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

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
    N OW 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.
    This he had done for years enough so that now when he came through the great gate he did not feel frightened or abashed or trip one foot over the other for staring as most countrymen did. He walked in with his head up and his face clean and a decent blue coat and trousers covering his body. He did not wear socks because it was summer but he put on a fresh pair of straw sandals that he and his brothers wove out of rice straw in the long