But Ling Sao thought her sons good enough for any woman, and after she had turned things over in herself awhile, she motioned to her daughter to come aside and so the daughter went into the kitchen with her and the mother said:
“You are there at the heart of affairs, and you can put out ears and hands and see what the outlook is. Find out whether the woman is wed already, and if she is not—well, a man is a man, and she could look very far and not find so much of a man to look at as my son!”
“She is a very learned woman,” her daughter said doubtfully.
“What is learning in bed?” Ling Sao replied. “Who wants reading and writing there?”
At this the daughter blushed, for she had lived long enough in the city to grow more delicate than her mother, and so she did not answer either by words or laughter.
“At least I can talk with my children’s father,” she said.
Ling Sao leaned over to her and now she was very grave and she whispered, “Arrange this for your brother, child, and I swear I will forget everything that ever I had against you and your man. Whatever comes in the future, I will say your duty toward your parents is done, if you will do this one thing.”
“What I can do I will do,” her daughter said, but she was still doubtful.
Thus it was left and Ling Sao told her husband what she had done, but he shook his head and was full of dolefulness.
“Do what you can, you women,” he said. “This is beyond a man. As for you, old woman, I know your power in mating two together—you could wed an eagle to a crow, I swear—but these are eagle and tiger and the one flies in heaven and the other walks on earth.”
“Leave it in my hands,” she said stoutly.
He sighed and gave it up to her.
… Now Lao San had not gone so straight as he pretended. Well he knew his father and mother and brother and sisters were all watching him and frightened by his temper, and so he made as if to go straight to the hills. But out of their sight he turned west and went toward the Mohammedan burial ground. When he came near he crept through the long new grass in the noiseless way hillmen learn from hill tigers, and he parted the tufted grasses and peered from between them. There he saw the woman he now loved so suddenly and powerfully. She stood at her mother’s grave, her head bowed, and her cloak wrapped about her, and he liked her the better that she did not kneel.
“She is very tall,” he thought, and he liked her tall. He liked the eagle beauty of her face, and the smooth amber of her skin, and her long hands holding her cloak together.
He was not a simple man such as his eldest brother was and even the second brother was more simple than he. The blood of his ancestors had brought up in him something that was very old. Once in the long past there had been another like him who had battled against an emperor and had all but won. So now when he looked at the woman he wanted it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself and besides he felt that in some ways she was like him, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.
Thus he stood steadfastly watching her and not once did she look up or see him there. But that pleased him, too. He was young enough to think, “I do not want her to see me again until I am at my best. I will get new garments and put them on and I will buckle on my sword, and have my hair cut and oiled.”
So he stood, his eyes and mind full of her until she turned at last and with Wu Lien went toward Ling Tan’s house again. Behind her the young man gazed at her until he could not see her, and then he let the grasses come together and he made his way to the hills.
… Now Lao Er and Jade had not been there to see all that had happened, for Jade, as soon as Wu Lien had gone, had plucked her husband’s sleeve and led him down into the secret room. There she turned on him a face brimming with triumph.
“Do you see?” she asked him.
“See what?” he asked, not having knowledge of what she meant so much as the mote in a sunbeam.
“Why, that is she!” Jade cried.
“What she?” he asked again.
“Oh, you bone!” she wailed, “oh, you lump of mud under my feet! Why has heaven made even the best of men in the shape of a fool? She is the goddess, your brother’s goddess!”
His jaw fell down as he perceived her meaning. “But she is so high,” he said, “how will she ever look down on one of us? And besides, what is she to the enemy?”
Jade looked grave then. “What indeed?” she said, “I had not thought of that. You are not such a fool.”
Her woman’s mind ran along the ground like a sniffing hound. “But I doubt she cares for the enemy,” she said. “No woman thinks first of who rules and what is above, if she sees the man she wants at her side.”
“He is not at her side,” he said. “He is very far from her. And will he think her fit for him if she is with the enemy? Men are not like women there.”
“Now you are wrong,” she said. “Men think a woman so little worth, and they think themselves so strong, that it does not matter what their women are.”
He laughed. “Are you and I to quarrel because of men and women?”
But Jade would not laugh. “No, but here is a thing,” she said stubbornly.
“It is a thing which we cannot decide because a strange woman happens to look like a goddess in a temple,” he said.
So after a while they came up again, and he helped her tenderly to mount the ladder that led upward, for she expected her second child any day. When they came up Lao San had gone and they found that while they had been talking underground, here on the top of the earth what they had been saying was not possible had already taken place.
“But how bring these two together?” Jade asked.
It was the question none could answer.
