Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck)
Page 17
He was afraid of his son’s dark dazed looks and in his heart he feared lest this wounded boy might join himself to other desperate men such as the bandits were and so he begged him:
“If you go to the hills, do not join the evil men who rob our own people. Seek out the good hill men who make war only on the enemy.”
But the boy did not answer. He let his father put on his outer coat and he tried to eat some bread, and when he could not he took it in his hand tied into a square of cloth, and he took the money and put it in his belly band and then he stood, swaying as he rose, so that Ling Tan caught him.
“How can you walk?” Ling Tan asked him afraid.
“I can walk,” the boy said, and he looked at his father with his dark dull eyes.
“Send me word somehow where you are,” Ling Tan begged him. Now that the boy was ready to go he seemed so young, he looked so ill.
“I will,” the boy said. He swayed again and then held fast to his father’s shoulder. “Father,” he cried, “father!”
His mouth quivered, and Ling Tan saw he was trying not to weep. He put his arms about his son. “Do not go until tomorrow,” he begged. “Rest a night first,” he begged him, “and I will make some hot thin rice for you to drink.”
“I cannot rest,” the boy said, “I must go.”
He straightened himself and went toward the door, and by now it was dark except for the faint light of the moon and fainter stars. The night was still and cold, and he went out into it and with no backward look he struck out toward the hills, and Ling Tan and his eldest son stood watching him as long as eye could see.
“Is there anything worse that can happen to us?” Ling Tan whispered.
His son did not answer, and above them the night sky was as beautiful as it had ever been in time of peace.
“That sky,” Ling Tan said suddenly, “will nothing change it?”
He looked up into it and Lao Ta was frightened, thinking that out of sorrow his father’s reason was gone. “Come in, my father,” he said gently. “The night is too cold.”
He drew his father in and Ling Tan let himself be drawn and then Lao Ta barred the door fast.
“Can you eat if I cook the rice?” he asked his father.
“I feel tonight as if never could I eat again,” Ling Tan answered.
“So I feel also,” Lao Ta said.
They went each into his own room then but after a while Ling Tan got up and went into his son’s room.
“I cannot close my eyes without seeing what I have seen,” he told his son. “I cannot be alone.”
“Come here and lie beside me,” Lao Ta said, and the father came and lay down beside his son. Neither of them had taken off a garment for none now dared to take off at night when none knew what might happen in the long dark hours.
There they lay, two men left alone in this house that had been so full, and they did not speak, for each knew all the other knew. But they did not sleep. Together their minds followed the slender figure of the boy, limping lonely through the night and toward the hills.
IX
NOW WU LIEN SAW that if he were to have safety from his own enemies he must have his protection from the enemy who had the city in their power, and so after a day or two of terror and not daring to come out of his door, he made up his mind one night that he would seek out the officer who had been courteous to him and tell him all his troubles, and how he was no traitor at heart, but merely a man of business who had in his house more than his own mouth to feed.
So he waited until night came full and then, putting on his oldest clothes and taking no lantern, he went to the street and the number which the officer had affixed to the paper he had left with him, and there he knocked upon a closed door, wondering while he did so, because he knew this door. After some time the door was opened and by a soldier and Wu Lien’s knees knocked together, because the soldier’s face was so surly. But he calmed himself by remembering how often these men of the enemy looked surly, and he held out his paper and after looking at it awhile, the soldier pulled him in and motioned to him to wait while he went into the house.
This house Wu Lien knew when he saw it, for it had belonged to a famous rich man of the city, now run away from the war, and once two springs ago the ladies there had sent for Wu Lien to bring some of his foreign toys and small goods, to see if any pleased them. It had been that day a gay and noisy place, full of women and children and in the garden where he now stood there had been a traveling show of puppets, and everyone, even the servants and bondmaids, had been out in the sunshine to see and to laugh, and they had bade him wait until the game was over, and so he had stood and laughed, too, for the puppets were better than usual and the man who spoke for them more than commonly witty.
But now the garden was gray with winter and dark with night, and the house was silent. When the soldier came back he motioned that Wu Lien was to follow him and so Wu Lien went behind him into the house and there in the main room were three or four enemy officers drinking together, and they looked at him so sourly that for a moment he wished he had not come. Even the courteous officer looked at him coldly, and he thought fearfully that if these were such men as grew more cold the more they drank, he had come at an ill time. Nevertheless he was here, and in his own way he had a dogged courage when he was working for his own ends, and so he spoke to the one he knew.
“Sir, I am come upon business, and if I may speak plainly then I shall use less of your time.”
“Speak, then,” the officer said, but did not ask him to sit down.
When Wu Lien saw he was to be treated as a servant he did not like it, but he was a sensible man and he knew this was no time for pride so he swallowed it as fast as it came up, and went on. “I am a citizen of this city and I have the shop that you saw and I have long dealt in foreign goods, which for the most part have come from your honorable East-Ocean country. I desire nothing but peace so that I may go on with this business. Whoever is to rule let him rule, and I will say nothing so long as my business can be done. But there are those in this city who call me traitor because this is my heart, and they have it in their purpose to kill me, and so I am come to you who rule us now to ask if there is any way that I can be made safe.”
