“Have you any children?”
At that the woman began to weep and she said, “I did have children, for I ever bore them easily, but I lost them all — five of them together in battle from the flying ships. Only I and my husband lived and then he lost himself, too, in a soldier’s battle, for he was taken into the army. He was a cobbler by trade and his trade kept him out on the streets and he could not stay at home and hide, as some men can. When word came down from those above that from our district a thousand men must be sent to make the army in the free land, where we lived, he was easily taken, for he was strong and his legs were hearty from his long walking with his load. He did not come home for many days and I feared he had been taken. Somehow he sent me word of where he was, and then I went near to him. But I never saw him, for there were many thousand soldiers there, and before I found him I heard he was dead.”
“What bitterness!” Ling Sao murmured and at that moment from pity she yielded to her eldest son, and took what Heaven had sent.
XX
THUS LING TAN’S HOUSE was full again, and with yet no abatement of hardship from the enemy’s rule, his life went on. So far as he could see there was no hope of abatement. He bore as all others did the cruelest taxes and the most unjust greed and every spring as far ahead as he could see there was the battle of opium to fight with the enemy. And in this battle the enemy was now the victor. Opium in these days sold in the city for twenty-one silver dollars for an ounce, and a dollar a day was enough for a man, if he did not buy food, and more and more were those who chose opium rather than food. Opium lamps and pipes were sold openly on the streets, a thing never heard of since ancient times, and the enemy put a tax on every lamp and every pipe and prospered upon the weakness of those who were desperate. But among the enemy opium was forbidden. And there were few shops for cloth or silk, for the enemy took all such goods, and all the factories for the making of silk were in enemy hands, and flour belonged to the enemy still, and fish and rice and cement.
Seeing how robbed the people were and how the enemy took away to their own country all the goods in houses and shops, and iron of every sort, even nails and locks and knives and forks and hoes and spades, and any metal thing not hidden, Ling Tan thought bitterly, many a day: “The earth is the one thing they cannot take back to that cursed country of theirs.” And yet as though the earth itself rebelled, the harvests shrank to half what they had once been.
And again he said, “This enemy, they did not declare war, but they made war upon us. Now they declare peace, but they cannot make it.”
And he hated them the more because he who all his life until now had been a proud and free man had to compel himself to silence before this enemy, and before the smallest and the weakest and the most evil of these little crooked-legged men he had to listen and to say nothing. This he could only do because there was the land and he was still faithful to it.
But there were times when his gorge rose in him and then he could not eat, and nothing made him better, not his wife’s coaxing nor the sight of grandchildren, nor anything that he had.
“If I must meet that enemy one more time upon my land it will be too much,” he told his wife, and she said nothing for once, because he could not be comforted. There was no comfort. “If I had so much as a seed of hope,” he said again, “if I saw an end, however far away, that one day we could rise up and push the enemy into the sea! But all we do is to endure, and can victory be won only by endurance?”
And again Ling Sao could answer nothing. These were the times that she dreaded, for when Ling Tan was downcast, the whole house was dark with his gloom, and even his sons could do nothing against it.
There came such a time in the late summer of that year and it was the darkest that Ling Tan had yet had, and it began on his birthday. In the old days Ling Tan’s birthday was a holiday for all the village, and he invited his friends and gave a great feast. Year after year he had looked forward to this his sixtieth birthday, for the sixtieth is the best birthday a man can have, if he is a good man and if he has sons. Had the times been right, his sons would have gathered around him and there would have been days of rejoicing. He would have had new garments and there would have been many gifts given to him, and he would have given money to all his house and all would have been gaiety and good cheer.
But how could such a thing be now? His third son was far in the free land, and his eldest son in and out of the hills. Ling Tan saw his birthday coming near and they had not even so much as a piece of meat in the house and no money wherewith to buy it. All they had must be saved for the meager food that kept them living. Besides this, the summer had been long and hot, and now near the end of it Ling Tan felt weary and old and his life was too much for him.
“I do not take joy even in my land,” he thought one day as he went out to see the rice and how thick it stood for harvest. “If the harvest is good it is a trouble to me, because it goes to feed the enemy. If it is scanty then I feel the land is angry somehow and I have not done well by it. A man can take no pleasure in anything so long as this wicked enemy crouches upon us like an evil beast.”
He wondered, for the first time, if it were well that he had chosen to remain on the land, because he had to feed the enemy year after year, and this was a very bitter thing.
“If there were a little hope somewhere in the sky,” he told his second son one day. “If we saw hope as large as a man’s hand even, raised to help us, but there is none who will help us. Everywhere in the world men think only of themselves.”
For by now even such men as he knew that none of the countries in the world had come forward to stand at their side or to give them aid in this desperate war, and he and all his fellows had heard that even in countries which called themselves friendly, men sold weapons and goods of war to the enemy for the price that they could get, and he and others like him were sore at heart because righteousness was not to be found any more among men. Each in his own way was like the other, and though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those who used it upon the innocent? Well Ling Tan knew all this, and he was weary of waiting for help. There was no help, and slowly hope went out of him, as the fifth year of war wore on toward autumn.
“All men are evil,” he told his son. “There is none under Heaven who think any more of right and wrong. When this comes about we perish.”
And he began to lose his wish for food and he worked less than he did and he had none of the old pleasure in harvest and planting that had kept him alive and young for his years.
This went on until Ling Sao grew frightened, for he was still more to her than all else besides, and she called her second son into the kitchen one day and she said, “You must think of some way to put hope into your father, for he is a man who has never before in his life given up hope.”
“You ask a very hard thing, mother,” Lao Er said sadly. “Where shall I find hope for us today? Can I buy it somewhere or find it lying on the ground to pick up like a jewel dropped? Hope must come out of what we have, or it is not hope, but a dream.”
“Then your father’s life is over,” Ling Sao said weeping. “And our long battle is lost. Now the enemy conquers us.” And she went away into her own room and closed the door and wept.