Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (45 page)

She waited for two days, and by then she knew that what she now felt she could not put aside. The only way to cure herself, if she could be cured, was to yield a little to her sudden love. Love she would not call it, for she was too shrewd not to see the folly in it. But at least she could go to Ling Tan’s house, and she would make no pretext. She would ask for Jade and tell Jade that she knew Pansiao and see what came of it.

So in her too fearless way, she left the puppet’s palace on the second day in the afternoon. As coolly as though there were no ruins anywhere made by the enemy and as though she saw nothing to make a young woman afraid, she hired an old horse carriage, and few there were, because by now the horses had been eaten for food, and she told the driver where she wanted to go and there she went.

Now Jade that day was not at work of any sort, for she moved too clumsily to be at ease. She was large with this child and she wondered that it could be so large, but so it was. She was sitting alone in the court with her two-year-old son when there came a strong knock at the gate. She listened and it came again. It was not the noise the enemy made with guns beating there. Ought she to open the gate? Ling Sao was in the fields that day with Ling Tan and Lao Er was away at his work. The father had told him to see whether or not his youngest brother had reached the hills safely, since he had left home in anger. So Jade, being alone with the child made her voice cracked and old and she called out. “Who is there?”

“I!” Mayli called over the gate, and it was like her to forget to say her name and to think that all would know that I.

But Jade was quick and she did know it. So she rose and opened the gate.

“Oh,” she said, and then made haste to be more courteous. “I swear I am too loutish—but I am so—I did not expect you—”

“Why should you?” Mayli said.

She came in and Jade shut the gate and barred it and Mayli sat down. She looked so full of ease and calm that no one could have known how her heart twisted and beat inside her breast, and Jade did not know. And yet she told her husband afterward, “I knew it was no common day. I felt that I was being led along a road that had an end in some destiny.”

Yet to another these would have seemed only two women talking. Jade poured tea, and took up her shy small son, and Mayli praised the boy, and drank the tea, and then she said, after such little talk:

“I could not speak as freely as I wished when I was here two days ago. I had my duty to my mother in my mind. But today I am come back to tell you that I know your husband’s sister Pansiao, and I taught her for a while.”

Here was news, and Jade could hardly take it to be true. But Mayli went on to tell her how it had been, and Jade hearing it thought now it had all come about as though by nature, and yet who could say that Heaven had not shaped it all?

“So when I came here,” Mayli said, looking about the court, “I seemed to know what I saw. She had told me everything. The child was fond of me—how do I know why? But she chattered to me, and I was glad to hear her—I have been so long away in foreign lands and she told me of my own.”

“Did she tell you of us all?” Jade asked. A thought of cunning had come into her mind, and she crept toward a certain knowledge as a cat creeps to a mouse.

“She told me of each one,” Mayli said, “so when I saw you I knew your names.”

Jade made herself very busy with her child, and lifted him upon her lap and smoothed his hair and seemed to see a mote of dust in the corner of his eye. “Did she show you a certain letter that I wrote her?” She asked this and she looked full into Mayli’s eyes, and Mayli did not turn her head.

“I saw that letter,” she said clearly, and still she did not look away.

The fearlessness in her made Jade fearless too. Indeed they were not different, these women, except in where they had spent their lives and how.

“He loved you when he first saw you,” she said.

“Some men are so,” Mayli said, and tried to smile, and wondered at how stiff her lips were.

“He is not like any other man,” Jade said. She put the child down, “I must speak when Heaven bids me speak. What shall I tell him?”

Now both were caught together as though one wave swept them upward to its crest. Mayli gazed into Jade’s long eyes and thought how beautiful they were, and Jade gazed into Mayli’s black eyes and thought how clear they were and how brave, and each admired what the other was as lesser women cannot admire others.

“How tall you are,” Jade said. “You are taller than I am.”

“I am too tall,” Mayli said, smiling at her.

