Sons (53 page)

During all these days that Wang the Tiger was in the houses of his brothers he watched over his son carefully. When the lad sat beside him at feasts Wang the Tiger himself saw to his son’s wine, and when the serving men had poured three times, he would not let them pour again for his son. And when the lads who were his cousins cried out to him to come and play here or there somewhere, Wang the Tiger sent his son’s tutor and the harelipped trusty man and the ten old soldiers with him everywhere. Every night Wang the Tiger made some excuse and he would not be at rest until he had gone himself to his son’s room and seen the lad in his own bed and alone except for the guard who watched at the door.

Now in this house of his father where his two brothers still lived so easily and well, it was as though no famine were in the land and as though no waters stood upon harvest fields, and as though none starved anywhere. Yet well enough did Wang the Landlord know and well enough did Wang the Merchant know what went on outside their peaceful home, and when Wang the Tiger had told them his straits and why he was come and when he ended saying, “It is to your interest to save me out of my danger, because my power keeps you safe, too,” they knew very well he spoke the truth.

For there were starving people outside of this city also, and many of them hated the two brothers very bitterly. They hated Wang the Landlord because he still owned land and those who worked on it must share with him, who did not labor at all, the bitter fruit they wrung from the earth, and to them it seemed, when they had bent over their fields in cold and heat and in rain and sun, that the earth and its fruit belonged to them. It was a very sore thing that at harvest time they must give a good half of it to one who had sat in a town house and waited for it, and that in famine time he must still have his share.

It was true that in these years when Wang the Eldest had been landlord and while he sold the land, too, he was still no easy landlord. No, for a man so weak and soft as he was, he could curse and quarrel, and his hatred of the land vented itself against these people who tilled it for him and he hated them not only for the land’s sake, but because he was so hard pressed often for money enough for his house’s needs and his own needs and he was doubly bitter because it seemed to him his tenants willfully held back what was his due and given him from his father. It came to such a pass that when his tenants saw him coming they would turn their faces to the sky and mutter,

“It must be we will have rain since the devils are out!”

And often they reviled him and said,

“You are no good son of your father, for he was a merciful man even in his age when he was rich, and he remembered that once he had toiled as we do, and he never pressed us for our rent, nor demanded grain of us in famine years. But you have never suffered and mercy has never been born in your heart!”

Such hatred had there been, and it was manifest in this hard year because in the night when the great gates were locked there were those who came and beat upon that gate and they lay on the steps and moaned out,

“We are starving and you still have rice to eat and rice to make into wines!” And others cried out upon the streets as they passed the gates, and they cried even in daytime, “Oh, that we might kill these rich men and take what they have robbed from us!”

At first the two brothers paid no heed, but at last they had hired a few soldiers of the town to stand about the gate and keep all off who had no proper business there. And indeed there were many rich men in that town and countryside who were robbed and despoiled as the year grew old, for robbers began to spring up, numerous and desperate, as they do in any evil time. Yet the two sons of Wang Lung were safe enough, because the chief of police and head of the soldiers of the town had married his daughter into that house, and because Wang the Tiger was near there and the lord of war. And so before that House of Wang the people did not as yet dare to do more than moan and curse.

Nor had they come to rob the earthen house which belonged to this family they hated. No, it stood up on its hillock out of the slowly receding waters, and Pear Blossom lived there safely enough through the bitter winter with her two. This was because Pear Blossom was well known by now for her pity, and they knew that she begged for stores out of the House of Wang and many came to her doors in their little boats and tubs and she fed them. Once Wang the Merchant had gone to her and said,

“In such dangerous times as these you must come into the town and live in the great house.”

But Pear Blossom had replied in her tranquil, usual way,

“No, I cannot, and I am not afraid, and there are those who depend on me.”

But as the winter grew deep and cold she did grow afraid at times because there were men made desperate by hunger and the bitter wind upon the icy waters where they lived in boats still or clung to tree tops as they could, and they were angry because Pear Blossom still fed the fool and the hunchback and they muttered before her very face, with her gifts in their hands,

“Shall those two still be fed, when good strong men, who have a whole child or two left, must starve?”

