There was no correction that could be made of the lad at all, for if his father said to him with anything beyond coaxing, “Now eat of the good meat and rice,” the lad turned stubborn and melancholy, and if Wang Lung was angry at all, he burst into tears and fled from the room.
Wang Lung was overcome with surprise and he could make nothing of it, so that he went after the lad and he said gently as he was able,
“I am your father and now tell me what is in your heart.” But the lad did nothing except sob and shake his head violently.
Moreover, he took a dislike to his old teacher and would not in the mornings rise out of his bed to go to school unless Wang Lung bawled at him or even beat him, and then he went sullenly and sometimes he spent whole days idling about the streets of the town, and Wang Lung only knew it at night, when the younger boy said spitefully,
“Elder Brother was not in school today.”
Wang Lung was angry at his eldest son then and he shouted at him,
“And am I to spend good silver for nothing?”
And in his anger he fell upon the boy with a bamboo and beat him until O-lan, the boy’s mother, heard it and rushed in from the kitchen and stood between her son and his father so that the blows rained upon her in spite of Wang Lung’s turning this way and that to get at the boy. Now the strange thing was that whereas the boy might burst into weeping at a chance rebuke, he stood these beatings under the bamboo without a sound, his face carven and pale as an image. And Wang Lung could make nothing of it, although he thought of it night and day.
He thought of it one evening thus after he had eaten his night’s food, because on that day he had beaten his eldest son for not going to the school, and while he thought, O-lan came into the room. She came in silently and she stood before Wang Lung and he saw she had that which she wished to say. So he said,
“Say on. What is it, mother of my son?”
And she said, “It is useless for you to beat the lad as you do. I have seen this thing come upon the young lords in the courts of the great house, and it came on them melancholy, and when it came the Old Lord found slaves for them if they had not found any for themselves and the thing passed easily.”
“Now and it need not be so,” answered Wang Lung in argument. “When I was a lad I had no such melancholy and no such weepings and tempers, and no slaves, either.”
O-lan waited and then she answered slowly, “I have not indeed seen it thus except with young lords. You worked on the land. But he is like a young lord and he is idle in the house.”
Wang Lung was surprised, after he had pondered a while, for he saw truth in what she said. It was true that when he himself was a lad there was no time for melancholy, for he had to be up at dawn for the ox and out with the plow and the hoe and at harvest he must needs work until his back broke, and if he wept he could weep for no one heard him, and he could not run away as his son ran away from school, for if he did there was nothing for him to eat on return, and so he was compelled to labor. He remembered all this and he said to himself,
“But my son is not thus. He is more delicate than I was, and his father is rich and mine was poor, and there is no need for his labor, for I have labor in my fields, and besides, one cannot take a scholar such as my son is and set him to the plow.”
And he was secretly proud that he had a son like this and so he said to O-lan,
“Well, and if he is like a young lord it is another matter. But I cannot buy a slave for him. I will betroth him and we will marry him early, and there is that to be done.”
Then he rose and went in to the inner court.
23
NOW LOTUS, SEEING WANG Lung distraught in her presence, and thinking of things other than her beauty, pouted and said,
“If I had known that in a short year you could look at me and not see me, I would have stayed in the tea house.” And she turned her head away as she spoke and looked at him out of the corner of her eyes so that he laughed and seized her hand and he put it against his face and smelled of its fragrance and he answered,
“Well, and a man cannot always think of the jewel he has sewn on his coat, but if it were lost he could not bear it. These days I think of my eldest son and of how his blood is restless with desire and he must be wed and I do not know how to find the one he should wed. I am not willing that he marry any of the daughters of the village farmers, nor is it meet, seeing that we bear the common name of Wang. Yet I do not know one in the town well enough to say to him, ‘Here is my son and there is your daughter,’ and I am loath to go to a professional matchmaker, lest there be some bargain she has made with a man who has a daughter deformed or idiot.”
Now Lotus, since the eldest son had grown tall and graceful with young manhood, looked on the lad with favor and she was diverted with what Wang Lung said to her and she replied, musing,
“There was a man who used to come in to me at the great tea house, and he often spoke of his daughter, because he said she was such an one as I, small and fine, but still only a child, and he said, ‘And I love you with a strange unease as though you were my daughter; you are too like her, and it troubles me for it is not lawful,’ and for this reason, although he loved me best, he went to a great red girl called Pomegranate Flower.”
“What sort of man was this?” asked Wang Lung.
“He was a good man and his silver was ready and he did not promise without paying. We all wished him well, for he was not begrudging, and if a girl was weary sometimes he did not bawl out as some did that he had been cheated, but he always said courteously as a prince might, or some might from a learned and noble house, ‘Well, and here is the silver, and rest, my child, until love blooms again.’ He spoke very prettily to us.” And Lotus mused until Wang Lung said hastily to waken her, for he did not like her to think on her old life,
“What was his business, then, with all this silver?”
And she answered,
“Now and I do not know but I think he was master of a grain market, but I will ask Cuckoo who knows everything about men and their money.”
