But he did not wait in complete idleness. He trained his men with fresh zeal and he enlarged his army once more, and enrolled in it many good young fellows who came to him and over the new ones he set the old and other soldiers, and his army swelled to ten thousand men, and to pay for this he added somewhat to his taxes on wine and on salt and on travelling merchants.
His only trouble at this time was that he had not enough guns, and he saw he must do one of two things; either he must get guns by guile, or he must conquer some little near captain and take his guns and ammunition. Now this was because guns were very hard to find, being foreign things and brought in from foreign parts, and Wang the Tiger had not thought of this when he had chosen his region an inland region, and he had no coastal port he controlled, and other ports were guarded so that he could not hope to smuggle guns through them. Moreover, he knew no foreign tongue, nor had he any near him who did, and so he had no way yet to deal with the foreign merchants, and so it seemed to him that after all he must have a little battle somewhere, for many of his men were without guns.
One night he told this to his woman, and she took a sudden interest and put her mind to it, for often she could be listless and paid no heed to him at all. Now when she put her mind to it she said very soon,
“But I thought you said you had a brother who is a merchant!”
“I do have such a one,” said Wang the Tiger, wondering, “but he is a grain merchant and not a merchant for guns.”
“Yes, but you see nothing!” she cried at him, in the impatient, high way she had. “If he is a merchant and deals with sea coasts, he can buy guns and smuggle them in his goods somehow. I do not know how, but there must be a way.”
Now Wang the Tiger thought this over awhile and again it seemed to him this was the cleverest woman, and he made a plan on what she had said. The next day he called his pocked nephew to him, grown tall in this past year, and he kept the youth by him continually for small special things he needed to have done, and he said,
“Go to your father and pretend you are home for a visit and nothing more but when you are alone with him tell him I need three thousand guns and I am hampered sorely because I have not them. Men grow everywhere, but not guns for them, and they are useless to me without each man his gun. Tell him he is a merchant and one who deals with the sea coast and he can think of a way for me. I send you, because the thing must be kept secret, and you are my own blood.”
The youth was glad enough to go, and he promised secrecy eagerly, and he was proud with his mission. And again Wang the Tiger waited, but he still received men under his ensign, only he chose his men carefully and tested each as to whether or not he feared to die.
XVIII
THE LAD WENT WINDING his way homeward, then, over the countryside. He had taken off his soldier’s garb and had put on the clothing of a farmer’s son and with these coarse blue garments and his face brown and pocked he looked nothing but a country lad, and fit grandson for Wang Lung. He rode upon his old white ass, with a ragged coat folded under him for a saddle, and he kicked the ass under the belly with his bare feet to hasten it sometimes. No one who saw him riding thus and often half asleep under the hot sun of summer would have dreamed that he carried a message that was to bring three thousand guns into that peaceful country. But when he did not sleep he sang his song of soldiers and war, for he loved to sing, and when he did this a farmer would look up at him uneasily from his work in the fields and stare after the youth, and once a farmer shouted after him,
“A curse on you to be singing a soldier’s ditty — do you want to bring the black crows around us again?”
But the youth was gay and careless and he spat here and there in the dust of the road to show how careless he was, and to show he would go on singing if he wished to sing. The truth was he did not know any other songs than these, having been so long among reckless and fighting men, and it cannot be expected that soldiers will sing the same songs that farmers sing in their quiet fields.
On the third day at noon he came to his home and as he slid off his ass at the place where the side street parted from the main street, there was his eldest cousin lounging along and he stared and stopped in a yawn he was making and said, in greeting,
“Well, and are you a general yet?”
Then the pocked lad called back quietly and wittily,
“No, but I have taken at least the first degree!”
This he said to mock his cousin a little because everyone knew how Wang the Landlord and his lady had always talked a great deal of how they would make a scholar of this son and how next season he was to go up for examination at such and such a seat of learning and so become a great man. But the season went and the year passed into another, and he never went. Now the pocked youth knew this cousin of his was on his way not to any school but to some tea house, being just up, doubtless, from his bed, and languid after the night he had had somewhere. But the son of Wang the Landlord was dainty and scornful and he surveyed his cousin and said,
“At least being a first degree general has not put a silk coat on your back!”
And he walked on without waiting to hear any answer, swaying himself as he walked so that his own silk robes, the color of the green of a willow tree newly leaved, swayed also with his lordly steps. But the pocked youth grinned and stuck his tongue out toward his cousin’s back, and went to his own door.
When he stepped into the court of his own home all was as it ever was. It was time for the noon meal, and the door was open into the house and he saw his father sitting down alone to the table to eat and the children ran anywhere and ate as they always did, and his mother stood at the door with her bowl to her lips and her chopsticks pushing the food into her mouth and as she chewed she chattered to a neighbor woman, who had come in to borrow something, about a salt fish that a cat had stolen the night before, although it was hung high on a beam, too. When she saw the son she shouted at him,
“Well, you are back in time to eat, and you could not have struck it better!” and she went on with her chatter.
The youth grinned at her but he said nothing except to call her name out, and he went inside and his father nodded to him, a little surprised, and the son called his name dutifully and then went and found himself a bowl and a pair of chopsticks and filled his bowl from the food on the table and then went to one side and sat down edgewise on his seat as sons should do if they sit in the presence of those above them.
When they had eaten, the father poured a little tea into his rice bowl, but sparingly, for he was sparing in all he did, and he drank it down in small, meager sips, and then he said to his son,
“Do you bring any word?”
And the son said, “Yes, I do, but I cannot tell you here.” This he said because his brothers and sisters crowded around him and stared at him silently, since he was strange to them, and they listened eagerly for any word he might say.
By now the mother was back also to fill her bowl again, for she was a very hearty one to eat and ate a long time after her husband was finished and gone, and she stared too at her son and said,
“You have grown a good ten inches, I swear! And why have you a ragged coat like that on? Does your uncle give you no better? What do they feed you to make you grow like that — good meat and wine, I swear!”
And the lad grinned again and said, “I have good clothes but I did not wear them this time, and we eat meat every day.”
At this Wang the Merchant was aghast and he cried with unwonted interest,
“What — does my brother give his soldiers meat every day?”
The lad hastened to say, “No, but now only because he prepares them for a war and he wants them fierce and full of blood. But I have meat because I do not live with the common soldiers and I may eat what my uncle and his woman leave in their bowls — I and the trusty men.”