Pearl Buck: Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

So they waited until he had his breath and his daughter brought him a fresh bowl of tea and his eldest son lit his pipe for him, but the youngest son only sat there and said nothing.

At last Ling Tan was near to himself again, and drawing on his pipe he said, while the smoke puffed out of his mouth:

“This thing who is my third son — he who will not marry any woman, now he says, ‘get her for my wife.’ ” He swallowed smoke and coughed.

“What her?” Ling Sao asked and was amazed and overjoyed. Marriage talk was perfume in her nostrils and food in her belly, and especially if it were for this son.

“What her?” Ling Tan repeated. “Why, that foreigner in the cloak!”

Now they were stricken too. When Ling Tan said this none said one word, and in that silence Lao San stole a sulky look at one face and another from under his handsome brows, and the more he looked at them the angrier he grew. He flung up his head and leaped to his feet.

“Not one of you knows what I am,” he said. “To you I am a child. I am no child. Mother, I have forgotten that I ever fed at your breast. Father, I do not eat your food. As for the others, who are you? I have no parents and no brothers and no sisters. I swear myself away from this house!”

He strode toward the door, but his mother ran and hung on his coat and twisted the tail of it in her strong hand.

“Where are you going?” she screamed. “What do you do?”

He jerked away, but so strong a hand did his mother have that his coat tore and he went on with his coat hanging from his bare shoulder.

“At least let me mend the rent!” she shrieked, after him, but he would not stay.

“When you give me what I want I will come home again,” he said over his shoulder, and he strode from the gate and into the full sunlight with all its danger to him. They ran to the gate after him and saw him walking swiftly down the road toward the hills.

Then Ling Tan sat down and put his head in his hands and groaned to his wife, “How is it such a one came out of your womb?”

“How was it you put such a one in me?” she cried back.

“Out of you or me he was not born,” he said heavily. “He is born out of these times, and what will we do with him when these times are gone?”

And he sat trying to ease himself with great groans and yet feeling no easier, for he knew it was his duty as a father to see his son married, and his duty, too, to the generations before and after. But how could this marriage be made? Looking at it from all the four directions, east and west, south and north, he saw no way by which the thing could be done. How could he, a farmer and his son a farmer’s son, make proposal for such a woman? His gall was not so big, nor his liver so bitter.

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.”