Indeed, such mutterings grew very loud and often, and Pear Blossom had just begun to wonder if she should not take these two into the town lest they be killed some time because of what they ate, and she too weak to defend them, when the poor fool, now more than fifty and two years of age, but still the same child she ever was, died in the sudden swift way such have of dying. One day she ate and played as ever she did with her bit of cloth, and she wandered out of the gate and into the water without knowing it was water and not dry land now where she usually sat, and Pear Blossom ran after, but the fool was already drenched and shivering with the icy water. From this she took a chill, in spite of every tenderness that Pear Blossom gave her, and in a few hours she was dead, since she died as easily as she lived without a will in anything.

Then Pear Blossom sent word into the town to Wang the Landlord for the coffin, and since Wang the Tiger was there, the three brothers came together, and Wang the Tiger brought his son, also. They stayed to see this poor thing put into her coffin, and she lay there for the first time in her life wise and grave with a dignity that death alone had given to her. And Pear Blossom truly grieving, was somewhat comforted to see how her child looked and she said in the quiet, murmuring way she had,

“Death has healed her and made her wise at last. She is like any of us now.”

But the brothers had no funeral for her, seeing what she had been, and Wang the Tiger left his son in the earthen house while he went in the boat with his brothers and with Pear Blossom and the tenant’s wife and a laboring man to the other high land where the graves of the family were, and there in a lowly place but still inside the earthen enclosure, they buried the fool.

When all was finished and they had returned to the earthen house and made ready to go back to the town again, Wang the Tiger looked at Pear Blossom and he spoke to her for the first time and he said in his calm, cold way,

“What will you do, now, lady?”

Then Pear Blossom lifted her face to him, brave for the first time in her life, knowing as she did that her hair was growing white, and her face no longer young and smooth, and she said,

“I have long said that when this child of mine was gone I would go into the nunnery near here, and the nuns are ready for me. I have lived close to them these many years and I have already taken many vows and the nuns know me and I shall be happiest there.” Then she turned to Wang the Landlord and said, “You and your lady have already made the plan about this son of yours, and his temple is very near to mine and I will still tend him, seeing how old I am now and old enough to be his mother, and if he is ill or fevered as he often is, I can go to him. Priests and nuns, they worship together at morning and evening, too, and I can see him twice a day, too, even if we may not speak.”

Then the three brothers looked at the hunchbacked lad who hung about Pear Blossom, lost now that the fool was gone, for whom he often cared with Pear Blossom. He was a man now, and he smiled painfully under their looks. Wang the Tiger was somehow touched because his own son stood so tall and strong and astonished at all this he had not known about before, and Wang the Tiger said very kindly, when he saw the son smile on the hunchback’s face,

“I wish you well, poor lad, and if you had been able, I would have taken you gladly as I took your cousin and I would have done as well for you as I have done for him. But as it is, I will add something to your fee in the temple and to yours, too, lady, for money always buys a place, and I daresay it is the same in temples as elsewhere.”

But Pear Blossom replied softly and surely,

“I will take nothing for myself and need nothing, for the nuns know me and I know them, and all I have is theirs too when I go to cast my lot with them. But for the lad I will take something, for it will help him.”

This she said in mild reproach to Wang the Landlord, for his sum he gave when he and the lad’s mother decided upon this life for their son was too meager, but if he knew it for a reproach he gave no sign, and he only sat down to wait for his brothers, being very heavy and finding it a grievance if he must stand up. But Wang the Tiger still gazed at the hunchbacked lad and said once more to him,

“And would you still rather go to the temple than to any other place?”

Then the youth took his eyes off from his tall cousin at whom he stared very avidly, and he hung his head and looked down the short length of his crooked body and he said slowly,

“Yes, seeing I am as I must be.” And he said after a moment, very heavily, “A priest’s robe will hide my hump, perhaps.”

