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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  When they had read it, Jade had shaken her head. “We who are young, we ought to go on and not go back,” she said. “We left that place because of the child and shall we take him there now?”

  But Lao Er said, “When we left, my elder brother was at home and my father had two sons besides me, and we could think first of our own. But now those sons are gone, and the old ones are alone, and will our son care for us in our time if now we leave my parents? We cannot expect good in our time if now we do evil.”

  So at last she had been willing and they began their journey. Yet every step she took had been unwilling, and now for the first time she felt herself knit to this family of her husband, for she perceived that not unto one is a child born, but to all who go before him in the house. And so she did not, as some women would have done, put out her arms jealously to the child. She let Ling Sao have her fill of him and she stood there enjoying this worship of the child whom she worshiped.

  As for that little boy, he had seen so many strange faces since he was born that he was afraid of none, and surely none had looked down on him so kindly as this wrinkled brown face. Since he had slept most of the day on his mother’s back and was full of mother’s milk besides, for Jade had taken care to nurse him well before they reached the house so that he would not fret the first moment, he was very gay and smiling. When Ling Sao set him on her knee at last and told Ling Tan to hold the light so that she could see, the child laughed and pulled the button on her coat and then she laughed, still weeping, and between laughter and tears she could not speak and Ling Tan thought she would choke. He grew frightened and gave the lamp to his son to hold and cried out to her:

  “Guard your heart, my old woman! It has broken away from its anchor in you and you will lose your wits in a moment more. Too much joy is as bad as too much sorrow.”

  He took the child from her as he spoke, and bade Jade pour a little tea out of the pot for her husband’s mother, and Jade did, and Ling Sao drank it and wiped her eyes and so brought her heart back again to its place. Only then would Ling Tan give the child back to her, and the truth was he, too, liked this little grandson in his arms, for the child’s body was firm and hard and his thighs were fat and strong, and his little breast broad and his shoulders square.

  “This is no usual child,” he said to his son. “Look at his face, how square it is, and he has a square mouth.”

  Then he saw his son look proudly at Jade and she as proudly at him, and he took pleasure in their mutual pride.

  “What can the enemy do to us when our family goes on like this?” he exclaimed, and indeed this sturdy boy of the generation to come after them put heart into them all and the house came to life again with him.

  So at last they were able to bestir themselves. Ling Sao got up, the child across her hip, and how good it was to feel him there, and Jade helped her and she heated food, and Ling Tan sat down and lit his pipe and told his son to sit down and tell them all that had happened since they met. Thus over food and tea, and the two women sat with the men and Ling Sao still held the child and laughed silently at all he did while the talk went on, they made known to each other something at least of what had come to all since they last met.

  There was only one moment’s small cloud over their joy, for Ling Sao as she had always done for her own children and for her grandchildren chewed some rice soft and leaned to put it into the little boy’s mouth, but Jade spoke against it.

  “I beg you not to be angry with me, mother,” she said, “but do not put food from your mouth into the child’s.”

  She said this softly and prettily but still she said it, and Ling Sao was astonished, first that she should speak so to one older, and then that there could be any harm in feeding a little child soft chewed rice.

  “Why, I fed my sons so,” she said with anger, “and it did no harm to them, I swear.”

  “But it is not thought good now,” Jade said bravely. “I bought a little book in that upper river city that told of how to care for children, and this it spoke against, that food should be put from one mouth to another.”

  “Am I foul then?” Ling Sao said with more anger still.

  “No, you are not,” Jade said pleadingly. “But, mother, I myself do not do this, and I beg you let us keep this little child the best we know.”

  To this Ling Sao made no answer, and the men at first said nothing either, for this was not their quarrel.

  “You had better take your child,” Ling Sao said to Jade. “Doubtless I pollute him when I hold him.”

  “Oh, mother!” Jade said pleading with her. “For you I brought him home at all.”

  “Cool your anger,” Ling Tan said suddenly to his wife. “Shall we quarrel this night of all nights and over the child who is the center of all our hearts?”

  So Ling Sao let her anger cool but she never forgot what Jade said, and ever after she did not do that thing. Now as the others talked she sat brooding in herself about the book that Jade said she had and she thought with scorn, “Are children then to be reared and fed out of books? Did I ever have a book to feed my children and did I ever lose a son?”

  But she kept these thoughts in herself and the innocent child was still precious to her, and after a while she forgot the matter in hearing the tale of all that her son and Jade had done, and in what they told of the free land.

  When each knew all it was nearly dawn, and Ling Tan took his son and Jade and showed them the hole behind the stove.

  “There you must hide if the enemy comes,” he told them. “You are not registered and they do not know you are alive.” And he told them how he had lied and said that he and his wife were childless.

  “I am glad of that,” his son said, “for we came through the hills and with those in the hills we made our plans, and it is better if my name is nowhere.”

