Under such cruelty the temper of the people could not but change. In the old days when men had been free, the very faces of men and women had been open and free and laughter was ready and quick and voices were merry and there was loud cheerful talking and cursing in every house, and none had need to hide anything from anyone. But now the villages were silent, and the faces of the people in the whole countryside grew grim and hard, because of the hardships of their life under this enemy and the bitterness of their hatred which they could not vent except by secret killing. This secret anger and this constant search for ways to kill could not but change men’s very hearts, and Ling Tan felt this change even in himself.
This enemy having always burned wood and wood only to cook their food, they knew no other fuel and so they cut down trees and they took out beams from people’s houses and lifted gates from their hinges, and whenever there was a need for wood they went out and took it where they saw it.
And they felled with all other trees in that spring the great old willow tree near Ling Tan’s house under which Lao Er and Jade had used to meet in the first year of their marriage. When Lao Er came and saw the huge beheaded stump he felt sorrow and he went back and said to Jade:
“They have cut down our tree, my heart.”
And she said sadly, “Were there once such peaceful days that we could meet beneath a tree?”
Now there chanced to come to Ling Tan’s village one day in the first month of the summer, a band of the enemy looking for wood. They were a band of some eight or nine men, but Ling Tan’s sharp eye, veiled with pretended dullness, saw that there were only five with guns and the others had no weapons. The villagers came to their doors as they always did, and their old women or their old men stood ready inside to hand them their weapons if Ling Tan gave the sign. This day, after considering the enemy, Ling Tan did give the sign, and in one body the villagers sprang out and fell upon the enemy and killed them all except one who was wounded by Ling Tan’s four-muzzled gun. He was able to crawl away into the bamboos at the south of Ling Tan’s own house. Here Ling Tan followed him, and the man rose on his hands and knees like a dog, and he turned a beseeching face to Ling Tan and in language that Ling Tan could understand he begged for his life. He was a man near to Ling Tan’s age and he said, gasping, “Let me live, I beg you, let me live! I have a wife and children. See, here they are!” He tried to find something in his bosom and could not.
But Ling Tan reached into the man’s own belt and took out a short knife he carried and without waiting a moment or indeed taking thought more than he could have for a snake or a fox he thrust it into the man’s belly. The man turned a dark sad look on him and died.
Then Ling Tan, who had killed an enemy three times before this, stood looking down on the man’s face and he thought:
“He has not an evil face, this devil.” He thought of what the man had told him, and the stain of his blood had not yet reached his bosom, and Ling Tan stooped and put his hand into the man’s pocket and took out a small silk case. He opened it and there were the pictures of a pretty woman and four children between eight and fourteen years of age. Ling Tan stared at them for a while and thought how they would never see again the man to whom they belonged.
At this moment Ling Tan knew how changed he too was, for he could think about this and could look at these faces and feel no sorrow. There was neither sorrow nor joy in him. What he had done he had done and he did not wish it undone, and if the chance came to him he would take it again tomorrow.
He had once been so soft at heart that he did not want to see fowls killed and Ling Sao had always to wring their necks behind the house where he could not see. “I do not like to kill,” he thought now, “and even today I would not kill for pleasure. But how is it I am able to kill at all?”
He went back to his house, pausing only to tell the villagers who were burying the dead that there was a dead body in the bamboos, for it was needful always to bury quickly lest these bodies be discovered. With the silk case in his hand he went into his house and put the case into his room. Yes, he was changed. Tonight he would eat as well as ever, and it would be nothing to him that because of him a man for whom a woman and children waited somewhere was now buried in the earth. There had been others, and the people in the village and he among them had often made jokes about these dead men and how they enriched the soil or poisoned it, and had wondered whether or not the same crops would come up next year. They were all changed. Before the enemy came it was never heard of that anyone was killed in this village, except perhaps a girl child too many and then only when it was new born and had not drawn the breath of life. Now they killed the enemy like lice in winter coats and thought no more of it.
“When the devils are gone can we get our old selves back?” Ling Tan asked himself and could not answer. He began to think of each one in his house, and he thought of Ling Sao who with all the other men and women ran out with her spade and her hoe and dug the ground to bury the enemy in, and came back as though they had buried offal, and then went into the kitchen or took up the child. He thought of Jade who held a gun and fired it from a doorway as cleverly as her husband did, and then nursed her son, and what did that child drink into himself with her milk? But of them all, none were so changed as he and his three sons were. For Ling Tan knew that women are more able to kill and do hard deeds than men are. They shed their blood each month, and they pour it out when they give birth, and so they are not afraid of blood. But when a man’s blood flows, he knows his life goes out with it, and so he is more squeamish than a woman is and to learn to shed blood easily moves him and stirs his being and changes him.
Thus it was with Ling Tan’s eldest son. He had been a simple tender-hearted man, and at first when he had to kill he went against his nature, and then when he did kill his nature was changed. Now Ling Tan seeing his eldest son come and go from his house to the hills saw a man who had been laughing and child-like even when he had children of his own, grow into a man who laughed no more, but went about his daily work of death as easily as once he had tilled the land.
