“Now that is a thing I have not heard for a long time,” she said sharply, and Wang Lung saw a handsome, shrewish, high-colored face looking out at him. “Come in,” she said briskly and she opened the gates wide enough to admit him and then behind his back, while he stood astonished in the court, she barred them securely again.
The Old Lord stood there coughing and staring, a dirty grey satin robe wrapped about him; from which hung an edge of bedraggled fur. Once it had been a fine garment, as anyone could see, for the satin was still heavy and smooth, although stains and spots covered it, and it was wrinkled as though it had been used as a bedgown. Wang Lung stared back at the Old Lord, curious, yet half-afraid, for all his life he half-feared the people in the great house, and it seemed impossible that the Old Lord, of whom he had heard so much, was this old figure, no more dreadful than his old father, and indeed less so for his father was a cleanly and smiling old man, and the Old Lord, who had been fat, was now lean, and his skin hung in folds about him and he was unwashed and unshaven and his hand was yellow and trembled as he passed it over his chin and pulled at his loose old lips.
The woman was clean enough. She had a hard, sharp face, handsome with a sort of hawk’s beauty of high bridged nose and keen bright black eyes and pale skin stretched too tightly over her bones, and her cheeks and lips were red and hard. Her black hair was like a mirror for smooth shining blackness, but from her speech one could perceive she was not of the lord’s family, but a slave, sharp voiced and bitter tongued. And besides these two, the woman and the Old Lord, there was not another person in the court where before men and women and children had run to and fro on their business of caring for the great house.
“Now about money,” said the woman sharply. But Wang Lung hesitated. He could not well speak before the Old Lord and this the woman instantly perceived as she perceived everything more quickly than speech could be made about it, and she said to the old man shrilly, “Now off with you!”
And the aged lord, without a word, shambled silently away, his old velvet shoes flapping and off at his heels, coughing as he went. As for Wang Lung, left alone with this woman, he did not know what to say or do. He was stupefied with the silence everywhere. He glanced into the next court and still there was no other person, and about the court he saw heaps of refuse and filth and scattered straw and branches of bamboo trees and dried pine needles and the dead stalks of flowers, as though not for a long time had anyone taken a broom to sweep it.
“Now then, wooden head!” said the woman with exceeding sharpness, and Wang Lung jumped at the sound of her voice, so unexpected was its shrillness. “What is your business? If you have money, let me see it.”
“No,” said Wang Lung with caution, “I did not say that I had money. I have business.”
“Business means money,” returned the woman, “either money coming in or money going out, and there is no money to go out of this house.”
“Well, but I cannot speak with a woman,” objected Wang Lung mildly. He could make nothing of the situation in which he found himself, and he was still staring about him.
“Well, and why not?” retorted the woman with anger. Then she shouted at him suddenly, “Have you not heard, fool, that there is no one here?”
Wang Lung stared at her feebly, unbelieving, and the woman shouted at him again, “I and the Old Lord—there is no one else!”
“Where then?” asked Wang Lung, too much aghast to make sense in his words.
“Well, and the Old Mistress is dead,” retorted the woman. “Have you not heard in the town how bandits swept into the house and how they carried away what they would of the slaves and of the goods? And they hung the Old Lord up by his thumbs and beat him and the Old Mistress they tied in a chair and gagged her and everyone ran. But I stayed. I hid in a gong half full of water under a wooden lid. And when I came out they were gone and the Old Mistress sat dead in her chair, not from any touch they had given her but from fright. Her body was a rotten reed with the opium she smoked and she could not endure the fright.”
“And the servants and the slaves?” gasped Wang Lung. “And the gateman?”
“Oh, those,” she answered carelessly, “they were gone long ago—all those who had feet to carry them away, for there was no food and no money by the middle of the winter. Indeed,” her voice fell to a whisper, “there are many of the men servants among the bandits. I saw that dog of a gateman myself—he was leading the way, although he turned his face aside in the Old Lord’s presence, still I knew those three long hairs of his mole. And there were others, for how could any but those familiar with the great house know where jewels were hid and the secret treasure stores of things not to be sold? I would not put it beneath the old agent himself, although he would consider it beneath his dignity to appear publicly in the affair, since he is a sort of distant relative of the family.”
The woman fell silent and the silence of the courts was heavy as silence can be after life has gone. Then she said,
“But all this was not a sudden thing. All during the lifetime of the Old Lord and of his father the fall of this house has been coming. In the last generation the lords ceased to see the land and took the moneys the agents gave them and spent it carelessly as water. And in these generations the strength of the land has gone from them and bit by bit the land has begun to go also.”
“Where are the young lords?” asked Wang Lung, still staring about him, so impossible was it for him to believe these things.
“Hither and thither,” said the woman indifferently. “It is good fortune that the two girls were married away before the thing happened. The elder young lord when he heard what had befallen his father and his mother sent a messenger to take the Old Lord, his father, but I persuaded the old head not to go. I said, ‘Who will be in the courts, and it is not seemly for me, who am only a woman.’”
