Free Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War by Pearl S. Buck Page A

it.”
    “Harm will come of this,” Wu Lien said, groaning. For he was a merchant and twice each year he went to the coast to buy his goods and he knew the city there very well, and he could see what was ahead of him now. The students who had destroyed his goods were only the forerunners of the evil to come. He dared not buy any more such goods, and if he did not, what had he to sell in his shop that could not be bought anywhere?
    “Comfort yourself,” Ling Sao said. “The sea is very far away, and even the river is far enough. What can they do to us?”
    “They have flying ships,” he said. It made him angry that these two women would not be afraid and he wanted to make them share his own fears. So he went on to sound as fearful as he could imagine. “Those flying ships can come up from the sea in two hours and let their eggs down on us and burst our house apart into dust and what can we do against them?”
    “You shall all come to our village,” Ling Sao said stoutly, “I always did say a city is a place full of danger. I can see this little meat dumpling every day if you live in our house. … Oh, Heaven, I ought to die!” This she screamed forth suddenly because at this moment the little boy she held let out his water and she, listening to Wu Lien, had forgot to hold the cloth to him and down the water came upon her best coat. There was great commotion and her daughter leaped forward to take the child but Ling Sao would not give him up and they struggled over him.
    “No, curse me,” she said laughing, “what do I care for his little water? He is not the first child that has used me so, and it will dry in a breath or two.”
    In the midst of this commotion Wu Lien’s old mother came out from her room where she had been sleeping, and so Ling Sao must spring to her feet for that, because Wu Sao’s place was above hers, and so she gave her greeting.
    “Here I am troubling your household again,” she said loudly, “but I heard of the shop and I came to see for myself. Now I tell your son that he is not to let himself be so disturbed. A man ought to eat for his parents’ sake, and he with no father, he ought to remember you, Elder Sister, and take care of himself, because his flesh is yours and not his own.”
    Now this mother of Wu Lien was a woman so fat that she could not walk more than the three or four steps from one place to another and she was too fat to try to talk, because her voice had grown into a whisper, so she nodded and smiled and sat down. As soon as she sat down she began to cough, not as a person ought to cough, but with a deep shaking rumble that made her eyes stand out like fish bladders and her face turn purple. When this began Ling Sao’s daughter ran for red sugar and Wu Lien leaped to pour tea for his mother and the maid servant came running out of the kitchen to rub her back and her neck, and what with the child and this old woman by the time quiet was come again, that which Wu Lien was saying had been forgotten, and he did not say it again in his mother’s presence.
    Instead he excused himself, telling them that he must go into the shop, for suddenly it seemed to him in his anxiety that he could not bear the presence of women. This Wu Lien was not a stupid man. He read a newspaper once or twice a month and he went to the largest tea shop in the city and he listened to all that was said there of what happened everywhere. He knew, therefore, what it might mean if the things he had heard were true. He felt the more fearful for he himself did not hate the East-Ocean people and he saw no good in war at any time, for his business would be ruined and many others with him. Only in peace could men be prosperous, for in war all was lost. This country of his was not like some others he had heard of, where only in war was there work enough to be done. He had often sat listening in the tea shop to those who talked of things they had seen in foreign countries, and this he held was a main