Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck)

by Buck, Pearl S.

  “I cannot,” Wu Lien replied, “I bought them from your country and I return them to you.” Then he too bowed.

  At this the officer sat down on a small stool by the counter, and waved his hand toward the street.

  “For all this—we are so sorry. Our soldiers, very brave—angry.”

  Wu Lien inclined his head. “We also have our soldiers and I know how soldiers are,” he said. “But now—let us hope for peace. Only in peace can we do business.”

  And then, in simple words which the officer could understand, he told him how students had destroyed his goods, and then he said, “Of recent years in this city the times have been evil. It may be they will be better now.”

  “Oh, we promise!” the officer said, “if many are like you.”

  “There are many,” Wu Lien said modestly. He now began to be encouraged and so he turned and chose from his newly ordered shelves some tins of sweet cakes, and he gave one to each soldier, and all were pleased.

  “Forgive me that I have no tea,” Wu Lien said, “but my household are not here, and I am alone.”

  “But why?” the officer inquired.

  Wu Lien coughed behind his hand. “She is visiting her mother,” he said, “but she will return in a few days.”

  The officer perfectly understood why Wu Lien did not have his wife here, but he was pleased that he did not say so, and so he told him to fetch paper and a pen. Wu Lien hastened to find them in his own inner room, and the officer wrote some bold black letters that Wu Lien could not read, and then in letters that he could read he wrote his name and where he lived in this city, and then he gave the paper to Wu Lien.

  “If any come here to trouble you, show them that paper,” he said.

  “How can I thank you?” Wu Lien answered. “What can I say except that whatever you want me to do I will do?”

  “Good,” the officer replied. Then he said, “And I will send you a sign from our headquarters to put at your door and a guard if that is not enough.”

  Wu Lien was glad to hear of the sign, but he trembled to think of a guard at his door, for whoever heard of a guard that did not eat more and drink more than ten usual men and who did not ask for the best chair and for whatever else came into his mind? So he made haste to say:

  “For the seal all my thanks, even to ten thousand thousand, but I am too small a man for a guard. All that I have is not worth half his price. Let it be that I may come to you, and I beg that if you have need of an honest plain man, here I am, Wu Lien the merchant, and this was my father’s shop before me, and with your kindness it will be my son’s after me.”

  “Certainly,” the officer said proudly. “We will do no harm to those who do not resist us.”

  “Why should I resist kindness?” Wu Lien replied.

  And so upon seeming mutual good will they parted. But after they were gone Wu Lien sat down and wiped his forehead, even though the day was cold. To his surprise his body under his garments was steaming with sweat, and now he knew that in his bowels he had been afraid of the enemy after all but that he would never be so afraid again, and with his relief sweat poured out. “I have only not to resist,” he thought, “and certainly that is easy enough for a man like me.”

  He felt more cheered than he had in many months, and when in the afternoon of that same day a soldier brought to his door a box and in it folded an enemy flag and attached to it a piece of cloth with some letters on it, he felt as though he had won his own battle. He made haste to give the man some money, and when the man was gone he put up the sign upon the lintel of his door. Yet while he did this he heard a girl scream in the alley next to his house and he stopped a moment to listen and knew from the girl’s babbling terror what was happening to her.

  “That soldier,” he thought, “that soldier who just now brought me this sign, can it be he?”

  He listened until there was silence, and did not go near to see what the silence meant, for how could he accuse the one who had only a moment before done him kindness?

  “Thus it is in war,” he thought sadly and was a little distressed for a while, and he made himself some hot tea. Then while he sat drinking it he reasoned with himself and he thought with anger of the girl’s father. “Why does he keep a young girl here in these days before peace is established?” he asked himself and he thought how wise he was to have arranged his own affairs so well.

  And yet all was not so well as he thought. At sundown when it was time to put up the boards for night he looked up to take down the sign first. That sign was gone. He could not believe it for he had himself nailed it up, and yet it was gone and only a few rags of the enemy flag clung to the nails. He stared at it and grew afraid as he looked. Was there a student still alive and near him?

  “An enemy has done this to me. I have an enemy near me,” he thought, and he went in and put the bar against the boards and he hid himself in his lonely bed and could not sleep. “A guard,” he thought, groaning, “it may be I must yet have a guard to keep me from my enemies.”

  … In his own house Ling Tan and his sons themselves made the coffin for Wu Lien’s mother. These were days when every coffin maker and every carpenter must work day and night and there was not one for hire. Some of the wisest of the coffin makers, knowing how good wars are for their business, had for months ahead made coffins and stored them in their own houses and in temples and anywhere they could, preparing for what was to come. But even all of these coffins were not enough for so many dead as were now in and around that city. Many were buried without coffins and the enemy dug holes and shoveled the dead bodies into them and covered them shallowly so that hungry dogs clawed them up again. Lucky for all it was winter and not summer, or the stench of that city would have risen into the nostrils of the gods themselves.