“He likes women tall,” Jade said, and then she put out her hand and touched Mayli’s hand with the tips of her fingers. “What shall I tell him?” she asked again, very softly.

Beneath that strong and gentle touch Mayli moved and she turned her head away.

Then she put her hand into her bosom and took out a small piece of bright folded silk and she shook it out, and Jade saw the flag of the free people—blue and red, the sun upon it white and pure. None could have that flag here for fear of death if the enemy found it, but some had it and hid it.

“Oh,” Jade whispered, “the free flag! You are as bold as this!”

But Mayli put it in Jade’s hands.

“Tell him I go to the free lands,” she said to Jade. “Tell him that I go to Kunming.”

A
FTER MAYLI HAD GONE
Jade sat for a long time idle. She watched the child at her feet and felt the child stirring in her body and though she was glad for both, she knew she was wistful with envy of that free tall woman. In her bosom was the folded flag.

“If my man and I had stayed in the free lands,” she thought, “could we together not have done great things? But he chose to return into this bondage.”

And she thought how close her life was in these walls and how little time she had for anything except the work in the house and the care of her son, and how she had no time to read books any more, nor any money to buy a new book, though there were no new books. Such books as were to be bought were only lies written by the enemy. Everywhere it could now be seen that the people, taught from their ancestors to revere the very paper on which letters were printed, now burned such paper for enemy lies, and their reverence for learning was nearly gone.

“All that I do is to sit here and bear children,” she thought half sadly, and in her bosom the free flag seemed to burn.

When the others came home at noon, she had their meal hot and ready, and she had done well with the poor stuff they had to eat now-a-days, with little salt and less oil. Though she had her great news to tell, Lao Er could see that a secret cloud hid Jade’s heart from all and he made up his mind to wait until he could be alone with her and could ask her why there was this cloud.

Meanwhile here was the news, and she told it with pleasure and while they ate they talked between themselves and turned it over and over to get all its light upon now and the future. And they looked at the flag Jade had, and they gloated on it, and yet dared not keep it here.

“Take it to the secret room,” Ling Tan told his second son. “If ever that room is found, we must die, anyway.”

So Lao Er took the flag and hid it, and he came back, and by now Ling Sao had had time to think of a thing she did not like.

“Did she mean my son was to go after her?” Ling Sao asked with some anger. “But what is that for a daughter-in-law? I never heard of a man going to find a woman. The woman must come to him.”

“Be sure that woman will never be a daughter-in-law,” Ling Tan said. He took his bowl from his face and chewed as he talked. He was hungry and though there were times in these days when he would have sold his right thumb for a piece of good meat such as he used to buy any day when he went to the city to sell his grain and his vegetables, still this food was better than none, for Jade was a clever cook.

“How can any woman be my son’s wife and not be my daughter-in-law?” Ling Sao asked, ready to oppose him.

“If he weds her, you will see, old woman,” he said, and grinned and put his bowl to his face again and supped down the noodles and wild clover that made their dinner.

“Then she is not a woman,” she said coldly, “and I doubt we have a grandchild out of her. I ever say let a woman take to running around on such big feet as she has, who has been to schools everywhere, and it is the end of the woman in her.”

“She is woman enough to have our son swear he will have her and no other,” Ling Tan said. “There must be something female in her somewhere.”

“When did any young man ever know what he wanted?” Ling Sao said peevishly. “I wish she had never come into our gate. Some devil sent her, and he had our son here, when he ought not to have been here for once, and nothing good will come of it.”

“Give over,” Ling Tan told her. “You are only angry because you have not all your sons’ wives where you can press your thumbs on them. I tell you, there are some who can fight in the free land, and there are others like us who can fight here on our own land, and well I can see our younger son is for the free land. Let him go where he wills, then, as long as he fights the enemy.”

This was a handful of words for Ling Tan to say, and whenever he spoke gravely there were none in his house who answered him. Even his wife remembered her duty when he took this place above her, though it was always hard for her to keep silence, and be sure that in one way or another she had her way somewhere else.

