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

and so tonight, though she had listened with wonder to what her second brother had to tell, once she had laid herself down to sleep, she slept.
    And Lao Er and Jade, too, had already forgotten. For she had opened the book and by the small light of the bean-oil lamp on the table she began to read the characters slowly aloud and Lao Er listened and watched her pretty lips. It was magic, he thought, that her eyes could pick up these letters which to him were like bird marks on the paper and her eyes gave them to her voice and her voice spoke them to his ears so that he could perfectly understand them.
    He understood them and yet what filled his mind was his delight in Jade and in watching her eyelids moving up and down the page and the little finger with which she pointed at one letter and another. She read softly, singing the words out as a story-teller does, and he was suffocated with his pride and his love and had to tell her so, lest he burst himself.
    “I hope no evil lies ahead of me,” he said, “because I am so wicked I love you more than I love my parents, and if there were food enough only for them or for you, I would give it to you and let them starve, and let the gods forgive me if they can for it is the truth.”
    She looked up from her page and then her face went red and white and her voice faltered and she put the book down.
    “I cannot read when you keep watching me,” she said, and her smile trembled on her lips.
    “But since I cannot look at the book and know what it says, I must look at you,” he said.
    And she, to divert his mind from shaming her and making her shy with his love, took this moment to cry out. “Oh, and I forgot I was going to teach you to read, too,” and so she put the book on the table and made him bend over with her and repeat after her the characters at which she pointed. He was obedient and did as she said, but all the time his mind was out of his body and hovering about hers, and he learned nothing. When at last they went to bed together he had forgotten the day as though it had never been and this house in which he was born was his world.
    Of all the ones who lay in that house only Lao San, the third son, was thinking of what his brother had seen. His bed was a bamboo couch in the main room of the house because there was no room for him to have for his own, though his father promised to add a room for him and his wife when he married. Upon this couch the boy lay restlessly turning and not able to sleep, imagining to himself the young men who had destroyed that fine shop. Who were they, and who was the enemy they cried against? It came to him that there were many things in the world that he did not know, and he wondered as he often did how he could learn them if he stayed on and on in his father’s house.
    He grew tired of turning at last and he rose from his bed as he did sometimes when he could not sleep and went into the shed where the buffalo was tied. The great silent beast had lain himself down on the earth for the night and the boy pulled some straw out from under its muzzle and curled himself against the warm hairy body. This dull familiar presence calmed him and he too fell asleep.
    By the time that the late summer dusk grew into darkness the house in the midst of the fields was as silent as one of the graves of the ancestors. But it was no grave. It stood full of life, sleeping but eternal. An aged and crooked moon shone down upon the water in the fields and upon the silent house, as hundred years upon hundred years the moon had so shone, when it was young and when it was old.

III
    T HIS LING TAN WAS a man who lived his life both wide and deep, though he seldom stepped off his own land. He did not need to wander, since where he was there was enough. Thus under the skin of the land which he tilled as his fathers had before him there was the body of the earth. He did not, as some do, own only the surface of the earth. No, to his family and to him belonged the earth