… But Mayli went straight to her own rooms when she returned to the puppet palace, and she took off her cloak and folded it very carefully and she washed herself and brushed her hair, and then she sat before a small table and looked at herself long in the mirror. The morning had made her bold heart strangely soft. There was the visit to her mother’s grave, and her mind was stirred with things she could not remember, and yet she felt she did remember them. Her mother had died when she was born and yet this morning standing at that grave among the summer grasses, she felt she did remember a lovely face, wilful enough to say that she would not go with her husband, and yet so sweet that it made him glad to stay where she was. For her father had told her through her childhood of her mother, and she knew the love between them, and to her it had made love the best thing in the world to be had if it could be love like that.
Upon her softened heart was now imprinted a young man’s face. Whatever he was, ignorant or not, he was brave and exceedingly beautiful and there was power in him and she could feel it, and were these three not enough? She had never seen them put together before in one man. And yet how would it be possible for her to become a part of that house? Ling Tan’s house was more foreign to her than any foreigner’s. She had not entered one like it in her life, and there she could not live.
“We would have to go away,” she thought. “He would have to forsake them all and cleave only to me, and I would forsake all I have known and cleave only to him. Well, would we not then be equal? We could make our own world.”
But where could such a world be made? She rose, most restless, and walked about the room as though she were on wings.
In the old times, now never to return, what she dreamed would have been impossible. There would have been no place for two like them to make a world. That old world was made and shaped, fixed and firm, and they would have been outcast had they not belonged to it. But now the old world was gone, old laws were broken, old customs dead. The young could do as they liked and tradition was no more.
“We could go into the free land,” she thought,
“anywhere we liked. Why should his power not be joined to mine? What I know I would tell him. What he knows he would tell me. Oh, how sick I am of learned, smooth men! How strong his hands were! He was wounded in battle. It was victory.”
She remembered every look of his face and the proud way he walked, and all that was distasteful to her was the family from which he sprang. They were too humble for him.
“He ought to leave them,” she thought. “Men like him are born by chance into lowly families. They belong to no one.”
So she mused, and when she went down to meet her host at dinner he found her silent.
“Have I made you angry?” he urged her. He had had a morning full of suffering, for his rulers had not spared him. “Do not you be angry,” he said, trying to laugh. “I need a little comfort. I have been told that I must catch the leader of those men who murdered the whole garrison yesterday. How can I do it?”
“How can you?” she repeated coldly. She saw within her heart that bold young face. “You cannot,” she said.
… Thus its own way Heaven moves toward its end. Though Ling Tan and his wife were sleepless, and though Lao Er and Jade could see no way to bring their goddess down to earth, and though Wu Lien shook his head at what his wife told him and said the thing was impossible, and that her third brother must have drunk too much wine, and wisdom was to forget it all, yet Mayli alone, herself deciding nothing, but moving along the way of Heaven’s will, went back to Ling Tan’s house.
She waited for two days, and by then she knew that what she now felt she could not put aside. The only way to cure herself, if she could be cured, was to yield a little to her sudden love. Love she would not call it, for she was too shrewd not to see the folly in it. But at least she could go to Ling Tan’s house, and she would make no pretext. She would ask for Jade and tell Jade that she knew Pansiao and see what came of it.
So in her too fearless way, she left the puppet’s palace on the second day in the afternoon. As coolly as though there were no ruins anywhere made by the enemy and as though she saw nothing to make a young woman afraid, she hired an old horse carriage, and few there were, because by now the horses had been eaten for food, and she told the driver where she wanted to go and there she went.
Now Jade that day was not at work of any sort, for she moved too clumsily to be at ease. She was large with this child and she wondered that it could be so large, but so it was. She was sitting alone in the court with her two-year-old son when there came a strong knock at the gate. She listened and it came again. It was not the noise the enemy made with guns beating there. Ought she to open the gate? Ling Sao was in the fields that day with Ling Tan and Lao Er was away at his work. The father had told him to see whether or not his youngest brother had reached the hills safely, since he had left home in anger. So Jade, being alone with the child made her voice cracked and old and she called out. “Who is there?”
“I!” Mayli called over the gate, and it was like her to forget to say her name and to think that all would know that I.
But Jade was quick and she did know it. So she rose and opened the gate.
“Oh,” she said, and then made haste to be more courteous. “I swear I am too loutish—but I am so—I did not expect you—”
“Why should you?” Mayli said.
She came in and Jade shut the gate and barred it and Mayli sat down. She looked so full of ease and calm that no one could have known how her heart twisted and beat inside her breast, and Jade did not know. And yet she told her husband afterward, “I knew it was no common day. I felt that I was being led along a road that had an end in some destiny.”
Yet to another these would have seemed only two women talking. Jade poured tea, and took up her shy small son, and Mayli praised the boy, and drank the tea, and then she said, after such little talk:
“I could not speak as freely as I wished when I was here two days ago. I had my duty to my mother in my mind. But today I am come back to tell you that I know your husband’s sister Pansiao, and I taught her for a while.”