  Ling Tan did not understand what he meant. But by now he was too weary and his mind too full of all he had heard to hear more, and he thought, “I will leave this until tomorrow to ask.” So they went to bed at last, though Ling Sao would have been glad to sit and hold the little boy all night and let him sleep in her arms, if Ling Tan had allowed, but he said:

  “You must have your sleep too, old woman, and I shall not rest if you are not sleeping.”

  So in the deep blackness before dawn they parted, and when Ling Tan lay down on his bed, though he was weary it was a good weariness, and all that his son had said was strong and full of hope and it had given him hope, too. For the first time since the enemy had come he turned toward his wife with his old self come back in him, and he felt clean again because of hope ahead and so he renewed himself with her and then he slept.

  In their old room Lao Er and Jade lay side by side, too tired to sleep. The way home had been twice as hard as the going, because then they had gone toward freedom and now they came back to what they knew could not be freedom, and perhaps never in their time would they be free again.

  “We must learn to live free within ourselves,” Lao Er said.

  But he did not want to talk much tonight, even with Jade. He had seen death and trouble enough over all the land that he and Jade traveled, night after night, for they walked or rode by night and hid by day, once they had left the free land, and everywhere helped by the people in the hills, so that by now Lao Er knew those men and women and they him, and indeed they had been sorry to let him go.

  But he told them that he must come home because his parents were alone and he promised to plan with them and see how he could help them. Yet now that he was here he knew that what the enemy had done in this city and the laws they made were worse than had been elsewhere.

  “Then I must work the more,” he thought, “I must be more clever, keep my wits more sharp, be ready to die and yet sure I will not die.”

  And he praised his parents that they had had the sense to dig the hole and he said to Jade before he slept, “We must work on that hole and dig it deep and strengthen it with posts and beams under the court and make it like a sec
ret fortress. It must shelter more than us and hide more than our goods.”

  “I will make it my work,” Jade said.

  “And it shall be my first work,” Lao Er said. “Then as soon as we have it done, I will let the people in the hills know and then we will see what we can hatch between us.”

  Jade slept at last, the child asleep already at her breast. But still Lao Er could not sleep. He heard again and again what his father had told him of the taking of the city and all that had been pillaged and burned and looted and what had befallen women, and the blood fevered in his veins and he grew so angry lying there in the night that he swore to himself that the rest of his life he would give to war against the enemy, and he would teach his children after him to carry on the war. Only then could he sleep.

  … Not in one night could all be told, and the next day Ling Tan told his son all that he had forgotten. What made his son more angry than all else put together was when he heard that Wu Lien had gone over to the enemy.

  “Such men are traitors and when we push the enemy into the sea, be sure that men like Wu Lien will go with them or be killed if they do not.”

  “I had not thought of the man as a traitor,” Ling Tan said, considering. “It is more to his kind to be thinking only of himself and his profits, and he is the sort of man who smells out profits as a dog does a hare, and he follows as heedlessly.”

  But his son would not allow this for an excuse. “Any man who thinks first of himself now is a traitor,” he said, and Ling Tan did not answer. He thought to himself, more humbly than usual, for he was not by nature a humble man, that perhaps the young must be right these days, since certainly he did not know what to do except to stay by any way he could upon the land.

  Thus in humility he listened to his son rather than commanded him and then Lao Er said:

  “Father, the first work to be done is the finishing of the hole and since I ought not to go out into the fields anyway until I see what the outlook is, then I will work at that hole and make a strong good room under the court where we can live if we must or where we can hide others.”

  “What others?” Ling Tan asked surprised.

  “We must ally ourselves to those in the hills,” Lao Er said, “and it may be that sometimes we must hide them.”

  To this Ling Tan said not a word, and how could he when now two of his sons were in the hills?

  So when they had eaten he went out alone to the land until such a time as Ling Sao could bear to leave the child, and his son went to work on the hole and Jade worked, too, as long as Ling Sao held the child, and worked as much as she dared without spoiling her milk for the child if she grew too weary.

  “My legs are strong enough,” she said laughing, “for I have learned almost to walk in my sleep, but now my arms must take their turn.”

  This Jade had in these hard months grown almost as strong as a man and her slender body was hard and all the softness of her face was gone. Anywhere she might have passed for a young man, if one did not take notice of her little bosom, which for all its smallness yet nourished the child well. What she ate seemed to go to the child and not to her, and Ling Sao rejoiced in this and she said:

  “I wish that poor Orchid could see this, for she was so fat and yet when she had a child to nurse all she ate so heartily went to herself, and her big round breasts that you would have said were full of milk were empty and only fat.”

  “She would have hated me the more,” Jade said sadly. “Oh, if she saw me reading a book and nursing my child at the same time how angry she would be!”

  But Ling Sao was grave about the book. “Are you sure you do well to read a book when you nurse the child?” she asked. “It seems to me a danger to do two such opposite things when you are a woman.”

  But Jade only smiled. “Look at me when the child eats again,” she said.

