So he told himself in the night. Yet he pondered painfully on this, that the Leopard, who had been but an ignorant fellow, risen but a little above his robber band, could have so won the love of the woman, who was no common woman, that even though he were dead, yet did she cleave to him and even against her living love she clave to the dead man still.
For Wang the Tiger could not believe she had never loved him. No, he remembered over and over with hunger when he thought of it how frank she had been and passionate upon this very bed where he now lay. He would not believe that such passion had sprung up where no love was. And he grew wretched and weak and felt that somehow he must be a lesser man, for all his pride and place, than the Leopard he had killed, because his living hold upon the woman had been less than the memory of the dead man in her. He could not understand all this, but only he felt it must be so.
And feeling himself less of a man than he thought, his life stretched ahead of him long and meaningless and he doubted himself that he could ever be great and if he did then for what use, seeing he had no son for whom to achieve greatness, and it would all die with him and what he had go to others. He did not love his brothers or his brothers’ sons enough to struggle in war and guile for them. And he groaned to himself in the dark and silent room and he groaned out,
“When I killed her I killed two, and the other was the son I might have had!”
Then he remembered again and he always saw her now as she looked when she lay dead, her strong fair throat pierced and the bright blood gushing out. When he saw her thus again and again, he could not bear it, and suddenly he could not lie any longer on this bed, no, although it had been washed and painted freshly and the blood stains were gone and the pillow was anew, and although no one had ever mentioned to him what had happened there nor had he ever known where they took her body. He rose from the bed and he wrapped his quilts about him and sat miserable and shivering upon a chair, until the feeble dawn came and showed pale and chill through his lattices.
So the winter nights wore on the same, night after night, and at last Wang the Tiger cried out to himself that this could not be, for these sad and lonely nights were making him less than a man and they were sucking the ambition out of him. He grew afraid for himself because nothing seemed good to him any more and he was impatient with all who came near, and most of all did he grow impatient with his nephew and he said bitterly,
“This is the best I have, this grinning pocked ape, son of a tradesman — this is nearest I have to my own son!”
At last when it seemed he must go mad a turn came in his own spirit and it came to him one night that the woman even though dead was ruining him as surely as she would have done if she had been alive and gone the way she planned. And suddenly he hardened himself and it seemed he spoke to her own ghost to defy her and he said in his own heart,
“Cannot any woman have sons, and do I not desire a son more than any mere woman? I will have a son. I will take a woman or two or three until I have a son. I have been a fool that I do always cling so to one woman — first to a woman I never even knew beyond a few scattered words such as a man may speak to a slave in his fathers’ house and I went sore for that woman nearly ten years, and then there was the one I had to kill. Shall I never be rid of her too and shall I go sore for her another ten years and be too old to beget a son then? No, I shall be as other men are and I will see if I cannot make myself free as other men do and take a woman and leave her again when I please.”
On that very day he called his trusty harelipped man to him and he called him into his own private room and he said,
“I have need of a woman, any woman of a decent kind, and go and tell my brothers that my wife is dead and tell them to find me something since I am busy with the wars that must come in the spring time and I do not care to deviate my thoughts from the wars.”
The harelipped man went gladly on this errand then, for he had seen with jealous eyes at least a little of what his general suffered and had guessed the cause, and he thought this good cure.
As for Wang the Tiger, he could but wait to see what time would bring and what his two brothers would do for him, and while he waited he forced himself to plan his wars and to think how he would enlarge himself. And he schemed how to weary himself into sleep at night
XXI
BY WINDING WAYS, LEST men mark his harelip and wonder at his frequent coming, the trusty man came to the town and thence to the great house where the Brothers Wang lived. He asked and found that Wang the Merchant was at this hour, which was nearly noon, in his counting house, and there the trusty man went at once to give his message. Wang the Merchant sat in his own part of the counting house, a small dark room which gave off the main market, and he was fingering an abacus and reckoning certain profits he had made on a ship’s load of wheat. He looked up and listened to the trusty man’s tale, and when he had heard he said, astounded, his little eyes staring, and his meager mouth pursed,
“Now I can get even silver more easily for him than I can get a woman. How should I know where to turn for a woman? It is an ill thing he has lost the one he had.”
The trusty man, sitting cornerwise upon a lowly seat to show he felt his place, answered humbly saying,
“All I ask, my master’s brother, is that you find a sort of woman who will not trouble our general and make him love her. He has a strange deep heart and he so fixes himself on one thing that it is a madness with him. So he loved this woman who died and he has not forgotten her yet, no, although months have passed he does not forget her and such constancy in a man is not good for his health.”
“How did she die?” asked Wang the Merchant curiously.
But the trusty man was very faithful and discreet and he stopped himself as he was about to answer, because he bethought himself that when men are outside the ranks of soldiers and not acquainted with war-like things, they grow squeamish and they cannot bear killing and dying as soldiers must, whose trade it is to kill and be killed if they cannot save themselves by guile. So he said simply,
“She died of a sudden flow of blood,” and Wang the Merchant let it be at that.
Then he sent the trusty man away, first bidding a clerk to take him to some small inn and feed him with rice and pork, and after they were gone Wang the Merchant sat and mused and he thought to himself,
“Well, and here is a time when that older brother of mine will know more than I, for if he knows anything at all it is women, and what woman do I know except the one I have?”
Then Wang the Merchant rose to go out and find his brother, Wang the Landlord, and he took from a nail in the wall his grey silk robe that he wore when he went out but took off in his counting house to spare it wear, and he went to his brother’s house and he asked the gateman to know if his master were at home that day. The gateman would have led him in, but Wang the Merchant would wait, and the gateman went in and asked a slave and the slave replied that he was at a certain gaming house. When Wang the Merchant heard this he went to that place, choosing his way as delicately as a cat over the cobbled street, because it had snowed in the night and the day was so cold that even yet the snow lay there, and there was only a little path in the middle made by vendors and those who must go out for a living or as his brother did, for pleasure.
He came to the gaming house and he asked a clerk and heard that his brother was within at a certain door, and Wang the Merchant went to it and opened it and found Wang the Landlord there gaming with certain of his friends in a small room made hot with a brazier of coals.
When Wang the Landlord saw his brother’s head come in at the door he was secretly glad to be disturbed and called away, for he was not over-skilled at gaming, since he had learned the thing late in life. Wang Lung, his father, would not have let a son of his gamble in city gaming houses if he had known it. But Wang the Landlord’s son was quick and able enough because he had gamed all his life long, and even the second son had been able to gain a little pile of silver at any game he had a share in.