“I will not sell my land,” he said.
his uncle stepped forward. At this instant the younger of Wang Lung’s two sons came creeping to the doorway upon his hands and knees. Since he had so little strength in these latter days the child at times had gone back to crawling as he used in bis babyhood.
“Is that your lad?” cried the uncle, “the little fat lad I gave a copper to in the summer?”
And they all looked at the child and suddenly Wang Lung, who through all this time had not wept at all, began to weep silently, the tears gathering in great knots of pain in his throat and rolling down his cheeks.
“What is your price?” he whispered at last. Well, there were these three children to be fed—the children and the old man. He and his wife could dig themselves graves in the land and lie down in them and sleep. Well, but here were these.
And then one of the men from the city spoke, a man with one eye blind and sunken in his face, and unctuously he said,
“My poor man, we will give you a better price than could be got in these times anywhere for the sake of the boy who is starving. We will give you…” he paused and then he said harshly, “we will give you a string of a hundred pence for an acre!”
Wang Lung laughed bitterly. “Why, that,” he cried, “that is taking my land for a gift. Why, I pay twenty times that when I buy land!”
“Ah, but not when you buy it from men who are starving,” said the other man from the city. He was a small, slight fellow with a high thin nose, but his voice came out of him unexpectedly large and coarse and hard.
Wang Lung looked at the three of them. They were sure of him, these men! What will not a man give for his starving children and his old father! The weakness of surrender in him melted into an anger such as he had never known in his life before. He sprang up and at the men as a dog springs at an enemy.
“I shall never sell the land!” he shrieked at them. “Bit by bit I will dig up the fields and feed the earth itself to the children and when they die I will bury them in the land, and I and my wife and my old father, even he, we will die on the land that has given us birth!”
He was weeping violently and his anger went out of him as suddenly as a wind and he stood shaking and weeping. The men stood there smiling slightly, his uncle among them, unmoved. This talk was madness and they waited until Wang’s anger was spent.
And then suddenly O-lan came to the door and spoke to them, her voice flat and commonplace as though every day such things were.
“The land we will not sell, surely,” she said, “else when we return from the south we shall have nothing to feed us. But we will sell the table and the two beds and the bedding and the four benches and even the cauldron from the stove. But the rakes and the hoe and the plow we will not sell, nor the land.”
There was some calmness in her voice which carried more strength than all Wang Lung’s anger, and Wang Lung’s uncle said uncertainly,
“Will you really go south?”
At last the one-eyed man spoke to the others and they muttered among themselves and the one-eyed man turned and said,
“They are poor things and fit only for fuel. Two silver bits for the lot and take it or leave it.”
He turned away with contempt as he spoke, but O-lan answered tranquilly,
“It is less than the cost of one bed, but if you have the silver give it to me quickly and take the things.”
The one-eyed man fumbled in his girdle and dropped into her outstretched hand the silver and the three men came into the house and between them they took out the table and the benches and the bed in Wang Lung’s room first with its bedding, and they wrenched the cauldron from the earthern oven in which it stood. But when they went into the old man’s room Wang Lung’s uncle stood outside. He did not wish his older brother to see him, nor did he wish to be there when the old man was laid on the floor and the bed taken from under him. When all was finished and the house was wholly empty except for the two rakes and the two hoes and the plow in one corner of the middle room, O-lan said to her husband,
“Let us go while we have the two bits of silver and before we must sell the rafters of the house and have no hole into which we can crawl when we return.”
And Wang Lung answered heavily, “Let us go.”
But he looked across the fields at the small figures of the men receding and he muttered over and over, “At least I have the land—I have the land.”
10
There was nothing to do but to pull the door tight upon its wooden hinges and fasten the iron hasp. All their clothes they had upon them. Into each child’s hands O-lan thrust a rice bowl and a pair of chopsticks and the two little boys grasped at them eagerly and held them tight as a promise of food to come. Thus they started across the fields, a dreary small procession moving so slowly that it seemed they would never be to the wall of the town.
The girl Wang Lung carried in his bosom until he saw that the old man would fall and then he gave the child to O-lan and stooping under his father he lifted him on his back and carried him, staggering under the old man’s dry, wind-light frame. They went on in complete silence past the little temple with the two small stately gods within, who never noticed anything that passed. Wang Lung was sweating with his weakness in spite of the cold and bitter wind. This wind never ceased to blow on them and against them, so that the two boys cried of its cold. But Wang Lung coaxed them saying,
“You are two big men and you are travellers to the south. There is warmth there and food every day, white rice every day for all of us and you shall eat and you shall eat.”
In time they reached the gate of the wall, resting continually every little way, and where Wang Lung had once delighted in its coolness now he clenched his teeth against the gust of wintry wind that swept furiously through its channel, as icy water will rush between cliffs. Beneath their feet the mud was thick and speared through with needles of ice and the little boys could make no headway and O-lan was laden with the girl and desperate under the weight of her own body. Wang Lung staggered through with the old man and set him down and then went back and lifted each child and carried him through, and then when it was over at last his sweat poured out of him like rain, spending all his strength with it, so that he had to lean for a long time against the damp wall, his eyes shut and his breath coming and going quickly, and his family stood shivering and waiting about him.
They were close to the gate of the great house now, but it was locked fast, the iron doors reared full to their height and the stone lions grey and windbitten on either side. Upon the doorsteps lay cowering a few dingy shapes of men and women who gazed, famished, upon the closed and barred gate, and when Wang Lung passed with his miserable little procession one cried out in a cracked voice,
“The hearts of these rich are hard like the hearts of the gods. They have still rice to eat and from the rice they do not eat they are still making wine, while we starve.”
And another moaned forth,
“Oh, if I had an instant’s strength in this hand of mine I would set fire to the gates and to those houses and courts within, even though I burned in the fire. A thousand curses to the parents that bore the children of Hwang!”
But Wang Lung answered nothing to all this and in silence they went on towards the south.