A House Divided Read Online Free PDF Page A

horse everywhere and lording it as all his family do. Why is he here? It must be he looks upon the land and tallies crops for his father and plans some new tax on us for war.” It came to be that whenever Yuan rode by they looked sourly at him and then turned away and spat into the dust.
    At first this scornful spitting made Yuan angry and astonished, for it was new to him to be so treated, who had never feared anyone except his father, and who had been used to servants hurrying to his bidding. But after a time he fell to thinking why it was, and how these people had been so oppressed, for so he had learned in the school of war, and then he turned good-humored again and let them spit to ease themselves.
    At last he even left his horse tied to the willow tree and walked and although it came a little hardly to him at first to use his own legs, yet in a day or two he was used to it. He put aside his usual leathern shoes and wore the straw sandals that the farmers wore, and he liked to feel beneath his feet the solid earth of path and roads, dry with the months of winter sunshine. He liked to pass a man and meet his stare as though he were any stranger and not a war lord’s son to be cursed and feared.
    In those few days Yuan learned to love his country as he never had. And being so free and lonely, his verses rose shaped and shining and ready to be written down. He had scarcely even to search out a word but only to write down what was in him. There was no book or paper in the earthen house, and only an old pen that once his grandfather had bought, perhaps, to set his mark on some purchase deed for land. Yet still the pen could be used, and with it and a broken bit of dried ink block he found Yuan brushed his verses on the whitewashed walls in the middle room, while the old tenant stared, admiring yet half fearful of the magic written unknown words. And now Yuan wrote new verses, not only of willows brushing silent pools, or of floating clouds and silver rains and falling flower petals. The new verses welled up from some deeper place within him, and they were not so smoothly written, for he told of his country and his new love of it. Where once his verses were pretty, empty shapes, like lovely bubbles on the surface of his mind, now they were not so pretty, but were filled more full of some meaning which he struggled with, not understanding wholly, coming with rougher rhythm and uneven music.
    Thus the days passed, and Yuan lived alone with his great swelling thoughts. What his future might be he did not know. No clear form of anything came to his mind to make his future plain. He was content for this time to breathe in the hard bright beauty of this northern land, glittering in the cloudless sun, its very light seeming blue, it poured down from so blue a sky. He listened to the talk and laughter of the people in the little hamlet streets; he mingled with the men who sat at wayside inns, listening, seldom speaking, as one listens to a language scarcely understood, but very sweet-sounding to the ear and heart; he rested in the peace where there was no talk of war, but only of the village gossip, what son was born, what land was sold or bought and what its price, what man or maid was to be wed, what seed due to be sown, and such good common things.
    His pleasure in all this grew greater every day, and when it grew too great, a verse came shaped into his mind, and he wrote it down also, and so was eased awhile, although here was a thing so strange it made him wonder at himself even, that while he found pleasure in these days, his verses came up out of him always not merry but tinged with deep melancholy, as though there were in him some hidden well of sadness, and he did not know why this was.
    Yet how could he live on like this, the Tiger’s only son? Everywhere the country folk were saying, “There is a strange tall black young man who wanders here and there like one witless. They say he is the son of Wang the Tiger, and nephew