And again the harvests were good and Wang Lung gathered silver from the selling of his produce and again he hid it in the wall. But the rice he reaped from the land of the Hwangs brought him twice as much as that from his own rice land. The earth of that piece was wet and rich and the rice grew on it as weeds grow where they are not wanted. And everyone knew now that Wang Lung owned this land and in his village there was talk of making him the head.
7
WANG LUNG’S UNCLE BEGAN at this time to become the trouble which Wang Lung had surmised from the beginning that he might be. This uncle was the younger brother of Wang Lung’s father, and by all the claims of relationship he might depend upon Wang Lung if he had not enough for himself and his family. So long as Wang Lung and his father were poor and scantily fed the uncle made muster to scratch about on his land and gather enough to feed his seven children and his wife and himself. But once fed none of them worked. The wife would not stir herself to sweep the floor of their hut, nor did the children trouble to wash the food from their faces. It was a disgrace that as the girls grew older and even to marriageable age they still ran about the village street and left uncombed their rough sunbrowned hair, and sometimes even talked to men. Wang Lung, meeting his oldest girl cousin thus one day, was so angered for the disgrace done to his family that he dared to go to his uncle’s wife and say,
“Now, who will marry a girl like my cousin, whom any man may look on? She has been marriageable these three years and she runs about and today I saw an idle lout on the village street lay his hand on her arm and she answered him only with brazen laughter!”
His uncle’s wife had nothing active in her body except her tongue and this she now loosed upon Wang Lung.
“Well, and who will pay for the dowry and for the wedding and for the middleman’s fees? It is all very well for those to talk who have more land than they know what to do with and who can yet go and buy more land from the great families with their spare silver, but your uncle is an unfortunate man and he has been so from the first. His destiny is evil and through no fault of his own. Heaven wills it. Where others can produce good grain, for him the seed dies in the ground and nothing but weeds spring up, and this though he break his back!”
She fell into loud, easy tears, and began to work herself up into a fury. She snatched at her knot of hair on the back of her head and tore down the loose hairs about her face and she began to scream freely,
“Ah, it is something you do not know—to have an evil destiny! Where the fields of others bear good rice and wheat, ours bear weeds; where the houses of others stand for a hundred years, the earth itself shakes under ours so that the walls crack; where others bear men, I, although I conceive a son, will yet give birth to a girl—ah, evil destiny!”
She shrieked aloud and the neighbor women rushed out of their houses to see and to hear. Wang Lung stood stoutly, however, and would finish what he came to say.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “although it is not for me to presume to advise the brother of my father, I will say this: it is better that a girl be married away while she is yet virgin, and whoever heard of a bitch dog who was allowed on the streets who did not give birth to a litter?”
Having spoken thus plainly, he went away to his own house and left his uncle’s wife screaming. He had it in his mind to buy more land this year from the House of Hwang and more land year after year as he was able, and he dreamed of adding a new room to his house and it angered him that as he saw himself and his sons rising into a landed family, this shiftless brood of his cousins should be running loose, bearing the same name as his own.
The next day his uncle came to the field where he was working. O-lan was not there, for ten moons had passed since the second child was born and a third birth was close upon her, and this time she was not so well and for a handful of days she had not come to the fields and so Wang Lung worked alone. His uncle came slouching along a furrow, his clothes never properly buttoned about him, but caught together and held insecurely with his girdle, so that it always seemed that if a gust of wind blew at him he might suddenly stand naked. He came to where Wang Lung was and he stood in silence while Wang Lung hoed a narrow line beside the broad beans he was cultivating. At last Wang Lung said maliciously and without looking up,
“I ask your pardon, my uncle, for not stopping in my work. These beans, must, if they are to bear, as you know, be cultivated twice and thrice. Yours, doubtless, are finished. I am very slow—a poor farmer—never finishing my work in time to rest.”
His uncle understood perfectly Wang Lung’s malice, but he answered smoothly,
“I am a man of evil destiny. This year out of twenty seed beans, one came up, and in such a poor growth as that there is no use in putting the hoe down. We shall have to buy beans this year if we eat them,” and he sighed heavily.
Wang Lung hardened his heart. He knew that his uncle had come to ask something of him. He put his hoe down into the ground with a long even movement and with great care, breaking up the tiniest clod in the soft earth already well cultivated. The bean plants stood erect in thrifty order, casting as they stood little fringes of clear shadow in the sunshine. At last his uncle began to speak.
“The person in my house has told me,” he said, “of your interest in my worthless oldest slave creature. It is wholly true what you say. You are wise for your years. She should be married. She is fifteen years old and for these three or four years could have given birth. I am terrified constantly lest she conceive by some wild dog and bring shame to me and to our name. Think of this happening in our respectable family, to me, the brother of your own father!”
Wang Lung put his hoe down hard into the soil. He would have liked to have spoken plainly. He would have liked to have said,
“Why do you not control her, then? Why do you not keep her decently in the house and make her sweep and clean and cook and make clothes for the family?”
