Pearl Buck: A House Divided

Then being after all young, on such a morning Yuan felt suddenly that no life, even his, could be wholly evil. His heart lifted and he remembered, as he went on, looking over the land, that he always said he would like to live where trees and fields were, and with the sight and sound of water somewhere near, and he thought to himself, “Perhaps this is now what I may do. I may do what I like, seeing that no one cares.” And while he had this small new hope rising in him before he knew it words were twisting in his mind and shaping into verse and he forgot his troubles.

For Yuan in these years of his youth found in himself a turn for shaping verses, little delicate verses which he brushed upon the backs of fans and upon the whitewashed walls of rooms he lived in anywhere. His tutor had laughed at these verses always, because Wang Yuan wrote of soft things such as leaves dropping down on autumn waters, or willows newly green above a pool or peach blossoms rosy through the white spring mists or the dark rich curls of land newly ploughed, and all like gentle things. He never wrote of war or glory, as the son of a war lord should, and when his comrades pressed him to a song of revolution until he wrote it, it was too mild for their desire, because it spoke of dying rather than of victory, and Yuan had been distressed at their displeasure. He murmured, “So the rhymes came,” and he would not try again, for he had a store of stubbornness in him and much secret willfulness for all his outward quietude and seeming docility, and after this he kept his verses to himself.

Now for the first time in his life Yuan was alone and at the behest of no one, and this was wonderful to him, and the more because here he was, riding alone through such land as he loved to see. Before he knew it the edge of his melancholy was tempered. His youth came up in him and he felt his body fresh and strong and the air was good in his nostrils, very cold and clean, and soon he forgot everything except the wonder of a little verse rising shaped out of his mind. He did not hasten it. He gazed about him at the bare hills, now mounting sandy clear and sharp against the blue unspotted sky and he waited for his verse to come as clear as they, as perfect as a hill bare against an unclouded heaven.

So this sweet lonely day passed, soothing him in passing, so that he could forget love and fear and comrades and all wars. When night came he lay at a country inn, where the keeper was an old solitary man and his quiet second wife was not too young and so did not find her life dull with the old husband. Yuan was the only guest that night, and the pair served him well, and the woman gave him little loaves of bread stuffed with fragrant seasoned pork ground small. When Yuan had eaten and had supped his tea, he went to the bed spread out for him and he lay weary with good weariness, and though before he slept the memory of his father and the quarrel came stabbing once or twice, yet he could forget this, too. For before the sun had set that day his verse came clear as he had dreamed it, shaped to his wish, four perfect lines, each word a crystal, and he slept comforted.

After three such free days, each better than its yesterday, and all full of winter sunshine, dry as powdery glass upon the hills and valleys, Yuan came riding, healed and somehow hopeful, to the hamlet of his ancestors. At high morning he rode into the little street and saw its thatched earthen houses, a score or so in all, and he looked about him eagerly. About the street were the farmers and their wives and children, standing at their doorways, or squatting at their thresholds upon their heels, eating bread and gruel for their meal. To Yuan they seemed all good folk, and all his friends and he felt warmly to them. Over and over had he heard his captain cry the cause of the common people, and here they were.

But they looked back at Yuan most doubtfully and in great fearful wonder, for the truth was that although Yuan hated wars and ways of war, yet although he did not know it, still he looked a soldier. Whatever was his heart, Yuan’s father had shaped his body tall and strong and he sat his horse uprightly as a general does, and not slack and anyhow as a farmer may.

So these people now looked at Yuan doubtfully, not knowing what he was and fearful always of a stranger and his ways. The many children of the hamlet, their bits of bread clutched in their hands, ran after him to see where he was bound, and when he came to the earthen house he knew, they stood there in a circle, staring at him steadily, and gnawing at their ends of bread, and pushing each other here and there, and snuffling at their noses while they stared. When they were wearied of such staring, they ran back one by one to tell their elders that the tall black young man had come down from his high red horse before the house of Wang, and that he tied his horse to a willow tree and that he went into the house, but when he went in he stooped because he was so tall the door of that house was too low for him. And Yuan heard their shrill voices shouting these things in the street, but he cared nothing for such children’s talk. But the elders doubted him the more after they heard their children and none went near that earthen house of Wang, lest there be some evil about to come upon them from the tall black young man, who was a stranger to them.

So did Yuan enter as a stranger this house of his forefathers who lived upon the land. He went into the middle room and he stood there and he looked about him. The two old tenants heard the noise of his entering and they came in from the kitchen and when they saw him they did not know who he was and they too were afraid. Then seeing them afraid, Yuan smiled a little and he said, “You need not be afraid of me. I am son of Wang the General, called the Tiger, who is third son of my grandfather Wang Lung, who lived here once.”

This he said to reassure the old pair to show them his right to be there, but they were not reassured. They looked at each other in greater consternation and the bread they held ready in their mouths to swallow went dry and stuck in their throats like stones. Then the old woman put down upon the table the stick of bread she held and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and the old man held his jaws still and he came forward and ducked his tousled head in a bow and he said, trembling and trying to swallow down his dry bread, “Sir and Honored, what can we do to serve you, and what would you have of us?”

Then Yuan sat down on a bench and smiled a little again and shook his head and answered freely, for he remembered how he had heard these people praised and so need not fear them, “I want nothing at all except to shelter myself here awhile in this house of my fathers — perhaps I may even live here — I do not know, except I have always had the strangest longing after fields and trees and water somewhere, although I know nothing, either, of such life on the land. But it happens just now I must hide myself awhile, and I will hide here.”

This he said still to reassure them and again they were not reassured. They looked back and forth to each other and now the old man laid down his stick of bread, too, and he said earnestly, his wrinkled face anxious and his few white hairs trembling on his chin, “Sir, this is a very ill place to hide. Your house, your name, are so well known hereabouts — and, sir, forgive me that I am only a rude coarse man who does not know how even to speak before such as you — but your honored father is not loved well because he is a lord of war, and your uncles are not loved, either.” The old man paused and looked about him and then he whispered into Yuan’s very ear, “Sir, the people on the land here so hated your elder uncle that he and his lady grew afraid and with their sons they went to a coastal city to live where foreign soldiers keep the peace, and when your second uncle comes to collect the rents, he comes with a band of soldiers he has hired from the town! The times are ill, and men on the land have suffered so full their shares of wars and taxes that they are desperate. Sir, we have paid taxes ten years ahead. This is no good place for hiding for you, little general.”