“My son must have beaten her after all,” she thought, and stepped through the gate.
Outside upon the threshing floor Ling Tan sat on a bench and his sons sat near him upon the hard beaten earth. The youngest was curled on a bundle of wheat straw asleep. She stared hard at her second son. He was eating with great joy in his food. There was no sign on him of anything except joy.
“He did beat her,” she thought and was glad to think he had. The best marriage was where the man could beat the woman, and she was proud of her son.
… Who could have believed, Lao Er asked himself, that a man and a woman could come closer together through speech than through flesh? Yet so it was with them that night, with Jade, his wife, and with him.
At first he felt so strange when he lay down beside her that he was abashed. “It is only Jade,” he told himself and yet it seemed to him that she was more strange to him than she had been on their wedding night. The flesh he could see and comprehend but what was hidden behind her pretty face and her smooth body? He had never known. Now he did not want to touch her, only to listen, to hear. He waited and she lay silent.
“Are you waiting, too?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” she said.
“Who will speak first, then?”
“You,” she said. “Ask me what you will.”
What he would? There it was in his mind, and it ran out to the end of his tongue.
“Do you ever think of my cousin who wanted you, too?” He blurted these words.
“Is that what you want to know?” she cried. She sat up in bed and drew up her legs and sat on them crosswise. “Oh, you are silly! Is that what has been curdling in you? Then no— no— no— and however you ask me I will say no!”
His head swirled as though it were full of a whirlpool of water.
“Then what are you thinking all day when you go about so silent, and what do you think of at night when you do not speak all night long?” he cried.
“I think of twenty things and thirty things at a time,” she said. “My thoughts are like a chain and one is fast to the other. So, if I begin thinking of a bird, why, then, I think how it flies, and why it can lift itself above the earth and I cannot, and then I think of the foreign flying ships and how they are made and is there any magic in them or is it only that foreigners know what we do not know, and now at this moment when I think of that I think of what the young man said before the tea house, how those ships fly over the cities in the North and crush them down and how the people run and hide.”
He broke this chain of her thinking. The cities of the North were far away.
“Why did you go there today?”
“I sat and sewed on your blue coat. Then I had no more thread and your mother had only white. So then I went out to buy some of the blue thread. When I went to the village there the people were.”
He broke in again.
“I wish you would not go on the street alone.”
“Why?”
“Other men will see you.”
“I do not look at them.”
“I do not want them to look at you. You are pretty and you are my wife.”
“But how can I stay always in the courtyard? These are not ancient times.”
“I wish it were those times. I would like to lock you up.”
“If you locked me up I would not eat and then I should die.”
“I would not let you die.”
She laughed. “But still these are the new times and I will come and go.”
“Does any man ever speak to you?”
“Not more than to another he knows.”
They fell silent again and then he began. “Tell me what you thought of me when you first saw me.”
She plucked at the blue and white flowered cotton cover of the bed. “The first time I saw you I cannot remember.”
“No, I mean when — after we were married.”
She turned her head away. In the moonlight he could see her forehead and small straight nose, her lips, the lower one a little behind the upper, and her full chin.
“I was glad you are taller than I am. For a woman I am too tall,” she said.
“No, you are not.”
She let him say this and did not answer.
“And then what did you think?” he asked her.
Now she hung her head. “Then I wondered what you thought about me.”
“But you knew I wanted you,” he said.
She lifted her head suddenly. “And then I wondered — if we should ever talk together. Were we to be to each other only what others married are? Yes, and would you care what I am or only that I gave you children and made your food? And was I to be yours or only belong to your house? Will you learn to read? There are things in books to know. Will you buy me a book? … There — that is my secret. Instead of the earrings, buy me a book! It is why I cut my hair off. I was going to sell it to buy a book. Then I was afraid to tell you, so I said earrings. It is a book I want.”
She leaned over him in her anxiety for him to hear her.
“A book!” he said. “But what have people like us to do with books?”
“I want only a book,” she said.
“But if you cannot read?”
“I can read,” she said.
Now if she had told him that she could fly like a bird, she could not so have astonished him.
“How can you read?” he cried. “Women like you never read!”
“I learned,” she said, “a word at a time. My father sent one of my brothers to school, and from him I learned a little every day. But I have no book of my own.”
He thought about this a moment.
“If this is what you want,” he said slowly, “I will give it to you. But I never thought to see a woman read in this house.”
So they talked on, half the night through, until they were drowsy with weariness.
“We must sleep,” he said at last. “Tomorrow’s work must be done. And if I am to go to the city, too, to buy the book—”
He stopped and held his breath. For now she curled down beside him as he spoke, and put herself close to him as she never had. It was so sweet, this movement of her own will toward him, that he could not say another word. It was the sweetest instant of his life, better by far than the first time he had taken her on his wedding night, for this was the first time she had ever come to him of her own will. Why had he been such a fool, he asked himself, as not to know before how a woman’s heart was made? But none had told him. He had stumbled upon the knowledge out of his own discontent that even marriage had not given her to him. Now he possessed her because she gave herself to him.
When he slept that night he knew as surely as though a god had been in him that out of this night she would conceive a child. Out of this night a son would be born to him.
II
NOW LAO ER HAD often bought goods for his father, because of all three sons he was the one who was most at his ease in the city. The father never entered the city gates if he could help it for he said his breath would not come in and out evenly once he was there, and his wife would not go often because she said the city people all had a stink to them. This Ling Tan himself would not wholly allow, because he said each kind of human flesh had its own smell, and then she said that if this were so, she would stay with her own kind of flesh that lived in the fields and ate its meats and vegetables fresh and not decayed from long lying in markets. The eldest son was too trusting a man for the city and he believed what city folk told him, and the youngest was too young and Ling Tan would not often allow him inside the city gates, lest he learn evil. So it came about that Lao Er was the son who did the city business, who took eggs to the corner shop at the Bridge of the South Gate, and who weighed the pig’s meat when they killed, who carried to the rice shops their surplus rice after each harvest.