Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (44 page)

“What now?” Ling Tan asked. He wondered to see his son’s face so red and hot and to see him frowning so heavily.

“That woman,” Lao San muttered through his teeth.

“What woman?”

“The one in the cloak—” Lao San said. He flung his hand out and toward the gate.

“Well, what of her?” Ling Tan asked. He prepared himself to hear his son say that she was a spy and ought not to have been let in, and indeed he had some such secret fears himself, but he had been so overcome with Wu Lien’s kindness that he had let himself forget wisdom.

“Get her for my wife,” Lao San said.

Now Ling Tan was the most saving and careful of men, and in this house it was a cause for mourning if so much as a small dish were broken, but when he heard this, in his astonishment his hand opened itself and his good tea bowl, which he had had from his father, fell to the ground and was broken to useless pieces.

He was so vexed that his anger spurted out of him at his son. “See this!” he cried. He stooped to pick up the pieces but they were too many and too small. Even the best dish-mender could not put them together, and Ling Tan cursed his son heartily. “You bone!” he cried, “you big turnip!”

Now Ling Sao heard the noise and she came running in to see what was wrong, and she cried out in her turn at the sight of a good bowl gone, and then Ling Tan shouted at her. “This turtle to which you gave birth!”

“What now?” she shouted back, and made herself ready to take her son’s part against the father, as she always did for any son. Only when there was a daughter in the wrong could Ling Tan hope for justice from her.

“He made me do this,” Ling Tan said.

“What is a dish?” she answered him.

“It is not the cursed dish,” he said. “It is this son of yours—he wants to swallow the sun and the moon. He has forgotten he is a man and a younger son. No, this one, he thinks he made heaven and earth!”

“You yourself are only an old bone,” she said. “What are you talking about? I had rather get sense out of the ducks quacking. Whose son is he if he is not yours?”

By now both were angry and the eldest son and their daughter came in to cool their anger, and the daughter said:

“Since none but you knows why you are angry, father, we will keep silence until you can speak.”

So they waited until he had his breath and his daughter brought him a fresh bowl of tea and his eldest son lit his pipe for him, but the youngest son only sat there and said nothing.

At last Ling Tan was near to himself again, and drawing on his pipe he said, while the smoke puffed out of his mouth:

“This thing who is my third son—he who will not marry any woman, now he says, ‘get her for my wife.’ ” He swallowed smoke and coughed.

“What her?” Ling Sao asked and was amazed and overjoyed. Marriage talk was perfume in her nostrils and food in her belly, and especially if it were for this son.

“What her?” Ling Tan repeated. “Why, that foreigner in the cloak!”

Now they were stricken too. When Ling Tan said this none said one word, and in that silence Lao San stole a sulky look at one face and another from under his handsome brows, and the more he looked at them the angrier he grew. He flung up his head and leaped to his feet.

“Not one of you knows what I am,” he said. “To you I am a child. I am no child. Mother, I have forgotten that I ever fed at your breast. Father, I do not eat your food. As for the others, who are you? I have no parents and no brothers and no sisters. I swear myself away from this house!”

He strode toward the door, but his mother ran and hung on his coat and twisted the tail of it in her strong hand.

“Where are you going?” she screamed. “What do you do?”

He jerked away, but so strong a hand did his mother have that his coat tore and he went on with his coat hanging from his bare shoulder.

“At least let me mend the rent!” she shrieked, after him, but he would not stay.

“When you give me what I want I will come home again,” he said over his shoulder, and he strode from the gate and into the full sunlight with all its danger to him. They ran to the gate after him and saw him walking swiftly down the road toward the hills.

Then Ling Tan sat down and put his head in his hands and groaned to his wife, “How is it such a one came out of your womb?”

“How was it you put such a one in me?” she cried back.

“Out of you or me he was not born,” he said heavily. “He is born out of these times, and what will we do with him when these times are gone?”

