Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Read Online Free PDF Page A

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