Sons (38 page)

He sent a soldier then to buy the paper money and the incense and all such things as are useful to the dead and with these he went out of the city with the men at his horse’s heels, their guns on their shoulders. He took a little faint comfort to see how people stared at him on the street and although he held his face stiff and stared ahead seeming to see and to hear nothing, still he heard his soldiers shout out roughly,

“Way for the general, way for our lord!” And as he saw the common people shrink back against the walls and into the gateways he was a little comforted because he was so great to them, and he held himself erect in his state and pomp.

Thus he came to the graves under the date tree which by now had grown knotted and gnarled, although when Wang Lung had first chosen that place to lay his dead, it was a smooth young tree. Now other date trees had sprung from it, and Wang the Tiger, having dismounted while he was yet a long way off to show his respect, came slowly to these trees and one of the soldiers stood and held the red horse, and Wang the Tiger walked slowly and stately in his reverence until he came to the grave of his father. There he made obeisance three times, and the soldiers who carried the money and the incense came forward and arranged it, the most at Wang Lung’s grave and the next at the grave of Wang Lung’s father and the next at the grave of Wang Lung’s brother, and the least at O-lan’s grave, whom Wang the Tiger could remember but dimly as his mother.

Then Wang the Tiger went forward again in his slow and stately way and he lit the incense and the paper and he knelt and knocked his head the number of times he should before every grave and when this was finished he stood motionless and meditated, while the fire burned and the silver and the gold paper turned to ash and the incense smouldered sharp and fragrant upon the wintry air of that day. There was no sunshine and no wind, a grey chill day such as may bring snow, and the warm slight smoke of the incense curled clearly in the chill air. The soldiers waited in completest silence while their general communed as long as he wished with his father and at last Wang the Tiger turned away and walked to his horse and mounted it and went back along the path he had come.

But while he meditated he had not thought at all of his father Wang Lung. He thought of himself and of how when he lay dead there would not be one to come and do him reverence as son to father, and when he thought of this it seemed well to him that he was to be wed and he bore a little better the dreariness he had in his soul for the hope of a son.

Now the path on which Wang the Tiger rode skirted the threshold of the earthen house and passed by the edge of the threshing floor that was its door yard, and the noise of the soldiers roused the hunchback youth who lived there with Pear Blossom and he came hobbling out as quickly as he could and stood staring. He did not know Wang the Tiger at all, or even that this was his uncle, and so he only stood there by the path and stared. For all he was now nearly sixteen years old and soon to be a man, he stood scarcely taller than a child of six or seven, and his back rose curved like a hood behind his head and Wang the Tiger was astonished at the sight of him and he asked, drawing his horse back,

“Who are you who live here in my earthen house?”

Then the lad knew him, for he had heard he had an uncle who was a general and he often dreamed of him and wondered what he was like, and now he cried out, yearningly,

“Are you my uncle?”

Then Wang the Tiger remembered, and he said slowly, still staring down at the lad’s upturned face,

“Yes, I have heard somewhere that my brother had a brat like you. Strange, for we are all so straight and strong and so was my father, too, the straightest, strongest old man, even in his age.”

Then the lad answered simply, as though it were a thing to which he were long used, and he stared avidly at the soldiers as he said it, and at the high red horse,

“But I was dropped.” Then he stretched out his hand toward Wang the Tiger’s gun and he peered up out of his strange aged face and his little, sad sunken eyes, and he said eagerly, “I have never held one of those foreign guns in my hand and I would like to hold it for a moment’s time.”

When he stretched up his hands thus, a little dried, wrinkled hand like an old man’s, out of a sudden pity for this poor warped lad Wang the Tiger handed him down his own gun to feel and to look at. And as he waited for the lad to have his fill of it, one came to the door. It was Pear Blossom. Wang the Tiger knew her instantly, for she had not changed much except to grow thinner even than she had been, and her face, always pale and egg-shaped, was now covered with fine threadlike wrinkles drawn lightly into the pale skin. But her hair was as smooth and black as ever. Then Wang the Tiger bowed very stiffly and deeply but without descending from his horse, and Pear Blossom gave a little bow and would have turned quickly away except that Wang the Tiger called out,

“Is the fool still living and well?”

