Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

“I will,” his cousin promised and rose a moment for courtesy while Ling Tan went out, but his eyes were still on what he read for he was a man who valued what was printed on a paper more than anything a living mouth could say.

  It was twilight when Ling Tan next looked out of his gate. He had eaten, and all his house had eaten and the children were in their beds, and he himself was about to go but he said to Ling Sao he would look out once more before he slept. When he opened the gate he thought he heard a moan. He listened and then he knew it was a moan, and his heart trembled with fear. He was about to shut the gate and lock it fast, not knowing whether what he heard was spirit or human, when a voice cried out faintly:

  “Cousin!”

  He threw the gate open at that and shouted for Ling Sao to bring the lamp and she came as soon as he called and they went out and there on the ground lay his third cousin’s son, that young man who had left so wilfully this morning to go to the city.

  Ling Tan would not have known him except that the young man had what none other in the village had, a red satin short coat without sleeves which he wore every day because he loved it and he had bought it in an old clothes’ shop in the city before the last new year. This red satin Ling Tan now saw, but its brightness was dulled.

  “Oh, my mother, how he is bleeding!” Ling Sao cried, and she gave the lamp to Ling Tan and was about to turn the young man over but her husband stopped her.

  “Do not touch him,” he told her, “else his parents will say we made him worse. Hold the lamp and I will run to call them.”

  He gave her the lamp back again and ran down the shadowy street to his third cousin’s house, and pounded with both hands on their locked gate and the dog inside helped him by barking and soon he heard his cousin’s wife’s voice asking who was there.

  “It is I, Ling Tan,” he called back, “and your son has come back wounded, how we do not know, but he fell at our gate because it was the first gate he reached and there he lies. We have not touched him.”

  The woman gave a great scream and called her husband, and the man came staggering out of his sleep, wrapping his coat around him, and he opened the gate, for the woman had forgotten to open it in her distress, and they all ran down the street together, the dog behind them, to where Ling Sao stood holding the lamp. By now the noise had roused Ling Tan’s sons, and there were others, too, who heard it and these came out of their houses, so that in a few minutes there was a crowd about the young man, but none touched him until his parents came. His father was frightened when he looked at him, but his mother bent and turned him over and thought him dead and then she screamed.

  There the young man’s impudent face lay, pale and quiet in the flickering lamplight.

  “What has wounded you, my son?” his mother cried in his ear, but he did not hear. “Oh, his red satin coat is spoiled and he will mind that!” she moaned, and then she struck off with her hand the dog who had followed them and now smelled the flowing blood and pressed forward eager to taste it, and the father was angry with the dog and gave him a great kick.

  “I, who feed you,” he cried to the beast, “and you would drink my own son’s blood!” And he cursed the beast.

  But moaning and cursing did not bring the young man back and at last Ling Tan said:

  “We ought to lift him to his bed and call a doctor to see how deep the wound is.”

  He said this gently and in the kindness of his heart but the mother turned on him and cursed him bitterly.

  “Yes, but it was you who sent him to the city this morning—I heard of it! He would not have gone alone, and he went out of the house without thinking of such a thing, but then you said—”

  Ling Tan burst out to defend himself then, and he looked around at his neighbors and sons and called upon them to witness for him.

  “Did I not tell my cousin’s son I would not say he was to go and did I ask him if he went of his own will?”

  “You did,” they cried in his defense, and so the woman was silenced.

  But Ling Tan forgave her, knowing it was fear made her angry, and he stooped and lifted the young man’s head and bade his cousin take his feet, and the mother held his middle and so they carried the young man home and laid him on his bed and covered him. Yet where could they get a doctor? There might only be doctors in the city, if they had not fled, and who dared to go there, seeing how this young man had come back? None dared and they all went home except Ling Tan and he stayed by the young man’s bed with his cousin and his wife.

  Now Ling Tan believed this young man was not dead, but only wounded and faint from loss of blood, for if he felt the hands and feet cold, he felt the body warm where the heart was, and so he asked his cousin for a little hot wine and he poured it into the young man’s mouth and though he heard no swallow, yet after a while when he looked the wine was gone, and so he poured more in and then that was gone. All the time he was doing this his cousin’s wife was moaning and reproaching herself and all of them, and out of her came a bitterness that Ling Tan did not know was there.

  “He has never been the same since you paid us to let your son have Jade,” she mourned. “Ever since then he has not cared whether he lived or died, and we ought not to have listened to you, and you ought not to have asked it of us and tempted us with your silver. We are poorer than you and it is hard for us to refuse silver.”

  This made him angry, for in times past he had done much for this cousin of his who read books instead of earning his own food, and many a winter Ling Tan had sent one of his sons here with a bundle of straw for fuel or a measure full of rice or a cabbage or two, and now he set down the wine cup on the table and he said:

  “Curse me if I ever give anything to anybody again, for it seems to me that the surest way to get hatred for myself is to feed the hungry and to lend to those poorer than I am! How it is you can be so surly with me because I give you something to help you, I will not ask or care.”