This the officers heard and the one who understood told the others what Wu Lien said, and they talked awhile together, Wu Lien understanding nothing of their foreign language, and at last the one he knew gave a short nod.
“You may be useful to us if you will,” he said.
“Will I not be?” Wu Lien replied.
“We shall set up a people’s government here,” the officer said, “and it will be a government of those who will rule for us. What is your ability?”
“Alas, I am a man of small abilities,” Wu Lien began, but the officer cut him short.
“Can you read? Can you write?”
“I? Certainly,” he replied proudly. “And I am skilled at the abacus, and I know how to conduct a merchant’s whole business. I am also a student of the Confucian classics, as my father was before me.”
“That will be no use to us,” the officer said. “Do you know English?”
“Alas that I do not,” Wu Lien said, “I never thought it would be necessary to learn another language than my own, seeing that we are so numerous a people that though a man spoke to a stranger every hour of his life, he would die before he had spoken to every man in our nation.”
“But are you swift with your brush in your own language?”
“Without boasting, I can say that I am,” Wu Lien said with modesty.
The officers talked together again, and after a little while once more the one he knew said to him:
“You will move into this house at once. Your wage will be fixed according to your abilities. You will have a title, also to be shaped according to what you are able. Come here tomorrow.”
Now as he heard this Wu Lien’s head began to whirl around inside as though birds circled his brain.
“But I have a wife—my old m
other—and two children,” he said.
“They may all come here,” the officer said. “Here they will be safe and you also. Rooms will be given them.”
Such good fortune as this, to live safely in a city where none were safe, to have a wage when none knew where his food was to come from, to have his household with him, to know, above all, that he himself would not be stabbed or shot if he turned his back, all this fortune poured upon Wu Lien and he felt the joy that a man feels on a hot and thirsty summer’s day when he finds a cool unknown spring on a steep mountain side.
“May I not bring my few things here at once?” he asked. “Most of my goods are ruined and what I can bring will take little room.”
They talked together again, and then the officer nodded his short nod.
“You may come at once,” he said.
“And tomorrow shall I bring my children and their mother?”
The officer gave a small smile. “Yes, you may,” he said. Then he put up his hand to bid Wu Lien listen to what he said.
“You see how merciful we are to those who do not resist us!” he said in a loud voice such as priests use in temples when they speak to the worshipers who come on a feast day. “We seek nothing but peace and the good of all, and those who help us shall have their full reward.”
“Yes, great one,” Wu Lien muttered. He bowed three times, without thinking, as though the officer were a magistrate, and overcome with his fortune, he went quickly out of the room, stopping only at the gate to give a coin to the soldier there.
That night he spent in putting together his goods, and it was dawn almost when he went out and found a ricksha and piled his stuff into it and then sat himself on top of all. And so he entered into the gates of the enemy.
Great was his joy the next day when he put on his best garments and with a guard of two enemy soldiers he went toward that place where his wife was in the white woman’s compound.
He only wished that he could hire a foreign motor vehicle instead of the old horse carriage he had found a few streets away. But even so he looked very well as the driver stopped his aged horse at the gate.
“Get down,” he called to the driver from the seat where he sat. “Beat on the gate and tell them that Wu Lien has come for his household.” And he sat himself back as an official does who has spoken to his servant.
But the driver shouted back at him, “I dare not leave this horse of mine. He has a failing that if he does not feel my pull on the bridle he sits down quickly on his tail like a dog to rest himself, and then I cannot get him up again with fewer than four men to help me lift him.”
Wu Lien was still afraid of his guards and he dared not ask them to lift a horse nor could he do it himself, and so he could do nothing but get down and beat on the gate and when the little window in it opened and the gateman’s old face peered out he had to say, as though he were his own servant:
“I am Wu Lien, and I am come for my household.”
The gateman stared very hard at the two enemy soldiers, and he opened the gate enough to let Wu Lien through and shut it against the soldiers, who shouted and beat on the gate with their guns to come in. Then the gateman turned to Wu Lien.
“How is it you have these two with you?” he asked him gravely.
“I am a merchant,” Wu Lien said, “and these two have been told off to protect me.”
“To protect you!” the gateman repeated and laughed.
“I will guarantee them,” Wu Lien said, with dignity.
“Still I cannot bring them in on my own body, seeing that they are the enemy,” the gateman retorted. “I must first ask the white woman.”
So Wu Lien had to stand there waiting until the man brought the white woman and then he had to explain as best he could to that woman why these two guards should be let in and the guards had not stopped their beating on the gate and roaring and Wu Lien was in a sweat and he heartily wished that he were not guarded at all.
