“Do it,” his mother replied. Then her small shrewd eyes lit with laughter. “Only make sure first, my son, that you are able! Women are not so easily beaten, now-a-days!”
She laughed a dry silent laugh and spread the grass sparsely over the flame. Ling Tan was not a poor farmer, and her own father had had rich soil to till, but she had been well taught that, rich or poor, in any house there should be no waste of food and fuel and cloth. When she wove a piece of cloth and cut a garment from it, the scraps of the cloth could lie in the palm of her hand. This the matchmaker had guaranteed and it was true. But it was hard to find such young women now. Orchid, her elder son’s wife, had feet bound in childhood, but the revolution had come before the work had been finished and her father had commanded her feet to be unbound, even as Ling Tan had refused to allow his own two daughters to have their feet bound.
She sat feeding the grass into the stove, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, a twig or two, a stalk, while she meditated upon her sons’ wives. Good or bad, sons’ wives could make the home happy or miserable and upon them depended the old. Sons could not be trusted, because in a house women were stronger than men. Thus, she thought, who could believe that her second son would beat Jade when he found her?
“He will not beat her,” she muttered into the flame. Her husband had beaten her twice in her youth, once in anger and once in jealousy, but he was stronger than his sons. Nor had she suffered the beatings calmly. She had pounded him with her fists and clawed his cheeks and bitten the lobe of his right ear so deeply that the marks of it were there still.
“Who bit you there?” people asked him even now.
“A hill tiger,” he always said and always laughed. She had come from a village in the hills.
But Jade—could any man beat Jade? She sighed and let the fire die and rose. Her knees were aching but she paid no heed to it. She lifted the lid of the cauldron and sniffed the rice. It was fragrant and nearly done. She fitted the lid firmly. There was no need for more fire—the steam would finish the cooking. She yawned and reached for the rice bowls that stood on a shelf in the earthen chimney. Part of a fish left from the noon meal would make meat, and the cabbage left she would stir into the rice. Fish cost nothing, for they had fish in their own pond and it was only needful to drop the net into the water.
She set the bowls on the table in the court, put down the chopsticks, and then went into the room where she and her husband slept. He was there, washing himself in a bowl full of cold water. They did not speak, but over the face of each of them came a look of peace. She sat down and taking the silver toothpick from her hair she picked her teeth slowly, gazing at him as he washed. She thought calmly that his body was as good now as it had been the first time she looked at it, hard and thin and brown. He moved quickly and with full strength, washing himself, wringing the cotton towel, which she wove as she had woven nearly all the cloth they used, and wiping himself dry. He was a clean man. There was never a smell nor a stink about him. When he opened his mouth to laugh in her face sometimes his teeth were sound and his breath came sweet. There was his third cousin whose breath was like a camel’s.
“How do you sleep at his side?” she had asked the cousin’s wife only the other day.
“Do not all men stink?” the woman had replied.
“Not mine,” she had said proudly.
“Now I will have my supper,” Ling Tan said suddenly. He drew on his loose blue cotton trousers and knotted a clean girdle about his waist. Then he remembered the pork. “I sent the eldest for pork,” he said. She opened her eyes wide. “We had half a fish left from noon.”
“I will have the pork,” he said loudly.
“Have it, then,” she replied and rose to go out to prepare it. When she entered the kitchen she saw the pork already there on the table, lying upon a dried lotus leaf. She seized it and examined it, always ready to be cheated by their eighth cousin, the butcher, though she never had been. The man was afraid of her and respected Ling Tan, and though he had his poor meats, as any butcher has, he knew where to sell them. This pound of pork was as good as could be had anywhere, the red and white in layers under the soft thick white skin, and she could find no fault with it. She chopped it quickly with garlic and salt and rolled it into small round balls and dropped them into boiling water. She had a deft hand at cooking and Ling Tan had not smoked more than two pipes before she was ready,
From the kitchen door she shouted to her eldest son, “Your father is ready to eat!”
Lao Ta came out of his family room, washed and clean, his child in his arms.
“We are here,” he said.
Ling Tan coming out of his door shouted for his second son.
“He will not hear,” his wife bawled from the kitchen. She was stirring the cold cabbage into the boiling rice. “He is looking for his woman.”
From the court came laughter, the laughter of two men whose wives never ran away. The mother dipped the rice into bowls and brought them out and laughed with them, and at the door the eldest son’s wife came and stood buttoning her jacket.
“Let me, mother,” she begged for courtesy, since she did not move. Then she laughed because they were all laughing, though she had not heard why. But this household was always laughing at something and being an easy kindly creature Orchid laughed without stopping to find the cause for their laughter.
And as they sat down the third son came quietly into the gate, leading the water buffalo by a rope through its nostrils. He was a tall silent boy not yet quite sixteen years of age, and nobody spoke to him when he came nor did he expect it. But he caught the quick careful look of his mother’s eyes and his father’s glance. Both looked at him to see if all was well, and Lao San knew what they did not, that he was the son they loved best though most uneasily, because of his temper. In many small ways he took a child’s advantage of his two older brothers, but they allowed him, doing no more than cuff him over his shorn head if he teased them. But toward his parents he was often wilful and ready to be sulky, and as little as possible did they command him to do anything, and Ling Tan purposely let him take the buffalo to the hills that he might have the rebellious boy away from him. Thus he was spared the need of dealing with his waywardness.
