“I wish I had that third son of mine here and I would jerk his ears! When did a son of mine ever go smelling around a woman when she was not his wife? If he is hungry for her, why does he not marry her? And she is worse than he is, to let him come near her, the bold daughter of a rotten mother—”
“Give over cursing, woman,” Ling Tan said. “Why is it that women will curse each other so easily?”
“Perhaps she will not marry my brother,” Lao Ta said. “You must remember, mother, that she is full of learning, and my brother does not know even his name on paper when he sees it.”
But Ling Sao flung up her head at her son. “If she has her belly full of ink, she is not the woman for him anyway,” she said, “and all the more he ought not to go near her.”
By this time they were all laughing at her and she seized one of the twins from Jade’s arms, and bore him away to comfort herself in the kitchen. For this woman could always be comforted by one of her grandsons. Her older children she could find fault with but the little ones were perfect in her eyes.
These were the small things of Ling Tan’s house, and somehow the house went on, even though the countryside was under the heavy rule of the enemy. Somehow they got enough food out of the earth for themselves, and Lao Ta and Lao Er grew clever in ways of deceiving the enemy. Since he had married the woman he found one day in his trap, Lao Ta had ceased to set traps any more, for she loved him beyond all reason, and she would not have him risk his life. So she wept until she had made him come home and live in his father’s house again, and till the fields, and be once more a decent farmer. Yet though this family seemed nothing but a common family such as in any country may be found upon the soil, they never for one moment gave up their hatred of the enemy nor their will that, when Heaven set the day, all the people, and they among them, would sweep the enemy into the sea.
To himself Ling Tan always said that the day would be that one when the men of Mei could be made so enraged that they, too, would join this war.
“On that day,” he said to his sons one night, “when we hear that the men of Mei have come into this war on our side, we shall all be given strength to rise up and fall upon the enemy and drive them out. Each man in his place will rise and fall upon the enemy next him, even though he has only his bare hands to put at the enemy’s throat, and then we shall all be free.”
It was on a cool night at the end of that month when he said this — so cool that Ling Sao had bade her two sons move the table from the court and set it inside the main room, so that they could eat their night meal in warmth. There had not yet been frost, but she lifted her head and sniffed the night air before she shut the door.
“I smell winter tonight,” she said.
“The fifth winter of this war,” Ling Tan said gravely. “But next winter we shall be free again.”
None spoke when he said this, not wanting to take away hope from him. He had come to believe too much in that day of his hope, plucking his belief out of the air, for there was still not one word of news from the outside world to tell him that the promise would be kept by the men of Mei and Ying. Even the random news they had been used to hearing from their old cousin who had lived in the city was now gone. For that old scholar had one night taken too much opium and had not waked again. The man who owned the poor room where he slept his life away found him dead the next morning, and was about to throw his frail body outside the city wall, for in these times the dead were not valuable as they once were. There were too many dead bodies in the streets each dawn, some starved and some diseased and some stabbed by who knows what dagger? Then the man saw that the dead one wore a good cotton vest under his ragged scholar’s robe, and so he thought he would take the vest off for himself, and then he found tied to it with a bit of thread a command from the dead man. “Should I be found dead,” the old scholar had written, “take my body to my wife who lives in the village of Ling outside the south wall of the city.”
This the man had done, wishing a reward for it, and Ling Tan gave it to him, be sure. But what a day that had been, when at last the cousin’s wife got back her old man! It was a day of mixed rage and sorrow, for she was so vexed that she could not mourn properly because however she scolded her old man could not hear her as he lay in the coffin Ling Tan gave him. It was Ling Sao’s own coffin, for both Ling Tan and Ling Sao had their coffins ready in an outhouse, and this had been done in the summer when Ling Tan was sixty years old. It was a comfort to them both to know that should death come down upon them, unseen, their coffins were ready and waiting for sleep.
But now Ling Sao let the cousin’s wife have hers. “I can get another the next time my sons go into the city,” she said, “and let the old scholar’s bones rest at last.”
So they did as she said, and the cousin’s wife wept and grew angry by turns. First she wept and moaned and then when she fell to thinking of those many months this old corpse had hidden himself in the city and how he had put all he earned into opium she grew angry and she stopped weeping and washed her face and combed her hair and cried out that she was glad he was dead, for he had been no use to her alive, and then she would remember that now indeed she was a widow and so she wept again, and all in all she made such commotion in the village that all were glad to have the old man under ground.
Once during the day before he was buried, Ling Tan looked down into the coffin and smiled. The old scholar, though wasted to his skeleton with opium, looked so peaceful that Ling Tan knew he was pleased as he lay there. He told Ling Sao that night, “I swear I believe the old rascal knows that he has the best of it because she cannot make him hear any more.”
Still, after the dead scholar was under ground, there was no other way of knowing what was going on beyond the seas, and Ling Tan had now only the promise to hold to, for hope.
How then could he be ready for that most evil day which came down upon them from heaven? On that day the enemy took by surprise the men of Mei. They fell upon the foreign ships as they lay side by side in a foreign harbor, and they set fire to the airplanes, resting wing to wing upon the ground. And those who had the keeping of these ships of sea and cloud were sleeping or finding their pleasure on a day when all were idle. Be sure that the enemy made known everywhere their victory. They cried it upon the streets and it was written upon the walls in great letters, and voices took it over the land faster than the winds could carry it. So the news reached the village of Ling. It was a clear cool day, such a day as in better times Ling Tan would have cried out to Ling Sao to make him noodles of white wheat flour. He had smelled the frost at the door that morning and he looked out and saw it white on the threshing ground.
“If it were the real times,” he said to her, “I would eat wheaten noodles today.”
“There is only the same millet,” she said, “but it is hot.”
So he ate his hot millet and the day went as it always did, his sons busy with their tasks, and he sitting in the sun to smoke his water pipe. Then suddenly one came running toward the house. It was a young fellow, the son of a neighbor in the next village and he came to Ling Tan first. He was weeping as he ran, and Ling Tan shouted at him.
“What now? Can there be anything more than what has happened to us already?”
“There is worse and it has happened,” the lad said, and then gasping and sobbing he told him. In the early morning of that day the enemy had fallen upon the ships and the airplanes of the people of Mei, thousands of miles across the sea, and had destroyed them utterly. The men of Mei were full of rage — but helpless.
Ling Tan sat, his water pipe in his hand and heard this black news. “I will not believe it,” he said.