Here was news, and Jade could hardly take it to be true. But Mayli went on to tell her how it had been, and Jade hearing it thought now it had all come about as though by nature, and yet who could say that Heaven had not shaped it all?
“So when I came here,” Mayli said, looking about the court, “I seemed to know what I saw. She had told me everything. The child was fond of me—how do I know why? But she chattered to me, and I was glad to hear her—I have been so long away in foreign lands and she told me of my own.”
“Did she tell you of us all?” Jade asked. A thought of cunning had come into her mind, and she crept toward a certain knowledge as a cat creeps to a mouse.
“She told me of each one,” Mayli said, “so when I saw you I knew your names.”
Jade made herself very busy with her child, and lifted him upon her lap and smoothed his hair and seemed to see a mote of dust in the corner of his eye. “Did she show you a certain letter that I wrote her?” She asked this and she looked full into Mayli’s eyes, and Mayli did not turn her head.
“I saw that letter,” she said clearly, and still she did not look away.
The fearlessness in her made Jade fearless too. Indeed they were not different, these women, except in where they had spent their lives and how.
“He loved you when he first saw you,” she said.
“Some men are so,” Mayli said, and tried to smile, and wondered at how stiff her lips were.
“He is not like any other man,” Jade said. She put the child down, “I must speak when Heaven bids me speak. What shall I tell him?”
Now both were caught together as though one wave swept them upward to its crest. Mayli gazed into Jade’s long eyes and thought how beautiful they were, and Jade gazed into Mayli’s black eyes and thought how clear they were and how brave, and each admired what the other was as lesser women cannot admire others.
“How tall you are,” Jade said. “You are taller than I am.”
“I am too tall,” Mayli said, smiling at her.
“He likes women tall,” Jade said, and then she put out her hand and touched Mayli’s hand with the tips of her fingers. “What shall I tell him?” she asked again, very softly.
Beneath that strong and gentle touch Mayli moved and she turned her head away.
Then she put her hand into her bosom and took out a small piece of bright folded silk and she shook it out, and Jade saw the flag of the free people—blue and red, the sun upon it white and pure. None could have that flag here for fear of death if the enemy found it, but some had it and hid it.
“Oh,” Jade whispered, “the free flag! You are as bold as this!”
But Mayli put it in Jade’s hands.
“Tell him I go to the free lands,” she said to Jade. “Tell him that I go to Kunming.”
XIX
AFTER MAYLI HAD GONE Jade sat for a long time idle. She watched the child at her feet and felt the child stirring in her body and though she was glad for both, she knew she was wistful with envy of that free tall woman. In her bosom was the folded flag.
“If my man and I had stayed in the free lands,” she thought, “could we together not have done great things? But he chose to return into this bondage.”
And she thought how close her life was in these walls and how little time she had for anything except the work in the house and the care of her son, and how she had no time to read books any more, nor any money to buy a new book, though there were no new books. Such books as were to be bought were only lies written by the enemy. Everywhere it could now be seen that the people, taught from their ancestors to revere the very paper on which letters were printed, now burned such paper for enemy lies, and their reverence for learning was nearly gone.
“All that I do is to sit here and bear children,” she thought half sadly, and in her bosom the free flag seemed to burn.
When the others came home at noon, she had their meal hot and ready, and she had done well with the poor st
uff they had to eat now-a-days, with little salt and less oil. Though she had her great news to tell, Lao Er could see that a secret cloud hid Jade’s heart from all and he made up his mind to wait until he could be alone with her and could ask her why there was this cloud.
Meanwhile here was the news, and she told it with pleasure and while they ate they talked between themselves and turned it over and over to get all its light upon now and the future. And they looked at the flag Jade had, and they gloated on it, and yet dared not keep it here.
“Take it to the secret room,” Ling Tan told his second son. “If ever that room is found, we must die, anyway.”
So Lao Er took the flag and hid it, and he came back, and by now Ling Sao had had time to think of a thing she did not like.
“Did she mean my son was to go after her?” Ling Sao asked with some anger. “But what is that for a daughter-in-law? I never heard of a man going to find a woman. The woman must come to him.”
“Be sure that woman will never be a daughter-in-law,” Ling Tan said. He took his bowl from his face and chewed as he talked. He was hungry and though there were times in these days when he would have sold his right thumb for a piece of good meat such as he used to buy any day when he went to the city to sell his grain and his vegetables, still this food was better than none, for Jade was a clever cook.
“How can any woman be my son’s wife and not be my daughter-in-law?” Ling Sao asked, ready to oppose him.
“If he weds her, you will see, old woman,” he said, and grinned and put his bowl to his face again and supped down the noodles and wild clover that made their dinner.
“Then she is not a woman,” she said coldly, “and I doubt we have a grandchild out of her. I ever say let a woman take to running around on such big feet as she has, who has been to schools everywhere, and it is the end of the woman in her.”