“Come and drink a bowl at my cost, and tell me the news of the town, since I have been a winter away.”
The shopkeeper was always ready for such talk, especially if he drank his own tea at another’s cost, and he sat down readily at Wang Lung’s table, a small weasel-faced man with a twisted and crossed left eye. His clothes were solid and black with grease down the front of his coat and trousers, for besides tea he sold food also, which he cooked himself, and he was fond of saying, “There is a proverb, ‘A good cook has never a clean coat,’&nsp;” and so he considered himself justly and necessarily filthy. He sat down and began at once,
“Well, and beyond the starving of people, which is no news, the greatest news was the robbery at the House of Hwang.”
It was just what Wang Lung hoped to hear and the man went on to tell him of it with relish, describing how the few slaves left had screamed and how they had been carried off and how the concubines that remained had been raped and driven out and some even taken away, so that now none cared to live in that house at all. “None,” the man finished, “except the Old Lord, who is now wholly the creature of a slave called Cuckoo, who has for many years been in the Old Lord’s chamber, while others came and went, because of her cleverness.”
“And has this woman command, then?” asked Wang Lung, listening closely.
“For the time she can do anything,” replied the man. “And so for the time she closes her hand on everything that can be held and swallows all that can be swallowed. Some day, of course, when the young lords have their affairs settled in other parts they will come back and then she cannot fool them with her talk of a faithful servant to be rewarded, and out she will go. But she has her living made now, although she live to a hundred years.”
“And the land?” asked Wang Lung at last, quivering with his eagerness.
“The land?” said the man blankly. To this shopkeeper land meant nothing at all.
“Is it for sale?” said Wang Lung impatiently.
“Oh, the land!” answered the man with indifference, and then as a customer came in he rose and called as he went, “I have heard it is for sale, except the piece where the family are buried for these six generations,” and he went his way.
Then Wang Lung rose also, having heard what he came to hear, and he went out and approached again the great gates and the woman came to open to him and he stood without entering and he said to her,
“Tell me first this, will the Old Lord set his own seal to the deeds of sale?”
And the woman answered eagerly, and her eyes were fastened on his,
“He will—he will—on my life!”
Then Wang Lung said to her plainly,
“Will you sell the land for gold or for silver or for jewels?”
And her eyes glittered as she spoke and she said,
“I will sell it for jewels!”
17
Now Wang Lung had more land than a man with an ox can plough and harvest, and more harvest than one man can garner and so he built another small room to his house and he bought an ass and he said to his neighbor Ching,
“Sell me the little parcel of land that you have and leave your lonely house and come into my house and help me with my land.” And Ching did this and was glad to do it.
The heavens rained in season then; and the young rice grew and when the wheat was cut and harvested in heavy sheaves, the two men planted the young rice in the flooded fields, more rice than Wang Lung had ever planted he planted this year, for the rains came in abundance of water, so that lands that were before dry were this year fit for rice. Then when this harvest came he and Ching alone could not harvest it, so great it was, and Wang Lung hired two other men as laborers who lived in the village and they harvested it.
He remembered also the idle young lords of the fallen great house as he worked on the land he had bought from the House of Hwang, and he bade his two sons sharply each morning to come into the fields with him and he set them at what labor their small hands could do, guiding the ox and the ass, and making them, if they could accomplish no great labor, at least to know the heat of the sun on their bodies and the weariness of walking back and forth along the furrows.
But O-lan he would not allow to work in the fields for he was no longer a poor man, but a man who could hire his labor done if he would, seeing that never had the land given forth such harvests as it had this year. He was compelled to build yet another room to the house to store his harvests in, or they would not have had space to walk in the house. And he bought three pigs and a flock of fowls to feed on the grains spilled from the harvests.
Then O-lan worked in the house and made new clothes for each one and new shoes, and she made coverings of flowered cloth stuffed with warm new cotton for every bed, and when all was finished they were rich in clothing and in bedding as they had never been. Then she laid herself down upon her bed and gave birth again, although still she would have no one with her; even though she could hire whom she chose, she chose to be alone.
This time she was long at labor and when Wang Lung came home at evening he found his father standing at the door and laughing and saying,
“An egg with a double yolk this time!”
And when Wang Lung went into the inner room there was O-lan upon the bed with two new-born children, a boy and a girl as alike as two grains of rice. He laughed boisterously at what she had done and then he thought of a merry thing to say,
“So this is why you bore two jewels in your bosom!”
And he laughed again at what he had thought of to say, and O-lan, seeing how merry he was, smiled her slow, painful smile.
Wang Lung had, therefore, at this time no sorrow of any kind, unless it was this sorrow, that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age, but only smiled her baby smile still when she caught her father’s glance. Whether it was the desperate first year of her life or the starving or what it was, month after month went past and Wang Lung waited for the first words to come from her lips, even for his name which the children called him, “da-da.” But no sound came, only the sweet, empty smile, and when he looked at her he groaned forth,
“Little fool—my poor little fool—”
And in his heart he cried to himself,
“If I had sold this poor mouse and they found her thus they would have killed her!”
And as if to make amends to the child he made much of her and took her into the field with him sometimes and she followed him silently about, smiling when he spoke and noticed her there.
In these parts, where Wang Lung had lived all his life and his father and his father’s father had lived upon the land, there were famines once in five years or so, or if the gods were lenient, once in seven or eight or even ten years. This was because the heavens rained too much or not at all, or because the river to the north, because of rains and winter snows in distant mountains, came swelling into the fields over the dykes which had been built by men for centuries to confine it.
Time after time men fled from the land and came back to it, but Wang Lung set himself now to build his fortunes so securely that through the bad years to come he need never leave his land again but live on the fruits of the good years, and so subsist until another year came forth. He set himself and the gods helped him and for seven years there were harvests, and every year Wang Lung and his men threshed far more than could be eaten. He hired more laborers each year for his fields until he had six men and he built a new house behind his old one, a large room behind a court and two small rooms on each side of the court beside the large room. The house he covered with tiles, but the walls were still made of the hard tamped earth from the fields, only he had them brushed with lime and they were white and clean. Into these rooms he and his family moved, and the laborers, with Ching at their head, lived in the old house in front.