He turned his eyes once more to his cousin, then suddenly it seemed he could not bear to look at him any more, and not even at his gilded sword, for he dropped his eyes and turned and limped quickly out of the room.

On that night when Wang the Tiger was returned to the house of his brothers, and when he went in to see his son in his bed, he found the lad awake and eager and he asked his father,

“My father, was that house my grandfather’s house too?”

And Wang the Tiger answered in surprise, “Yes, and I lived there as a lad and until he founded this house and brought us all here.”

Then the boy looked up out of his bed, and his head lay pillowed on his hands crossed under his head and he looked eagerly at his father and he said with ardor,

“I like that house. I would like to live in a house set in fields like that earthen house, and very quiet and trees there and the oxen!”

But Wang the Tiger answered with an impatience he could not understand, seeing that, after all, his son had said no great harmful things,

“You do not know what you say! I know, for I was there as a lad, it is a very hateful ignorant life, and I longed every hour to be away from it!”

But the lad said with some strange stubbornness,

“I would like it—I know I would like it!”

These few words his son said very ardently, and so ardently that Wang the Tiger felt some strange small anger in him and he rose and went away. But his son lay and dreamed that night that the earthen house was his home and that he lived there among the fields.

As for Pear Blossom, she went to that nunnery and the son of Wang the Landlord went to his temple, and the old earthen house stood empty of the three who had lived there these many years. Of the family of Wang Lung no one lived there on his land, and there were but the old tenant and his wife, and these two lived on alone. Sometimes the old woman took a withered cabbage she had hid in the earth or a handful of meal she had saved, and she tied it up in a kerchief and went to the nunnery to give it to Pear Blossom, because in her years of service she had learned to love the gentle, silent woman. Yes, even in these hard times the old woman took what little thing she had, and she would wait at the gate for Pear Blossom to come out, clothed as she was now in the grey nun’s robe, and she would whisper to her,

“I have a new-laid egg from that one hen I still have and it is for you!”

Then she thrust her hand into her bosom and brought out a small egg and she covered it in her hand and she held it to Pear Blossom’s hand and tried to slip it in and she coaxed her, whispering,

“Eat it, mistress! I swear there would be many nuns who would do it, for all their vows, and I have seen many priests eating meat and drinking wine. Stand here where none will see you and eat it fresh—you are so pale!”

But Pear Blossom would not. No, she had made her true vows, and she shook her shaven head in its grey cap and she pushed the old woman’s hands gently away and she said,

“No, you must eat it, for you need it more than I, even if I could eat it, for I am well fed enough for my needs. But even if I were not fed, I could not eat it because I have taken my vows!”

Yet the old woman would not be satisfied and she forced it into Pear Blossom’s bosom where her robes crossed at the throat, and then hastened into her tub and pushed it away from the door into the water so that Pear Blossom could not reach her, and she went away smiling and content. But Pear Blossom gave the egg away in the next half hour to a poor starving wretch who crawled out of the water at the temple gate. It was a mother, and she held a starveling to the shriveled bit of skin that had been once a full round breast, and pointing to it, she begged of Pear Blossom, who came at her feeble call,

“Look at these breasts of mine! Once they were round and full and this child as fat as a god!” And she gazed down at the small dying creature whose lips were still pressed to the empty fountain. Then Pear Blossom took the egg out of her bosom and gave it to the woman and rejoiced she had so good a thing to give.

In such ways of peace did Pear Blossom live out her life from that time on, and Wang the Tiger never saw her more.

Now Wang the Merchant was very able to help Wang the Tiger in that year of straits if he would, for the truth was he had great stores of grain and if famine brought poverty to others to him and to others like him it brought yet greater riches. For, when he saw what the times were to be, he began to hoard vast bins of grains, and even though he sold some from time to time to the rich who were able to buy at the high prices he set upon it, yet he bought also of flour and of rice from other regions, and he sent his agents out even to the nearest foreign countries to buy such goods, and his granaries were heaped with food.