And Pear Blossom answered in her soft small voice,

“She is well.”

And Wang the Tiger asked again,

“Do you have your full due every month?”

And she answered again in the same voice, “I thank you, I have all my due,” and she held her head down as she spoke and looked at the beaten ground of the threshing floor and this time when she had answered him she went swiftly away and he was left staring at the empty doorway.

Then he said suddenly to the lad,

“Why does she wear a robe that is like a nun’s?” for he had seen without knowing he did that Pear Blossom’s grey robes were crossed at her throat as a nun’s are.

The lad answered, scarcely thinking of what he said, so longing and fixed was his heart upon the gun as he fingered it and smoothed its wood,

“When the fool is dead she will go into the nunnery near here and be a nun. She eats no meat at all now and she knows many prayers by heart and she is a lay nun already. But she will not leave the world and cut off her hair until the fool dies, because my grandfather left her the fool.”

Wang the Tiger heard this and he was silent a moment in some vague pain and at last he said pityingly to the lad,

“What will you do then, you poor hunched ape?”

And the lad made answer, “When she goes into the nunnery I am to be a priest in the temple because I am so young I must live for a long time and she cannot wait for me to die, too. But if I am a priest I can be fed and if I am ill and I am often ill with this thing I carry on me, then she can come and tend me, since we are kin.” This the boy said carelessly. Then his voice changed and grew half sobbing with some passion, and he looked up at Wang the Tiger and cried out, “Yes, I am to be a priest—but, oh, I wish that I were straight and then I would be a soldier—if you would have me, Uncle!”

There was such fire in his sunken dark eyes that Wang the Tiger was moved by it, and he answered sorrowfully, for he was a merciful man at heart,

“I would have you gladly, you poor thing, but shaped as you are, what can you be now but a priest!”

And the lad hung his head out of its strange socket and he said in a small, low voice,

“I know it.”

Without another word he handed the gun back to Wang the Tiger and he turned and limped away across the threshing floor. And Wang the Tiger went on his way to his marriage.

This was a strange marriage to Wang the Tiger. He was in no burning haste this time, and day and night were alike to him. He went through it all silently and decorously as he did everything he had to do unless a rage came over him. But now love and rage seemed forever equally far from his dead heart, and the red-robed figure of the bride was like some dim, distant figure with which he had nothing at all to do. So also the guests, and so the figures of his brothers and their wives and children, and the monstrous fat figure of Lotus, leaning on Cuckoo. Yet he looked at her once, too, for she panted as she breathed she was so heavy with her flesh and Wang the Tiger could hear this thick gusty breathing as he stood to bow to his elder brothers and to those who sponsored the woman and to the guests and to all those to whom he must bow in ceremony.

But when the wedding feast was brought he scarcely tasted this dish or that, and when Wang the Landlord began his jokes, since there should be merriment even at a man’s second wedding, and when a guest took up the laughter, it died away into feebleness and silence before Wang the Tiger’s grave face. He said nothing at all at his own wedding feast except that when the wine was brought he took up the bowl quickly as though he were thirsty. But when he had tasted it he set the bowl down again and he said harshly,

“If I had known the wine would be no better than this I would have brought a jar of the wine of my own region.”

After the days of wedding were over, he mounted his red horse and went away and he did not cast one look behind at the bride and her serving maid who came behind him in a mule cart, with the curtains drawn. No, he rode on as seeming solitary as he had been when he came, his soldiers at his heels, and the cart lumbering behind them. Thus Wang the Tiger brought his bride to his own regions, and in a month or two and a little more the second woman came under her father’s care, and her he received also, since one or two were the same to him.