All of this was because Lao San’s face was so beautiful. This third son indeed was so beautiful that his parents had from his birth prepared themselves for his death at any moment, for how could the gods not be jealous of such beauty? He had long eyes whose pupils were black as onyx under water, and the whites were clear. His face was square and his mouth full and the lips cut square and full as a god’s are. His great fault was his dreaming indolence, but they forgave him this as they forgave him everything, and it was true that in the last two years he had grown as fast as in any other four. Now he dipped up water out of a jar and into a wooden bucket, and standing just outside the court among the bamboos there he washed himself and then came in and took his place at the table.
It was a sight to make a man’s heart strong, the father thought to himself, looking at his sons. Lao Er’s place was still empty, but he would come sooner or later, and then the table would be full. Upon his knee Lao Ta held his baby son and now and again he put into the child’s little mouth, pink as a lotus bud, a morsel of rice he had chewed fine and soft. The evening air was growing cool and the lotus flowers were closing for the night. There was silence everywhere except for the sound of the loom in the weaving room, where Lao Tan’s younger daughter was still at work and would work until she was called to her meal.
The mother threw down an armful of straw for the buffalo to eat. The yellow dog came in fawning and humble in the hope of food. This dog was as bold as a wolf before strangers from whom it expected nothing, but now before its master it was mild as a kitten, and it crawled under the table to wait for scraps. Ling Tan put his feet upon it for a footstool and felt the beast’s stiff hairs against his bare skin and its body warm beneath his soles. He bent and threw down a good lump of fish in sudden kindness to this one who wa
s also of his household.
… In the fields about the house Lao Er was still searching for Jade. The sun had not yet gone down, and its long yellow rays lay like honey on the green. If she were there he could easily see her blue coat. The wheat was cut and the rice still short and there was nothing to hide her. But she was not there. Then she must be somewhere in the village. He cast his mind quickly over the places where she went—not the tea shop, because only men were there, and not to his third cousin’s house, for the son of that house was of his own age and had wanted Jade for his wife in the days when the old woman who was matchmaker for her was searching out the best husband for her. This fourth cousin had seen Jade one day as she stood at her father’s door in another village, and had loved her then. But so had Lao Er already seen her and loved her, too, and between the two young men there had grown a great anger and they hated each other, and took every excuse for quarreling. The thing came to be known in the village so that everybody kept their eyes on the two, ready to shout out and leap forward to part them if they flew at each other.
Nor would Jade say nor did she yet say which of the two she wanted. She shrugged her thin shoulders and would not speak when her mother asked her, or if she spoke she said:
“If they both have two legs and two arms and all their fingers and toes, and if they are not cross-eyed or scabby-headed, what is the difference between them?”
So her father put the whole choice upon which man’s father gave the best price for Jade and the two young men begged and harried their own fathers and threatened to kill themselves if they could not have her, and so destroyed the whole peace of the two households that Ling Tan met his third cousin one day at the tea shop and took him aside and said:
“Since I am a richer man than you, let me give you thirty silver dollars for yourself and then I beg you to tell your son that my son is to have this girl, otherwise we cannot find peace.”
The cousin was willing, for thirty dollars was as much as he could earn as a scholar in half a year and so the thing was settled and Lao Er was betrothed to Jade and as quickly as he could bring it about, he married her. But the strange thing was that he could not forgive her in the most secret part of his heart because she had not chosen him against the other, and he had not yet dared to ask her why she had not. Sometimes in the night when he lay beside her he planned that when he knew her better, when she had opened to him her heart, he would ask her:
“Why was it that you would not choose me when the choice was put to you?”
But he had not asked her yet. Though he knew her body so well, her he did not know, and so there was no peace in his love for her, and all his love was still quick and full of possible pain.
He went swiftly now toward the village and without seeming to do so, kept his eyes wide for a slender girl in a blue cotton coat and trousers, whose hair was cut short about her neck. He had fallen into a fury that day not twenty days ago when he came home and found that Jade had cut off her long black hair.
“I was hot,” she said to his angry eyes.
“Your hair was mine,” he had cried to her, “You had no right to throw it away!”
She had not answered this and then when he saw that she would not speak he cried at her again, “What have you done with the long hair you cut off?”
Still without a word she went into their room and brought out the long loose stuff. She had tied the thick end of it with a red cord, and he took it from her hand and laid it across his knees. There it was, straight and smooth and black, a part of her which she had wilfully cut off from her life. He felt the tears suddenly come to his eyes, as though for something he had possessed which had been living and now was dead.
“What shall we do with it?” he had asked in a low voice. “It cannot be thrown away.”
“Sell it,” she had said. “It will buy me a pair of earrings.”
