The Good Earth thoet-1
Page 5
5
The New Year approached and in every house in the village there were preparations. Wang Lung went into the town to the candlemaker’s shop and he bought squares of red paper on which were brushed in gilt ink the letter for happiness and some with the letter for riches, and these squares he pasted upon his farm utensils to bring him luck in the New Year. Upon his plow and upon the ox’s yoke and upon the two buckets in which he carried his fertilizer and his water, upon each of these be pasted a square. And then upon the doors of his house he pasted long strips of red paper brushed with mottoes of good luck, and over his doorway he pasted a fringe of red paper cunningly cut into a flower pattern and very finely cut. And he bought red paper to make new dresses for the gods, and this the old man did cleverly enough for his old shaking hands, and Wang Lung took them and put them upon the two small gods in the temple to the earth and he burned a little incense before them for the sake of the New Year. And for his house he bought also two red candles to burn on the eve of the year upon the table under the picture of a god, which was pasted on the wall of the middle room above where the table stood.
And Wang Lung went again into the town and he bought pork fat and white sugar and the woman rendered the fat smooth and white and she took rice flour, which they had ground from their own rice between their millstones to which they could yoke the ox when they needed to do so, and she took the fat and the sugar and she mixed and kneaded rich New Year’s cakes, called moon cakes, such as were eaten in the House of Hwang.
When the cakes were laid out upon the table in strips, ready for heating, Wang Lung felt his heart fit to burst with pride. There was no other woman in the village able to do what his had done, to make cakes such as only the rich ate at the feast. In some of the cakes she had put strips of little red haws and spots of dried green plums, making flowers and patterns.
“It is a pity to eat these,” said Wang Lung.
The old man was hovering about the table, pleased as a child might be pleased with the bright colors. He said,
“Call my brother, your uncle, and his children—let them see!”
But prosperity had made Wang Lung cautious. One could not ask hungry people only to see cakes.
“It is ill luck to look at cakes before the New Year,” he replied hastily. And the woman, her hands all dusty with the fine rice flour and sticky with the fat, said,
“Those are not for us to eat, beyond one or two of the plain ones for guests to taste. We are not rich enough to eat white sugar and lard. I am preparing them for the Old Mistress at the great house. I shall take the child on the second day of the New Year and carry the cakes for a gift.”
Then the cakes were more important than ever, and Wang Lung was pleased that to the great hall where he had stood with so much timidity and in such poverty his wife should now go as visitor, carrying his son, dressed in red, and cakes made as these were, with the best flour and sugar and lard.
All else at that New Year sank into insignificance beside this visit. His new coat of black cotton cloth which O-lan had made, when he had put it on, only made him say to himself,
“I shall wear it when I take them to the gate of the great house.”
He even bore carelessly the first day of the New Year when his uncle and his neighbors came crowding into the house to wish his father and himself well, all boisterous with food and drink. He had himself seen to it that the colored cakes were put away into the basket lest he might have to offer them to common men, although he found it very hard when the plain white ones were praised for their flavor of fat and sugar not to cry out,
“You should see the colored ones!”
But he did not, for more than anything he wished to enter the great house with pride.
Then on the second day of the New Year, when it is the day for women to visit each other, the men having eaten and drunk well the day before, they rose at dawn and the woman dressed the child in his red coat and in the tiger-faced shoes she had made, and she put on his head, freshly shaven by Wang Lung himself on the last day of the old year, the crownless red hat with the small gilt Buddha sewed on front, and she set him upon the bed. Then Wang Lung dressed himself quickly while his wife combed out afresh her long black hair and knotted it with the brass pin washed with silver which he had bought for her, and she put on her new coat of black that was made from the same piece as his own new robe, twenty-four feet of good cloth for the two, and two feet of cloth thrown in for good measure, as the custom is at cloth shops. Then he carrying the child and she the cakes in the basket, they set out on the path across the fields, now barren with winter.
Then Wang Lung had his reward at the great gate of the House of Hwang, for when the gateman came to the woman’s call he opened his eyes at all he saw and he twirled the three long hairs on his mole and cried out,
“Ah, Wang the farmer, three this time instead of one!” And then seeing the new clothes they all wore and the child who was a son, he said further, “One has no need to wish you more fortune this year than you have had in the last.”
Wang Lung answered negligently as one speaks to a man who is scarcely an equal, “Good harvests—good harvests—” and he stepped with assurance inside the gate.
The gateman was impressed with all he saw and he said to Wang Lung,
“Do you sit within my wretched room while I announce your woman and son within.”
And Wang Lung stood watching them go across the court, his wife and his son, bearing gifts to the head of a great house. It was all to his honor, and when he could no longer see them when they had dwindled down the long vista of the courts one inside the other, and had turned at last wholly out of sight, he went into the gateman’s house and there he accepted as a matter of course from the gateman’s pock-marked wife the honorable seat to the left of the table in the middle room, and he accepted with only a slight nod the bowl of tea which she presented to him and he set it before him and did not drink of it, as though it were not good enough in quality of tea leaves for him.