But one cannot say these things to an older generation. He remained silent, therefore, and hoed closely about a small plant and he waited.
“If it had been my good destiny,” continued his uncle mournfully, “to have married a wife as your father did, one who could work and at the same time produce sons, as your own does also, instead of a woman like mine, who grows nothing but flesh and gives birth to nothing but females and that one idle son of mine who is less than a male for his idleness, I, too, might have been rich now as you are. Then might I have, willingly would I have, shared my riches with you. Your daughters I would have wed to good men, your son would I have placed in a merchant’s shop as apprentice and willingly paid the fee of guaranty—your house would I have delighted to repair, and you I would have fed with the best I had, you and your father and your children, for we are of one blood.”
Wang Lung answered shortly,
“You know I am not rich. I have the five mouths to feed now and my father is old and does not work and still he eats, and another mouth is being born in my house at this very moment, for aught I know.”
His uncle replied shrilly,
“You are rich—you are rich! You have bought the land from the great house at the gods know what heavy price—is there another in the village who could do this thing?”
At this Wang Lung was goaded to anger. He flung down his hoe and he shouted suddenly, glaring at his uncle,
“If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!”
The blood flew into his uncle’s yellow face and he rushed at his nephew and slapped him vigorously on both cheeks.
“Now that,” he cried, “for speaking so to your father’s generation! Have you no religion, no morals, that you are so lacking in filial conduct? Have you not heard it said that in the Sacred Edicts it is commanded that a man is never to correct an elder?”
Wang Lung stood sullen and immoveable, conscious of hi
s fault but angry to the bottom of his heart against this man who was his uncle.
“I will tell your words to the whole village!” screamed his uncle in a high cracked voice of fury. “Yesterday you attack my house and call aloud in the streets that my daughter is not a virgin; today you reproach me, who if your father passes on, must be as your own father to you! Now may my daughters all not be virgins, but not from one of them would I hear such talk!” And he repeated over and over, “I will tell it to the village—I will tell it to the village …” until at last Wang Lung said unwillingly, “What do you want me to do?”
It touched his pride that this matter might indeed be called out before the village. After all, it was his own flesh and blood.
His uncle changed immediately. Anger melted out of him. He smiled and he put his hand on Wang Lung’s arm.
“Ah, I know you—good lad—good lad—” he said softly. “Your old uncle knows you—you are my son. Son, a little silver in this poor old palm—say, ten pieces, or even nine, and I could begin to have arrangements with a matchmaker for that slave of mine. Ah, you are right! It is time—it is time!” He sighed and shook his head and he looked piously to the sky.
Wang Lung picked up his hoe and threw it down again.
“Come to the house,” he said shortly. “I do not carry silver on me like a prince,” and he strode ahead, bitter beyond speech because some of the good silver with which he had planned to buy more land was to go into this palm of his uncle’s, from whence it would slip on to the gambling table before night fell.
He strode into the house, brushing out of his way his two small sons who played, naked in the warm sunshine, about the threshold. His uncle, with easy good nature, called to the children and took from some recess in his crumpled clothing a copper coin for each child. He pressed the small fat shining bodies to him, and putting his nose into their soft necks he smelled of the sun-browned flesh with easy affection.
“Ah, you are two little men,” he said, clasping one in either arm.
But Wang Lung did not pause. He went into the room where he slept with his wife and the last child. It was very dark, coming in as he did from the outer sunshine, and except for the bar of light from the hole, he could see nothing. But the smell of warm blood which he remembered so well filled his nostrils and he called out sharply,
“What now—has your time come?”
The voice of his wife answered from the bed more feebly than he had ever heard her speak,
“It is over once more. It is only a slave this time—not worth mentioning.”
Wang Lung stood still. A sense of evil struck him. A girl! A girl was causing all this trouble in his uncle’s house. Now a girl had been born into his house as well.
He went without reply then to the wall and felt for the roughness which was the mark of the hiding place and he removed the clod of earth. Behind it he fumbled among the little heap of silver and he counted out nine pieces.
“Why are you taking the silver out?” said his wife suddenly in the darkness.
“I am compelled to lend it to my uncle,” he replied shortly.
His wife answered nothing at first and then she said in her plain, heavy way,
“It is better not to say lend. There is no lending in that house. There is only giving.”
“Well I know that,” replied Wang Lung with bitterness. “It is cutting my flesh out to give to him and for nothing except that we are of a blood.”
Then going out into the threshold he thrust the money at his uncle and he walked quickly back to the field and there he fell to working as though he would tear the earth from its foundations. He thought for the time only of the silver; he saw it poured out carelessly upon a gambling table, saw it swept up by some idle hand—his silver, the silver he had so painfully collected from the fruits of his fields, to turn it back again for more earth for his own.
It was evening before his anger was spent and he straightened himself and remembered his home and his food. And then he thought of that new mouth come that day into his house and it struck him, with heaviness, that the birth of daughters had begun for him, daughters who do not belong to their parents, but are born and reared for other families. He had not even thought, in his anger at his uncle, to stop and see the face of this small, new creature.
