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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  How had it come about? This man caught between the grindstones of his life was nevertheless a little better than he need be, and therefore he was miserable. Afraid of his wife, he had gone back and forth with her messages to Wu Lien. They were small messages, often useless, such as that she had that day seen some men whom she was sure were hillmen and they had gone toward the west. But sometimes she sent word that Ling Tan’s sons had come and were in hiding in their father’s house. Small or large, her husband had to carry her messages because of the money Wu Lien gave for them, and often the man meditated whether or not he could twist these messages and put north for south or forget to mention Ling Tan’s sons, but his courage was at first too weak. He did not know in what large affairs these messages were links and he feared being caught and tortured as the enemy now tortured, gouging men’s eyes and pulling out the ends of their entrails, and cutting off their ears and noses or right hands and all those cruelties which now the people took as things that might happen to anyone any day.

  “The New Order!” he now murmured as he began to sink to sleep.

  The thin girl bent over him. “What do you say?” she asked him.

  But he was already gone and he could not answer. In three hours she would wake him as she always did and he would pay her a small coin and go away. Still drowsy, he would go to Wu Lien and tell him whatever he remembered and Wu Lien would give him two coins, and one he would take and one he would keep hidden for another day here. At first he had been frightened lest surely some day he would be found out. But he had now passed fear of any kind and all he wanted was enough money to come back, and his greatest hope was a little more money so that he might go to a place where he could buy real opium, and not the scrapings and the ashes of pipes from houses better than this one. Nor was he alone here or anywhere. The people crowded into these opium houses, because they saw no hope of freedom to come in their lifetime. They longed for the old years back, and of that there was no hope.

  In the village none noticed what had befallen the third cousin, for none heeded one whom they thought only a silly old man. Ling Tan saw him grow more dry and yellow, but so did they all, since food was now dear and scarce, and great floods this year had spoiled the crops. And yet Ling Tan could not curse Heaven for flood as he always did in other years. Hungry though he often was, and though he knew he risked his life by hiding food for his house, yet he was glad when the rains fell, because this year the enemy would pay the loss.

  “Heaven helps earth, after all,” he said.

  All that happened in Ling Tan’s house the third cousin’s wife knew, or guessed, and she sent word on it to Wu Lien, but of what he learned Wu Lien still told nothing. He sat in his place in that enemy palace and did his work and his words were few. To the enemy he seemed a mild man who would do anything he was told, and they paid him well. This money Wu Lien saved as he did his knowledge, and without knowing what he would do with it. He did not give it to anyone nor did he do good with it, nor did he spend it for himself or for his family more than was needful. His children grew within these walls and they played with enemy children and learned their language, and he let this be also, and he did not send them out to school. His wife he loved moderately and in his own way, and he comforted her when she mourned that she never saw her parents, and he told her that when times were better they would all understand each other again.

  But within himself Wu Lien kept all that he knew, and he was careful never to let anything in his manner or his voice or his look betray that he had any special knowledge. Yet he did have, for to him came ten or twelve men and women who told him news of every kind and were his ears and eyes everywhere. Thus he learned fully how evil the enemy was and how they continued to burn villages and to pillage the land as they had the city, and he learned what the hillmen did, and before Ling Tan knew it he knew what Ling Tan’s sons did. He was stuffed with knowledge he seemed never to use.

  This Wu Lien was a man of his own loyalties. If ever this city was taken from the conquerors, he would turn again to his own. But while the conquerors were here, in his way he worked hard for what he thought was right for his own people, and he comforted himself always by thinking that at some time he would be able to do one great thing to show how right he was. Meanwhile he did small things that were right. Since that money he paid his ears and eyes was enemy money and he must show some return for it, he did write down long reports of small things and gave them to the enemy. But of Ling Tan’s village he wrote nothing, not so much as its name, nor did he tell what the hillmen did except in some far distant place where he knew Ling Tan’s sons were not, and in all ways he spared his wife’s blood, not only for her sake, but because Ling Tan had buried his old mother, and had given her shelter in the earth in a day when many had no such shelter.

  All this time the city had been like an island in the middle of the sea. There were no messages from the outer world. None here knew what the people in the free lands were doing, and people often asked each other, “Is there any hope that our own armies will come back?” For of all those who had complained of their own soldiers there was now not one who did not think of them with longing and as good men, so evil was this enemy and so cruel these East-Ocean soldiers who took what they wanted from miserable shops and gave worthless money long since not honored. Sometimes they gave foreign money and more often they gave nothing, and they took the women they wanted, even though the city was full of courtesans who had gathered here from everywhere around, because here were the great men among the enemy and their many soldiers.

