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

by Buck, Pearl S.

  Mayli opened her big eyes. “I? Ah, you do not know me! How my father would laugh! Why, child, I have a very bad temper. I am very fierce!”

  “I cannot believe it,” Pansiao whispered. She had forgotten the sugar she held in her hand. She gazed at the lovely face now ruddy in the light of the coals.

  “I beg you,” she said faintly, her love giving her strength. “Oh, I pray you—will you marry my brother?”

  Now of all the things which Mayli might have heard from this young girl, here was the last she could have expected. She dropped her pretty lower jaw and stared at her.

  “Do I hear what you say or not?” she asked.

  Pansiao put down the sugar and dropped on her knees. “My third brother,” she faltered. “At home he is the captain among the hillmen. He looks for one like you. And my father wrote me a letter bidding me find a wife for my brother in the free lands, because there is no woman fit for him where the enemy is. But I could find no one—there was no one fit for him here, before you came.”

  Then trembling with her boldness she brought out of her bosom Jade’s letter. She had put it in her pocket when she came tonight, thinking that if her own words failed her the written words would speak for her.

  Still unbelieving, Mayli took the letter and read it and while she read Pansiao rose and dusted off her knees and nibbled her sugar and watched Mayli’s face. First there was laughter and then there was surprise, and then gravity crept about the beautiful full red mouth, and hung upon the edge of the straight black lashes.

  These lashes she lifted when she had read the letter. Then she folded the letter and gave it back to Pansiao without speaking.

  “Where else in the world could this happen?” she thought to herself. “Who could believe it who had not seen it? What shall I say to this child?”

  Pansiao put the sugar down again and waited.

  “It is a good letter,” Mayli said. “The writing is very clear and the style is simple. Does your brother write as well?”

  “He?” Pansiao repeated. “He does not read or write.”

  “You see,” Mayli said simply, “it would be difficult for me to marry a man who did not read or write.”

  “Oh, he is very clever,” Pansiao cried. “He has not learned only because he saw no good in it. Nobody reads or writes in our village except one old cousin, and he is a fool.”

  She examined Mayli’s face anxiously. “If you wished him to learn he would learn. If you taught him he would learn very quickly!”

  Mayli said gently, “Could I marry a man I have never seen?”

  “Who has seen the man she is to wed?” Pansiao asked in wonder.

  “It is another world,” Mayli thought. “And yet, is it not mine? If I had not been taken from it young, so I would have answered.”

  “Tell me all about your brother,” she said aloud. She had not the least thought of the man and what the child had said was absurd and only to be laughed at, and yet this was her world and here was her country.

  Then Pansiao did tell her all that she remembered of her third brother from his boyhood, and even until now, and she was honorable and told of his evil tempers and his cruelties. At them Mayli only laughed. Then Pansiao told of his brave deeds and Mayli grew grave as she listened. It was a long time before Pansiao was finished, so long that over the red coals there had come a covering of soft gray ash, and the night was half over and neither of them knew it. They were far from here, each in her own way living another life and seeing a strong wilful bold young man, ignorant but powerful.

  “That is my brother,” Pansiao said at last.

  “You have made him very clear,” Mayli said.

  She saw Pansiao looking at her and hoping for more answer than this, and she shook her head.

  “Dear child,” she said. “It is all strange to me and like a story out of a book. Now you must go to bed. The good Miss Freem will find you away, perhaps, and if you are here, how angry she will be!”

  She touched the young girl’s cheek and rose and led her to the door, and Pansiao could only beseech her with her eyes, for she felt her tongue forbidden.

  “Good night,” Mayli said. “I shall dream dreams tonight!”

  When Pansiao had gone everything was changed to Mayli. Until now this room had been hers, a part of the country from which she had come. She had made it foreign, with here and there a cushion, a small unframed picture, a photograph of her father’s home. Now it was no longer her room. It had become a cave in a rocky cliff upon a mountainside in occupied country. A young guerrilla captain stood here, a strong shadow, a powerful ghost, a presence she could not drive out. She sat down again by the gray coals and thought of him and of all she had heard about him.

  “A pity,” she thought, “a shame that a man like that has had no chance!” She thought about him again. “Would he be the braver if he could read? Would he be any bolder against the enemy?” She remembered the morning and laughed small laughter. “Perhaps Paul Revere was an ignorant man too,” she thought.

  Then she rose and shook herself to cast off the spell of this man she had never seen. “I must not be romantic,” she thought.

  Thus determined she went to her window and opened it and stood there for a long time. The moon was high and poured its light over the barren peaks. They were gray and fierce. Not a tree could be seen upon them, and the shadows they cast upon each other were black. It was a landscape like none other in the world for beauty, but it took a strong heart to look at it and not be afraid. She was not afraid. She stared at it, motionless for almost an hour.

  “I must not be a fool,” she thought, and went to bed.

  XVII

  SHE AVOIDED PANSIAO FOR days and often, when by chance she met the young girl’s waiting eyes, she smiled quickly and turned her head away. What those eyes asked was impossible.