  This quarreling made his cousin anxious, for he did not ask where his food came from or his fuel, so long as he was left to his book, and so now he coaxed his wife, “Why do you anger a good man like this?” And he turned her anger on him, and she screamed at him that he was less than a man and she wished that she were a widow, and then she would sit and fan his grave dry night and day so that she could the sooner marry another and better man.

  All this noise woke the young man from his faint, and in the midst of the fury he opened his eyes and spoke.

  “Father!” he said.

  They all stopped at the sound of that small voice from the bed, and the moment they saw him alive all the anger went out of them.

  “Oh, my son, tell us how you were wounded!” his mother cried and she ran to his side.

  The young man tried to tell her then but they had to bend to listen and to piece together his broken words and what they heard and put together was this, that he had been caught with others and stood against a wall and shot and left for dead. But he was not dead and in the night by crawling and moving he had crept into a street and there a rich Buddhist at this last moment escaping the city in a cart had taken pity on him and put him in the cart and left him near the village. But when the young man had crawled the distance to Ling Tan’s house he lost his wits again and remembered nothing until now.

  “Why should they kill you?” Ling Tan asked astonished.

  “We ran,” the young man gasped. “So fearsome were their soldiers I ran with the others—all who run are killed—”

  The elders looked at each other and they were able to make nothing of this. Why should innocent men be killed because they were afraid?

  At this moment the first light of dawn came into the small room and the young man moaned that his breast hurt him, and that was where the wound was. Yet when they touched him he screamed with pain and lost his wits again, and so they could only cover him and let him lie.

  Thus it was when full dawn came and then Ling Tan knew that he ought to go back to his own house, and he told his cousin he would
go and return later and so he left them.

  That was a strange gray dawn, and made stranger by what Ling Tan now saw as he came toward his own house. For in the distance when he looked toward the city it seemed as though the gray land itself were moving. He stood still and stared, and then he saw that it was many people moving on foot out of the city gates toward his village. One instant he looked and then he went into his house and shut the gate and locked it.

  “Where are you?” he shouted to Ling Sao, and at the sound of his voice she ran out. She had been combing her hair, and the great twist of it was between her teeth to hold it while she fastened the red cord that held it at her neck and so she was speechless.

  In his terror Ling Tan pulled it out of her mouth.

  “The enemy is coming,” he gasped. “Bid all get up and put on their clothes and be ready for what is to come.”

  He himself ran out of the house and in doubt and yet not knowing what else to do except what they had planned, he roused the men of the village and bade the ninety-year-old to put on his best garments and his third cousin to put on his scholar’s robes and he roused the inn-keeper of the tea house and told him to get his cauldrons boiling for tea and his cakes set out on the tables, and in a very few minutes they were all standing in the street, shivering with fear in the misty chill of that wintry morning. And for some reason which Ling Tan did not know himself the tears welled into his eyes at the sight of this handful of village men in their best clothes and the bent old man at their head and all with little enemy flags in their hands going out to meet the conquerors they had never seen. His heart misgave him and yet what could he do but go with them?

  Down the road in the mists they could now see strange huge shapes.

  “Let us go,” he said, and he went slowly at the old man’s side, and they went along the cobbled road of their village and beyond the last house to where the fields lay, and they held up their little flags.

  But the strange huge shapes bore down upon them as though they were ants in the dust and to save themselves they had to step aside and let them pass. Now Ling Tan and his fellows saw these shapes were machines, and how could they speak welcome to machines? Ling Tan and his fellows could only stand aside, gaping and waiting, and the machines went through the village and on.

  Then they asked each other, “Is this the enemy?” None had seen such machines before, grinding upon their own wheels as they went. But who could answer?

  They waited a while longer in the cold cloud around them debating whether to return to their houses, when they heard the sound of tramping feet, and then they saw the dim shapes of walking men and these they knew were the real enemy. Now they gathered close together and in the road they stood waking and when the leaders of the enemy drew near, they bowed to the enemy, and the old man took off his cap and the cold wind blew on his bare skull, and he began to speak the few words of welcome he had by heart and he lifted up his old piping voice,

  “Friends and conquerors,” he began, and then his heart misgave him and he stopped. The faces of those leaders were not good. They were fierce and savage faces, and upon them now were unnatural smiles.

  When Ling Tan heard the old man fail he quickly took his place and stepped forward.

  “Sirs,” he said, “we are only farmers and a small merchant or two in a village and my cousin the scholar, and we are men of peace and reason, and we welcome law and order. Sirs, we have no weapons, but we have prepared a few cakes and some tea—”

  At this point one of the enemy shouted out:

  “Where is your inn?”

  Ling Tan scarcely knew what this enemy said, so broken and guttural were the words.

  “In the middle of our village street,” he said, “and it is a poor village for we are poor men.”

  “Lead us there,” the enemy said.

  Ling Tan’s heart misgave him more and he did not like the looks of the enemy as they came out of the mists and now close to him but what could he and the other villagers do except go on in front? Beside him the ninety-year-old hobbled as fast as he could, but it was not fast enough, for one of the enemy behind him prodded him in the back with a knife at the end of his gun and the old man cried out and then he began to sob with pain and surprise because no one in the village was ever hard with such an old man, and he turned to Ling Tan.

