The Good Earth (36 page)

Then since evening came on, he wished his son would go away out of this court and into his own. He wished the young man to go away and leave him in peace in the twilight and alone. But there was no peace for him with this son of his. This son was willing to obey his father now for he was satisfied in the rooms and the courts, at least for the time, and he had done what he would do, but he began again,

“Well, let it be enough, but there is another thing.”

Then Wang Lung flung his pipe down upon the ground and he shouted,

“Am I never to be in peace?”

And the young man went on stubbornly,

“It is not for myself or for my son. It is for my youngest brother, who is your own son. It is not fit that he grow up so ignorant. He should be taught something.”

Wang Lung stared at this for it was a new thing. He had long ago settled the life of his youngest son, what it was to be, and he said now,

“There is no need for any more stomachsful of characters in this house. Two is enough, and he is to be on the land when I am dead.”

“Yes, and for this he weeps in the night, and this is why he is so pale and so reedy a lad,” answered the eldest son.

Now Wang Lung had never thought to ask his youngest son what he wished to do with his life, since he had decided one son must be on the land, and this that his eldest son had said struck him between the brows and he was silent. He picked up his pipe from the ground slowly and pondered about his third son. He was a lad not like either of his brothers, a lad as silent as his mother, and because he was silent none paid any attention to him.

“Have you heard him say this?” asked Wang Lung of his eldest son, uncertainly.

“Ask him for yourself, my father,” replied the young man.

“Well, but one lad must be on the land,” said Wang Lung suddenly in argument and his voice was very loud.

“But why, my father?” urged the young man. “You are a man who need not have any sons like serfs. It is not fitting. People will say you have a mean heart. ‘There is a man who makes his son into a hind while he lives like a prince.’ So people will say.”

Now the young man spoke cleverly for he knew that his father cared mightily what people said of him, and he went on,

“We could call a tutor and teach him and we could send him to a southern school and he could learn and since there is I in your house to help you and my second brother in his good trade, let the lad choose what he will.”

Then Wang Lung said at last,

“Send him here to me.”

After a while the third son came and stood before his father and Wang Lung looked at him to see what he was. And he saw a tall and slender lad, who was neither his father nor his mother, except that he had his mother’s gravity and silence. But there was more beauty in him than there had been in his mother, and for beauty alone he had more of it than any of Wang Lung’s children except the second girl who had gone to her husband’s family and belonged no more to the house of Wang. But across the lad’s forehead and almost a mar to his beauty were his two black brows, too heavy and black for his young, pale face, and when he frowned, and he frowned easily, these black brows met, heavy and straight, across his brow.

And Wang Lung stared at his son and after he had seen him well, he said,

“Your eldest brother says you wish to learn to read.”

And the boy said, scarcely stirring his lips,

“Aye.”

Wang Lung shook the ash from his pipe and pushed the fresh tobacco in slowly with his thumb.

“Well, and I suppose that means you do not want to work on the land and I shall not have a son on my own land, and I with sons and to spare.”

This he said with bitterness, but the boy said nothing. He stood there straight, and still in his long white robe of summer linen, and at last Wang Lung was angry at his silence and he shouted at him,

“Why do you not speak? Is it true you do not want to be on the land?”

And again the boy answered only the one word,

“Aye.”

And Wang Lung looking at him said to himself at last that these sons of his were too much for him in his old age and they were a care and burden to him and he did not know what to do with them, and he shouted again, feeling himself ill-used by these sons of his,

“What is it to me what you do? Get away from me!”

Then the boy went away swiftly and Wang Lung sat alone and he said to himself that his two girls were better after all than his sons, one, poor fool that she was, never wanted anything more than a bit of any food and her length of cloth to play with, and the other one married and away from his house. And the twilight came down over the court and shut him into it alone.

Nevertheless, as Wang Lung always did when his anger passed, he let his sons have their way, and he called his elder son and he said,

“Engage a tutor for the third one if he wills it, and let him do as he likes, only I am not to be troubled about it.”

And he called his second son and said,

“Since I am not to have a son on the land it is your duty to see to the rents and to the silver that comes in from the land at each harvest. You can weigh and measure and you shall be my steward.”

The second son was pleased enough for this meant the money would pass through his hands at least, and he would know what came in and he could complain to his father if more than enough was spent in the house.

Now this second son of his seemed more strange to Wang than any of his sons, for even at the wedding day, which came on, he was careful of the money spent on meats and on wines and he divided the tables carefully, keeping the best meats for his friends in the town who knew the cost of the dishes, and for the tenants and the country people who must be invited he spread tables in the courts, and to these he gave only the second best in meat and wine, since they daily ate coarse fare, and a little better was very good to them.

And the second son watched the money and the gifts that came in, and he gave to the slaves and servants the least that could be given them, so that Cuckoo sneered when into her hand he put a paltry two pieces of silver and she said in the hearing of many,

“Now a truly great family is not so careful of its silver and one can see that this family does not rightly belong in these courts.”

The eldest son heard this, and he was ashamed and he was afraid of her tongue and he gave her more silver secretly and he was angry with his second brother. Thus there was trouble between them even on the very wedding day when the guests sat about the tables and when the bride’s chair was entering the courts.

And of his own friends the eldest son asked but a few of the least considered to the feast, because he was ashamed of his brother’s parsimony and because the bride was but a village maid. He stood aside scornfully, and he said,

“Well, and my brother has chosen an earthen pot when he might, from my father’s position, have had a cup of jade.”