  But even among the enemy Wu Lien had a friend, a good man. He was no warrior but a man who made pictures and sent them away, and this man went out every day to see what he could see for his pictures, and he sought for good and he found much evil. With his own eyes he saw his fellows seize young women and foul even old ones, and he saw the wine-filled soldiers of his own people do their filthy deeds in daylight before the eyes of decent people who would have been killed had they lifted a voice to cry put, and indeed he saw them die. He grew so weary with such wickedness that one day he spoke to Wu Lien when they were alone and he said:

  “I have no chance to talk elsewhere, but to you at least I can say that I hate what we have done to your people, and I am ashamed, and I wish our Emperor could know, but he cannot, for none would dare to tell him. Yet why do I say the Emperor? Even our people at home would never believe if they were told the cruel things their sons and husbands and fathers and brothers do here.”

  Wu Lien listened and answered well, and after that a sort of friendship grew up, Wu Lien saying little and the man saying much, and from this one Wu Lien first heard that not only in this nation of his was there war but in other nations, too and perhaps in the whole world,

  “How can you find out so much?” Wu Lien asked. And then the man took him to his own room and showed him a small black box, a thing of which Wu Lien had heard but had never seen. The man turned a peg and then another and out of the box came a voice, very low.

  “Listen!” the man said.

  So Wu Lien listened and out of that box the voice told of vast happenings and for the first time Wu Lien heard for himself that nation had declared war on nation, and in the great western cities the bombs were falling even as they had fallen on this city. What were the small things Wu Lien knew from his little spies when such things were happening as this?

  “Where can I buy one of these boxes?” he asked the man.

  “I will get you one,” the man said.

  And then they talked and Wu Lien heard for the first time how great was this war. The man told him that here they were a part of a whole, and that some day there would not be a single country outside the war, and he sighed as he said it.

  “My fellows rejoice at this,” he told Wu Lien. “They see a chance to grow powerful and rich, each man for himself. But I have no wish for such things. I should like to go home to my town which is a quiet place by the sea and there live with my wife and children and old
parents. I ask no more.”

  “It is enough,” Wu Lien agreed.

  “And too much, it seems, to get now-a-days,” the man said sadly.

  This was how Wu Lien himself came to have such a box for his own, for not long after his enemy friend gave it to him. Wu Lien kept it in his room and thereafter in his every empty moment, far into the night, he kept the voice alive and he listened. Most of the time there was nothing, nonsense or strange music or idle words, but now and again truth came out of the box. Then he took it in greedily, and he heard how the peoples abroad suffered and how what befell them was the same as had come here, and he heard the anger of nations and the fury of rulers. When it was over, he went to bed dazed with what he heard and trembling with the size of the times.

  “Evil—evil,” he muttered, “it is all evil.”

  “What is wrong with you now?” his wife asked him one night. “It is that soup you drank. I thought it had a smell.”

  He only groaned, for how could he tell a woman that the world was being destroyed? He grew closer than ever in his being, for now he knew that peace was so far off that by the time it came men might have forgotten it as they forget a dream long past and the young could not even dream of peace because they had not seen it since they were born.

  It happened one day that as he was listening to his box, and it grew to be a thing he did more and more often, Ling Tan’s old third cousin came in to give his news and he saw Wu Lien listening, and he asked what it was. Wu Lien told him, and then full of what he had just heard he could not forbear saying to the cousin that the whole world was at war. When the cousin asked him how he knew, he showed him how this box did its work, and what peg to turn, and which to subdue, so that the voice would come out. At this moment nothing came out except music, but there it was, a pleasant noise, and from it an evil thought came into the cousin’s mind.

  This cousin was not altogether the fool he looked, but he had been in his life so badgered and oppressed first by his mother and then by his wife, and his love of learning among men who had no learning had so set him apart that he had never had his own will and his wits out and at work. But now opium had done for him what he had not been able to do for himself. Since he had begun to smoke opium and to hide it, he felt himself desperate and in such danger anyway that more danger or less was nothing, so long only as he could get his opium every day. This man who had never been able to put his head out of his quilt at night to see what a rat did in his room, now without changing his meek outer looks grew daily more brazen within. He stole what he could from counters in shops and sold it, and he took his wife’s good clothes and pawned them, and when she cried out that she had been robbed he kept his face as it ever was, and no one could have pretended better surprise. Every thing he had went for opium. Many a day he lied to his wife and said that Wu Lien had given him nothing because he had spent all that Wu Lien had given him. And he took to smoking before he went to Wu Lien to give him courage to make up lies for news, and after he left he smoked again because he had two coins in his pocket, and his daring grew with his hunger.

  Today, as he listened to the box, it came to him that what a thing it would be if he had such a box and he could set it up in a secret room and listen to it, and there in a tea shop take people’s money to hear what he knew and from that money he could do as he liked. This notion which would never have entered into his skull had his brain been his own, so full of danger to his life it was, now seemed to him a thing possible and easy to do because of his false courage. He sat on and on that day, pretending to listen to the box and he learned everything about it with twice his usual quickness to learn anything, and still he sat on. At last Wu Lien was called away.

