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

“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.”