He stood leaning upon his hoe and he was seized with sadness. It would be another harvest before he could buy that land now, a piece adjoining the one he had, and there was this new mouth in the house. Across the pale, oyster-colored sky of twilight a flock of crows flew, sharply black, and whirred over him, cawing loudly. He watched them disappear like a cloud into the trees about his house, and he ran at them, shouting and shaking his hoe. They rose again slowly, circling and re-circling over his head, mocking him with their cries, and they flew at last into the darkening sky.
He groaned aloud. It was an evil omen.
8
IT SEEMED AS THOUGH once the gods turn against a man they will not consider him again. The rains, which should have come in early summer, withheld themselves, and day after day the skies shone with fresh and careless brilliance. The parched and starving earth was nothing to them. From dawn to dawn there was not a cloud, and at night the stars hung out of the sky, golden and cruel in their beauty.
The fields, although Wang Lung cultivated them desperately, dried and cracked, and the young wheat stalks, which had sprung up courageously with the coming of spring and had prepared their heads for the grain, when they found nothing coming from the soil or the sky for them, ceased their growing and stood motionless at first under the sun and at last dwindled and yellowed into a barren harvest. The young rice beds which Wang Lung sowed at first were squares of jade upon the brown earth. He carried water to them day after day after he had given up the wheat, the heavy wooden buckets slung upon a bamboo pole across his shoulders. But though a furrow grew upon his flesh and a callus formed there as large as a bowl, no rain came.
At last the water in the pond dried into a cake of clay and the water even in the well sunk so low that O-lan said to him,
“If the children must drink and the old man have his hot water the plants must go dry.”
Wang Lung answered with anger that broke into a sob,
“Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve.” It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth.
Only the piece of land by the moat bore harvest, and this because at last when summer wore away without rain, Wang Lung abandoned all his other fields and stayed the day out at this one, dipping water from the moat to pour upon the greedy soil. This year for the first time he sold his grain as soon as it was harvested, and when he felt the silver upon his palm he gripped it hard in defiance. He would, he told himself, in spite of gods and drought, do that which he had determined. His body he had broken and his sweat he had spilled for this handful of silver and he would do what he would with it. And he hurried to the House of Hwang and he met the land agent there and he said without ceremony,
“I have that with which to buy the land adjoining mine by the moat.”
Now Wang Lung had heard here and there that for the House of Hwang it had been a year verging upon poverty. The old lady had not had her dole of opium to the full for many days and she was like an old tigress in her hunger so that each day she sent for the agent and she cursed him and struck his face with her fan, screaming at him,
“And are there not acres of land left, yet?” until he was beside himself.
He had even given up the moneys which ordinarily he held back from the family transactions for his own use, so beside himself had he been. And as if this were not enough, the Old Lord took yet another concubine, a slave who was the child of a slave who had been his creature in her youth, but who was now wed to a man servant in the house, because the Old Lord’s desire for her failed before he took her into his room as concubine. This child of the slave, who was not more than sixteen, he now saw with fresh lust, for as he grew old and infirm and heavy with flesh
he seemed to desire more and more women who were slight and young, even to childhood, so that there was no slaking his lust. As the Old Mistress with her opium, so he with his lusts, and there was no making him understand there was not money for jade earrings for his favorites and not gold for their pretty hands. He could not comprehend the words “no money,” who all his life had but to reach out his hand and fill it as often as he would.
And seeing their parents thus, the young lords shrugged their shoulders and said there must still be enough for their lifetime. They united in only one thing and this was to berate the agent for his ill management of the estates, so that he who had once been oily and unctuous, a man of plenty and of ease, was now become anxious and harried and his flesh gone so that his skin hung upon him like an old garment.
Neither had Heaven sent rain upon the fields of the House of Hwang, and there, too, there were no harvests, and so when Wang Lung came to the agent crying, “I have silver,” it was as though one came saying to the hungry, “I have food.”
The agent grasped at it, and where before there had been dickering and tea-drinking, now the two men spoke in eager whispers, and more quickly than they could speak whole words, the money passed from one hand to the other and papers were signed and sealed and the land was Wang Lung’s.
And once again Wang Lung did not count the passing of silver, which was his flesh and his blood, a hard thing. He bought with it the desire of his heart. He had now a vast field of good land, for the new field was twice as large as the first. But more to him than its dark fertility was the fact that it had belonged once to the family of a prince. And this time he told no one, not even O-lan, what he had done.
Month passed into month and still no rain fell. As autumn approached the clouds gathered unwillingly in the sky, small, light clouds, and in the village street one could see men standing about, idle and anxious, their faces upturned to the sky, judging closely of this cloud and that, discussing together as to whether any held rain in it. But before sufficient clouds could gather for promise, a bitter wind rose out of the northwest, the acrid wind of the distant desert, and blew the clouds from the sky as one gathers dust from a floor with a broom. And the sky was empty and barren, and the stately sun rose each morning and made its march and set solitary each night. And the moon in its time shone like a lesser sun for clearness.