  “I am hurt!” he cried, piteously.

  Ling Tan turned to make protest to that enemy who had stuck the old man, but what he saw on the faces of those men behind him dried the spittle in his mouth and he went on, only putting his arm around the weeping old man until he came to his own door and then he thrust him in and told his son to go with him to care for him. So without these two they went on to the tea shop and there the keeper was ready with hot tea and cakes and his two sons had stayed to help him and the smiles were as thick as lard on their faces.

  But the enemy swelled into the tea shop like an evil horde, and they sat down at the tables. By now Ling Tan and all the villagers knew that the outlook was not good with these men their conquerors and so he and his fellows stayed near the back door to the tea shop and waited while the keeper and his two sons poured tea. As soon as the tea was in the bowls a low roar went over the enemy and Ling Tan and his fellows could understand nothing of it, until that one spoke who could speak and that one said,

  “Wine—we want wine, not tea!”

  Ling Tan and his fellows looked at each other. Where could they find wine to feed so large a company of greedy men? Wine the villagers drank sometimes at the feast of the new year, or once or twice more when they went into the city after they had sold a good harvest, but there was no wine here.

  “Alas, we have no wine,” Ling Tan faltered, and he moved nearer to that back door.

  This the enemy told the others, and the men looked darker than ever and muttered together and then that one spoke again, to Ling Tan:

  “What women have you in this village?”

  Now Ling Tan could not believe what he heard and for a moment he looked silly, thinking the man must have used one word for another.

  “Women?” he repeated.

  The man did not speak but he made an evil gesture toward himself and Ling Tan knew then that he did mean women, and now he looked at his fellows and he gasped out a lie to save them all.

  “We will go and find women,” he said, and then he and all his fellows ran out of that back gate and he stopped only long enough to tell the women in the kitchen of the inn,

  “Run—run—hide yourselves—they look for women!” and then he ran to his own house and every man with him ran to his own house to save his own.

  Inside his own gate Ling Tan drew the bar across and shouted to Ling Sao to get the household together, and he took down the old broadsword as he spoke and Ling Sao for once said nothing. She ran and called to her sons and daughters and their children, while Ling Tan stood and waited by the gate.

  In a while he heard the sound of many feet come toward his gate, and he listened to this until it seemed he could not bear it, and then he opened the gate a little to see what went on outside. Well it would have been for him if he had borne his anxiety and kept the gate locked, for at that moment when he opened it there those faces were before his eyes, angry and full of fury, and under soldiers’ caps he looked into eyes black and fierce with lust. They were like men drunk, their faces so red, and when they saw Ling Tan they plunged at him with a great shout. He stepped back and locked his gate at the same instant and the points of their guns struck into the wood. He heard his faithful dog, who had been barking and snarling at the enemy, yelp and then howl and then grow still.

  “Our good old dog is gone,” he groaned, but he could not help a beast now.

  Well he knew there behind his gate that even its heavy wood could not hold and that he must prepare for the instant when they broke through, but he had this instant between. Now he thanked his fortune that he had seen war before this and that he knew how men in battle looked. He knew too how a man embattl
ed is no longer himself but a creature with his mind gone and only the lowest part of his body left, and so his first thought was for the women in the house.

  He ran back therefore into the house while the gate held and there he found all his household gathered in the main room, the women holding their children and the men’s faces green.

  “We are lost,” his eldest son cried, but Ling Tan raised his hand for silence. Long ago he had made his plan for this hour.

  “Every one of you is to go to that little back gate that has been locked all these years, and the vines hang over it so that it is not easily seen. Go out of that gate and scatter over the land through the bamboos and behind any hillock you can find. Let each man know where his own wife and children are, but pay no heed to others, and my third son is to look after his younger sister and his mother.”

  “I will stay by you,” Ling Sao said.

  “You cannot,” he said, “I must climb the rafters and hide in the thatch.”

  “So will I,” she said.

  There was no time to deny her, and so he ran before them to the back wall and there he found the gate and he pulled aside the vines and wrenched off the rusty latch. It was such a narrow gate that he and Wu Lien saw at once Wu Lien’s mother could never be pushed through it, and so he bade her stay until the last so that the others could be saved. Then he tried to push her through and Wu Lien pulled but it was true she was too fat and there was no way to do it without cutting her and that they could not, so Ling Tan pulled her back again and he told Wu Lien to leave and he would do his best for this old soul if Wu Lien would help the others. So Ling Tan saw them gone and over the sobbing old woman he let the vines hang, and he hoped for her safety but he could stay no longer to see to it, for she was not his own mother. The strong gate was giving now, and he could tell it by the yelling triumph of the voices.

  Back in the main room he climbed upon the table and swung up to the big beam above it and behind him Ling Sao came like an old cat, and he stooped and gave her his hand to pull her when she stuck and thus they reached the roof. Into that thick thatch which his forefathers had put over this house and which once in ten years or so each in his time mended and added to, he burrowed a hole above a side beam and he and Ling Sao clung there, suffocated with dust and straw, but still able to live.