Then the New Year drew on and its festivals and these passed, and it was the time when spring first begins to stir in the earth, although no sign of it could yet be seen in any leaf upon a tree. Yet there were signs, too, for the snow, if it came on a chill grey day, did not lie but melted in the sudden heat of a warm wind that blew fitfully out of the south, and the wheat plants in the fields, while they did not yet grow, took on a fresher green, and everywhere farmers stirred themselves out of their winter idleness and looked to their hoes and their rakes and fed their oxen a little better to prepare them for labor. By the roadsides the weeds began to send up shoots and children roamed everywhere with their knives and pointed bits of wood and tin if they had not knives, to dig the fresh green stuff for food.

So also did the lords of war bestir themselves in their winter quarters and soldiers stretched their full-fed bodies and wearied of their gaming and brawling and idling about towns where they were entrenched and they stirred themselves to wonder what their fortunes could be in the new wars of the spring, and every soldier dreamed a little and hoped that one above him might be killed and give him place.

So also did Wang the Tiger dream of what he would do. Yes, he had a scheme, and it was a good one, and now he could put himself to it for it seemed to him that his gnawing, nagging love was dead. Or, if not dead, then buried somewhere, and whenever he was troubled by its memory he went deliberately to one of those two wives of his, and if his flesh lagged, he drank wine deeply to rouse it.

And being a very just man, he showed no favor to one wife above the other, although they were very different, too, the one learned and neat and pleasing in a plain and quiet way, and the other somewhat uncouth, but still a woman of virtue and of good heart. Her greatest fault was her blackened teeth, and that she had a very foul breath if one came near her. But even so Wang the Tiger was fortunate in that they did not quarrel, these two women. Yet doubtless his justice helped this, for he was scrupulous and he went to them each in turn, and the truth was they were the same to him and alike nothing.

But he need no longer lie alone unless he wished. Still, he never grew familiar with either woman, and he always went in to them haughtily and for a set purpose and he made no speech with them and there was no frankness as there had been between him and the one dead and he never gave himself freely.

Sometimes he pondered on this difference that a man may feel toward women, and when he did he told himself bitterly that the one dead had never been truly frank with him, no, not even when she seemed as free as a harlot, for all the time she hugged her design against him in her heart. When he thought of this Wang the Tiger sealed his heart again and calmed his flesh with his two wives. And he had this for a hope and for a fresh light to his ambition, and it was that from one of the twain surely he might have his son at last. In this hope Wang the Tiger encouraged his dreams of glory once more and he swore that in this very year in this very spring he would go forth to a great war somewhere and win for himself power and wide territories, and he saw the victory already his own.

T
HEN AS SPRING BLOSSOMED
and the white cherry trees and the pale pink peach blooms lay like light clouds over the green land, Wang the Tiger took counsel with his trusty men as to war and they waited for two things. The first was to see how the war would renew itself between the lords of north and south, for the truce they had made the year before was very slight and tenuous and it was but a truce of the winter when it is not convenient to do battle in wind and snow and mud. Aside from this, the lords of north and south so differed in their nature, the one being large in body and slow and fierce, and the other little tricky men, good in guile and ambush, that with such difference in temper and even in blood and language, it was not easy for them to agree upon long truce. The other thing for which Wang the Tiger waited and his trusty men with him was for the return of the many spies he sent out early in the year. And while they waited Wang the Tiger took counsel with his trusty men as to what territory they might attach to what they had and so enlarge the region.

Now they took counsel together in the great room which Wang the Tiger used for his own and there they sat, each according to his rank, and the Hawk said,

“North we cannot go, for we are in allegiance with the north.”

And the Pig Butcher said loudly, for it was his way to speak whatever the Hawk said, like a rude echo, for he did not like to be thought less wise than the Hawk, and yet he himself could not think easily of a new thing to say,

“Yes, but even so, it is a very poor and meager land there, and the pigs are so accursed and so thin they are no use butchering. I have seen those pigs and I swear their backs are sharp as curved scythes, and a sow’s pigs can be counted before ever she gives them birth. It is not a country anyone wants to wage a war to gain.”