicacy to her nose, a dark luster to her eyes, and height beyond what is usual for a woman. He had loved her for the differences, and then had lost her in an hour, and all that was left was the small, strong crying girl. He had named the child Mayli for her mother and then had taken willingly a post abroad which he had steadfastly refused for two years because his young wife had not wished to leave her home in her own province. Now she would never leave the city where she was born, for she lay buried outside its walls with her ancestors and he wanted to flee from it as quickly as he could, nor could he bear even to think of return. He had by now lived abroad so long that he knew he would the there. Only his bones would be sent back to lie beside his wife. When she died, he had taken her faith so that when he died, he might be buried beside her.

“But I cannot stay here safe and be happy when the East-Ocean people are taking our country,” Mayli now told her father in that foreign country.

She spoke her own language badly, but she had recently determined to speak it. This, her father observed, was only one of the many signs of her purpose to return to her own country. She had also stopped wearing the foreign dress to which she was used and now wore only the long narrow robes of the modern Chinese women. He had said nothing while these changes were taking place, but he saw them all.

One morning at the breakfast table he had dipped his delicate aging fingers in a silver bowl of water before answering her. They were finishing breakfast together and there were no servants in the room for the moment.

“I cannot imagine what you think you will do if you go back,” he said in English. “They need men, engineers and military experts, but scarcely a young woman who has not yet finished her education.”

She looked like her mother, he thought, and yet he was glad that something, perhaps this foreign country, had given her a look that to him made her wholly different from that one he had buried long ago, and yet who had remained alive in him, so that although he had often thought he ought to marry and have sons he had never been able to come to it. It was not as necessary in this country as it would have been in his own.

“I will find something,” Mayli said firmly.

Her big black eyes flashed at him in a way he knew only too well, and he said no more. It would be a waste of his life force to argue with her and he had given it up when she was fourteen. Since then she had done exactly as she liked. There were times in the night when he, Wei Ming-ying, first secretary to the Chinese ambassador in this foreign capital, had lain awake half through the night because of his failure to make his daughter possible for a man to marry. So far as he could observe, in nothing was she fit to be a wife. He shuddered to think of his future son-in-law one day turning bitter reproach upon him.

“I swear I cannot help it,” he often muttered to that man in his imagination. “I did my best. She early became too strong for me. I could not waste my life in useless struggle. Besides, I have had to support her and pay for her education. I have had no time for anything else.”

And yet no such son-in-law had appeared. Young men had fallen in love with Mayli, but she herself had refused them, and her father had had nothing to do with it.

“Then you are going,” Mr. Wei now said, sighing. He lifted his mild brown eyes in one last appeal. “What of me, left alone in a foreign country?”

Mayli laughed too loudly for a Chinese girl. “That you are alone is only your own fault, father,” she said, and rose from her chair as she spoke. “Are there not at least three ladies who long to comfort you?” She could not remember her mother, and so she did not spare her father from her teasing. He was a very handsome man and his natural courtliness led him often to go further than he knew. A strain of malice in her took pleasure in the discomfiture of those ladies whom he thus innocently deceived.

“At least tell me when you leave,” he murmured hastily. She knew so much more always than she ought to know!

It was only a matter of weeks before she was actually on her way across the ocean. There had been no trouble in finding a place when the Chinese Embassy knew she wanted it. The only trickery her father had practiced in the matter was to keep from her that he had allowed nothing to be offered her in a danger zone. He wished if possible that she be put in a mission school as a teacher, so that her surroundings would be the strictest and most old fashioned. Luckily a girls’ school in the caves of the high western range of mountains in inner China had seemed romantic to her, and in her own opinion she was able to teach anything.

Thus she came one cold clear morning to Pansiao’s school. The ice was crusted on the small rickety airplane that had brought her here. That it had been ready to bring her at all was another arrangement her father had made in the capital of that foreign country far away. It had seemed simple enough to her. When she stepped off the ship a pilot was waiting for her. When he had escorted her from the landing field up the mountain to the caves he told her that he had orders to be ready to take her back whenever she liked, and he gave her his secret address.

“I do not go back,” she said haughtily.

“Nevertheless, take it, so that I may have done my duty,” the pilot said hastily. He was terrified of this tall and wilful young woman who knew every moment what she would and would not do, and he was glad to be rid of her. Suppose she had wanted to fly the plane herself, then what would he have done? But she did not propose it. She had sat motionless and in silence, the west wind blowing her short black hair from her face. Midway she ate heartily of a large package of bread and meat and fruit that she had brought with her and did not offer to share it with him, so he ate his cold rice and fish.

Nevertheless at this moment of parting she opened a bag of foreign leather that she carried in her hand and took out a sum of money three times the amount he had hoped for and gave it to him. So he liked her better when he left her than he had at any time. He bowed and went down the mountain on foot as he had come up, though she had ridden in a mountain chair of bamboo, and he hoped he would never see her again.

Mayli was full of pleasure at the room that was given her in a cave, with one window toward the south. The openings of the caves were boarded and had doors and windows in them, and the outlook from her little window was wild beyond her imagination. The bare mountains rolled on like great waves of solemn music, thundering in their silence.

She had thrown the window open, although it was a day of piercing cold, and now she stretched out her arms in a gesture that seemed false and was not.

“Mine!” she murmured. “It is all mine. Mountains, I come home to you!”

She stood a moment, then remembered that she was very hungry and that the old servant who had led her to the room from the gate had told her the classes would be out in a few minutes. But first she must go to the office to see the foreign principal who was now teaching, and after that there would be food. She turned and examined herself in a small thin mirror which stood on the table. She brushed up her strong black hair, wiped her face with a wet towel, and then powdered and rouged it a little. Her lips also she made red but to the exact shade that suited her. Her gown she left as it was. It was a robe of dark red foreign wool and the warmest she had.