But the white woman seemed not to hear any noise as she came near. She looked as cool and quiet as an image in a foreign temple, and she said to Wu Lien in her foreign voice that always made the words she spoke seem foreign:
“Are you not a traitor?”
By this time he was in such a sweat that he was peevish and so he said very peevishly:
“Lady, how do I know what you call traitor? In my own eyes I am only a man who wants to do his business as best he can, and I have my family to feed and I am the only one to do it.”
But she said in the same cool voice, “Have you not seen what has taken place in this city?”
And he answered still peevishly, “What has happened has happened and it is only to be expected that foreign victors are worse than our own, and I say the sooner we forget such things, the sooner peace will come for us all.”
Then this woman said, “I see you are a traitor and the sooner you have your household out of these walls, the better it is,” and she turned to the gateman and told him to let the guards in. So the man opened the gate very unwillingly, and the guards burst in angry at the delay, but they were taken back somewhat when they saw this tall cold woman with her face white and her yellow hair.
“Be quiet,” she told them, as sternly as though they were children. “Conduct yourselves decently and stay where you are.”
And Wu Lien trembled to hear her, and thanked Heaven that the guards spoke no language except their own and so did not understand her. But her coldness they understood and her tones, and they stood sheepish and angry before her and she turned to Wu Lien:
“I cannot let you come further than the gatehouse with such companions as these, and so I will bring your own to you here.”
She left him and he watched her walking over the grass, her long black foreign skirts brushing behind her. And there he stood with these two surly guards and the truth was he was afraid to be left with them lest they think the delay was his fault and turn on him somehow, and he felt like a man who has against his own will been given two wolves for pets, and he cannot refuse them and yet he fears he will be eaten. And the gateman stood there grinning and picking his teeth and watching the three of them.
But in a few moments Wu Lien saw his wife coming and with them her children and then Ling Sao. Now Orchid would gladly have come too, but the white woman had forbidden it because she was still young and pretty and she did not want the soldiers to see her.
“I wish you well, mother,” Wu Lien called to Ling Sao.
“And you also,” she replied. She was surprised to see the soldiers and all that was on the edge of her tongue to say to Wu Lien she held back in her amazement.
“Have you heard anything of my old man?” she only asked him.
“No, I have not,” Wu Lien replied. “I have heard nothing since the day my children’s mother came here, and I do not even know how you are here.”
“I came that night,” Ling Sao said, and as she spoke she reasoned that this man did not know of his mother’s death and she made up her mind that she would not tell him the worst truth of it, but only so much as he must know.
“Since you have not seen my children’s father, I must tell you, and prepare yourself, son-in-law, for bad news. Your old mother is no more. She was crushed under a beam when the enemy came into our house and my old man buried her in the field in a coffin he made himself, and there is a mound over her, or so I am told by others who have come here since I have.”
Wu Lien’s wife at once put her sleeve to her eyes, for though by now she knew all, yet it was only decent to make a show of fresh weeping before her husband, and Wu Lien quickly wiped his eyes, too.
But the guards were growing weary by now and they prodded Wu Lien in the buttocks with the ends of their guns to signify to him that they were ready to return and so weeping had to be postponed and Wu Lien could not even thank Ling Sao as he ought for caring for his mother. And Ling Sao, though she would not be afraid, yet she bawled after him through the gate, “Is it safe for my daughter to go with you?”
Then in haste he made off and Ling Sao was left there with the white woman of whom she was in hearty awe at all times and especially now because that woman looked at her with her yellow eyes and said:
“I am sorry for you, poor woman,” and so saying she went away and then Ling Sao was left only with the gateman, and she asked him:
“Why does she pity me when there are others who have suffered much more?”
“Because,” the gateman said, “your daughter’s husband has gone over to be a running dog of the enemy.”
“Is that why he had on his best wine red robe and his black velvet vest!” she cried.
And the gateman said, “That is why,” and he grinned and began to pick his teeth again.
Upon this thought Ling Sao walked back into the hall where Orchid was and her daughter and her grandchildren, for it was too cold a day to loiter out of doors. Rain had fallen and now it was changing to snow and she was glad of the warmth of the hall when she stepped into it. Yet she was very restless somehow because her elder daughter was gone and free, and she sat down and told everything to her little daughter and to Orchid, and the more they talked together the more these women longed to be free, too.
“I could eat my food down better if I saw that old man of mine,” Ling Sao thought to herself, and she thought about her husband and her sons and she was sure they did not do well without her, for like all good women she had taught them to be helpless in the house without her, and she was very gloomy for awhile and in her mind she saw what was left of her house filthy, the work undone and the men eating their food cold and raw and anyhow, and she did not even know whether one of them had ever taken thought to see how she cooked the rice or how she braised the cabbage, not to consider fish or meat.
“Meat perhaps is not yet to be bought,” she mused in herself, “but fish they can catch any day in the pond if they break the ice, if there is ice, but do they know enough even to take the entrails out, or if they do, then what to do next!”