Pearl Buck - A House Divided

Now Yuan had run out of his father’s house in wildest anger, and this anger must cool from its very heat or he would die. And it did cool. He began to think what he could do, a lone young man, who had cut himself away from comrades and from father. The very day helped him to coolness, for the winter sunshine, which seemed so endless in the days Yuan spent in the earthen house, now was not endless. The day was turned to greyness, and the wind blew from the east, very chill and bitter, and the land through which Yuan’s horse went slowly, for the beast was wearied with the days of travel, turned grey, too, and in its greyness Yuan felt himself swallowed up and cooled. The very people on the land took on this same greyness, for they were so like the earth upon which they lived and worked that their looks changed with it and their speech and all their movements quieted. Where in the sunshine their faces were live and often merry, now under the grey sky their eyes were dull and their lips unsmiling, and their garments dun-colored and their bodies slow. The little vivid colors of the land and hills, the blue of garments, the red of a child’s coat, the crimson of a maiden’s trousers, all these hues which commonly the sun would choose out and set alive, were now subdued. And Yuan, riding now through this dun country, wondered how he could have loved it so before. He might have turned back to his old captain and the cause, except he remembered the villagers and how they had not loved him, and these people whom he passed this day seemed so sullen that he cried to himself bitterly, “And shall I go and throw my life away for them?” Yes, on this day even the land seemed to him unsmiling. And as if that were not enough, his horse began to hobble and when he descended near a certain small city that he passed, he found the beast stone-bruised and lame and useless.

Now as Yuan had stopped and bent to look at the horse’s hoof he heard a great roaring noise, and he looked up and there rushed past him a train, smoking mightily and full of haste. But still it did not pass too quickly for Yuan to see the many guests within, because he was so near and kneeling by his horse. There they sat so warm and so secure and thus went with such speed that Yuan envied them, and felt his own beast too slow and now useless and he cried to himself, and it seemed to him a quick clever thing to think, “I will sell this beast inside the city and take that train and go far away — as far as I can—”

On that night he lay at an inn, a very filthy inn it was, inside that little city, and Yuan could not sleep, the vermin crawled so on him, and he lay awake and while he lay he planned what he could do. He had some money on him, for his father always made him wear a belt of money next his body, lest he be too short sometime or other, and he had his horse to sell. But for a long time he could not think where he must go and what he must do.

Now Yuan was no common and untutored lad. He knew old books of his own people, and he knew the new books of the west, for so his tutor had taught him. From his tutor, too, he had learned to speak very well a foreign tongue, and he was not helpless and untaught as he might have been. So while he tossed his body on the hard boards of that inn bed, he asked himself what he should do with the silver that he had, and with his knowledge. To and fro in his own mind he asked himself if he had better go back to his captain. He could go and say, “I have repented. Take me back.” And if he told that he had left his father and struck down the trusty man, it would be enough, since among this band of revolutionists it was a passport if a parent were defied and always proof of loyalty, so that some of these young, both men and women, even killed their parents to show their loyalty.

But Yuan, even though he knew he would be welcome, somehow did not want to go back to that cause.

The memory of the grey day was still melancholy in him, and he thought of the dusty common people and then he did not love them. He muttered to himself, “I have never in all my life long had any pleasure. All the little joys that other young men have I have not had. My life has been filled with my duty to my father and then this cause I could not follow.” And suddenly he thought he would like some life he had not yet seen, a merrier life, a life with laughter in it. It seemed to Yuan suddenly that all his life he had been grave and without playmates, and yet there must be pleasure somewhere as well as work to do.

When he thought of play he remembered into his very early childhood, and he thought of that younger sister he once knew and how she used to laugh and patter here and there upon her little feet and how he used to laugh when he was with her. Well and why should he not seek her out again? She was his sister they were one blood. He had been so knotted into his father’s life all these long years that he had forgotten he had others too to whom he belonged.

Suddenly he saw them all in his mind — he had a score of kin folk. He might go to his uncle, Wang the Merchant. For a moment he thought it might be pleasant to be in that house again, and he saw in his memory a hearty merry face, which was his aunt’s, and he thought of his aunt and of his cousins. But then he thought willfully, no, he would not go so near his father, for his uncle surely would tell his father, and it was too near. … He would take the train and go far away. His sister was far away, very far in the coastal city. He would like to live awhile in that city and see his sister and take pleasure in the merry sights, and see all the foreign things he had heard of and never seen.

His heart hurried him. Before dawn came he rose leaping up and shouted for the servant in the inn to fetch him hot water to wash himself and he took off his clothes and shook them well to rid them of the vermin, and when the man came he cursed him for such filth and was all eagerness to be gone.

When the serving man saw Yuan’s impatience he knew him for a rich man’s son, for the poor dare not curse so easily, and he grew obsequious and made haste, and so by dawn Yuan was fed and off, leading his red horse to sell. This poor beast he sold for very little at a butcher’s shop. A moment’s pang Yuan had, it is true, for he shrank a little to think his horse must be turned into food for men, but then he hardened himself against this softness. He had no need for horses now. He was no longer a general’s son. He was himself, Wang Yuan, a young man free to go where he would and do what he liked. And that very day he mounted into the train that took him to the great coastal city.

It was a lucky thing for Yuan that he had sometimes read to his father the letters which the Tiger’s learned wife sent him from that coastal city where she had gone to live. The Tiger as he was older grew more indolent about reading anything, so that, although as a youth he had read very well, in his age he had forgotten many letters and did not read with ease. Twice a year the letters came from this lady to her lord, and she wrote a very learned sort of writing which was not easy to read, and Yuan read the letters to his father and explained them. Now remembering, he could remember where she said she lived, in what street and in what part of that great city. So when at the end of a day and a night Yuan came down off that train, having crossed a river on the way and skirted by a lake or two and passed through many mountains and through much good planted land whereon the spring wheat was sprouting, he knew where he must go. It was not very near to where he was and so he hired a ricksha to pull him there, and thus he went through the lighted city streets alone and to his own adventure, and as he went he stared about him as freely as any farmer might, since no one knew him.

Never had he been in such a city as this was. For the houses rose so high on the sides of the streets that even with all the blazing lights he could not see their tops which ended somewhere in the darkness of the sky. But at the foot of the towering houses where Yuan was it was bright enough, and the people walked as though in the light of day. He saw the people of the world here, for they were of every race and kind and color; he saw black men from India and their women wrapped about with cloth of gold and with pure white muslin and with scarlet robes to set off their dark beauty. And he saw the swift-moving shapes of white women and their men with them all dressed the same always, and all their noses long, so that Yuan looking at the men wondered how these women told their husbands from other men, they looked so much the same except some were big-bellied or hairless on their scalps or had some other such lack in beauty.