“Do you want earrings?” he had asked in surprise. “But your ears are not pierced.”
“I can pierce them,” she had said.
“I will buy you the earrings,” he had answered her, “but not with your own hair.”
He had taken the hair then and put it into his own small pigskin trunk where he kept his best clothes and the silver neck chain he had worn as a child and one or two more of his own things. When she was old and the hair on her head was white, when he was old and had forgotten how she looked now, he would take that long hair out of the trunk and remember.
He had not yet had time to buy the earrings. The rice planting had kept him busy from dawn to dark until today. Now as he pretended to saunter through the village, his eyes sharp and his wits flying ahead of his feet, he thought that if he found her doing no naughty thing, he would go tomorrow into the city and buy those earrings, and tonight he would find out what she wanted them to be. Still he did not see her. He began to be frightened because he did not see her anywhere and his thought took hold of that young man who was not yet married to any woman, because he was still peevish at having lost the one he wanted. He went toward his cousin’s house and there was his cousin’s wife at the door. She was a large pig-shaped woman and she stood with her bowl of food held to her face and she supped out of it as though it were a trough. He would not mention the name of Jade in her presence.
“Are you eating, my sister-cousin?” he asked politely.
“Come in and eat too,” she replied, taking the bowl from her face.
“I cannot, though I thank you,” he replied. “Are you alone at home, then?”
“Your cousin my lord is eating, but your cousin my son is not home yet.”
“Ah,” Lao Er said, “where is he?”
“He went toward the city, or said he was going there when the sun hung over that willow tree. I do not know where he is now,” she answered.
She put the bowl back to her face and he went on. By now his heart was beating wildly. If Jade were with this cousin of his, he would kill them both and lay their bodies in the open street for all to see. His blood came rushing up the veins of his throat and swelled into his cheeks and eyes and his right hand twitched.
At this moment he drew near to the open land before the village tea house and here a crowd had gathered, as there often was to see some passing show of actors or jugglers or travelling merchants with foreign goods. Today it was not any of these, but a band of four or five young men and women, city people he could see at once, who were showing some magic pictures upon a sheet of white cloth they had hung between two bamboos. The pictures he did not see, for at this moment his eyes fell upon his cousin, sitting on a wooden bench where the crowd parted. He was so sure that Jade was with him somehow that he looked to see if she were at his side but she was not. For a moment he was taken aback, and all his hot blood turned cold and he felt faint with weariness and hunger. When he found her, he thought, he would beat her anyway even if she were doing no wrong, because she was not where a woman should be, at home and waiting for her husband.
At this moment the voice of a young man who had all along been speaking now came into his ears and he heard it.
“We must burn our houses and our fields, we must not leave so much as a mouthful for the enemy to keep him from starving. Are you able for this?”
No one in that crowd spoke or moved. They did not understand his meaning. They could only stare at the picture upon the white cloth. Now Lao Er looked at it, too. It was of a city somewhere of many houses, and out of the houses came great flames and black smoke. The people looked and said nothing. And then before his eyes Lao Er saw one move and leap up and it was Jade. She flung back her short hair from her face.
“We are able!” she cried.
Before all these people she cried out and he was afraid. What were these words and what did they mean? And what right had she to speak so when he was not there?
“Come home!” he shouted at her. “I am hungry!”
She turned and looked at him and seemed not to see him. But his shout had brought the crowd back to their village and to t
heir even life. They stirred and yawned, and then stretched themselves and muttered that they were hungry, too, and had forgotten it. One by one they rose and began to saunter home and Lao Er nodded to his cousin, though he was still angry because he could not find fault with him and he waited for Jade. He would not be mild with her, he thought, watching her out of the end of his eye because he was ashamed to look full at his wife in the presence of others.
“Do not forget that what I have shown you are true things!” the young man called but no one heard him. There Lao Er stood until Jade came near and then he began to walk away, seeing out of his eye’s end that she was following him. He did not speak to her until they were well away from the village and then he made his voice surly.
“Why do you shame me by showing yourself off to everybody?”
She did not answer this. He heard her steady tread in the dusty path behind him. He went on, his voice as loud as he could make it.
“I come home my belly roaring like a hungry lion,” he cried.
“Why did you not eat, then?”
He heard her voice behind him, clear and mild.
“How can I eat when you are not in your proper place?” he shouted at her without turning his head. “How can I ask where you are? I am ashamed before my own parents not to know where my wife is.”
This she did not answer at all, and at last he could not bear not to know what she was thinking, so against his own will he turned his head and met her eyes full, ready and waiting for that head of his to turn. She was laughing. The moment their eyes met the laughter burst out of her and all the strength of his anger went out of him like wind from his bowels. She took two steps forward and caught his hand and he could not pull it from her grasp though he still did not want to forgive her.
“You use me very ill,” he said, his voice now as feeble as an old man’s voice.
“Oh, you look so pale and so thin and so ill-used,” she said, her voice rich with her laughter. “Oh, you are so to be pitied, you big turnip!”
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 2