  And yet upon that which was impossible certain powers worked. There was the power of the mountains, and she felt their wild power day and night, urging her away from the docile pattern of the days.

  “I was never meant to be a school teacher,” she thought passionately. “I never can sing hymns!”

  Yet what was she meant to be? She had now come to ask herself that constantly. What could a woman do alone? She played with her imagination. What if she sent for that pilot who had brought her here and told him to take her—anywhere?

  But where could she go? To her mother’s family? They were scattered, the city occupied by the enemy. No, alone she could do nothing. She must ally herself. Ally herself with what? With an army, perhaps. There were the armies in the northwest. Women fought there beside men. But she did not want to fight as one of many. She was too proud for that. She wanted a place of power, or where she could create power. She thought of a certain woman known all over the world, a woman of her own race, educated abroad as she had been, a rich, beautiful wilful woman, who had married a warlord—a man such as she could imagine this brother was of whom Pansiao had told her. That woman had taken a raw strong ignorant man and as his wife she had shaped him into a ruler whose name the whole world knew now. Could not she do the same?

  … “I shall have to do something,” Miss Freem thought day after day, staring at her through thick spectacles. “I feel as if this girl were turning into a tiger. O God, please let me find a way to get rid of her!”

  … Alone in her room at night Mayli turned the radio to the voice. It came between two and three every night, that voice from the heart of her country, telling of victory and of hard-held losses. In the midst of the days patterned like a cage about her, she waited for the night. When she had heard the voice she always turned to the mountains, and however bitter the cold she opened the windows and stood there, and the mountains did their work.

  “I must get out of this place,” she thought.

  … But it was Miss Freem who set her free.

  “God gave me strength,” Miss Freem said to the other teachers when it was done. “I had been praying for weeks that He would rid me of
this burden. But I had not been shown the way. Then one day I heard her with my own ears. She was urging the girls to run away, these dear girls, committed to my care and keeping! I happened to go by her classroom, where she was supposed to be teaching American history, and she was saying, ‘It is despicable that we stay here in these caves studying what other nations have done. We ought all to be out and fighting our own war. Come—if I go, who will go with me?’ That is what I heard. I opened the door and God gave me strength. ‘Miss Wei,’ I said, ‘Miss Wei, I consider that your contract is broken.’ ”

  The docile teachers murmured their horror. Most of them had once been Miss Freem’s pupils and they knew how she felt.

  Mayli, hearing later through some of them how God had helped Miss Freem, laughed her too loud laugh. “Does she know how God used her for me? He used her to set me free!”

  She scornfully demanded of Miss Freem her full salary and bade the gateman call a mountain messenger and when he had gone she sent him with a telegram to the nearest city. That telegram called the pilot to take her away. She went away without seeing Pansiao again.

  As for Pansiao, when she found her goddess gone she wept secretly and long. Where was that goddess, and had she made her go, because she had besought her to be the wife of so human a creature as her third brother? Who could say? There was none to answer.

  … Mayli settled herself in the small narrow seat of the plane.

  “I go back to the coast,” she told the pilot.

  They had met in a village at the foot of the mountains. He was there this morning when her sedan was let down before the inn, and he came forward, smiling because he was afraid of her, his old cap in his hand and his blue cotton uniform more faded even than it had been. He was not surprised when a few days before this one he had her message telling him to be here on a certain day. He had not thought when he left her that such a young woman would stay long in the mountains.

  “I shall be ready in half an hour,” had been her only greeting.

  Then she went into the inn, and after she had told the innkeeper that his was the filthiest inn in the two halves of the world and after she had eaten a bowl of noodles, she came out again, her fur robe wrapped around her, and she stepped into the plane.

  She twisted in her seat for one last look at the mountains as they soared upward. Then she set her face toward the sea, and her mind she put on what she wanted to do. She had never let Pansiao know what she thought as she had listened to her tell of her father and his house, and when Pansiao pressed her with shy questions, she had only laughed. To anyone she would have said that it was folly to think of an ignorant man she had never seen. And yet what Pansiao had told her had nevertheless directed her thoughts and her imagination. Now with the whole world to choose from and no one knowing where she was, she felt as free as a wind-cloud. Never had she had such whole freedom. The man with her was nothing to her. He was part of the machine. She did not once speak to him, and when he looked at her he saw her face set toward the sky, motionless and gazing ahead.

  But out of the freedom her mind was shaping its plan. Why should she not go and see for herself if that brother were as handsome as Pansiao had said he was? For Pansiao with a woman’s cunning had told her again and again of her brother’s great beauty. Tall, she had said, “much taller than you are,” she had said, and his eyes were long and the black so black and the white so white that whomever he looked upon felt the god in him. So she had said.

  Now Mayli was one of those women who had never seen a man she thought her own equal. She was scornful of men and yet she was passionate, and since she had been a child of thirteen she had dreamed of a man whom she could not flout as she flouted every one who came near her and her own father too. Learning in a man she did not value, and by now it even added something to this man of whom she had been told that he could not read and write. If without learning he had such power, what would he be when he had learning too? She imagined him her dragon, stronger than she was and yet dependent on her for learning. She wanted him untamed and untameable, and yet she wanted a way to shape him. It would be sweet to have her own power over a wild and powerful man, a man such as she had never seen in palaces and cities and seats of government where suave smooth men gather together. So through all the long day, high above the earth, she plotted how she would get near enough to this man to see him and know whether or not he was anything like the one of whom she dreamed but whom she had never seen.

