The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) Read Free Page A

hand,” she now said to soothe the old man.
    “But it is the hand I used to sow seed in the earth,” Ling Tan grumbled.
    “Therefore the more weary,” Jade said gently.
    Ling Tan gave a great sigh and took the letter in both hands and turned it slowly around and around. He would not for pride’s sake ask which was top and which bottom, and Jade would not tell him when at last he held it wrongly, after all. Why should she shame an old one? So he held the letter and stared at it carefully, imagining into the marks he saw the things which he had just heard from her lips.
    “It is strange she writes about him and they are not wed,” he said at last. “Why are they not wed?”
    “How can I tell why another woman will not wed one of your sons?” Jade said laughing.
    Ling Tan did not smile.
    “I will never see my third son again,” he said sadly. “Foreign winds and foreign waters—they are ill things.”
    “Do not allow such thoughts,” Jade replied. The child in her arms was asleep and she was thinking that she might lay him on the bed and rest her arms a while. Thus thinking she rose and tiptoed through the court where she had been sitting with the old man and so he was alone.
    For a while he continued to stare at the letter which he could not read, but at last he folded it up small and put it inside his girdle. There he would keep it until it wore into dust, as he had kept the other letters which the woman had sent, the woman whom his third son loved. Yes, he could not understand this woman who though she would not marry so fine a man as his third son yet faithfully wrote to them now and again, sending the letters by any messenger whom she could find. But nothing was usual in these years of war and men and women were the strangest of all. He sighed again and laid his head on his arms on the table. The sun came down warm into the court and all around him was still. He heard the sound of the loom again, the loom which had been silent since his third daughter Pansiao had been sent away to the inland mountains to school. They had not heard of Pansiao now for many months. He had almost forgotten how that small daughter of his looked. But he thought of her now when he heard the loom.
    He knew it was not Pansiao who now sat at the loom but the widow whom his eldest son had married. She was a good weaver, good everywhere in the house, though Ling Sao was often impatient with her because she was always anxious lest she did not please and, being too anxious, she did not please, and she would creep away to weep. Then Ling Sao cried after her angrily: “Give over weeping, poor stupid good soul! It is true you always try to please me, but I swear it would be easier if you were not always at my side, like a cat rubbing my legs and in my way. Do not try so hard, daughter-in-law, and I will like you better!”
    But this the woman could not understand. She would only roll her tearful eyes at her mother-in-law. “It seems to me I cannot try too hard to please you,” she whimpered.
    Time and again this quarrel had come between the two women until one day Ling Tan had taken it upon himself to say to Ling Sao, “Since my eldest son has found this woman for himself and likes her, leave her alone. Am I to have a miserable old age because of you and this woman? Since there is no peace in the world, can I not have it in my own house?” Ling Sao did her grumbling out of his hearing after he said this and so he had peace.
    Now the light clack of the loom beat through the warm sunshine of a mild winter’s day and carried him away from all thought and he slept.

II
    A THOUSAND AND MORE miles away from where this old man slept in his courtyard in the sun, his third son, Lao San, stood in another courtyard.
    This Lao San had in these days another name. Lao San, or Lao Three, is well enough for the name of a farmer’s son, but after the victory of Long Sands he had been made into a commander of other men, and his General, with his new