It seemed a long time before the gateman returned, bringing back again the woman and child. Wang Lung looked closely at the woman’s face for an instant trying to see if all were well, for he had learned now from that impassive square countenance to detect small changes at first invisible to him. She wore a look of heavy content, however, and at once he became impatient to hear her tell of what had happened in those courts of the ladies into which he could not go, now that he had no business there.
With short bows, therefore, to the gateman and to his pockmarked wife he hurried O-lan away and he took into his own arms the child who was asleep and lying all crumpled in his new coat.
“Well?” he called back to her over his shoulder as she followed him. For once he was impatient with her slowness. She drew a little nearer to him and said in a whisper,
“I believe, if one should ask me, that they are feeling a pinch this year in that house.”
She spoke in a shocked tone as one might speak of gods being hungry.
“What do you mean?” said Wang Lung, urging her.
But she would not be hastened. Words were to her things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.
“The Ancient Mistress wore the same coat this year as last. I have never seen this happen before. And the slaves had no new coats.” And then after a pause she said, “I saw not one slave with a new coat like mine.” And then after a while she said again, “As for our son, there was not even a child among the concubines of the Old Master himself to compare to him in beauty and in dress.”
A slow smile spread over her face and Wang Lung laughed aloud and he held the child tenderly against him. How well he had done—how well he had done! And then as he exulted he was smitten with fear. What foolish thing was he doing, walking like this under an open sky, with a beautiful man child for any evil spirit passing by chance through the air to see! He opened his coat hastily and thrust the child’s head into his bosom and he said in a loud voice,
; “What a pity our child is a female whom no one could want and covered with smallpox as well! Let us pray it may die.”
“Yes—yes—” said his wife as quickly as she could, understanding dimly what a thing they had done.
And being comforted with these precautions they had now taken, Wang Lung once more urged his wife.
“Did you find out why they are poorer?”
“I had but a moment for private talk with the cook under whom I worked before,” she replied, “but she said, ‘This house cannot stand forever with all the young lords, five of them, spending money like waste water in foreign parts and sending home woman after woman as they weary of them, and the Old Lord living at home adding a concubine or two each year, and the Old Mistress eating enough opium every day to fill two shoes with gold.’ “
“Do they indeed!” murmured Wang Lung, spellbound.
“Then the third daughter is to be married in the spring,” continued O-lan, “and her dowry is a prince’s ransom and enough to buy an official seat in a big city. Her clothes she will have of nothing but the finest satins with special patterns woven in Soochow and Hangchow and she will have a tailor sent from Shanghai with his retinue of under tailors lest she find her clothes less fashionable than those of the women in foreign parts.”
“Whom will she marry, then, with all this expense?” said Wang Lung, struck with admiration and horror at such pouring out of wealth.
“She is to marry the second son of a Shanghai magistrate,” said the woman, and then after a long pause she added, “They must be getting poorer for the Old Mistress herself told me they wished to sell land—some of the land to the south of the house, just outside the city wall, where they have always planted rice each year because it is good land and easily flooded from the moat around the wall.”
“Sell their land!” repeated Wang Lung, convinced. “Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one’s flesh and blood.”
He pondered for a while and suddenly a thought came to him and he smote the side of his head with his palm.
“What have I not thought of!” he cried, turning to the woman. “We will buy the land!”
They stared at each other, he in delight, she in stupefaction.
“But the land—the land—” she stammered.
“I will buy it!” he cried in a lordly voice. “I will buy it from the great House of Hwang!”
“It is too far away,” she said in consternation. “We would have to walk half the morning to reach it.”
“I will buy it,” he repeated peevishly as he might repeat a demand to his mother who crossed him.
“It is a good thing to buy land,” she said pacifically. “It is better certainly than putting money into a mud wall. But why not a piece of your uncle’s land? He is clamoring to sell that strip near to the western field we now have.”
“That land of my uncle’s,” said Wang Lung loudly, “I would not have it. He has been dragging a crop out of it in this way and that for twenty years and not a bit has he put back of manure or bean cake. The soil is like lime. No, I will buy Hwang’s land.”
He said “Hwang’s land” as casually as he might have said “Ching’s land,”—Ching, who was his farmer neighbor. He would be more than equal to these people in the foolish, great, wasteful house. He would go with the silver in his hand and he would say plainly,
“I have money. What is the price of the earth you wish to sell?” Before the Old Lord he heard himself saying and to the Old Lord’s agent, “Count me as anyone else. What is the fair price? I have it in my hand.”
And his wife, who had been a slave in the kitchens of that proud famfly, she would be wife to a man who owned a piece of the land that for generations had made the House of Hwang great It was as though she felt his thought for she suddenly ceased her resistance and she said,
“Let it be bought. After all, rice land is good, and it is near the moat and we can get water every year. It is sure.”