  So Ling Tan well knew that it was useless to hope to find a carpenter, and he and his sons took boards from the beds no longer slept in and two inner doors and they built the coffin and then with ropes and poles they lifted that great body and heaved it into the coffin and nailed the lid, and with the buffalo pulling on ropes and they all pushing they dragged the coffin into the fields and buried Wu Sao and made a high mound over her body so that they could point it out to Wu Lien if ever he came back, and could say to him:

  “There she is, and we did all we could for her.”

  Then they went back into their house and they began to sort out the ruins and to mend what they could and make what they could, so that they could live. Thus it was with every house in that village for there was not one that had escaped without ruin except the house of Ling Tan’s third cousin, which was so poor that the enemy had not even troubled to destroy its miserable furniture. The third cousin and his wife had escaped free, for when the enemy came they ran and sank themselves into a great jar of ordure and the jar was nearly as deep as a man is tall, and wide enough around for five men. It stood at the edge of a field and its ordure was kept to enrich the land. Into this the third cousin and his wife leaped and only kept their noses out to breathe with, and they were safe, though still stinking even after many washings, so that the villagers laughed in the midst of their grief. Their son, too, had escaped, for he was in a faint when the enemy came in and his mother covered him with bundles of fuel behind the kitchen stove and so he was not found.

  This house only out of all the village was as it had been, and the third cousin’s wife was virtuous and said that it was because the gods saved them. Whether the young man would live or die, none yet knew, for he could not yet eat or speak, and if he came out of one faint he fell into another, and he bled again if he were moved, but at least he did not die, and one villager after another came and looked at him and said what he would do if it were his son, and his mother did everything that any said, and spared nothing, so there was hope that out of some one thing his life would yet be saved.

  But except for this household, all the others were spoiled as Ling Tan’s had been, and some had suffered worse than he, for they had not been so quick-witt
ed to get their women away and hidden. Out of that village of less than a hundred souls, seven young girls were dead, and four women, and none knew how many were despoiled, for no man would tell if his own daughter or his wife had suffered. Among the dead, too, was that oldest man. He had laid himself down in his bed the very day the enemy had pricked him, and because it was so small a wound and the day so full of terror, none had given him great heed. In the evening when they went to him, they found him dead. And Ling Tan grieved for the old man as though he had been more than a distant kinsman in his village, and he thought sadly. “That prick went very deep. The old one knew the days were gone of our happiness and freedom and so he did not wish to live.”

  When Ling Tan had seen his village and what it had endured, he and the other elders came together to decide how to put their women in safety and he told how he had his own women inside the white woman’s gate and so they all said they would do the same thing, and thereafter whenever that gateman of the white woman heard the soft scratching of a willow branch on the gate he opened it and there were other women and more girls and the white woman took them in.

  So at last in the village there were left only men and one or two grandmothers, and Ling Tan’s third cousin’s wife who could not go because of her son, and she said:

  “There is always the jar of ordure, and what has been done once can be done again.”

  The only quarrel that came out of the jar of ordure was that her husband had a scholar’s beard that he had raised with great trouble and only after years for he was not a hairy man, as men of learning are not, and yet every scholar wants his beard. So he had his little beard at last and try in every way he could, he could not now wash the stink out of his beard, and his wife who all these years had put up with the foul bream that came out of his belly complained that at least he could cut off his beard. But no, he could not smell himself and he would not cut it off, and this came to be a quarrel between them, and it made something for the villagers to laugh at and they were glad to have it, for there was little else. It is a sorry thing for men to be living alone in a village and every man missed his wife, and they teased the one man who had his wife left to him, and they said:

  “Do you love your wife best or your beard, old head?” and in the morning they would guffaw and one would say, “ah, the old one still has his beard and so she would not have him again! Well, I had rather have my wife locked behind walls somewhere than in my bed and refusing!”

  For this third cousin’s wife had put her husband to shame by saying where she could be heard that she would not allow him her favor until he had cut off his little beard, and so that beard made jokes every morning for them all except the man who had it on his face.

  Without going near the city himself Ling Tan contrived to send by any who took his wife or daughter there or his sister, some small thing to Ling Sao. The black hen laid a handful of eggs in spite of evil times and these he sent in a handkerchief, and he caught a fresh fish out of the pond and wrapped it in a dried lotus leaf with salt and sent it, or he picked two cabbages that a man could slip under his coat, and he longed that he could write to Ling Sao or that she could read, but all that he could do was to trust to another’s ears and mouth.

  “Tell her that we have cleaned the house and that we manage, though poorly without her,” he told one, and he said, “tell her we buried the old dead woman and made the coffin ourselves,” and he said, “tell her not to be impatient to come home, for we hear that now the city is despoiled the enemy comes into some village every day, though we do not fear, for all the women are gone out of ours.”

