The Good Earth thoet-1

by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck

  “Save a life—save a life—do not kill me. I have money for you—much money—”

  It was this word “money” which suddenly brought to Wang Lung’s mind a piercing clarity. Money! Aye, and he needed that! And again it came to him clearly, as a voice speaking, “Money—the child saved—the land!”

  He cried out suddenly in a harsh voice such as he did not himself know was in his breast,

  “Give me the money then!”

  And the fat man rose to his knees, sobbing and gibbering, and feeling for the pocket of the robe, and he brought forth his yellow hands dripping with gold and Wang Lung held out the end of his coat and received it. And again he cried out in that strange voice that was like another man’s,

  “Give me more!”

  And again the man’s hands came forth dripping with gold and he whimpered,

  “Now there is none left and I have nothing but my wretched life,” and he fell to weeping, his tears running like oil down his hanging cheeks.

  Wang Lung, looking at him as he shivered and wept, suddenly loathed him as he had loathed nothing in his life and he cried out with the loathing surging up in him,

  “Out of my sight, lest I kill you for a fat worm!”

  This Wang Lung cried, although he was a man so softhearted that he could not kill an ox. And the man ran past him like a cur and was gone.

  Then Wang Lung was left alone with the gold. He did not stop to count it, but thrust it into his bosom and went out of the open gate of peace and across the small back streets to his hut. He hugged to his bosom the gold that was yet warm from the other man’s body and to himself he said over and over,

  “We go back to the land—tomorrow we go back to the land!”

  15

  Before a handful of days had passed it seemed to Wang Lung that he had never been away from his land, as indeed, in his heart he never had. With three pieces of the gold he bought good seed from the south, full grains of wheat and of rice and of corn, and for very recklessness of riches he bought seeds the like of which he had never planted before, celery and lotus for his pond and great red radishes that are stewed with pork for a feast dish and small red fragrant beans.

  With five gold pieces he bought an ox from a farmer ploughing in the field, and this before ever he reached his own land. He saw the man ploughing and he stopped and they all stopped, the old man and the children and the woman, eager as they were to reach the house and the land, and they looked at the ox. Wang Lung had been struck with its strong neck and noticed at once the sturdy pulling of its shoulder against the wooden yoke and he called out,

  “That is a worthless ox! What will you sell it for in silver or gold, seeing that I have no animal and am hard put to it and willing to take anything?”

  And the farmer called back,

  “I would sooner sell my wife than this ox which is but three years old and in its prime,” and he ploughed on and would not stop for Wang Lung.

  Then it seemed to Wang Lung as if out of all the oxen the world held he must have this one, and he said to O-lan and to his father,

  “How is it for an ox?”

  And the old man peered and said, “It seems a beast well castrated.”

  And O-lan said, “It is a year older than he says.”

  But Wang Lung answered nothing because upon this ox he had set his heart because of its sturdy pulling of the soil and because of its smooth yellow coat and its full dark eye. With this ox he could plough his fields and cultivate them and with this ox tied to his mill he could grind the grain. And he went to the farmer and said,

  “I will give you enough to buy another ox and more, but this ox I will have.”

  At last after bickering and quarrelling and false starts away the farmer yielded for half again the worth of an ox in those parts. But gold was suddenly nothing to Wang Lung when he looked at this ox, and he passed it over to the farmer’s hand and he watched while the farmer unyoked the beast, and Wang Lung led it away with a rope through its nostrils, bis heart burning with his possession.

  When they reached the house they found the door torn away and the thatch from the roof gone and within their hoes and rakes that they had left were gone, so only the bare rafters and the earthen walls remained, and even the earthen walls were torn down with the belated snows and the rains of winter and early spring. But after the first astonishment all this was as nothing to Wang Lung. He went away to the town and he bought a good new plow of hard wood and two rakes and two hoes and mats to cover the roof until they could grow thatch again from the harvest.

  Then in the evening he stood in the doorway of his house and looked across the land, his own land, lying loose and fresh from the winter’s freezing, and ready for planting. It was full spring and in the shallow pool the frogs croaked drowsily. The bamboos at the corner of the house swayed slowly under a gentle night wind and through the twilight he could see dimly the fringe of trees at the border of the near field. They were peach trees, budded most delicately pink, and willow trees thrusting forth tender green leaves. And up from the quiescent, waiting land a faint mist rose, silver as moonlight, and clung about the tree trunks.

  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 pri
ce 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.”

  “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 th
ere 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.