“He told me so himself,” said Ai-lan, but she put her voice low, and glanced at the man’s back who drove the vehicle.
So much she said and much more, and when Wang Yuan went in his uncle’s house, he knew each one there because of what his sister said.
It was a different house indeed from the great house Wang Lung had bought and left his sons in that old northern country town. That house was aged and great, and the rooms were vast and deep and dark, or small and dark and set about the courts, and there was no upper story to it, but room upon room sprawled out, and space was plenty and the roofs were high and beamed and old, and the windows latticed with a sort of shell sent from the south.
But this new house in this new foreign city stood in a street with others like it which pressed hard against it. They were foreign houses, tall, high, narrow, without a single court or garden, and the rooms were close together, small, and very bright with many glass windows without lattices. The sunlight poured into the rooms, hard and shining and lightening every hue and color on the walls or on the flowered satin-covered chairs and tables, and the bright silks of women’s clothes and the vermilion of their painted lips, so that when Yuan entered the room where all his kin folk were, he felt a glitter there which was too much for beauty.
Now his uncle rose, his hands lifting his huge belly from his knees, and from it his brocaded robes hung down like curtains, and he gasped out to greet his guests, “Well, sister-in-law, and my brother’s son, and Ai-lan! Well, eh, this Yuan is a great tall black lad, too, like his father — not like, no, I swear — gentler than a tiger somewhat, perhaps—”
He laughed his rolling gasping laugh and heaved himself into seat again, and his lady rose and Yuan looking sidewise saw her a neat, grey-faced lady, very plain and proper in her black satin coat and skirt, her hands crossed into her sleeves, and her little bound feet holding her unsteadily. She gave greeting to them, and she said, “I hope I see you well, sister-in-law, and brother’s son. Ai-lan, you are grown thin — too thin. These maids nowadays will starve themselves and wear their little straight-cut dresses that are bold as men’s robes. Pray sit down, sister—”
Near her stood a woman Yuan did not know at all, a woman with a scrubbed rosy face, her skin shining with soapy washing and her hair drawn straight from her brow in a country fashion, and her eyes very bright but not too wise. No one thought to say this woman’s name, and Yuan did not know if she were a servant or not, until his lady mother said a kind greeting to her and from it Yuan knew this was his uncle’s concubine. He moved his head a little then and the woman blushed and bowed as country women will, her hands folded in her sleeves, but she said nothing.
Then when greetings were all given, the cousins called out to Yuan to come and drink his tea aside in another room with them, and he and Ai-lan did, glad to be free of their elders. And Yuan sat silently and heard the chatter of those who know each other well, to whom only he was stranger, though he was their cousin.
Very well he marked them one by one, his eldest cousin not young any more, not slender either, but his belly growing as his father’s did. He was half foreign in his dark woolen foreign garb, and his pale face was handsome still, his soft hands smooth-fleshed, and his wandering restless glance lingered over-long even on his girl cousin, so that his pretty sharp-voiced wife recalled him with a little sneer she slipped sidewise into something else she said. And there was Sheng the poet, his second cousin, his hair straight and long about his face, his fingers long and pale and delicate, his face studied in its look of smiling meditation. Only the young third cousin was not smooth in his looks and ways. He was a lad of sixteen years or so, clad in a common school uniform of grey, buttoned to the neck, and his face was not beautiful at all, shaped anyhow and pimpled, and his hands were angular and loose and hung too long from out his sleeves. He only said nothing while the others chattered, but he sat eating peanuts from a dish nearby, eating hungrily and yet with such a look of young gloom upon his face that one would say he ate them against his will entirely.
About the room and among the feet of all of them ran younger children, a lad or two of ten and eight, two little girls, and there was a screaming two-year-old looped in a band of cloth held by a serving woman, and a babe in arms suckling at the breast of a wet nurse. These were the children of Yuan’s uncle’s concubine, and of his elder cousins, but Yuan was shy of children and he let them be.
At first the talk was among them all and Yuan sat silently, for while they bade him eat as he would from varied sweetmeats that stood near in dishes on small tables, and while his elder cousin’s wife called to a serving maid to pour out tea, they forgot him seemingly, and paid no heed to courtesies in which he had been taught. So he cracked a few nuts noiselessly and sipped his tea and listened, and now and then he shyly gave a nut meat to a child who gobbled it gracelessly and with no word of thanks.
But soon the talk fell quiet among the cousins. The elder cousin, it is true, asked Yuan a thing or two, such as where he would go to school, and when he heard Yuan might go abroad he said enviously, “I wish I might have gone, but my father never would spend the money on me.” Then he yawned and put his finger in his nose and fell to moody thinking, and at last he took his youngest lad upon his knee and fed him sweets and teased him for a while and laughed to hear him grow angry and laughed yet more when the child beat him with little furious fists. Ai-lan fell to talking in a low voice with her cousin’s wife, and the cousin’s wife spoke in an angry tone which she made low, but still Yuan could hear her and perceive the speech was of her mother-in-law and how she demanded things no woman nowadays would give another.
“With this house full of servants she will call to me to pour her bowl of tea, Ai-lan — and she blames me if a measure more of rice is used this month than last! I swear I cannot bear it. Not many women nowadays will live in the house with their husband’s parents, and no more will I!” And much more of such women’s talk.
Of all of them Yuan looked most curiously at his second cousin, Sheng, whom Ai-lan called the poet, and this was partly because Yuan himself loved verses and partly because he liked the grace about the youth, a slender grace, made quicker and more marked because he wore the dark and simple foreign garb. He was beautiful, and Yuan loved beauty very well, and he could scarcely keep his eyes from Sheng’s golden, oval face and from his eyes, as apricot in shape as any maid’s, and soft and black and dreaming, for there was some feeling in this cousin, some look of inner understanding, which drew the heart of Yuan and made him long to speak with Sheng. But neither Sheng nor Meng said anything and soon Sheng read a book, and when the nuts were gone Meng went away.
But in this crowded room no speech was easy. The children wept at anything, and the doors squeaked with constant passing of the servants coming in with tea and tidbits and there was the whispering of his elder cousin’s wife, and Ai-lan’s laughter and mocking interest in the tales she heard.
So did a long evening pass. There was a mighty dinner at which the uncle and the elder cousin ate beyond belief, complaining together if some dish fell below their hopes, and comparing the cooking of meats and sweets, and praising loudly if a dish were good, and calling for the cook to come and hear their judgments. The cook came, his apron very foul and black with all his labors, and he listened anxiously, his oily face all smiles if he were praised and he all promises and hanging of his head if he were blamed.
As for the lady, Yuan’s uncle’s wife, she was distraught on her own account to find out if any dish were meat or cooked with lard or had an egg in it, for now that she was old she took the Buddhist vow against all flesh, and she had her own cook, who served up vegetables in every sort of cunning shape of meats, so that a dish that one would swear was pigeons’ eggs in soup, would have no pigeon egg at all, or a fish would come so like a fish with eyes and scales in such cunning imitation that one must believe it was a fish until he cut and saw there were no flesh and bones The lady kept her husband’s concubine busy to see to all this, and she did it ostentatiously, saying, “Lady, it ought to be a task my son’s wife does for me, but in these new days the son’s wives are not what they were. I have no daughter-in-law at all or good as none.”