Sons (7 page)

There was none more learned than the son of the old Confucian scholar who had once been their teacher, a man who had gone up in his youth to the imperial examinations. True, he had failed, but still he was more learned than those who had not gone at all, and he had given all his learning to his son and this son was a scholar too. When he was invited to so honorable a task as this, therefore, he came swinging his robes as he walked and setting his feet out as scholars do, and he wore his spectacles low upon the end of his nose. When he was come he seated himself at the table before the tablet, having first bowed as many times as he ought to it, and then, pushing back his long sleeves and pointing his brush of camel’s hair very fine and sharp, he began to write. Brush and ink slab and ink and all were new, for so they must be at such a task, and thus he inscribed. When he came to the last letter of the inscription he paused for a time before he wrote the very end, and he waited and closed his eyes and meditated so that he might catch the whole spirit of Wang Lung in the last touch of the last word.

And after he had meditated awhile it came to him thus: “Wang Lung, whose riches of body and soul were of the earth.” When he thought of this it seemed to him that he had caught the essence of Wang Lung’s being, so that his very soul would be held fast, and he dipped his brush in red and set the last stroke, upon the tablet.

Thus was it finished, and Wang the Eldest took his father’s tablet and carried it carefully in both his hands and they all went together and set the tablet in that small upper room where the other tablets were, the tablets of the two old farmers who had been Wang Lung’s father and grandfather. Here their tablets were in this rich house, and they would never have dreamed when they were alive of having tablets such as only rich people have, and if they thought at all of themselves when they would be dead, it was only to suppose their names would be written upon a bit of paper by some fellow a little learned and pasted to the earthen wall of the house in the fields and so stay until it wore away after a while. But when Wang Lung had moved into this town house he had tablets made for his two ancestors as though they had lived here, too, although whether their spirits were there or not, no one could know.

Here then was Wang Lung’s tablet put also, and when his sons had done all that should be done they shut the door and came away, and they were glad in their secret hearts.

Now it was the proper time to invite guests and to feast and to be merry, and Lotus put on robes of a bright blue flowered silk, too bright for so huge and old a creature, but no one corrected her, knowing what she was, and they all feasted. And as they feasted they laughed together and drank wine and Wang the Eldest shouted again and again, for he loved a great merry gathering,

“Drink to the bottom of your cups—let the bottom be seen!”

And he drank so often that the dark red came up from the wine in him and flushed his cheeks and eyes. Then his lady, who was apart with the women in another court, heard he was about to be drunken and she sent her maid out to him to say, “It is scarcely seemly to be drunken yet and at such a feast as this.” So he recalled himself.

But even Wang the Second was cheerful this day and did not begrudge anything. He took opportunity to speak secretly with some of the guests to see if any wished to buy more land than he had, and he spread it about here and there secretly that he had some good land to part with, and thus the day passed, and each brother was satisfied because he broke the bond under which he had been to the old man who lay in the earth.

There was one who did not feast among them and Pear Blossom sent her excuse saying, “The one I care for is a little less well than usual and I beg to be excused.” So, since no one missed her, Wang the Eldest sent word she was to be excused if she liked from the feasting and she alone did not take off her mourning that day, nor the white shoes she wore nor the white cord that bound her hair where it was coiled. Neither did she take these signs of sadness from the fool either. While the others feasted she did what she loved to do. She took the fool by the hand and led her to Wang Lung’s grave and they sat down. Then while the fool played, content to be near the one who cared for her, Pear Blossom sat and looked over the land, and there it was spread in its small green fields laid edgewise and crosswise and fitted into each other for as many miles as her eyes could reach. Here and there a spot of blue stood or moved where some farmer bent over his spring wheat. So had Wang Lung once bent also over the fruit of his earth when it had been his turn to have it for his own, and Pear Blossom remembered how in his old age he had dwelled on those years before she was born and how he loved to tell her of them and of how he had been used to plough this field and plant that one.