  “I do not like to leave you here,” Wu Lien said to him as he went. “It is against the enemy law for any of our people to listen to this box, and I am safe only because I live within these walls. But if any know that you listen here alone, there may be trouble for both of us.”

  “Only let me finish this that I hear now and I will go,” the cousin begged him.

  Wu Lien was willing for this and he went away. As soon as he had gone that cousin took the box and unwound its wires from a metal pole that ran through the room for support to the roof, and he put the box under his wide scholar’s robe and tied the wires to his belly band and he walked out of the room as coolly as he had come in. By that time everyone knew him and let him come and go as he liked. Well he knew he would never dare to come back and face Wu Lien again, but he did not care. He had the way to make money enough for what he wanted.

  And yet now the thing was done he must have an accomplice here in the city, and who could it be? He could not take the box home for he must still deceive his wife and let her think he came and went to the city to Wu Lien and she must not know how much money he had. He knew no one, and so what could he do ? Yet his unnatural brain could drink of this too, and he thought of the thin yellow girl who stirred his opium. She always wanted money, and he would give her some of what he earned. He would not teach her how to turn the pegs but he would only give her something to keep the box safe for him.

  To that usual place he went then, and when she bent over his pipe to light it he said to her in a low voice.

  “Would you like to make more money than you do now?”

  “How can I?” she asked cautiously. “Do you want to keep me?”

  “No—no, I have one woman too many already,” he said quickly.

  “What then?” she asked.

  “Let me smoke only a little,” he begged her, “only enough to stop my hunger but not enough to make me sleep, and then lead me where none can hear us and I will tell you.”

  So she did, and when he woke fully to himself he was in a room he had never seen before, a poor room, with only a board bed and a broken table and two benches in it. But it was clean and there was a bamboo bird cage in the small window, and in the cage a plump small yellow bird. The singing of this bird was the first thing he heard when he came to himself. For a moment he thought it was his box, but he put his hand to his belly and felt it hard and square under his robes and the corners bit into his belly.

  Then he came to himself wholly and there was the thin girl and she was shaking him.

  “Wake—wake,” she called in his ear. “It is long past midnight.”

  He woke then, and asked where he was, and she said this was her own room and it was in the court behind the opium den where she worked. He brought out the box from his belly when he had all this clearly in his mind, and he told her his plan. She listened, her face as narrow as the palm of a hand. It grew more narrow as she understood and saw what the thing might mean.

  “You have had a thought for once, you old book-fool,” she said, “and luck has brought you to me. You may keep the box here in my room, and it is safe. No one comes here whom I do not bring.”

  By now the man was clear in his head and with far more than his usual clearness. He set the box under the bed where it was hidden and he put the wire into the wall where the light was and then he looked for a metal pole, but there was none. For a while he was distraught and then they found a hole in the plaster, for this was not an old house but one built quick and new and inside the wall were rods of steel, and to one of these he wrapped the wire. Then carefully turning the pegs he waited and power filled the box and the voice came out.

  “The news today from the free land,” that voice said, and then it went on and told of enemy bombings and how the people hid themselves in the caves of the hills, and then the voice said, “but we are not alone. Today in the western countries, too, the people hide themselves in the pits of the earth, and the same enemy oppresses all. We do not yield—”

  The cousin heard a strange noise. He looked up and there was that thin girl with her hands at her throat as though she would choke herself.

  The cousin turned off the box and cried out. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Do they still resist?” she whispered. “I thought no one resi
sted any more, anywhere!”

  “Everything this box says is true,” the cousin said proudly.

  “Then fortune is in our hands,” the girl said, “for what this voice says is what men long to hear.”

  For a few days the cousin told a hundred lies to his wife. He told her that Wu Lien said he was to come at night and no more by day, and since he brought back double the money he had before and said Wu Lien gave it to him because he came by night, she believed him for awhile. But the cousin was lost from that day when his hand was first full of money. He smoked no longer the dregs and ashes but he went to a fine place where the pure black sticky stuff was put into his bowl and now he fell into such dreams as he had never had before. The day came soon when he did not go home and then another day passed and another and then being afraid the thought came to him, “Why should I ever go home any more? Why should I be scolded and be set upon by a woman when I can be free?”

  And he wondered that he had not thought of this earlier, and from that day on he stayed in the city, sleeping all day and rising by night to tell the news he heard out of the box, and no one knew who he was, not even the thin girl, for he told his name to none, and to her he was only the old opium-smoker who owned the box. As for the cousin, he did not see from day’s end to day’s end a face he knew, and at last he was truly free.

  Thus Heaven used this man, too, worthless as he was. In that whole city there were few voices that came from outside to tell these people, beleaguered by the enemy, what went on in a world still free, and the news of the box leaked secretly from mouth to ear, and all knew that in the free land their people still fought the enemy and held them back. There came to be a password among the people of that city and it was the word “Resist.” “Do we resist?” one man asked another secretly. “We resist!” was the secret answer. And now courage began to live again where it had died.