This eldest son laid a trap so well that none could tell there was a pit under the dust. He did the thing over and over on many roadsides, and he went to his traps night and morning. If an innocent man were there he pulled him out and let him go free but if it were an enemy he thrust his knife into him as easily as though he had caught a little fox in his trap. He would not waste a bullet on an enemy who had no gun, and he put his knife into him where the heart lay and then tossed the man into a thicket and laid the trap fresh again. Ling Tan saw this eldest son, one day when he was home and eating his food, get up quickly from the table and go out. There was a solitary enemy at the gate who had come to write something down on his little book, and the eldest son killed him and then came back to his meal.
“Do you not even wash your hands?” Ling Tan asked in a wonder. “Why should I?” his son answered simply, “I did not touch him—I only pushed him with my foot into the bamboo thicket.”
In this same fearful simpleness he ate his food heartily and only when he had finished did he bury the enemy he had hidden in the thicket. But Ling Tan could not eat his own meal then with heartiness, not because any had been killed, but because of the change in his son.
“Can he change back?” Ling Tan asked himself. “When peace comes, will my son be gentle again as he once was?”
Yet nothing was so fearful to Ling Tan as the joy of his younger son in these days whenever he killed an enemy. This son, only now a young man, had come out of his dreaming silence, and he grew into a beauty more terrible with every day. He was far taller than most men are and his face was such that man and woman turned to look at it, and he went disguised except among his own because his was a face not to be forgotten. His brow was square and his eyebrows were black and clear, and his eyes shone with his will. His nose was straight and high and his lips still fresh as a child’s and yet everything he had was bigger than another man had. He had known no women bu
t they looked at him and yearned for him, though he turned his head away from them. For what the enemy had done to this son was to turn his being away from nature, and all that passion which he could have put into loving a woman he put now into one deep will, and it was the will to kill, and it became his joy to kill.
Now Ling Tan saw before his own eyes that this son had become the sort of man he feared and hated most, a man who loved to make war and found it his pleasure and his life. There was no way to hide this knowledge that the youngest son was full of zest for war and that he liked everything that had to do with war. The men in the hills knew it and he had easily risen to be a leader of a division of them and he, so much younger than them all, devised schemes and plans as though he were playing a game. He became a master of ambush and secret attack, and he was the boldest of all the hillmen of that region, and the enemy came to know when an attack was his rather than another’s, because the plan was so masterly and the escape difficult, though who he was they did not know.
This youngest son did not often come home, either, but when he came it was always to tell of some success he had had, and he told of it, laughing and proud, and he grew vain of his success and his luck, and he came to believe that luck was his because he had some favor of Heaven. He would boast, “Heaven chose me to that work,” or he said, “To that place Heaven led me” or he said “Heaven put power in my hand,” until one day Ling Tan burst out, “Do not say Heaven this and Heaven that! I tell you what happens on earth now is not the will of Heaven. It is not Heaven’s will that men kill each other, for Heaven created us. If we must kill, then let us not say it is Heaven who bids it.” This he said as a father may speak to a son, and he was not pleased when he saw his handsome son lift his lip at him and sneer at him and say, “This is old doctrine and by such doctrine we are come to the place where we now are. We have lain dead with our ancestors instead of living in the world and while we slept others prepared weapons and came to attack us. We who are young know better!”
Now this was such impudence as Ling Tan could not bear and he let fly his right hand and slapped his son full on his red mouth. “Talk to me like that!” he roared at him. “By the doctrines of our ancestors we have lived for thousands of years and longer than any people on this earth! By peace men live, but by war they die, and when men live the nation lives and when men die the nation dies!”
But Ling Tan did not know this son of his now. For the son stepped forward and raised his hand against his father, and he said in a bitter voice, “These are other times! You may not strike me! I can kill you as well as another!”
This Ling Tan heard with his own ears, and his hands fell limp at his side. He stared at that handsome angry face which he himself had begotten and at last he turned away and sat down and hid his own face with his hand.
“I think you can kill me,” he whispered. “I think you can kill anyone now.”
The young man did not answer but he did not change his proud and sullen look. He left the house and went away and Ling Tan did not see him for many days.
They were not good days for Ling Tan and the nights were sleepless and he thought to himself, “Is this not the end of our people when we become like other war-like people in the world?” And he wished that this younger son of his would die rather than live beyond this war.
“A man who kills because he loves to kill ought to die for the good of the people, though he is my own son,” Ling Tan thought heavily. “Such men are always tyrants and we who are the people are ever at their mercy.”
“I do feel our youngest son is dead,” he told Ling Sao one night. “He is so changed that I feel that tender boy we had is now no more—he who retched with horror when he saw the dead, even!”
He had thought that she would not know what he meant and he was surprised when he heard her sigh into the darkness.
“Are we not all changed?” she asked.
“Are you changed?” he asked in his surprise.
“Am I not?” she replied. “Can I ever go back to the old ways? Even when I hold the child on my knee I do not forget what we have done and must do.”