And he was scornful and nodded stiffly when the pair came and bowed before him and his wife as their elder brother and sister. And the wife of the eldest son was correct and haughty and bowed only the least that could be considered proper for her position.

Now of all of them who lived in these courts it seemed there was none wholly at peace and comfortable there except the small grandson who had been born to Wang Lung. Even Wang Lung himself, waking within the shadows of the great carved bed where he slept in his own room that was next to the court where Lotus lived, even he woke to dream sometimes that he was back in the simple, dark, earth-walled house where a man could throw his cold tea down where he would not splatter a piece of carven wood, and where a step took him into his own fields.

As for Wang Lung’s sons, there was a continual unrest, the eldest son lest not enough be spent and they be belittled in the eyes of men and lest the villagers come walking through the great gate when a man from the town was there to call, and so make them ashamed before him; and the second son lest there was waste and money gone; and the youngest son striving to make repair the years he had lost as a Farmer’s son.

But there was one who ran staggering hither and yon and content with his life and it was the son of the eldest son. This small one never thought of any other place than this great house and to him it was neither great nor small but only his house, and here was his mother and here his father and grandfather and all those who lived but to serve him. And from this one did Wang Lung secure peace, and he could never have enough of watching him and laughing at him and picking him up when he fell. He remembered also what his own father had done, and he delighted to take a girdle and put it about the child and walk, holding him thus from falling, and they went from court to court, and the child pointed at the darting fish in the pools and jabbered this and that and snatched the head of a flower and was at ease in the midst of everything, and only thus did Wang Lung find peace.

Nor was there only this one. The wife of the eldest son was faithful and she conceived and bore and conceived and bore regularly and faithfully, and each child as it was born had its slave. Thus Wang Lung each year saw more children in the courts and more slaves, so that when one said to him, “There is to be another mouth again in the eldest son’s court,” he only laughed and said,

“Eh—eh—well, there is rice and enough for all since we have the good land.”

And he was pleased when his second son’s wife bore also in her season, and she gave birth to a girl first as was fitting and it was seemly out of respect to her sister-in-law. Wang Lung, then, in the space of five years had four grandsons and three granddaughters and the courts were filled with their laughter and their weeping.

Now five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old, and if it gave to Wang Lung these others, it took away also that old dreamer, his uncle, whom he had almost forgotten except to see that he and his old wife were fed and clothed and had what they wished of opium.

On the winter of the fifth year it was very cold, more cold than any thirty years before, so that for the first time in Wang Lung’s memory the moat froze about the wall of the town and men could walk back and forth on it. A continual icy wind blew also from the northeast and there was nothing, no garment of goatskin or fur, that could keep a man warm. In every room in the great house they burned braziers of charcoal and still it was cold enough to see a man’s breath when he blew it out.

Now Wang Lung’s uncle and his wife had long since smoked all the flesh off their bones and they lay day in and day out on their beds like two old dry sticks, and there was no warmth in them. And Wang Lung heard his uncle could not sit up even any more in his bed and he spat blood whenever he moved at all, and he went out to see and he saw there were not many hours left for the old man.

Then Wang Lung bought two coffins of wood good enough but not too good, and he had the coffins taken into the room where his uncle lay that the old man might see them and die in comfort, knowing there was a place for his bones. And his uncle said, his voice a quavering whisper,

“Well, and you are a son to me and more than that wandering one of my own.”

And the old woman said, but she was still stouter than the man,

“If I die before that son comes home, promise me you will find a good maid for him, so that he may have sons for us yet.” And Wang Lung promised it.

What hour his uncle died Wang Lung did not know, except that he lay dead one evening when the serving woman went in to take a bowl of soup, and Wang Lung buried him on a bitter cold day when the wind blew the snow over the land in clouds, and he put the coffin in the family enclosure beside his father, only a little lower than his father’s grave, but above the place where his own was to be.

Then Wang Lung caused mourning to be made for the whole family and they wore the sign of mourning for a year, not because any truly mourned the passing of this old man who had never been anything but a care to them, but because it is fitting so to do in a great family when a relative dies.

Then Wang Lung moved his uncle’s wife into the town where she would not be alone, and he gave her a room at the end of a far court for her own, and he told Cuckoo to supervise a slave in the care of her, and the old woman sucked her opium pipe and lay on her bed in great content, sleeping day after day, and her coffin was beside her where she could see it for her comfort.

And Wang Lung marvelled to think that once he had feared her for a great fat blowsy country woman, idle and loud, she who lay there now shrivelled and yellow and silent, and as shrivelled and yellow as the Old Mistress had been in the fallen House of Hwang.

N
OW ALL HIS LIFE
long Wang Lung had heard of war here and there but he had never seen the thing come near except the once that he wintered in the southern city when he was young. It had never come nearer to him than that, although he had often heard men say from the time he was a child, “There is a war to the west this year,” or they said, “War is to the east or the northeast.”

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was. Now and again he heard men say, “We will go to the wars.” This they said when they were about to starve and would rather be soldiers than beggars; and sometimes men said it when they were restless at home as the son of his uncle had said it, but however this was, the war was always away and in a distant place. Then suddenly like a reasonless wind out of heaven the thing came near.

Wang Lung heard of it first from his second son who came home from the market one day for his noon rice and he said to his father,

“The price of grain has risen suddenly, for the war is to the south of us now and nearer every day, and we must hold our stores of grain until later for the price will go higher and higher as the armies come nearer to us and we can sell for a good price.”

Wang Lung listened to this as he ate and he said,

“Well, and it is a curious thing and I shall be glad to see a war for what it is, for I have heard of it all my life and never seen it.”