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

difference, that in foreign countries war was a business, but here it had never been.
    Now, suddenly weary of all the women’s commotion in his house, he made up his mind that he would go to the tea shop for awhile, where for shame he had not been since his shop was ruined, and so he dressed himself in his room, seeing with grief how loose his trousers were around his belly and how long was the tie to his girdle. When he went out he took another way than through the room where the women sat and he went by a side street instead of the main one, and when he came to the tea shop he sat at a small side table instead of the one in the center where he usually sat with his friends. All of them, he knew, must have heard of his shop, and none had come near him, and so he did not know how he stood with them, whether he could still be called a good merchant, or whether he was a traitor. So he waited to find out what he was.
    It was not long before he heard. For a little while it seemed good to him to be back here in the place where all were men and where there were no children and women to disturb the talk. But today it was not as usual. The place, though full of men, was silent. In silence men sat and drank their tea, or if they spoke it was only to exchange a few words, and then to fall silent again. Little meat was eaten and there were no full tables of noisy sweating men gorging themselves on good foods and emptying their wine cups to each other. They were all dressed neatly and quietly and none laid aside his coat because he was hot and to let his sweat flow. Instead it seemed as though they were cold with fear.
    In his place he sat waiting to see if any would greet him. He ordered some green tea and when a careless small waiter brought it to him and wiped out the bowl with a foul black cloth he had not the courage to reprove him. Instead he blew in it and rinsed it out with the hot tea and drank a bowlful slowly, watching for an eye to catch his. If he were greeted, all would be well. If he were not, then he must know his name had been put up for a traitor. For these students had their revenge not only in destruction but they would print in newspapers and post on walls and on the city gates all those whose goods they had destroyed and call them traitors.
    At the moment that he filled his bowl for the second time he did catch the eye of a man he knew, one of his own guild, with whom he had often feasted and drunk tea in this very place. Had all been well, the man would have shouted to him and Wu Lien would have bade him come to his table. But the man’s eye slipped over him as though he were a stone.
    “I am a traitor,” Wu Lien thought heavily. So quickly had the world about him changed that what a few weeks ago was good business today was traitordom.
    The tea in his mouth changed to salt water and he put down his copper coins and got up and went away. Down the street at the same book stalls where Lao Er had bought his book he stopped and bought a newspaper, and stood there reading it. That city on the coast, he read, was set afire and in the blaze the armies now fought. He read and groaned aloud to read the name of one good shop after another gone and ruin everywhere. Why it need be so he had no idea. A bare month ago there had been a small trouble in the North. For years there had been headlong talk by students against the East-Ocean, people, but what good business man had listened to them? He and his kind prospered and once in a year or so he met an East-Ocean merchant or two who were full of courtesy and kindness, though their tongues were stiff when they spoke any language except their own, and in courtesy he had learned enough of their language to do his business with them. He had no quarrel with them then or now, and what was their quarrel with him?
    He felt so bewildered standing there that the old bookseller asked him if his belly pained him or if something were wrong with his vitals. He shook his head at that and