So Lao Er took the flag and hid it, and he came back, and by now Ling Sao had had time to think of a thing she did not like.
“Did she mean my son was to go after her?” Ling Sao asked with some anger. “But what is that for a daughter-in-law? I never heard of a man going to find a woman. The woman must come to him.”
“Be sure that woman will never be a daughter-in-law,” Ling Tan said. He took his bowl from his face and chewed as he talked. He was hungry and though there were times in these days when he would have sold his right thumb for a piece of good meat such as he used to buy any day when he went to the city to sell his grain and his vegetables, still this food was better than none, for Jade was a clever cook.
“How can any woman be my son’s wife and not be my daughter-in-law?” Ling Sao asked, ready to oppose him.
“If he weds her, you will see, old woman,” he said, and grinned and put his bowl to his face again and supped down the noodles and wild clover that made their dinner.
“Then she is not a woman,” she said coldly, “and I doubt we have a grandchild out of her. I ever say let a woman take to running around on such big feet as she has, who has been to schools everywhere, and it is the end of the woman in her.”
“She is woman enough to have our son swear he will have her and no other,” Ling Tan said. “There must be something female in her somewhere.”
“When did any young man ever know what he wanted?” Ling Sao said peevishly. “I wish she had never come into our gate. Some devil sent her, and he had our son here, when he ought not to have been here for once, and nothing good will come of it.”
“Give over,” Ling Tan told her. “You are only angry because you have not all your sons’ wives where you can press your thumbs on them. I tell you, there are some who can fight in the free land, and there are others like us who can fight here on our own land, and well I can see our younger son is for the free land. Let him go where he wills, then, as long as he fights the enemy.”
This was a handful of words for Ling Tan to say, and whenever he spoke gravely there were none in his house who answered him. Even his wife remembered her duty when he took this place above her, though it was always hard for her to keep silence, and be sure that in one way or another she had her way somewhere else.
“As for you, my son,” Ling Tan said to Lao Er, “take the message to your younger brother, and tell him that I have no way to follow this woman. I cannot leave my land for love or for anything. But his feet are loose and tied nowhere, and let him do what he likes. Only he is not to go away without sending us word that he does, and if he goes, he is not to stay long years and tell us nothing.”
Lao Er bowed his head and so the meal was over, and he would have lingered until Jade had washed the dishes and to follow her into their room and there ask her why she seemed sad, but well he knew he could not do this in the daytime without his mother wanting to know why he did. So he could only smile at her secretly and asked her if she felt well, or was the child beginning to come, and when she shook her head at this, he said:
“I will not go to my brother until tomorrow, and today I work with my father to finish the wheat field.”
She nodded and tried to smile, and so he left her. All that afternoon Jade was very quiet, and Ling Sao, who stayed to spin cotton thread on her spindle, let her be silent because she thought she was feeling the weight of the child in her. Cotton was hard to come by now, and Ling Sao saved any she could raise and they sold none of it, because they needed it for their own winter garments, and since another child was coming then there would be more winter garments to be made. She sat twisting her spindle and wetting thumb and finger in her mouth to make the thread smooth and firm, and now and again speaking to Jade and telling how it was when her self gave birth, and Jade listened and said little.
… In the field Ling Tan and his second son worked together. The times were somewhat better for farmers now than they had been, in this one way, that so many farmers had died or had gone to the free lands that there was not enough food for the enemy, and so less than they had the enemy took men off the land either for death or bitter labor. Yet Ling Tan kept his eyes on the road and whenever he saw the enemy, he would tell his son and Lao Er would go quickly into the house and take his wife and child down with him into that secret room until it was safe to come up again. For who could trust that enemy for anything except evil?
But the bitterness of the enemy’s rule did not abate. Of what Ling Tan took from his land he had the good of less than one third, and his taxes were grievous. He could only curse in his heart because well he knew that even the high enemy did not get the good of these taxes, but the little enemies at the bottom, the petty men. For they all knew, mouth to ear, that never had such rapacious rulers put themselves over any people. There was nothing this enemy would not do for money, and if any wished to buy or sell or smuggle goods, it could be done if money enough was put first upon the palms of the enemy. The very guns the hillmen used nowadays, that came from foreign parts, were smuggled in by little enemy men who thought only of their own gain, and were traitors even to their kind. Up the river guns could be smuggled to the army in the free land, if money were given to the many outstretched enemy hands.
All these things Ling Tan knew as every one knew, and it was so much good news. Though men might gnash their teeth for the moment, such rottenness in the enemy everywhere meant that one day they would be rotten enough to be overthrown and to be cast into the sea.
“We wait the day,” Ling Tan often said to his son. “We will hold the land against that day.”
… “It is nothing,” Jade said. She turned her head away from her husband and poured him a cup of hot water before he slept. There was not often tea in the pot now, and most of the time they drank hot water.
But he caught her wrists and took the teapot from her. “There is something,” he said. “Do you think you can draw your breath differently and I not know it?”
“You must not watch me so,” Jade said, and she tried to pull away from him, but she could not.
“I do not watch you,” he said. “I know without watching you. When you change I know from within myself.”
So coaxing her and commanding her and she biting her pretty lower lip and first laughing and then saying again it was nothing, and then putting her sleeve to her eyes to wipe her tears away, but angrily because she wept too easily now while she waited for the child, she yielded to him, and she said:
“It only came to me today — how I am no better than any farm woman, and if we had stayed in the free land, would we not have done something great, too? I could have been of more use — you and I together—”
“This is because you have seen that woman,” he said.
“Is there any sin in her or me because she makes me want to do something greater than sit behind these walls and bear children?” she asked hotly and now she did pull away from him, and he let her.
“Is it so little to you that you bear my children?” he asked.
But now she would not answer and for a while he did not speak, either, first because he was somewhat hurt by her, and second because he had not the words ready. He had always to sort the feeling out of his mind and then to put it into words for her. The feeling was there, strong and stubborn, and he knew she was wrong, but how could he tell her so and make her feel as he did? This Jade was so mixed with large and small, and he must be sure to pluck the right part in her now. But he struggled against his own simplicity.
“Had I only been a learned man!” he murmured.
He could not have spoken better, for this touched her, and she was so made that she would not hear of fault in any that was hers.