She pursed her narrow red lips virtuously as she spoke these words, and cast down her bold eyes, and again she said, when she had paused a little, “Besides, I have been my lord’s faithful slave for these several years and I have no other house.”
Wang Lung looked at her closely then and turned quickly away. He began to perceive what this was, a woman who clung to an old and dying man because of what last thing she might get from him. He said with contempt,
“Seeing that you are only a slave, how can I do business with you?”
At that she cried out at him, “He will do anything I tell him.”
Wang Lung pondered over this reply. Well, and there was the land. Others would buy it through this woman if he did not.
“How much land is there left?” he asked her unwillingly, and she saw instantly what his purpose was.
“If you have come to buy land,” she said quickly, “there is land to buy. He has a hundred acres to the west and to the south two hundred that he will sell. It is not all in one piece but the plots are large. It can be sold to the last acre.”
This she said so readily that Wang Lung perceived she knew everything the old man had left, even to the last foot of land. But still he was unbelieving and not willing to do business with her.
“It is not likely the Old Lord can sell all the land of his family without the agreement of his sons,” he demurred.
But the woman met his words eagerly.
“As for that, the sons have told him to sell when he can. The land is where no one of the sons wishes to live and the country is run over with bandits in these days of famine, and they have all said, ‘We cannot live in such a place. Let us sell and divide the money.’”
“But into whose hand would I put the money?” asked Wang Lung, still unbelieving.
“Into the Old Lord’s hand, and whose else?” replied the woman smoothly. But Wang Lung knew that the Old Lord’s hand opened into hers.
He would not, therefore, talk further with her, but turned away saying, “Another day—another day—” and he went to the gate and she followed him, shrieking after him into the street,
“Th
is time tomorrow—this time or this afternoon—all times are alike!”
He went down the street without answer, greatly puzzled and needing to think over what he had heard. He went into the small tea shop and ordered tea of the slave and when the boy had put it smartly before him and with an impudent gesture had caught and tossed the penny he paid for it, Wang Lung fell to musing. And the more he mused the more monstrous it seemed that the great and rich family, who all his own life and all his father’s and grandfather’s lives long had been a power and a glory in the town, were now fallen and scattered.
“It comes of their leaving the land,” he thought regretfully, and he thought of his own two sons, who were growing like young bamboo shoots in the spring, and he resolved that on this very day he would make them cease playing in the sunshine and he would set them to tasks in the field, where they would early take into their bones and their blood the feel of the soil under their feet, and the feel of the hoe hard in their hands.
Well, but all this time here were these jewels hot and heavy against his body and he was continually afraid. It seemed as though their brilliance must shine through his rags and someone cry out,
“Now here is a poor man carrying an emperor’s treasure!”
And he could not rest until they were changed into land. He watched, therefore, until the shopkeeper had a moment of idleness and he called to the man and said,
“Come and drink a bowl at my cost, and tell me the news of the town, since I have been a winter away.”
The shopkeeper was always ready for such talk, especially if he drank his own tea at another’s cost, and he sat down readily at Wang Lung’s table, a small weasel-faced man with a twisted and crossed left eye. His clothes were solid and black with grease down the front of his coat and trousers, for besides tea he sold food also, which he cooked himself, and he was fond of saying, “There is a proverb, ‘A good cook has never a clean coat,’” and so he considered himself justly and necessarily filthy. He sat down and began at once,
“Well, and beyond the starving of people, which is no news, the greatest news was the robbery at the House of Hwang.”
It was just what Wang Lung hoped to hear and the man went on to tell him of it with relish, describing how the few slaves left had screamed and how they had been carried off and how the concubines that remained had been raped and driven out and some even taken away, so that now none cared to live in that house at all. “None,” the man finished, “except the Old Lord, who is now wholly the creature of a slave called Cuckoo, who has for many years been in the Old Lord’s chamber, while others came and went, because of her cleverness.”
“And has this woman command, then?” asked Wang Lung, listening closely.
“For the time she can do anything,” replied the man. “And so for the time she closes her hand on everything that can be held and swallows all that can be swallowed. Some day, of course, when the young lords have their affairs settled in other parts they will come back and then she cannot fool them with her talk of a faithful servant to be rewarded, and out she will go. But she has her living made now, although she live to a hundred years.”
“And the land?” asked Wang Lung at last, quivering with his eagerness.
“The land?” said the man blankly. To this shopkeeper land meant nothing at all.
“Is it for sale?” said Wang Lung impatiently.
“Oh, the land!” answered the man with indifference, and then as a customer came in he rose and called as he went, “I have heard it is for sale, except the piece where the family are buried for these six generations,” and he went his way.
Then Wang Lung rose also, having heard what he came to hear, and he went out and approached again the great gates and the woman came to open to him and he stood without entering and he said to her,
“Tell me first this, will the Old Lord set his own seal to the deeds of sale?”
And the woman answered eagerly, and her eyes were fastened on his,
“He will—he will—on my life!”