And he sat trying to ease himself with great groans and yet feeling no easier, for he knew it was his duty as a father to see his son married, and his duty, too, to the generations before and after. But how could this marriage be made? Looking at it from all the four directions, east and west, south and north, he saw no way by which the thing could be done. How could he, a farmer and his son a farmer’s son, make proposal for such a woman? His gall was not so big, nor his liver so bitter.

But Ling Sao thought her sons good enough for any woman, and after she had turned things over in herself awhile, she motioned to her daughter to come aside and so the daughter went into the kitchen with her and the mother said:

“You are there at the heart of affairs, and you can put out ears and hands and see what the outlook is. Find out whether the woman is wed already, and if she is not—well, a man is a man, and she could look very far and not find so much of a man to look at as my son!”

“She is a very learned woman,” her daughter said doubtfully.

“What is learning in bed?” Ling Sao replied. “Who wants reading and writing there?”

At this the daughter blushed, for she had lived long enough in the city to grow more delicate than her mother, and so she did not answer either by words or laughter.

“At least I can talk with my children’s father,” she said.

Ling Sao leaned over to her and now she was very grave and she whispered, “Arrange this for your brother, child, and I swear I will forget everything that ever I had against you and your man. Whatever comes in the future, I will say your duty toward your parents is done, if you will do this one thing.”

“What I can do I will do,” her daughter said, but she was still doubtful.

Thus it was left and Ling Sao told her husband what she had done, but he shook his head and was full of dolefulness.

“Do what you can, you women,” he said. “This is beyond a man. As for you, old woman, I know your power in mating two together—you could wed an eagle to a crow, I swear—but these are eagle and tiger and the one flies in heaven and the other walks on earth.”

“Leave it in my hands,” she said stoutly.

He sighed and gave it up to her.

… Now Lao San had not gone so straight as he pretended. Well he knew his father and mother and brother and sisters were all watching him and frightened by his temper, and so he made as if to go straight to the hills. But out of their sight he turned west and went toward the Mohammedan burial ground. When he came near he crept through the long new grass in the noiseless way hillmen learn from hill tigers, and he parted the tufted grasses and peered from between them. There he saw the woman he now loved so suddenly and powerfully. She stood at her mother’s grave, her head bowed, and her cloak wrapped about her, and he liked her the better that she did not kneel.

“She is very tall,” he thought, and he liked her tall. He liked the eagle beauty of her face, and the smooth amber of her skin, and her long hands holding her cloak together.

He was not a simple man such as his eldest brother was and even the second brother was more simple than he. The blood of his ancestors had brought up in him something that was very old. Once in the long past there had been another like him who had battled against an emperor and had all but won. So now when he looked at the woman he wanted it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself and besides he felt that in some ways she was like him, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.

Thus he stood steadfastly watching her and not once did she look up or see him there. But that pleased him, too. He was young enough to think, “I do not want her to see me again until I am at my best. I will get new garments and put them on and I will buckle on my sword, and have my hair cut and oiled.”

So he stood, his eyes and mind full of her until she turned at last and with Wu Lien went toward Ling Tan’s house again. Behind her the young man gazed at her until he could not see her, and then he let the grasses come together and he made his way to the hills.

… Now Lao Er and Jade had not been there to see all that had happened, for Jade, as soon as Wu Lien had gone, had plucked her husband’s sleeve and led him down into the secret room. There she turned on him a face brimming with triumph.

“Do you see?” she asked him.

“See what?” he asked, not having knowledge of what she meant so much as the mote in a sunbeam.

“Why, that is she!” Jade cried.

“What she?” he asked again.

“Oh, you bone!” she wailed, “oh, you lump of mud under my feet! Why has heaven made even the best of men in the shape of a fool? She is the goddess, your brother’s goddess!”

His jaw fell down as he perceived her meaning. “But she is so high,” he said, “how will she ever look down on one of us? And besides, what is she to the enemy?”

