It was at the end of one of those days in late winter when for the first time it seems possible that spring may come again. The ground about the huts was still muddy with the melting snow and the water ran into the huts so that each family had hunted here and there for a few bricks upon which to sleep. But with the discomfort of the damp earth there was this night a soft mildness in the air and this mildness made Wang Lung exceedingly restless so that he could not sleep at once as was his wont after he had eaten, so that he went out to the street’s edge and stood there idle.
Here his old father habitually sat squatting on his thighs and leaning against the wall and here he sat now, having taken his bowl of food there to sup it, now that the children filled the hut to bursting when they were clamoring. The old man held in one hand the end of a loop of cloth which O-lan had torn from her girdle, and within this loop the girl child staggered to and fro out falling. Thus he spent his days looking after this child wbo had now grown rebellious at having to be in her mother’s hosom as she begged. Besides this, O-lan was again with child and the pressure of the larger child upon her from without was too painful to bear.
Wang Lung watched the child falling and scrambling and falling again and the old man pulling at the loop ends, and standing thus he felt upon his face the mildness of the evening wind and there arose within him a mighty longing for his fields.
“On such a day as this,” he said aloud to his father, “the fields should be turned and the wheat cultivated.”
“Ah,” said the old man tranquilly, “I know what is in your thought. Twice and twice again in my years I have had to do as we did this year and leave the fields and know that there was no seed in them for fresh harvests.”
“But you always went back, my father.”
“There was the land, my son,” said the old man simply.
Well, they also would go back, if not this year, then next, said Wang to his own heart. As long as there was the land! And the thought of it lying there waiting for him, rich with the spring rains, filled him with desire. He went back to the hut and he said roughly to his wife.
“If I had anything to sell I would sell it and go back to the land. Or if it were not for the old head, we would walk though we starved. But how can he and the small child walk a hundred miles? And you, with your burden!”
O-lan had been rinsing the rice bowls with a little water and now she piled them in a corner of the hut and looked up at him from the spot where she squatted.
“There is nothing to sell except the girl,” she answered slowly.
Wang Lung’s breath caught.
“Now, I would not sell a child!” he said loudly.
“I was sold,” she answered very slowly. “I was sold to a great house so that my parents could return to their home.”
“And would you sell the child, therefore?”
“If it were only I, she would be killed before she was sold… the slave of slaves was I! But a dead girl brings nothing. I would sell this girl for you—to take you back to the land.”
“Never would I,” said Wang Lung stoutly, “not though I spent my life in this wilderness.”
But when he had gone out again the thought, which never alone would have come to him, tempted him against his will. He looked at the small girl, staggering persistently at the end of the loop her grandfather held. She had grown greatly on the food given her each day, and although she had as yet said no word at all, still she was plump as a child will be on slight care enough. Her lips that had been like an old woman’s were smiling and red, and as of old she grew merry when he looked at her and she smiled.
“I might have done it,” he mused, “if she had not lain in my bosom and smiled like that.”
And then he thought again of his land and he cried out passionately.
“Shall I never see it again! With all this labor and begging there is never enough to do more than feed us today.”
Then out of the dusk there answered him a voice, a deep burly voice,
“You are not the only one. There are a hundred hundred like you in this city.”
The man came up, smoking a short bamboo pipe, and it was the father of the family in the hut next but two to Wang Lung’s hut. He was a man seldom seen in the daylight, for he slept all day and worked at night pulling heavy wagons of merchandise which were too large for the streets by day when other vehicles must continually pass each other. But sometimes Wang Lung saw him come creeping home at dawn, panting and spent, and his great knotty shoulders drooping. Wang Lung passed him thus at dawn as he went out to his own ricksha pulling, and sometimes at dusk before the night’s work the man came out and stood with the other men who were about to go into their hovels to sleep.
“Well, and is it forever?” asked Wang Lung bitterly.
The man puffed at his pipe thrice and then spat upon the ground. Then he said,
“No, and not forever. When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways. Last winter we sold two girls and endured, and this winter, if this one my woman bears is a girl, we will sell again. One slave I have kept—the first. The others it is better to sell than to kill, although there are those who prefer to kill them before they draw breath. This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” He nodded and pointed the stem of his pipe to the wall behind them. “Have you seen inside that wall?”
Wang Lung shook his head, staring. The man continued,
“I took one of my slaves in there to sell and I saw it. You would not believe it if I told you how money comes and goes in that house. I will tell you this—even the servants eat with chopsticks of ivory bound with silver, and even the slave women hang jade and pearls in their ears and sew pearls upon their shoes, and when the shoes have a bit of mud upon them or a small rent comes such as you and I would not call a rent, they throw them away, pearls and all!”
The man drew hard on his pipe and Wang Lung listened, his mouth ajar. Over this wall, then, there were indeed such things!
“There is a way when men are too rich,” said the man, and he was silent for a time and then as though he had said nothing he added indifferently,
“Well, work again,” and was gone into the night.
But Wang Lung that night could not sleep for thinking of silver and gold and pearls on the other side of this wall against which his body rested, his body clad in what he wore day after day, because there was no quilt to cover him and only a mat upon bricks beneath him. And temptation fell on him again to sell the child, so that he said to himself,
“It would be better perhaps that she be sold into a rich house so that she can eat daintily and wear jewels, if it be that she grow up pretty and please a lord.” But against his own wish he answered himself and he thought again, “Well, and if I did, she is not worth her weight in gold and rubies. If she bring enough to take us back to the land, where will come enough to buy an ox and a table and a bed and the benches once more? Shall I sell a child that we may starve there instead of here? We have not even seed to put into the land.”
And he saw nothing of the way of which the man spoke when he said, “There is a way, when the rich are too rich.”
14
Spring seethed in the village of huts. Out to the hills and the grave lands those who had begged now could go to dig the small green weeds, dandelions and shepherd’s purse that thrust up feeble new leaves, and it was not necessary as it had been to snatch at vegetables here and there. A swarm of ragged women and children issued forth each day from the huts, and with bits of tin and sharp stones or worn knives, and with baskets made of twisted bamboo twigs or split reeds they searched the countrysides and the roadways for the food they could get without begging and without money. And every day O-lan went out with this swarm, O-Lan and the two boys.