Then Wang Lung said to her plainly,
“Will you sell the land for gold or for silver or for jewels?”
And her eyes glittered as she spoke and she said,
“I will sell it for jewels!”
17
NOW WANG LUNG HAD more land than a man with an ox can plough and harvest, and more harvest than one man can gather and so he built another small room to his house and he bought an ass and he said to his neighbor Ching,
“Sell me the little parcel of land that you have and leave your lonely house and come into my house and help me with my land.” And Ching did this and was glad to do it.
The heavens rained in season then; and the young rice grew and when the wheat was cut and harvested in heavy sheaves, the two men planted the young rice in the flooded fields, more rice than Wang Lung had ever planted he planted this year, for the rains came in abundance of water, so that lands that were before dry were this year fit for rice. Then when this harvest came he and Ching alone could not harvest it, so great it was, and Wang Lung hired two other men as laborers who lived in the village and they harvested it.
He remembered also the idle young lords of the fallen great house as he worked on the land he had bought from the House of Hwang, and he bade his two sons sharply each morning to come into the fields with him and he set them at what labor their small hands could do, guiding the ox and the ass, and making them, if they could accomplish no great labor, at least to know the heat of the sun on their bodies and the weariness of walking back and forth along the furrows.
But O-lan he would not allow to work in the fields for he was no longer a poor man, but a man who could hire his labor done if he would, seeing that never had the land given forth such harvests as it had this year. He was compelled to build yet another room to the house to store his harvests in, or they would not have had space to walk in the house. And he bought three pigs and a flock of fowls to feed on the grains spilled from the harvests.
Then O-lan worked in the house and made new clothes for each one and new shoes, and she made coverings of flowered cloth stuffed with warm new cotton for every bed, and when all was finished they were rich in clothing and in bedding as they had never been. Then she laid herself down upon her bed and gave birth again, although still she would have no one with her; even though she could hire whom she chose, she chose to be alone.
This time she was long at labor and when Wang Lung came home at evening he found his father standing at the door and laughing and saying,
“An egg with a double yolk this time!”
And when Wang Lung went into the inner room there was O-lan upon the bed with two newborn children, a boy and a girl as alike as two grains of rice. He laughed boisterously at what she had done and then he thought of a merry thing to say,
“So this is why you bore two jewels in your bosom!”
And he laughed again at what he had thought of to say, and O-lan, seeing how merry he was, smiled her slow, painful smile.
Wang Lung had, therefore, at this time no sorrow of any kind, unless it was this sorrow, that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age but only smiled her baby smile still when she caught her father’s glance. Whether it was the desperate first year of her life or the starving or what it was, month after month went past and Wang Lung waited for the first words to come from her lips; even for his name which the children called him, “da-da.” But no sound came, only the sweet, empty smile, and when he looked at her he groaned forth,
“Little fool—my poor little fool—”
And in his heart he cried to himself,
“If I had sold this poor mouse and they found her thus they would have killed her!”
And as if to make amends to the child he made much of her and took her into the field with him sometimes and she followed him silently about, smiling when he spoke and noticed her there.
In these parts, where Wang Lung had lived all his life and his fa
ther and his father’s father had lived upon the land, there were famines once in five years or so, or if the gods were lenient, once in seven or eight or even ten years. This was because the heavens rained too much or not at all, or because the river to the north, because of rains and winter snows in distant mountains, came swelling into the fields over the dykes which had been built by men for centuries to confine it.
Time after time men fled from the land and came back to it, but Wang Lung set himself now to build his fortunes so securely that through the bad years to come he need never leave his land again but live on the fruits of the good years, and so subsist until another year came forth. He set himself and the gods helped him and for seven years there were harvests, and every year Wang Lung and his men threshed far more than could be eaten. He hired more laborers each year for his fields until he had six men and he built a new house behind his old one, a large room behind a court and two small rooms on each side of the court beside the large room. The house he covered with tiles, but the walls were still made of the hard tamped earth from the fields, only he had them brushed with lime and they were white and clean. Into these rooms he and his family moved, and the laborers, with Ching at their head, lived in the old house in front.
By this time Wang Lung had thoroughly tried Ching, and he found the man honest and faithful, and he set Ching to be his steward over the men and over the land and he paid him well, two silver pieces a month besides his food. But with all Wang Lung’s urging Ching to eat and eat well, the man still put no flesh on his bones, remaining always a small, spare, lean man of great gravity. Nevertheless he labored gladly, pottering silently from dawn until dark, speaking in his feeble voice if there was anything to be said, but happiest and liking it best if there were nothing and he could be silent; and hour after hour he lifted his hoe and let it fall, and at dawn and sunset he would carry to the fields the buckets of water or of manure to put upon the vegetable rows.
But still Wang Lung knew that if any one of the laborers slept too long each day under the date trees or ate more than his share of the beancurd in the common dish or if any bade his wife or child come secretly at harvest time and snatch handfuls of the grain that was being beaten out under the flails, Ching would, at the end of the year when master and man feast together after the harvest, whisper to Wang Lung,