“As for you, my son,” Ling Tan said to Lao Er, “take the message to your younger brother, and tell him that I have no way to follow this woman. I cannot leave my land for love or for anything. But his feet are loose and tied nowhere, and let him do what he likes. Only he is not to go away without sending us word that he does, and if he goes, he is not to stay long years and tell us nothing.”

Lao Er bowed his head and so the meal was over, and he would have lingered until Jade had washed the dishes and to follow her into their room and there ask her why she seemed sad, but well he knew he could not do this in the daytime without his mother wanting to know why he did. So he could only smile at her secretly and asked her if she felt well, or was the child beginning to come, and when she shook her head at this, he said:

“I will not go to my brother until tomorrow, and today I work with my father to finish the wheat field.”

She nodded and tried to smile, and so he left her. All that afternoon Jade was very quiet, and Ling Sao, who stayed to spin cotton thread on her spindle, let her be silent because she thought she was feeling the weight of the child in her. Cotton was hard to come by now, and Ling Sao saved any she could raise and they sold none of it, because they needed it for their own winter garments, and since another child was coming then there would be more winter garments to be made. She sat twisting her spindle and wetting thumb and finger in her mouth to make the thread smooth and firm, and now and again speaking to Jade and telling how it was when her self gave birth, and Jade listened and said little.

… In the field Ling Tan and his second son worked together. The times were somewhat better for farmers now than they had been, in this one way, that so many farmers had died or had gone to the free lands that there was not enough food for the enemy, and so less than they had the enemy took men off the land either for death or bitter labor. Yet Ling Tan kept his eyes on the road and whenever he saw the enemy, he would tell his son and Lao Er would go quickly into the house and take his wife and child down with him into that secret room until it was safe to come up again. For who could trust that enemy for anything except evil?

But the bitterness of the enemy’s rule did not abate. Of what Ling Tan took from his land he had the good of less than one third, and his taxes were grievous. He could only curse in his heart because well he knew that even the high enemy did not get the good of these taxes, but the little enemies at the bottom, the petty men. For they all knew, mouth to ear, that never had such rapacious rulers put themselves over any people. There was nothing this enemy would not do for money, and if any wished to buy or sell or smuggle goods, it could be done if money enough was put first upon the palms of the enemy. The very guns the hillmen used nowadays, that came from foreign parts, were smuggled in by little enemy men who thought only of their own gain, and were traitors even to their kind. Up the river guns could be smuggled to the army in the free land, if money were given to the many outstretched enemy hands.

All these things Ling Tan knew as every one knew, and it was so much good news. Though men might gnash their teeth for the moment, such rottenness in the enemy everywhere meant that one day they would be rotten enough to be overthrown and to be cast into the sea.

“We wait the day,” Ling Tan often said to his son. “We will hold the land against that day.”

… “It is nothing,” Jade said. She turned her head away from her husband and poured him a cup of hot water before he slept. There was not often tea in the pot now, and most of the time they drank hot water.

But he caught her wrists and took the teapot from her. “There is something,” he said. “Do you think you can draw your breath differently and I not know it?”

“You must not watch me so,” Jade said, and she tried to pull away from him, but she could not.

“I do not watch you,” he said. “I know without watching you. When you change I know from within myself.”

So coaxing her and commanding her and she biting her pretty lower lip and first laughing and then saying again it was nothing, and then putting her sleeve to her eyes to wipe her tears away, but angrily because she wept too easily now while she waited for the child, she yielded to him, and she said:

“It only came to me today—how I am no better than any farm woman, and if we had stayed in the free land, would we not have done something great, too? I could have been of more use—you and I together—”

“This is because you have seen that woman,” he said.

“Is there any sin in her or me because she makes me want to do something greater than sit behind these walls and bear children?” she asked hotly and now she did pull away from him, and he let her.