At first and for a long time it seemed to Wang Lung that he wished to see no human being but only to be alone on his land. He went to no houses of the village and when they came to him, those who were left of the winter’s starving, he was surly with them.
“Which of you tore away my door and which of you have my rake and my hoe and which of you burned my roof in his oven?” Thus he bawled at them.
And they shook their heads, full of virtue; and this one said, “It was your uncle,” and that one said, “Nay, with bandits and robbers roving over the land in these evil times of famine and war, how can it be said that this one or that stole anything? Hunger makes thief of any man.”
Then Ching, his neighbor, came creeping forth from his house to see Wang Lung and he said,
“Through the winter a band of robbers lived in your house and preyed upon the village and the town as they were able. Your uncle, it is said, knows more of them than an honest man should. But who knows what is true in these days? I would not dare to accuse any man.”
This man was nothing but a shadow indeed, so close did his skin stick to his bones and so thin and grey had his hair grown, although he had not yet reached forty-five years of his age. Wang Lung stared at him awhile and then in compassion he said suddenly,
“Now you have fared worse than we and what have you eaten?”
And the man sighed forth in a whisper,
“What have I not eaten? Offal from the streets like dogs when we begged in the town and dead dogs we ate and once before she died my woman brewed some soup from flesh I dared not ask what it was, except that I knew she had not the courage to kill, and if we ate it was something she found. Then she died, having less strength than I to endure, and after she died I gave the girl to a soldier because I could not see her starve and die also.” He paused and fell silent and after a time he said, “if I had a little seed I would plant once more, but no seed have I.”
“Come here!” cried Wang Lung roughly and dragged him into the house by the hand and he bade the man hold up the ragged tail of his coat and into it Wang Lung poured from the store of seed he had brought from the south. Wheat he gave him and rice and cabbage seed and he said,
“Tomorrow I will come and plough your land with my good ox.”
Then Ching began to weep suddenly and Wang Lung rubbed his own eyes and cried out as if he were angry, “Do you think I have forgotten that you gave me that handful of beans?” But Ching could answer nothing, only he walked away weeping and weeping without stop.
It was joy to Wang Lung to find that his uncle was no longer in the village and where he was none knew certainly. Some said he had gone to a city and some said he was in far distant parts with his wife and his son. But there was not one left in his house in the village. The girls, and this Wang Lung heard with stout anger, were sold, the prettiest first, for the price they could bring, but even the last one, who was pock-marked, was sold for a handful of pence to a soldier who was passing through to battle.
Then Wang Lung set himself robustly to the soil and he begrudged even the hours he must spend in the house for food and sleep. He loved rather to take his roll of bread and garlic to the field and stand there eating, planning and thinking, “Here shall I put the black-eyed peas and here the young rice beds.” And if he grew too weary in the day he laid himself into a furrow and there with the good warmth of his own land against his flesh, he slept.
And O-lan in the house was not idle. With her own hands she lashed the mats firmly to the rafters and took earth from the fields and mixed it with water and mended the walls of the house, and she built again the oven and filled the holes in the floor that the rain had washed.
Then she went into the town one day with Wang Lung and together they bought beds and a table and six benches and a great iron cauldron and then they bought for pleasure a red glay teapot with a black flower marked on it in ink and six bowls to match. Last of all they went into an incense shop and bought a paper god of wealth to hang on the wall over the table in the middle room, and they bought two pewter candlesticks and a pewter incense urn and two red candles to burn before the god, thick red candles of cow’s fat and having a slender reed through the middle for wick.
And with this, Wang Lung thought of the two small gods in the temple to the earth and on his way home he went and peered in at them, and they were piteous to behold, their features washed from their faces with rain and the clay of their bodies naked and sticking through the tatters of their paper clothes. None had paid any heed to them in this dreadful year and Wang Lung looked at them grimly and with content and he said aloud, as one might speak to a punished child,
“Thus it is with gods who do evil to men!”
Nevertheless, when the house was itself again, and the pewter candlesticks gleaming and the candles burning in them shining red, and the teapot and the bowls upon the table and the beds in their places with a little bedding once more, and fresh paper pasted over the hole in the room where he slept and a new door hung upon its wooden hinges, Wang Lung was afraid of his happiness. O-lan grew great with the next child; his children tumbled like brown puppies about his threshold and against the southern wall his old father sat and dozed and smiled as he slept; in his fields the young rice sprouted as green as jade and more beautiful, and the young beans lifted their hooded heads from the soil. And out of the gold there was still enough left to feed them until the harvest, if they ate sparingly. Looking at the blue heaven above him and the white clouds driving across it, feeling upon his ploughed fields as upon his own flesh the sun and rain in proportion, Wang Lung muttered unwillingly,
“I must stick a little incense before those two in the small temple. After all, they have power over earth.”
16
One night as Wang lay with his wife he felt a hard lump the size of a man’s closed hand between her breasts and he said to her,
“Now what is this thing you have on your body?”
He put his hand to it and he found a cloth-wrapped bundle that was hard yet moved to his touch. She drew back violently at first and then when he laid hold of it to pluck it away from her she yielded and said,
“Well, look at it then, if you must,” and she took the string which held it to her neck and broke it and gave him the thing.
It was wrapped in a bit of rag and he tore this away. Then suddenly into his hand fell a mass of jewels and Wang Lung gazed at them stupefied. There were such a mass of jewels as one had never dreamed could be together, jewels red as the inner flesh of watermelons, golden as wheat, green as young leaves in spring, clear as water trickling out of the earth. What the names of them were Wang did not know, having never heard names and seen jewels together in his life. But holding them there in his hand, in the hollow of his brown hard hand, he knew from the gleaming and the glittering in the half-dark room that he held wealth. He held it motionless, drunk with color and shape, speechless, and together he and the woman stared at what he held. At last he whispered to her, breathless,
“Where—where—”
And she whispered back as softly,
“In the rich man’s house. It must have been a favorite’s treasure. I saw a brick loosened in the wall and I slipped there carelessly so no other soul could see and demand a share. I pulled the brick away, caught the shining, and put them into my sleeve.”