Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (3 page)

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 their 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!”

He did not want her laughter and he did not know what he wanted but it was not her teasing laughter. The moon that had been a shape of white cloud was turning gold in the darkness and the fields of water were full of frogs’ voices. In his hand her hand lay like a little beating heart and he put it to his neck and held it against the hollow of his throat. He wanted some huge great thing for which he had no words. His words were always too few for his need, enough for the things of his usual life but not enough for this.

“I wish I were a man of learning,” he said thickly, “I wish I knew words.”

“Why do you want words?” she asked.

“To ease myself,” he answered, “so that I could tell you what I feel in me.”

“What do you feel?” she asked him.

“I know,” he said. “But I have not the words.”

They stood facing each other in the narrow path between the rice fields, for the moment out of sight of any house. A great willow hung its long green strands about them. Lao Er put his hands upon her shoulders and drew her slowly until she was against him. There he held her for a moment and she did not move. They stood alone in the quiet evening and closer for this moment than they had ever been.

“But I, too, am not very learned,” she said in a whisper.

“Is that why you do not often speak to me?” he asked her.

“But how can I, when you are always so silent?” she asked in return. “Two must speak, for understanding.”

He pondered this for another moment, his arms loosening their hold upon her. Were they both waiting for each other, expecting each other, and neither knew what to say until the other spoke first?

“Will you tell me everything in you if I tell you all that is in me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

His arms dropped. Without touching her he felt nearer to her than he ever had.

“Then tonight we will speak together,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Her voice was so soft that it was not like Jade’s voice, but he heard it. She put her hand into his and they walked on and came toward the house. Only when they came to the gate did she take her place behind him again.

In the court the men had finished their food and at the table his mother and his elder brother’s wife were eating and with them his younger sister.

“You were a long time gone,” his mother cried. “We could wait no longer.”

“I want no waiting,” he replied. And to his wife he said roughly so that none might think them shamefully in love, “Fetch me my food in a bowl and I will eat it where my father and brother are.”

And like any proper wife Jade filled his bowl and gave it to him before she took her place among the women. She too had forgotten what the young man had said at the temple, though while he was speaking she had thought that she could never forget it. She took up her bowl dreamily, her heart too quick for hunger. This man to whom she was married, tonight would she know what he was?

Ling Sao spoke to Jade as she rose from the table.

“Since you did not cook the meal, you may clean after it.”

Jade rose at her mother-in-law’s voice.

“I will, my mother,” she said.

So rare was it for her to rise thus, so soft her voice was, that the mother stared at her in the twilight and said nothing as she went toward the gate of the court.

“My son must have beaten her after all,” she thought, and stepped through the gate.

Outside upon the threshing floor Ling Tan sat on a bench and his sons sat near him upon the hard beaten earth. The youngest was curled on a bundle of wheat straw asleep. She stared hard at her second son. He was eating with great joy in his food. There was no sign on him of anything except joy.

“He did beat her,” she thought and was glad to think he had. The best marriage was where the man could beat the woman, and she was proud of her son.

… Who could have believed, Lao Er asked himself, that a man and a woman could come closer together through speech than through flesh? Yet so it was with them that night, with Jade, his wife, and with him.

At first he felt so strange when he lay down beside her that he was abashed. “It is only Jade,” he told himself and yet it seemed to him that she was more strange to him than she had been on their wedding night. The flesh he could see and comprehend but what was hidden behind her pretty face and her smooth body? He had never known. Now he did not want to touch her, only to listen, to hear. He waited and she lay silent.

“Are you waiting, too?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” she said.

“Who will speak first, then?”

“You,” she said. “Ask me what you will.”

What he would? There it was in his mind, and it ran out to the end of his tongue.

“Do you ever think of my cousin who wanted you, too?” He blurted these words.

“Is that what you want to know?” she cried. She sat up in bed and drew up her legs and sat on them crosswise. “Oh, you are silly! Is that what has been curdling in you? Then no— no— no— and however you ask me I will say no!”

His head swirled as though it were full of a whirlpool of water.

“Then what are you thinking all day when you go about so silent, and what do you think of at night when you do not speak all night long?” he cried.

“I think of twenty things and thirty things at a time,” she said. “My thoughts are like a chain and one is fast to the other. So, if I begin thinking of a bird, why, then, I think how it flies, and why it can lift itself above the earth and I cannot, and then I think of the foreign flying ships and how they are made and is there any magic in them or is it only that foreigners know what we do not know, and now at this moment when I think of that I think of what the young man said before the tea house, how those ships fly over the cities in the North and crush them down and how the people run and hide.”