Now of all of them who lived in these courts it seemed there was none wholly at peace and comfortable there except the small grandson who had been born to Wang Lung. Even Wang Lung himself, waking within the shadows of the great carved bed where he slept in his own room that was next to the court where Lotus lived, even he woke to dream sometimes that he was back in the simple, dark, earth-walled house where a man could throw his cold tea down where he would not splatter a piece of carven wood, and where a step took him into his own fields.

As for Wang Lung’s sons, there was continual unrest, the eldest son lest not enough be spent and they be belittled in the eyes of men and lest the villagers come walking through the great gate when a man from the town was there to call, and so make them ashamed before him; and the second son lest there was waste and money gone; and the youngest son striving to make repair the years he had lost as a farmer’s son.

But there was one who ran staggering hither and yon and content with his life and it was the son of the eldest son. This small one never thought of any other place than this great house and to him it was neither great nor small but only his house, and here was his mother and here his father and grandfather and all those who lived but to serve him. And from this one did Wang Lung secure peace, and he could never have enough of watching him and laughing at him and picking him up when he fell. He remembered also what his own father had done, and he delighted to take a girdle and put it about the child and walk, holding him thus from falling, and they went from court to court, and the child pointed at the darting fish in the pools and jabbered this and that and snatched the head of a flower and was at ease in the midst of everything, and only thus did Wang Lung find peace.

Nor was there only this one. The wife of the eldest son was faithful and she conceived and bore and conceived and bore regularly and faithfully, and each child as it was born had its slave. Thus Wang Lung each year saw more children in the courts and more slaves, so that when one said to him, “There is to be another mouth again in the eldest son’s court,” he only laughed and said,

“Eh—eh—well, there is rice and enough for all since we have the good land.”

And he was pleased when his second son’s wife bore also in her season, and she gave birth to a girl first as was fitting and it was seemly out of respect to her sister-in-law. Wang Lung, then, in the space of five years had four grandsons and three grand-daughters and the courts were filled with their laughter and their weeping.

Now five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old, and if it gave to Wang Lung these others, it took away also that old dreamer, his uncle, whom he had almost forgotten except to see that he and his old wife were fed and clothed and had what they wished of opium.

On the winter of the fifth year it was very cold, more cold than any thirty years before, so that for the first time in Wang Lung’s memory the moat froze about the wall of the town and men could walk back and forth on it. A continual icy wind blew also from the northeast and there was nothing, no garment of goatskin or fur, that could keep a man warm. In every room in the great house they burned braziers of charcoal and still it was cold enough to see a man’s breath when he blew it out.

Now Wang Lung’s uncle and his wife had long since smoked all the flesh off their bones and they lay day in and day out on their beds like two old dry sticks, and there was no warmth in them. And Wang Lung heard his uncle could not sit up even any more in his bed and he spat blood whenever he moved at all, and he went out to see and he saw there were not many hours left for the old man.

Then Wang Lung bought two coffins of wood good enough but not too good, and he had the coffins taken into the room where his uncle lay that the old man might see them and die in comfort, knowing there was a place for his bones. And his uncle said, his voice a quavering whisper,

“Well, and you are a son to me and more than that wandering one of my own.”

And the old woman said, but she was still stouter than the man,

“If I die before that son comes home, promise me you will find a good maid for him, so that he may have sons for us yet.” And Wang Lung promised it.

What hour his uncle died Wang Lung did not know, except that he lay dead one evening when the serving woman went in to take a bowl of soup, and Wang Lung buried him on a bitter cold day when the wind blew the snow over the land in clouds, and he put the coffin in the family enclosure beside his father, only a little lower than his father’s grave, but above the place where his own was to be.

Then Wang Lung caused mourning to be made for the whole family and they wore the sign of mourning for a year, not because any truly mourned the passing of this old man who had never been anything but a care to them, but because it is fitting so to do in a great family when a relative dies.

Then Wang Lung moved his uncle’s wife into the town where she would not be alone, and he gave her a room at the end of a far court for her own, and he told Cuckoo to supervise a slave in the care of her, and the old woman sucked her opium pipe and lay on her bed in great content, sleeping day after day, and her coffin was beside her where she could see it for her comfort.

And Wang Lung marvelled to think that once he had feared her for a great fat blowsy country woman, idle and loud, she who lay there now shrivelled and yellow and silent, and as shrivelled and yellow as the Old Mistress had been in the fallen House of Hwang.

31

Now all his life long Wang Lung had heard of war here and there but he had never seen the thing come near except the once that he wintered in the southern city when he was young, It had never come nearer to him than that, although he had often heard men say from the time he was a child, “There is a war to the west this year,” or they said, “War is to the east or the northeast.”

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was. Now and again he heard men say, “We will go to the wars.” This they said when they were about to starve and would rather be soldiers than beggars; and sometimes men said it when they were restless at home as the son of his uncle had said it, but however this was, the war was always away and in a distant place. Then suddenly like a reasonless wind out of heaven the thing came near.

Wang Lung heard of it first from his second son who came home from the market one day for his noon rice and he said to his father,

“The price of grain has risen suddenly, for the war is to the south of us now and nearer every day, and we must hold our stores of grain until later for the price will go higher and higher as the armies come nearer to us and we can sell for a good price.”

Wang Lung listened to this as he ate and he said,

“Well, and it is a curious thing and I shall be glad to see a war for what it is, for I have heard of it all my life and never seen it.”

To himself then he remembered that once he had been afraid because he would have been seized against his will, but now he was too old for use and besides he was rich and the rich need not fear anything. So he paid no great heed to the matter beyond this and he was not moved by more than a little curiosity and he said to his second son,

“Do as you think well with the grain. It is in your hands.”

And in the days to come he played with his grandchildren when he was in the mood, and he slept and ate and smoked and sometimes he went to see his poor fool who sat in a far corner of his court.