  Never had he thought he could miss anyone as he now missed Ling Sao, and yet it was not that he missed her as woman, but as though she were part of himself, and nothing was good in his mouth or to his hand because she was not there. He wondered somewhat that he did not miss her more, but no, his body was as quiet as though he were a eunuch, and he could not understand why this was so, since all his manhood years he had been used to what he wished. He put this to his eldest son one day when the youngest was out of hearing, and he said, not speaking for himself out of shame between the generations:

  “Do you find yourself ill at ease with your children’s mother so long gone, my son?”

  And the young man answered, surprised at himself, indeed,

  “No, I am not, and it is strange, too, but I take it thus, that we hear so many tales of lust and evil against women that the taste for any woman has gone out of us for awhile, and so I think it is with all men who are clean husbands and good men.”

  This Ling Tan had not thought of, and yet the more he thought of it the more he saw it might be true and he looked about him and he found that the men he knew were of two kinds, and some were like him and his son, and there were others who were stirred to greater lust because of all the evil that they heard, and so he knew that men are good or evil in their hearts, whatever others think they are, and such times show them out.

  And yet there was another evil to fall upon Ling Tan, a new one, and if any had told him he would not have believed it until he saw it with his own eyes and it happened to his youngest son.

  Now it was true that the city grew calmer as days passed and that it did was because from the horror of what was happening there went up a noise to heaven and spread over all the earth so that men and women in other countries heard it and cried out that such beastliness had never yet been known since the first man was made, and when the enemy perceived that all others knew what its own men did, a sort of shame fell on the enemy rulers, and so half-heartedly and in one way and another they let down commands that at least evil must be hidden and that not in the city streets could such things be done as would leak out and shame them before the world. Then the enemy began to come from the city and to spread among the villages, and one day Ling Tan looked up and there at his door stood four enemy soldiers. He was washing the rice for the evening meal, and his sons were at the loom, the younger one sorting out the threads. The loom alone in his house had not been destroyed, for it stood in a dark room where a lamp had to burn, and it looked like nothing useful, besides, to one who did not understand its shuttles and its ropes.

  Ling Tan put down his basket and went to the door. Well he knew that it was no use to pretend he was not there, for he would only have his mended door broken in again. So he went and threw the door open, and the sunset light fell upon the hot faces of four young men. They shouted at him and first he thought they wanted food for he could not understand them, and so he stepped back and pointed to his rice to ask if that was what they wanted. With that they shouted more loudly and shook their heads in a fury and then they pointed at themselves and loosened their garments and he saw that what they wanted was women, and they were demanding that his women be given to them. He thanked his forefathers in his heart that every woman in his house was gone and so he said in his own language, since he knew no other:

  “There are no women in my house.”

  But they in turn could understand nothing that he said and so they leaped in and pushed him aside and searched for themselves in every room and place and when they found no sign of women, except some women’s garments left behind they grew fierce and bellowed at him, and still he could not understand what they said. But their anger he did understand.

  “If there are no women here am I a god that I can make you one?” he asked them.

  At that moment there was the sound of the loom again and with an evil yell these men ran toward the weaving room, and Ling Tan followed, fearful of what might happen in their fury when they found no women there. He stepped in behind the soldiers, and he saw their eyes seeking every corner. His eldest son sat high on the loom and now he stopped it, and stared down, and his third son dropped the loops of thread he held and stared, too.

  When those furious soldiers saw that indeed there was no woman their lust knew no bounds. It burst from them like wicked flames and now Ling Tan saw what he had never dreamed of seeing. He saw them lay hold up
on his youngest son, that lad who had always been too beautiful for his own good, and now his beauty was his grief, for they took this boy and used him as a woman. And Ling Tan, his gorge rising and his vomit in his throat, could not bear it, and the eldest son could not, and they fell on the soldiers. Yet what could men unarmed do against four with weapons? Those four stopped and bound the father and his eldest son together with ropes they jerked from off the loom, and they bound them so that they must face the thing they did, and prodded them when they closed their eyes, and so the thing was done, and the beautiful boy lay like dead on the ground. Then, laughing, those soldiers went their way.

  And Ling Tan and his sons said not a word. Slowly with great effort Ling Tan and his eldest son freed themselves, and the son gnawed the rope apart with his strong teeth, stronger and more whole than his father’s, and when they were free, Ling Tan took the water he had prepared to cook the rice in, and washed his youngest son and put his clothes on him, and soothed him and helped him to rise, and the eldest son helped him. The lad was not dead, nor even wounded near to death, but he was like one dead, as though his heart had been stabbed, and his father was afraid he was out of his wits.

  “My little son,” he said, “you are living.”

  “I wish I were dead,” the boy whispered.

  “You must not wish for death,” Ling Tan said, “for that is to be unfilial to your ancestors. No, my son, if you are alive it is because Heaven has said you are not yet to die.”

  But the boy seemed not to hear him. His skin was pale green in its color on his cheeks and his black eyes were like the eyes of the dead.

  “I cannot stay here,” he gasped.

  “You shall not stay here,” Ling Tan soothed him. “I have some money hidden in the wall where it was not found, and you shall take it and go anywhere you will. Ah, if we knew where your second brother is, and where Jade is with him!”