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

they have given birth are in a daze at what they have done and she could think of nothing but her last child and she would sit idle staring at him and listening to him breathe while he slept and think that she was busy and too busy to tidy their room or to sew a rent in her husband’s coat or to make a shoe sole. For this the mother cursed her secretly and complained about her to her husband.
    “That Orchid,” she grumbled one night in bed, “she has this last child and now she has no time for anything else even the elder one. And if it were not for me our son himself would starve and go in rags like a beggar. She can do nothing but sit and look at the child, though he is still so small that put him anywhere and there he lies. What when he crawls and walks and what when there is a third and a fourth? Why, when I had a child I counted it nothing. Do you remember how I tended the fields and cut the wheat and harvested it and bore the second child and how I put the two of them in a tub and did my work and no ill came to them? But she—oh, the last child’s breath will stop if she does not see it come in and out, and the child might swallow a mite of dust out of a beam of sun falling upon it!”
    “There are not many women like you,” Ling Tan agreed, half asleep.
    “And Jade,” Ling Sao mourned. “What use is Jade to me? Her mind is on that book our second son brought her. Yes, when her child comes—”
    Ling Tan woke up. “Is Jade to have a child, too?”
    She pursed her lips in the dark. “Her flux has stayed itself ten days beyond its usual coming,” she said solemnly, for, being a good mother to her sons, Ling Sao knew it was her duty to question her sons’ wives of such things. “And what she will do when the child comes if she has not finished reading that book I do not know.” She went on, “She will hold it in her hand, I swear, and let the child be born anyhow. It was an evil day when a book came into this house, and there is nothing so bad for a woman as reading. I had rather she took to opium.”
    “No, not opium,” he said. “I saw that curse in my own old mother and never will an ounce of opium come into this house.”
    “Well, then, not opium,” his wife agreed. For she knew what ill had befallen this house when Ling Tan’s mother in the forty-sixth year of her age had begun to smoke opium to soften a pain she had in her womb. Food and clothing, she cared nothing if she had neither, but the opium she must have, and she lay with her eyes half shut night and day, dreaming and sleeping and waking only if they tried to cure her of the habit. Nor had they heart to try very much, for the pain grew hard and strong in her and only with opium could she draw her breath. Seven years the thing had gone on and more money had been wasted in the buying of opium than had been spent in food or clothing, and worse than that, for in those years opium was made a forbidden thing by the magistrates and if any bought or sold or used the stuff he took his life into his hands. Ling Tan’s father knew this, and so he forbade his son to buy it and he himself went to secret places to get it, telling no one, and it came to be so dangerous a thing to do that each month or so when Ling Tan’s father knew he must go yet again to buy he arranged all his affairs with his son and warned him that if he did not come back he must not go out to search for him, because he would be in prison and beyond any hope of rescue and Ling Tan must behave him as though he were dead and remember that it was his duty to live on.
    Time and again the two looked at each other knowing that it might be the last time, and not so long as he lived would Ling Tan forget that brave wrinkled face looking into his as his father risked himself yet once again for his old wife. He was glad at last when within three days a cholera carried both of them off and his mother first, so that his father could die in peace, knowing that his son had not to make the