So did this time pass and so did this day pass for the family of Wang Lung. But his third son did not come home even for such a day. No, wherever he was he remained there and he busied himself in some life of his own and apart from them all.

N
OW AS THE BRANCHES
of some great old tree spring out from the stout trunk and strain away from that trunk and from each other, straining and spreading each upon its own way, although their root is the same, so it was with the three sons of Wang Lung, and the strongest and most willful of the three was Wang the Third, Wang Lung’s youngest son, who was a soldier in a southern province.

On the day when Wang the Third had received the news that his father lay dying he was standing in front of a temple outside the city where his general lived, for there was a piece of bare ground before that temple, and he marched his soldiers to and fro and he taught them feints and postures of war. So he was doing when his brothers’ messenger came running and panting and, breathless with the importance of the message he bore, gasped forth,

“Sir, and our third young lord—your father, the old lord—lies dying!”

Now Wang the Third had had no dealing with his father at all since the day he had run away from home in a mighty fit of anger because his father took him into his own court, when he was already a very old man, a certain young maid who had been reared in the house, who was Pear Blossom, and Wang the Third had not known he loved her until he heard what his father had done. That same night he ran into his father’s court, for he had brooded the whole day since he heard, and he was so surcharged with his brooding that he dashed into the room where his father sat with the maid. Yes, he dashed into that room out of the hot darkness of a summer’s night and there she sat, still and pale, and he knew surely he could have loved her. Then such a sea of anger rose in him against his father that he could not bound it, for he was given to anger, and he knew if he stayed to let it swell it must have burst his heart, and he flung himself out of his father’s house that very night, and because he had always longed to adventure forth and to be a hero under some banner of war, he spent the silver he had by him and went south as far as he could and took service under a general famous at that time in a rebellion. And Wang the Third was so tall and strong and fierce a youth and his face so dark and angry and his lips hard and pressed over his great white teeth, that the general had marked him at once and wanted him near himself and he had raised Wang the Third up very quickly and much more quickly than usual. This was partly because he was so silent and changeless a young man that the general came to trust him and partly because Wang the Third had such a fierce and angry temper that when it was roused he did not fear to kill nor to risk being killed, and there are not many men so brave as this to be hired. Besides this, there was a war or two and war is a time when soldiers may rise rapidly and so it was with Wang the Third, for as men above him were killed or displaced the general gave him higher and higher office until from a common soldier he had risen to be a captain over many men, and so he had been when he set out for his father’s house.

When Wang the Third heard what the messenger had to say he sent his men away and he walked alone over the fields and the messenger walked a distance behind him. It was a day in early spring, such a day as his father Wang Lung had been used to stir himself and go out and look over his land and on such a day he would take his hoe and turn over the earth between the rows of his wheat. There, although there were no signs of new life to any other eye than his, to his eye there was a swelling and a change, the promise of a new harvest out of the earth. Now he was dead, and Wang the Third could not imagine death on such a day.

For in his own way did Wang the Third feel the spring also. Where his father had gone out restless to his land Wang the Third grew restless, too, and every spring he turned his mind to a plan he had, and it was to leave the old general and set out upon a war of his own and entice such men as would to come under the banner he would set up for himself. Every spring it seemed to him a thing he could do and at last a thing that he must do, and as year after year he planned how he could do it, it grew into his dream and his ambition, and so great had it grown that in this very spring he had said to himself he must set out on it, and he could not any longer endure the life he led under the old general.

For the truth was that Wang the Third was very bitter against the old general. When he had first come to the banner under which he served, the general was one of those who led in a rebellion against a wicked ruler and he had been still young enough then so he could talk of revolution and how fine a thing it was and how all brave men must fight for a good right cause, and he had a great rolling voice and words slipped easily from his tongue and he had a trick of moving men beyond what he felt himself, although those who heard him did not know this.

