“Now how did you know?” he whispered again, filled with admiration, and she answered with the smile on her lips that was never in her eyes,
“Do you think I have not lived in a rich man’s house? The rich are always afraid. I saw robbers in a bad year once rush into the gate of the great house and the slaves and the concubines and even the Old Mistress herself ran hither and thither and each had a treasure that she thrust into some secret place already planned. Therefore I knew the meaning of a loosened brick.”
And again they fell silent, staring at the wonder of the stones. Then after a long time Wang Lung drew in his breath and said resolutely,
“Now treasure like this one cannot keep. It must be sold and put into safety—into land, for nothing else is safe. If any knew of this we should be dead by the next day and a robber would carry the jewels. They must be put into land this very day or I shall not sleep tonight.”
He wrapped the stones in the rag again as he spoke and tied them hard together with the string, and opening his coat to thrust them into his bosom, by chance he saw the woman’s face. She was sitting cross-legged upon the bed at its foot and her heavy face that never spoke of anything was moved with a dim yearning of open lips and face thrust forward.
“Well, and now what?” he asked, wondering at her.
“Will you sell them all?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
“And why not then?” he answered, astonished. “Why should we have jewels like this in an earthen house?”
“I wish I could keep two for myself,” she said with such helpless wistfulness, as of one expecting nothing, that he was moved as he might be by one of his children longing for a toy or for a sweet.
“Well, now!” he cried in amazement.
“If I could have two,” she went on humbly, “only two small ones—two small white pearls even…”
“Pearls!” he repeated, agape.
“I would keep them—I would not wear them,” she said, “only keep them.” And she dropped her eyes and fell to twisting a bit of the bedding where a thread was loosened, and she waited patiently as one who scarcely expects an answer.
Then Wang Lung, without comprehending it, looked for an instant into the heart of this dull and faithful creature, who had labored all her life at some task at which she won no reward and who in the great house had seen others wearing jewels which she never even felt in her hand once.
“I could hold them in my hand sometimes,” she added, as if she thought to herself.
And he was moved by something he did not understand and he pulled the jewels from his bosom and unwrapped them and handed them to her in silence, and she searched among the glittering colors, her hard brown hand turning over the stones delicately and lingeringly until she found the two smooth white pearls, and these she took, and tying up the others again, she gave them back to him. Then she took the pearls and she tore a bit of the corner of her coat away and wrapped them and hid them between her breasts and was comforted.
But Wang Lung watched her astonished and only half understanding, so that afterwards during the day and on other days he would stop and stare at her and say to himself,
“Well now, that woman of mine, she has those two pearls between her breasts still, I suppose.” But he never saw her take them out or look at them and they never spoke of them at all.
As for the other jewels, he pondered this way and that, and at last he decided he would go to the great house and see if there were more land to buy.
To the great house he now went and there was in these days no gateman standing at the gate, twisting the long hairs of his mole, scornful of those who could not enter past him into the House of Hwang. Instead the great gates were locked and Wang Lung pounded against them with both fists and no one came. Men who passed in the streets looked up and cried out at him,
“Aye, you may pound now and pound again. If the Old Lord is awake he may come and if there is a stray dog of a slave about she may open, if she is inclined to it.”
But at last he heard slow footsteps coming across the threshold, slow wandering footsteps that halted and came on by fits, and then he heard the slow drawing of the iron bar that held the gate and the gate creaked and a cracked voice whispered,
“Who is it?”
Then Wang Lung answered, loudly, although he was amazed,
“It is I, Wang Lung!”
Then the voice said peevishly,
“Now who is an accursed Wang Lung?”
And Wang Lung perceived by the quality of the curse that it was the Old Lord himself, because he cursed as one accustomed to servants and slaves. Wang Lung answered, therefore, more humbly than before.
“Sir and lord, I am come on a little business, not to disturb your lordship, but to talk a little business with the agent who serves your honor.”
Then the Old Lord answered without opening any wider the crack through which he pursed his lips,
“Now curse him, that dog left me many months ago and he is not here.”
Wang Lung did not know what to do after this reply. It was impossible to talk of buying land directly to the Old Lord, without a middleman, and yet the jewels hung in his bosom hot as fire, and he wanted to be rid of them and more than that he wanted the land. With the seed he had he could plant as much land again as he had, and he wanted the good land of the House of Hwang.
“I came about a little money,” he said hesitatingly.
At once the Old Lord pushed the gates together.
“There is no money in this house,” he said more loudly than he had yet spoken. “The thief and robber of an agent—and may his mother and his mother’s mother be cursed for him—took all that I had. No debts can be paid.”
“No—no—” called Wang Lung hastily, “I came to pay out, not to collect debt.”
At this there was a shrill scream from a voice Wang Lung had not yet heard and a woman thrust her face suddenly out of the gates.
“Now that is a thing I have not heard for a long time,” she said sharply, and Wang Lung saw a handsome, shrewish, high-colored face looking out at him. “Come in,” she said briskly and she opened the gates wide enough to admit him and then behind his back, while he stood astonished in the court, she barred them securely again.
The Old Lord stood there coughing and staring, a dirty grey satin robe wrapped about him, from which hung an edge of bedraggled fur. Once it had been a fine garment, as anyone could see, for the satin was still heavy and smooth, although stains and spots covered it, and it was wrinkled as though it had been used as a bedgown. Wang Lung stared back at the Old Lord, curious, yet half-afraid, for all his life he half-feared the people in the great house, and it seemed impossible that the Old Lord, of whom he had heard so much, was this old figure, no more dreadful than his old father, and indeed less so for his father was a cleanly and smiling old man, and the Old Lord, who had been fat, was now lean, and his skin hung in folds about him and he was unwashed and unshaven and his hand was yellow and trembled as he passed it over his chin and pulled at his loose old lips.
The woman was clean enough. She had a hard, sharp face handsome with a sort of hawk’s beauty of high bridged nose and keen bright black eyes and pale skin stretched too tightly over her bones, and her cheeks and lips were red and hard. Her black hair was like a mirror for smooth shining blackness, but from her speech one could perceive she was not of the lord’s family, but a slave, sharp voiced and bitter tongued. And besides these two, the woman and the Old Lord, there was not another person in the court where before men and women and children had run to and fro on their business of caring for the great house.