  And Ling Sao did look and while Jade read and held the child to nurse, the milk flowed out of her so rich and full that the child had to gulp to take it in, and out of the other breast it flowed, too, there was so much. Ling Sao could say no more, and she could forgive Jade anything because she had so much milk for the child.

  In the morning how beautiful the child was, and how sweet his flesh smelled to her! She could do no work nor anything except sit and hold him and gaze at him and smell him and laugh at him, and her eyes were dazed with pleasure and she heard nothing anybody said and cared not whether a dish were washed or the floor swept or whether there was anything for the next meal.

  “Leave your mother alone,” Ling Tan told his son, “and tell Jade to indulge her and let her hold the child to her heart’s wish. It will heal her for everything.”

  They did as he told them, and now and again they looked at her and she did not see them. She was murmuring to the child, laughing because he wet her so often, and she carried him into the courtyard for the sun to fall upon him, and she rubbed oil into his little arms and legs, and once she cried out and they hurried in and she said to them:

  “Look at his back! I swear I never saw a child under a year so strong and able to sit alone! Look at this back of his!” And her eyes were full of tears.

  So they laughed and went back to their digging, and in that one day of digging Lao Er and Jade made the hole deeper than Ling Tan and Ling Sao had made it in seven.

  Out in the fields at his own work Ling Tan thought whether or not he could keep his son hid and how, for others in the village must know he was there, and after a while it seemed to him that it would be best to hide nothing from the village, who were after all of his own blood. So when he came in to eat at noon he told his son so, and the son agreed with him, and that night after the day’s work was finished Ling Tan took his son to the tea shop openly with him. When all greetings had been given and taken, he rose and said:

  “This son of mine has seen many things which if you are willing he will tell you, not because he has any merit in seeing them, but to hear will give you heart.”

  They clapped their hands on the table at this and so Lao Er stood up and in his clear and quiet voice without any pride or bombast he told his kinsmen how he had traveled westward to a city a thousand miles away until his father’s letter found him and he turned back again, and how everywhere the people were of one mind that the enemy must be resisted, openly where the land was free and secretly where the land was lost, but always resisted.

  “There are only two kinds of men who are not of this will,” he said, “and they are the ones who think of their own profit first and the others are the weak and the evil, the ones who can be bought with opium and with drugs, who are less than nothing anyway and now dangerous only because they can be spies on others. These are the traitors.”

  “Good!” they shouted back to him, and they looked at each other and nodded that he was right, and Lao Er looked about on these brown dark faces that he had known all his life, and his heart rose in him.

  “Uncles and cousins,” he said, “we must join ourselves to those in the free land who make war on the enemy, and how shall we join? Only by working in secret with the nine thousand men in the hills.”

  Now when he said this he well knew that he invited those men of his blood to be ready to die, for if the enemy knew that the hill men had anything to do with a village their anger knew no reason and they burned that village down.

  But man by man in that room held up his thumb and his forefinger to signify that he agreed to what Lao Er said, and of them all there was only the third cousin who hesitated, and then out of shame he too put up his thumb and finger. Yet no one blamed him for this, knowing that learning makes a man weak and a learned man can never be so brave as one unlettered. Lao Er waited until every hand was up and then he said:

  “What does this mean? It means that we must hide our rice and wheat harvests and give to the enemy the least we can to save our lives. It means that where we had cotton fields our land now will not grow cotton. It means that as often as can be done an enemy or a few enemies suddenly die from unse
en guns.” To this they all listened with uttermost silence.

  “But we have no guns,” a voice now said.

  “I know where to get guns,” Lao Er said, “and every man shall have his gun.”

  A great sigh went over those men like a wind of joy and they murmured and said aloud,

  “If we have guns what can we not do! It is our bare hands that have kept us back, or having nothing but pitchforks and old swords, when the enemy has such weapons as we have never seen.”

  As for Ling Tan he sat ready to burst with pride in his son and he thought, “The wisest thing I ever did was to call this son home.”

  When they were in his house again he said so to Lao Er and he said, “I only wish you had not gone away at all.”

  But his son said, “No, I am glad I went and saw the free land and the people there, so that I know what they are, and I know that they and we together will push this enemy into the sea if we are steadfast. Yet I well know their way of fighting in the free land and ours here must be different. They can fight openly but we secretly. Ours is a harder war than theirs, for we live in the midst of the enemy, and we have nowhere to go.”

  Thereafter the people in that village waited for Lao Er to bring them guns, and he waited until he had finished the room under the court. But he worked no longer alone. Seeing how loyal the villagers were to each other, and how they were all the same clan, he chose a few to whom to tell of the room, and he called them to work with him, and then how quickly was that room finished! Four strong men working together hewed the clay out, and they set up poles and beams and door frames and they made another secret entrance. Lao Er dug all deeper than had been planned, because in the free land he had seen the shelters against the fighting ships and he went very deep, only praying not to find a river. In this he was lucky, for he found only a small stream which he drained off into the well through a tube he made from bamboos joined and their joints knocked through.