Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online

slept, anxious for their elder daughter, and Ling Tan said he wished that he had given her after all to a farmer with half the promises that Wu Lien had made. But his wife would not agree to this.
    “She is no longer of our house,” she told her husband, “and what happens to her is her husband’s business now since she has given him two sons. Tomorrow if they are in trouble they will find a way to send us word and then we will see if there is need to worry.”
    He listened to this and willingly put his worry aside, and soon over these two stole the quiet of the house in which they had lived so many years and the quiet of fields they had tended so long, to which they trusted for food and for all they needed. Whatever befell, the earth which they owned was theirs and would feed them.
    And Lao Ta in his room where he lay on his bed with his wife while she suckled her child to sleep told her what he thought of the thing that had happened to his sister’s husband.
    “Such things come of foreign learning,” he told her. “These students, nowadays, they do not know the ancient righteousness and they have no measure whereby to measure themselves. This seems right to them today and that tomorrow and they do not know that one man’s mind cannot say what is the true right for another. No, in their pride of a little learning they rush out to do evil like this.”
    “We will never let a child of ours go to those schools,” his wife murmured, and fell asleep with the babe still tugging at her breast.
    “We will not,” he agreed and lay thinking further. He thought slowly and with difficulty and sweated at it as though he were plowing a rough field behind the water buffalo. At last, having made a thought, he spoke it aloud for his wife to hear. “A man should stay in his own house,” he said, “if he stays in his own house and does the work he knows how to do and cares for his own, who can destroy him? If every man so behaves himself, what enemy can prevail against the nation?”
    He waited for his wife to agree with this but first there was only silence and then came the sound of her gentle snore. He felt a little angry that his wisdom was so wasted but he was too good-hearted a man to wake her as some men would because she slept before he did, and so he let his hard thinking subside, and soon the quiet of the house stole over him too, and he slept.
    And Pansiao, who spent her days at the loom, who never went to the city, she could not imagine the thing she had heard and it was so strange it went out of her mind like a dream told. In the house she had been kept a child. She was the last born and born indeed so late that her mother had been ashamed. To conceive, to bear a child when Ling Sao was more than forty years old had made everyone who heard of it smile, and in the village the women called out to her as she grew big:
    “What vigor, old one!” and they laughed and said, “a good sow is not too old as long as she litters.”
    This shame had put a cloud upon the child, and since in the village, nothing was hidden from anyone, Pansiao knew that her birth had brought mockery upon her mother. Her very name carried the mockery, though this had not been meant. Ling Tan’s old third cousin had chosen for her the name Pansiao, or Half-Smile, a pretty name, though one too bookish for a farmer’s daughter. But the cousin could not deny himself the pleasure of such a name and Ling Tan had let it pass, thinking the matter of small account since the child was a girl. But when the villagers heard the name they put their own meaning into it. “Half-Smile—Half-Smile,” they said with laughter, and thereafter the name could not be changed.
    Now, as Pansiao grew, she had grown like her name, and she was a gentle, half-smiling, half-sad young girl, never feeling herself wholly welcome anywhere, and eager, therefore, to do all she could to win welcome. But she was often weary, not being as strong as her mother’s other children,