“Can we do differently?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He pondered a while and then he said, “And yet in these days we must remember that peace is good. The young cannot remember, and it is we who must remember and teach them again that peace is man’s great food.”
“If they can be taught anything except what they have now learned,” she said sadly. “I wish it were not so easy to kill people! Our sons grow used to this swift and easy way of ending all. I sometimes think that if you and I oppose them, old man, they will kill us as easily, if they have no other enemy, or they will fall upon each other.”
He could not answer this, but he lay sleepless long after that and so did she, for he did not hear her steady snore that always told him when she slept. And he made up his mind then that though he would oppress the enemy as bitterly as ever, he would not let it be his life. Each day, whatever he did, he would take a little time to remember what peace was, and what the life here in this house once had been.
And the more he remembered the more he knew that for him to kill a man was evil.
“Let others kill,” he thought. “I will kill no more.”
Thereafter he reasoned to himself that in his own way he served, because he kept alive in himself the knowledge that peace was right. Without excuse he gave no more the sign of death in his own village, and if any wondered, he let them wonder, and he made amends by putting poisons in his pond and killing all the fish so that the enemy gained nothing from it, and when the rice was ready for harvest, he threshed by night inside the court and hid more than half of what he had, and when that crop was reaped, what the enemy took was scarcely worth their fetching, and to their anger he gave only silence and he made silence his weapon.
… But Ling Tan’s second son was not like the other two. He killed when he must, but not because it was the easiest thing as the eldest son did, nor because it was his pleasure as it was the third son’s pleasure. This second son laid his schemes far and wide, and if in carrying them through he had to kill, he killed, but he thought of the end and not of the moment. And in this scheming no woman could have helped him more than Jade did.
“We ought to use Wu Lien as a gate into the enemy’s fortress,” she told Lao one day. “It is idle to be angry and hate such persons. They are not to be loved or hated, but only to be used. But how can we do it?”
“You speak wisely,” Lao Er said.
At this moment they were in the secret room and they oiled and cleaned the weapons that were hid there, for word had come from the men in the hills that a sortie would be made some time within the next three days upon an enemy garrison in a certain town in the region, and the weapons here were to be ready.
“How can we seem friends with them again?” Jade mused. As she spoke she peered into the bright barrel of the gun she held. It was a new gun taken not long ago from some enemy and placed here with the others. She put a rod into it and moved it slowly up and down. Upon the beaten earth of the floor her son sat playing with some empty cartridges. They made good toys, safe and clean to bite upon. One little empty shell he loved especially because it was slender and fitted into his gums, and upon the brass were the marks of his first teeth. Jade watched where he dropped it, because when he was tired of it she planned to put it in a box she had of his first things, his little first shoes that she had made, with tiger faces on them, and his baby cap with Buddhas sewed upon it, and all those things that mothers love to keep.
Now though these two did not dream of it, Wu Lien knew of their hiding in the farmhouse. For he had ears and eyes in the village, and who could this be but that one who was jealous of Jade and her little son? The third cousin’s wife knew, as all the village did, that Wu Lien and his wife had come to Ling Tan’s house rich and well fed. And so one day she took some fresh fish she had caught and with the pretext that she must turn them over to t
he enemy since fish was forbidden for others to eat, she went to the house where Wu Lien lived. There she gave his name to the soldier at the gate and the soldier let her in, and with her fish still wrapped in lotus leaves she came easily into Wu Lien’s very presence as his wife’s kinswoman.
He greeted her with courtesy as he greeted all and bade her sit, and sent for his wife, and to these two the cousin’s wife, pretending only old friendship, told of Ling Tan and his sons.
“Your brothers are well,” she told Wu Lien’s wife, “I saw the second one not many days ago.”
“My second brother!” that one cried, “and is he here?”
“Yes, and Jade, too, and they have a fine child. Still I would not wish him mine, that child, for he is marked for an early death. Death sits on his eyebrows, I say whenever I look at him.”
She sighed and cast up her eyes and marked the secret look that passed between Wu Lien and his wife. So she went on, “And your other two brothers are very well, cousin,” she said, “and I see them sometimes when they come in from the hills.”
“Do they live in the hills?” Ling Tan’s eldest daughter cried.
“Yes, they live there now,” the cousin’s wife said. She meditated whether or not she ought to tell of the secret room under Ling Tan’s house and how from that fortress the men went out to make their secret attacks. But after she had thought a minute she decided against it. “I ought not to tell everything at once,” she thought. “I had better keep something in my belly for the future, lest I need it.”
So she smiled, and then she sighed and said, “You have heard doubtless that my own son died. Yes, the enemy struck him and he was lost. Now I have no one. He was doing no evil, either. He had only come to the city to look and see what went on, and he had no weapon in his hand. I always said that if your father had not put the notion into his belly he would never have come. Yes, when I see Jade I know that all our evil came from the day your father bought Jade from my son. Because we are poor we lost all. But that is what it is to be so poor.” She wiped her eyes, and Wu Lien coughed and tried to comfort her.