When Wang the Third had first heard these fair words he was very moved, for his was a simple heart, and he swore to himself he would stand by such a general as this in so good a cause, and his deep heart was filled with the purpose.

It astonished him, therefore, when the rebellion was successful and the general came back from his wars and took this rich river valley for his place to live, to see this man, who had been a hero in wars, settle himself with zest to these things he now did, and Wang the Third could not forgive him that he had forgotten himself like this, and in the strangest way it seemed to Wang the Third he had been robbed or defrauded somehow of something, although he did not know what, either, and it was out of this bitterness the thought had first come that he would leave this general he had once served with all his heart in war, and that he would pursue alone his own path.

For in these years power had passed out of the old general and he grew idle and he lived off the land and went no more out to any wars. He let himself grow huge in flesh and he ate the richest meats every day and drank wines from foreign countries that do eat out a man’s belly they are so fiery, and he talked no more of war but all his talk was of how this cook had made such a sauce upon a fish caught out of the sea, and of how that cook could pepper a dish to suit a king, and when he had eaten all he could eat then the only other game he knew was women and he had fifty wives and more and it was his humor to have women of every sort, so that he had even a strange woman with a very white skin and leaf-colored eyes and hair like hemp, whom he had bought for a price somewhere. But he was afraid of her, too, because she had so much discontent in her that she was festering with some bitterness and she would mutter to herself in her own strange tongue as though she cast a spell. But still it amused the old general and it was a thing to boast of that he could have such a one, even, among his women.

Under a general like this the captains grew weak and careless also and they caroused and drank and lived off the people and all the people hated the general and his men very heartily. But the young men and the brave grew restless and stifled with inaction and when Wang the Third held himself above them all and lived his plain way and would not even look at women, these young men turned to him, one after the other, this handful and that, this brotherhood and that, and they said among themselves,

“Is it he who can lead us out?”

And they turned their eyes to him expectantly.

There was but one thing that held Wang the Third back from his dream now and it was that he had no money, for after he left his father’s house he had no more except the paltry bit he received at the end of each month from the old general, and often he did not have even that, for sometimes the general had not enough to pay his men, since he needed so much himself and fifty women in a man’s house are rapacious and they vie with one another in their jewels and their garments and in what they can secure by tears and coquetry out of an old man who is their lord.

So it seemed to Wang the Third he could never do what he hoped unless he became a robber for a while and his men a robber band, as many like him have done, and when he had robbed for a time until he had enough, he could wait for a lucky war and make terms with some state army or other somewhere and demand to be pardoned and received into the state again.

But it was against his stomach to be a robber, too, for his father had been an honest man and not such a man as falls easily into robbery in any famine or time of war, and Wang the Third might have struggled on for more years yet and waited for a chance, for now he had dreamed so long that it had come to be a certainty in him that heaven itself had marked out his destiny for him even as he dreamed and he had but to wait until his hour came and he could seize it.

The one thing which made it well-nigh impossible for him to wait, for he was not a man of patient temper, was that his soul had come to loathe this southern country where he lived and he longed to be out of it and away to his own north. He was a man of the north and there were days when he could scarcely swallow one more time the endless white rice these southerners loved and he longed to set his great hard white teeth into a stiff sheet of unleavened wheaten bread rolled about a garlic stalk. Yes, he made his own voice harsher and louder even than its nature was because he hated so heartily the smooth oiled courtesies of these southern men, who were so smooth they must be tricky since it is against nature to be always gentle, and he thought all clever men must have hollow hearts. Yes, he scowled at them often and was angry with them often because he longed to be in his own country again where men grew tall as men ought to be and not little apes as these southerners were, and where men’s speech was scant and plain and their hearts stern and straight. And because Wang the Third had so evil a temper men were afraid of him and they feared his black brows’ frowning and his surly mouth and because of these and his white long teeth, they made a nickname for him and they called him Wang the Tiger.