  It was not too hard. She could see a way very clear if she cared to take it. Pansiao had told her of her elder sister’s husband, who was working with the enemy in the city, and his name Wu Lien. From the coast she could write to the puppet ruler in that city of her mother’s birth, and ask merely that she be allowed to come there with his safeguard so that she might visit her mother’s birthplace and her grave. The puppet had been her father’s friend once, and she had known him in the days when the country was free and there had been no puppets. A rebel always, not from strength but from weakness, because he had never been given as much as he wanted, this man, now a puppet, had quarrelled with his own government and had spent years abroad, an exile, though with some faint honor, because he had strength of family and wealth to support him. Mayli had seen him more than once in her father’s house, for there the man went as he went to many places to make secret complaint of what went on at home and how he was never listened to and how he had been put aside, and in his way he plotted weakly in foreign capitals and among any whom he thought had any power. Nor could her father put him wholly aside, for the man was his townsman and they had been schoolmates in childhood. When the enemy came conquering, who should be a better puppet than this discontented man?

  And yet so eager would he be to justify himself in the eyes of those who had once been his friends, that if Mayli wrote him asking him to safeguard her while she went to her mother’s home in that now captured city, he would give it and urge her to come and stay at his house, and he would show her fawning honor, so that he could prove to the enemy what friends he had, and how the daughter of an honored man came to seek his protection. Well she knew how angry her father would be, but had she ever told him anything she wanted to do if she knew he would not like it?

  Thus her plan shaped itself more and more clear. Yes, and after she was in the puppet’s house, she could easily have him find for her that brother-in-law Wu Lien, and go into the countryside to the burial ground, since she knew from Pansiao where Ling Tan’s house was and his village. She could go and see for herself all in that house and perhaps the one whom she most wanted to see. All was plain before her, and she would follow it without telling anyone. If she found the man what Pansiao had said, why, then, who could tell what would happen? If the man was only a hind, she had but to go away again and call it adventure and pleasure. She took no risk on herself, whatever came about.

  Thus she planned. They came down and spent the night at a small town on the border, at an inn dirty as all inns are dirty, and she was bitten by bedbugs besides. This made her angry and she told the innkeeper so before she left in the morning. The innkeeper only grinned, but his wife was not so kind and she cursed the tall foreign-looking girl and said:

  “Be sure it is not you I am sorry for but the bedbugs! If they drank your black blood, you have poisoned them. And whoever heard of good honest folk who have no bedbugs and no lice? When such small creatures leave a house luck goes with them.”

  “You are an ignorant fool,” Mayli said, “and the enemy is welcome to such as you. What good is it to our country to have such old images as you?”

  In the end the pilot besought her to come away and the innkeeper held his hand over his wife’s mouth and so the men parted the two women. And the pilot made the more haste that day so that he could be rid of his charge before night and so brought her to the coast.

  Mayli did as she planned and sent by telegraph her message to the puppet. Within a few hours there was his message back again, as she knew it would be, begging her to c
ome and saying that he would prepare a special place for her on the train and that she would be met with his own car. He himself would give her protection and he signed his name plain and openly as the ruler of the land. She smiled sidewise when she saw this, remembering his weak face.

  She waited for two days, seeming only a handsome and proud young woman who had money in her hand. She came and went alone and bought herself some new garments and some fine pearls and if she saw anything hateful about this coastal city she did not say so to any of the strangers about her. But she saw, nevertheless, much that was very hateful. There were ruins in many parts and the city was crowded with the beggared and the homeless, not only from her own people but from other parts of the world as well. She saw hungry white faces, the faces of Jews driven out and desperate, and seeking shelter here in this sad place. Half the world was homeless and ruined. But this great and rich city had belonged to her people and why need it have fallen? Alone and knowing no one and refusing the friendly looks of all who wished to know who she was, she brooded on what she saw, and all her passion gathered into anger against the enemy.

  In such mood she took the train and found the place prepared for her, and like an angry princess who will not tell the cause of her anger, she went to the city which had been her mother’s childhood home, and by night was there.

  … “I am very lonely,” the puppet ruler said, and she knew he wondered whether he could lean still closer toward her and touch her hand. She had grown into a woman since he had seen her last. She looked at him and he knew he could not touch her. He drew back and set his cup down on the table.

  “Naturally you are lonely,” she said calmly. “What you have done has cut you off.”

  They spoke in the English which both knew equally well.

  “But you understand me?” His handsome, weak face besought her understanding. “I am not a traitor. I am a realist. If we recognize the truth, that these East-Ocean people have conquered half our country, the only hope for our future is to work with them. Besides, what I am doing is thoroughly Chinese. History tells us again and again that we have always seemed to yield to our conquerors, but actually we have ruled and our conquerors have died.”