Jade looked grave then. “What indeed?” she said, “I had not thought of that. You are not such a fool.”

Her woman’s mind ran along the ground like a sniffing hound. “But I doubt she cares for the enemy,” she said. “No woman thinks first of who rules and what is above, if she sees the man she wants at her side.”

“He is not at her side,” he said. “He is very far from her. And will he think her fit for him if she is with the enemy? Men are not like women there.”

“Now you are wrong,” she said. “Men think a woman so little worth, and they think themselves so strong, that it does not matter what their women are.”

He laughed. “Are you and I to quarrel because of men and women?”

But Jade would not laugh. “No, but here is a thing,” she said stubbornly.

“It is a thing which we cannot decide because a strange woman happens to look like a goddess in a temple,” he said.

So after a while they came up again, and he helped her tenderly to mount the ladder that led upward, for she expected her second child any day. When they came up Lao San had gone and they found that while they had been talking underground, here on the top of the earth what they had been saying was not possible had already taken place.

“But how bring these two together?” Jade asked.

It was the question none could answer.

… But Mayli went straight to her own rooms when she returned to the puppet palace, and she took off her cloak and folded it very carefully and she washed herself and brushed her hair, and then she sat before a small table and looked at herself long in the mirror. The morning had made her bold heart strangely soft. There was the visit to her mother’s grave, and her mind was stirred with things she could not remember, and yet she felt she did remember them. Her mother had died when she was born and yet this morning standing at that grave among the summer grasses, she felt she did remember a lovely face, wilful enough to say that she would not go with her husband, and yet so sweet that it made him glad to stay where she was. For her father had told her through her childhood of her mother, and she knew the love between them, and to her it had made love the best thing in the world to be had if it could be love like that.

Upon her softened heart was now imprinted a young man’s face. Whatever he was, ignorant or not, he was brave and exceedingly beautiful and there was power in him and she could feel it, and were these three not enough? She had never seen them put together before in one man. And yet how would it be possible for her to become a part of that house? Ling Tan’s house was more foreign to her than any foreigner’s. She had not entered one like it in her life, and there she could not live.

“We would have to go away,” she thought. “He would have to forsake them all and cleave only to me, and I would forsake all I have known and cleave only to him. Well, would we not then be equal? We could make our own world.”

But where could such a world be made? She rose, most restless, and walked about the room as though she were on wings.

In the old times, now never to return, what she dreamed would have been impossible. There would have been no place for two like them to make a world. That old world was made and shaped, fixed and firm, and they would have been outcast had they not belonged to it. But now the old world was gone, old laws were broken, old customs dead. The young could do as they liked and tradition was no more.

“We could go into the free land,” she thought, “anywhere we liked. Why should his power not be joined to mine? What I know I would tell him. What he knows he would tell me. Oh, how sick I am of learned, smooth men! How strong his hands were! He was wounded in battle. It was victory.”

She remembered every look of his face and the proud way he walked, and all that was distasteful to her was the family from which he sprang. They were too humble for him.

“He ought to leave them,” she thought. “Men like him are born by chance into lowly families. They belong to no one.”

So she mused, and when she went down to meet her host at dinner he found her silent.

“Have I made you angry?” he urged her. He had had a morning full of suffering, for his rulers had not spared him. “Do not you be angry,” he said, trying to laugh. “I need a little comfort. I have been told that I must catch the leader of those men who murdered the whole garrison yesterday. How can I do it?”

“How can you?” she repeated coldly. She saw within her heart that bold young face. “You cannot,” she said.

… Thus its own way Heaven moves toward its end. Though Ling Tan and his wife were sleepless, and though Lao Er and Jade could see no way to bring their goddess down to earth, and though Wu Lien shook his head at what his wife told him and said the thing was impossible, and that her third brother must have drunk too much wine, and wisdom was to forget it all, yet Mayli alone, herself deciding nothing, but moving along the way of Heaven’s will, went back to Ling Tan’s house.