“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.