Then she clapped her hands and Cuckoo ran in from the kitchen, her high cheeks and nose flushed with the fire, and Lotus asked her,
“Who was that great, large, goodly man who came to me and then to Pomegranate Flower, because I was like his little daughter, so that it troubled him, although he ever loved me best?”
And Cuckoo answered at once, “Ah, and that was Liu, the grain dealer. Ah, he was a good man! He left silver in my palm whenever he saw me.”
“Where is his market?” asked Wang Lung, although idly, because it was woman’s talk and likely to come to nothing.
“In the street of the Stone Bridge,” said Cuckoo.
Then before she finished the words Wang Lung struck his hands together in delight and he said,
“Now then, that is where I sell my grain, and it is a propitious thing and surely it can be done,” and for the first time his interest was awake, because it seemed to him a lucky thing to wed his son to the daughter of the man who bought his grain.
When there was a thing to be done, Cuckoo smelled the money in it as a rat smells tallow, and she wiped her hands upon her apron and she said quickly,
“I am ready to serve the master.”
Wang Lung was doubtful, and doubting, he looked at her crafty face, but Lotus said gaily,
“And that is true, and Cuckoo shall go and ask the man Liu, and he knows her well and the thing can be done, for Cuckoo is clever enough, and she shall have the match-maker’s fee, if it is well done.”
“That will I do!” said Cuckoo heartily and she laughed as she thought of the fee of good silver on her palm, and she untied her apron from her waist and she said busily, “Now and at once will I go, for the meat is ready except for the moment of cooking and the vegetables are washed.”
But Wang Lung had not pondered the matter sufficiently and it was not to be decided so quickly as this and he called out,
“No, and I have decided nothin
g. I must think of the matter for some days and I will tell you what I think.”
The women were impatient, Cuckoo for the silver and Lotus because it was a new thing and she would hear something new to amuse her, but Wang Lung went out, saying,
“No, it is my son and I will wait.”
And so he might have waited for many days, thinking of this and that, had not one early morning, the lad, his eldest son, come home in the dawn with his face hot and red with wine drinking, and his breath was fetid and his feet unsteady. Wang Lung heard him stumbling in the court and he ran out to see who it was, and the lad was sick and vomited before him, for he was unaccustomed to more than the pale mild wine they made from their own rice fermented, and he fell and lay on the ground in his vomit like a dog.
Wang Lung was frightened and he called for O-lan, and together they lifted the lad up and O-lan washed him and laid him upon the bed in her own room, and before she was finished with him the lad was asleep and heavy as one dead and could answer nothing to what his father asked.
Then Wang Lung went into the room where the two boys slept together, and the younger was yawning and stretching and tying his books into a square cloth to carry to school, and Wang Lung said to him,
“Was your elder brother not in the bed with you last night?”
And the boy answered unwillingly,
“No.”
There was some fear in his look and Wang Lung, seeing it, cried out at him roughly,
“Where was he gone?” and when the boy would not answer, he took him by the neck and shook him and cried, “Now tell me all, you small dog!”
The boy was frightened at this, and he broke out sobbing and crying and said between his sobs,
“And Elder Brother said I was not to tell you and he said he would pinch me and burn me with a hot needle if I told and if I do not tell he gives me pence.”
And Wang Lung, beside himself at this, shouted out,
“Tell what, you who ought to die?”
And the boy looked about him and said desperately, seeing that his father would choke him if he did not answer,
“He has been away three nights altogether, but what he does I do not know, except that he goes with the son of your uncle, our cousin.”
Wang Lung loosed his hand then from the boy’s neck and he flung him aside and he strode forth into his uncle’s rooms, and there he found his uncle’s son, hot and red of face with wine, even as his own son, but steadier of foot, for the young man was older and accustomed to the ways of men. Wang Lung shouted at him,
“Where have you led my son?”
And the young man sneered at Wang Lung and he said,
“Ah, that son of my cousin’s needs no leading. He can go alone.”
But Wang Lung repeated it and this time he thought to himself that he would kill this son of his uncle’s now, this impudent scampish face, and he cried in a terrible voice,
“Where has my son been this night?”
Then the young man was frightened at the sound of his voice and he answered sullenly and unwillingly, dropping his impudent eyes,
“He was at the house of the whore who lives in the court that once belonged to the great house.”
When Wang Lung heard this he gave a great groan, for the whore was one well known of many men and none went to her except poor and common men, for she was no longer young and she was willing to give much for little. Without stopping for food he went out of his gate and across his fields, and for once he saw nothing of what grew on his land, and noted nothing of how the crop promised, because of the trouble his son had brought to him. He went with his eyes fixed inward, and he went through the gate of the wall about the town, and he went to the house that had been great.
The heavy gates were swung back widely now, and none ever closed them upon their thick iron hinges, for any who would might come and go in these days, and he went in, and the courts and the rooms were filled with common people, who rented the rooms, a family of common people to a room. The place was filthy and the old pines hewed down and those left standing were dying, and the pools in the courts were choked with refuse.