And again the slow smile spread over her face, the smile that never lightened the dullness of her narrow black eyes, and after a long time she said,
“Last year this time I was slave in that house.”
And they walked on, silent with the fullness of this thought.
6
This piece of land which Wang Lung now owned was a thing which greatly changed his life. At first, after he had dug the silver from the wall and taken it to the great house, after the honor of speaking as an equal to the Old Lord’s equal was past, he was visited with a depression of spirit which was almost regret. When he thought of the hole in the wall now empty that had been filled with silver he need not use, he wished that he had his silver back. After all, this land, it would take hours of labor again, and as O-lan said, it was far away, more than a li which is a third of a mile. And again, the buying of it had not been quite so filled with glory as he had anticipated. He had gone too early to the great house and the Old Lord was still sleeping. True, it was noon, but when he said in a loud voice,
“Tell his Old Honor I have important business—tell him money is concerned!” the gateman had answered positively,
“All the money in the world would not tempt me to wake the old tiger. He sleeps with his new concubine, Peach Blossom, whom he has had but three days. It is not worth my life to waken him.” And then he added somewhat maliciously, pulling at the hairs on his mole, “And do not think that silver will waken him—he has had silver under his hand since he was born”
In the end, then, it had had to be managed with the Old Lord’s agent, an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them in passing. So it seemed sometimes to Wang Lung that after all the silver was more valuable than the land. One could see silver shining.
Well, but the land was his! He set out one grey day in the second month of the new year to look at it. None knew yet that it belonged to him and he walked out to see it alone, a long square of heavy black clay that lay stretched beside the moat encircling the wall of the town. He paced the land off carefully, three hundred paces lengthwise and a hundred and twenty across. Four stones still marked the corners of the boundaries, stones set with the great seal character of the House of Hwang. Well, he would have that changed. He would pull up the stones later and he would put his own name there—not yet, for he was not ready for people to know that he was rich enough to buy land from the great house, but later, when he was more rich, so that it did not matter what he did. And looking at that long square of land he thought to himself,
“To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!”
Then he had a turn of his mind and he was filled with a contempt for himself that a small piece of land should seem so important. Why, when he had poured out his silver proudly before the agent the man had scraped it up carelessly in his hands and said,
“Here is enough for a few days of opium for the old lady, at any rate.”
And the wide difference that still lay between him and the great house seemed suddenly impassable as the moat full of water in front of him, and as high as the wall beyond, stretching up straight and hoary before him. He was filled with an angry determination, then, and he said to his heart that he would fill that hole with silver again and again until he had bought from the House of Hwang enough land so that this land would be less than an inch in his sight
And so this parcel of land became to Wang Lung a sign and a symbol.
Spring came with blustering winds and torn clouds of rain and for Wang Lung the half-idle days of winter were plunged into long days of desperate labor over his land. The old man looked after the child now and the woman worked with the man from dawn until sunset flowed over the fields, and when Wang Lung perceived one day that again she was with child, his first thought was of irritation that during the harvest she would be unable to work. He shouted at her, irritable with fatigue,
“So you have chosen this time to breed again, have you!”
She answered stout
ly.
“This time it is nothing. It is only the first that is hard.”
Beyond this nothing was said of the second child from the time he noticed its growth swelling her body until the day came in autumn when she laid down her hoe one morning and crept into the house. He did not go back that day even for bis noon meal, for the sky was heavy with thunder clouds and his rice lay dead ripe for gathering into sheaves. Later before the sun set she was back beside him, her body flattened, spent, but her face silent and undaunted. His impulse was to say,
“For this day you have had enough. Go and lie upon your bed.” But the aching of his own exhausted body made him cruel, and he said to himself that he had suffered as much with his labor that day as she with her childbirth, and so he only asked between the strokes of his scythe,
“Is it male or female?”
She answered calmly,
“It is another male.”
They said nothing more to each other, but he was pleased, and the incessant bending and stooping seemed less arduous, and working on until the moon rose above a bank of purple clouds, they finished the field and went home.
After his meal and after he had washed his sunburnt body in cool water and had rinsed his mouth with tea, Wang Lung went in to look at his second son. O-Ian had lain herself upon the bed after the cooking of the meal and the child lay beside her—a fat, placid child, well enough, but not so large as the first one. Wang Lung looked at him and then went back to the middle room well content. Another son, and another and another each year—one could not trouble with red eggs every year; it was enough to do it for the first Sons every year; the house was full of good fortune—this woman brought him nothing but good fortune. He shouted to his father,
“Now, Old One, with another grandson we shall have to put the big one in your bed!”
The old man was delighted. He had for a long time been desiring this child to sleep in his bed and warm his chilly old flesh with the renewal of young bones and blood, but the child would not leave his mother. Now, however, staggering in with feet still unsteady with babyhood, he stared at this new child beside his mother, and seeming to comprehend with his grave eyes that another had his place, he allowed himself without protest to be placed in his grandfather’s bed.