“I ask your pardon, my uncle, for not stopping in my work. These beans, must, if they are to bear, as you know, be cultivated twice and thrice. Yours, doubtless, are finished. I am very slow—a poor farmer—never finishing my work in time to rest.”
His uncle understood perfectly Wang Lung’s malice, but he answered smoothly,
“I am a man of evil destiny. This year out of twenty seed beans, one came up, and in such a poor growth as that there is no use in putting the hoe down. We shall have to buy beans this year if we eat them,” and he sighed heavily.
Wang Lung hardened his heart. He knew that his uncle had come to ask something of him. He put his hoe down into the ground with a long even movement and with great care, breaking up the tiniest clod in the soft earth already well cultivated. The bean plants stood erect in thrifty order, casting as they stood little fringes of clear shadow in the sunshine. At last his uncle began to speak.
“The person in my house has told me,” he said, “of your interest in my worthless oldest slave creature. It is wholly true what you say. You are wise for your years. She should be married. She is fifteen years old and for these three or four years could have given birth. I am terrified constantly lest she conceive by some wild dog and bring shame to me and to our name. Think of this happening in our respectable family, to me, the brother of your own father!”
Wang Lung put his hoe down hard into the soil. He would have liked to have spoken plainly. He would have liked to have said,
“Why do you not control her, then? Why do you not keep her decently in the house and make her sweep and clean and cook; and make clothes for the family?”
But one cannot say these things to an older generation. He remained silent, therefore, and hoed closely about a small plant and he waited.
“If it had been my good destiny,” continued his uncle mournfully, “to have married a wife as your father did, one who could work and at the same time produce sons, as your own does also, instead of a woman like mine, who grows nothing but flesh and gives birth to nothing but females and that one idle son of mine who is less than a male for his idleness, I, too, might have been rich now as you are. Then might I have, willingly would I have, shared my riches with you. Your daughters I would have wed to good men, your son would I have placed in a merchant’s shop as apprentice and willingly paid the fee of guaranty—your house would I have delighted to repair, and you I would have fed with the best I had, you and your father and your children, for we are of one blood.”
Wang Lung answered shortly,
“You know I am not rich. I have the five mouths to feed now and my father is old and does not work and still he eats, and another mouth is being born in my house at this very moment, for aught I know.”
His uncle replied shrilly,
“You are rich—you are rich! You have bought the land from the great house at the gods know what heavy price—is there another in the village who could do this thing?”
At this Wang Lung was goaded to anger. He flung down his hoe and he shouted suddenly, glaring at his uncle,
“If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!”
The blood flew into his uncle’s yellow face and he rushed at his nephew and slapped him vigorously on both cheeks.
“Now that,” he cried, “for speaking so to your father’s generation! Have you no religion, no morals, that you are so lacking in filial conduct? Have you not heard it said that in the Sacred Edicts it is commanded that a man is never to correct an elder?”
Wang Lung stood sullen and immoveable, conscious of his fault but angry to the bottom of his heart against this man who was his uncle.
“I will tell your words to the whole village!” screamed his uncle in a high cracked voice of fury. “Yesterday you attack my house and call aloud in the streets that my daughter is not a virgin; today you reproach me, who if your father passes on, must be as your own father to you! Now may my daughters all not be virgins, but not from one of them would I hear such talk!” And he repeated over and over, “I will tell it to the village—I will tell it to the village…” until at last Wang Lung said unwillingly, “What do you want me to do?”
It touched his pride that this matter might indeed be called out before the village. After all, it was his own flesh and blood.
His uncle changed immediately. Anger melted out of him. He smiled and he put his hand on Wang Lung’s arm.
“Ah, I know you—good lad—good lad—” he said softly. “Your old uncle knows you—you are my son. Son, a little silver in this poor old palm—say, ten pieces, or even nine, and I could begin to have arrangements with a matchmaker for that slave of mine. Ah, you are right! It is time—it is time!” He sighed and shook his head and he looked piously to the sky.
Wang Lung picked up his hoe and threw it down again.
“Come to the house,” he said shortly. “I do not carry silver on me like a prince,” and he strode ahead, bitter beyond speech because some of the good silver with which he had planned to buy more land was to go into this palm of his uncle’s, from whence it would slip on to the gambling table before night fell.
He strode into the house, brushing out of his way his two small sons who played, naked in the warm sunshine, about the threshold. His uncle, with easy good nature, called to the children and took from some recess in his crumpled clothing a copper coin for each child. He pressed the small fat shining bodies to him, and putting his nose into their soft necks he smelled of the sun-browned flesh with easy affection.
“Ah, you are two little men,” he said, clasping one in either arm.
But Wang Lung did not pause. He went into the room where he slept with his wife and the last child. It was very dark, coming in as he did from the outer sunshine, and except for the bar of light from the hole, he could see nothing. But the smell of warm blood which he remembered so well filled his nostrils and he called out sharply,
“What now—has your time come?”
The voice of his wife answered from the bed more feebly than he had ever heard her speak,
“It is over once more. It is only a slave this time—not worth mentioning.”
Wang Lung stood still. A sense of evil struck him. A girl! A girl was causing all this trouble in his uncle’s house. Now a girl had been born into his house as well.
He went without reply then to the wall and felt for the roughness which was the mark of the hiding place and he removed the clod of earth. Behind it he fumbled among the little heap of silver and he counted out nine pieces.
“Why are you taking the silver out?” said his wife suddenly in the darkness.
“I am compelled to lend it to my uncle,” he replied shortly.
His wife answered nothing at first and then she said in her plain, heavy way,
“It is better not to say lend. There is no lending in that house. There is only giving.”
“Well I know that,” replied Wang Lung with bitterness. “It is cutting my flesh out to give to him and for nothing except that we are of a blood.”
Then going out into the threshold he thrust the money at his uncle and he walked quickly back to the field and there he fell to working as though he would tear the earth from its foundations. He thought for the time only of the silver; he saw it poured out carelessly upon a gambling table, saw it swept up by some idle hand—his silver, the silver he had so painfully collected from the fruits of his fields, to turn it back again for more earth for his own.
It was evening before his anger was spent and he straightened himself and remembered his home and his food. And then he thought of that new mouth come that day into his house and it struck him, with heaviness, that the birth of daughters had begun for him, daughters who do not belong to their parents, but are born and reared for other families. He had not even thought, in his anger at his uncle, to stop and see the face of this small, new creature.