But he saw none of this. He stood in the court of the first house and he called out,
“Where is the woman called Yang, who is a whore?”
There was a woman there who sat on a three-legged stool, sewing at a shoe sole, and she lifted her head and nodded toward a side door opening on the court and she took up her sewing again, as though many times she had been asked this question by men.
Wang Lung went to the door and he beat on it, and a fretful voice answered,
“Now go away, for I am done my business for this night and must sleep, since I work all night.”
But he beat again, and the voice cried out, “Who is it?”
He would not answer, but he beat yet again, for he would go in whether or not, and at last he heard a shuffling and a woman opened the door, a woman none too young and with a weary face and hanging, thick lips, and coarse white paint on her forehead and red paint she had not washed from her mouth and cheeks, and she looked at him and said sharply,
“Now I cannot before tonight and if you like you may come as early as you will then in the night, but now I must sleep.”
But Wang Lung broke roughly into her talking, for the sight of her sickened him and the thought of his son here he could not bear, and he said,
“It is not for myself—I do not need such as you. It is for my son.”
And he felt suddenly in his throat a thickening of weeping for his son. Then the woman asked,
“Well, and what of your son?”
And Wang Lung answered and his voice trembled,
“He was here last night.”
“There were many sons of men here last night,” replied the woman, “and I do not know which was yours.”
Then Wang Lung said, beseeching her,
“Think and remember a little slight young lad, tall for his years, but not yet a man, and I did not dream he dared to try a woman.”
And she, remembering, answered,
“Were there two, and was one a young fellow with his nose turned to the sky at the end and a look in his eye of knowing everything, and his hat over one ear? And the other, as you say, a tall big lad, but eager to be a man!”
And Wang Lung said, “Yes—yes—that is he—that is my son!”
“And what of your son?” said the woman.
Then Wang Lung said earnestly,
“This: if he ever comes again, put him off—say you desire men only—say what you will—but every time you put him off I will give you twice the fee of silver on your palm!”
The woman laughed then and carelessly and she said in sudden good humor,
“And who would not say aye to this, to be paid for not working? And so I say aye also. It is true enough that I desire men and little boys are small pleasure.” And she nodded at Wang Lung as she spoke and leered at him and he was sickened at her coarse face and he said hastily,
“So be it, then.”
He turned quickly and he walked home, and as he walked he spat and spat again to rid him of his sickness at the memory of the woman.
On this day, therefore, he said to Cuckoo,
“Let it be as you said. Go to the grain merchant and arrange the matter. Let the dowry be good but not too great if the girl is suitable and if it can be arranged.”
When he had said this to Cuckoo he went back to the room and he sat beside his sleeping son and he brooded, for he saw how fair and young the boy lay there, and he saw the quiet face, asleep and smooth with its youth. Then when he thought of the weary painted woman and her thick lips, his heart swelled with sickness and anger and he sat there muttering to himself.
And as he sat O-lan came in and stood looking at the boy, and she saw the clear sweat standing on his skin and she brought vinegar in warm water and washed the sweat away gently, as they used to wash the young lords in the great house when they drank too heavily. Then seeing the delicate
childish face and the drunken sleep that even the washing would not awaken, Wang Lung rose and went in his anger to his uncle’s room, and he forgot the brother of his father and he remembered only that this man was father to the idle, impudent young man who had spoiled his own fair son, and he went in and he shouted,
“Now I have harbored an ungrateful nest of snakes and they have bitten me!”
His uncle was sitting leaning over a table eating his breakfast, for he never rose until midday, seeing there was no work he had to do, and he looked up at these words and he said lazily,
“How now?”
Then Wang Lung told him, half-choking, what had happened, but his uncle only laughed and he said,
“Well, and can you keep a boy from becoming a man? And can you keep a young dog from a stray bitch?”
When Wang Lung heard this laughter he remembered in one crowded space of time all that he had endured because of his uncle; how of old his uncle had tried to force him to the selling of his land, and how they lived here, these three, eating and drinking and idle, and how his uncle’s wife ate of the expensive foods Cuckoo bought for Lotus, and now how his uncle’s son had spoiled his own fair lad, and he bit his tongue between his teeth and he said,
“Now out of my house, you and yours, and no more rice will there be for any of you from this hour, and I will burn the house down rather than have it shelter you, who have no gratitude even in your idleness!”
But his uncle sat where he was and ate on, now from this bowl and now from that, and Wang Lung stood there bursting with his blood, and when he saw his uncle paid no heed to him, he stepped forward with his arm upraised. Then the uncle turned and said,
“Drive me out if you dare.”
And when Wang Lung stammered and blustered, not understanding, “Well—and what—well and what—” his uncle opened his coat and showed him what was against its lining.
Then Wang Lung stood still and rigid, for he saw there a false beard of red hair and a length of red cloth, and Wang Lung stared at these things, and the anger went out of him like water and he shook because there was no strength left in him.