Then when the rooms were finished and the earth smoothed and beaten down for a floor, he had bricks bought and the men set them closely together and welded them with lime and there was a good brick floor to the three rooms for Lotus. And Wang Lung bought red cloth to hang at the doors for curtains and he bought a new table and two carved chairs to put on either side and two painted scrolls of pictured hills and water to hang upon the wall behind the table. And he bought a round red lacquered comfit dish with a cover, and in this he put sesame cakes and larded sweets and he put the box on the table. Then he bought a wide and deep carven bed, big enough for a small room in itself, and he bought flowered curtains to hang about it But in all this he was ashamed to ask O-lan anything, and so in the evenings his uncle’s wife came in and she hung the bed curtains and did the things a man is too clumsy for doing.
Then all was finished and there was nothing to do, and a moon of days had passed and the thing was not yet complete. So Wang Lung dallied alone in the little new court he had built for Lotus and he thought of a little pool to make in the center of the court, and he called a laborer and the man dug a pool three feet square and set it about with tiles, and Wang Lung went into the city and bought five goldfish for it. Then he could think of nothing more to be done, and again he waited impatient and fevered.
During all this time he said nothing to anyone except to scold the children if they were filthy at their noses or to roar out at O-lan that she had not brushed her hair for three days and more, so that at last one morning O-lan burst into tears and wept aloud, as he had never seen her weep before, even when they starved, or at any other time. He said harshly, therefore,
“Now what, woman? Cannot I say comb out your horse’s tail of hair without this trouble over it?”
But she answered nothing except to say over and over, moaning,
“I have borne you sons—I have borne you sons—”
And he was silenced and uneasy and he muttered to himself for he was ashamed before her and so he let her alone. It was true that before the law he had no complaint against his wife, for she had borne him three good sons and they were alive, and there was no excuse for him except his desire.
Thus it went until one day his uncle’s wife came and said,
“The thing is complete. The woman who is keeper for the master of the tea house will do it for a hundred pieces of silver on her palm at one time, and the girl will come for jade earrings and a ring of jade and a ring of gold and two suits of satin clothes and two suits of silk clothes and a dozen pairs of shoes and two silken quilts for her bed.”
Of all this Wang Lung heard only this part, “The thing is complete—” and he cried out,
“Let it be done—let it be done—” and he ran into the inner room and he got out silver and poured it into her hands, but secretly still, for he was unwilling that anyone should see the good harvests of so many years go thus, and to his uncle’s wife he said, “And for yourself take a good ten pieces of silver.”
Then she made a feint of refusal, drawing up her fat body and rolling her head this way and that and crying in a loud whisper,
“No, and I will not. We are one family and you are my son and I am your mother and this I do for you and not for silver.” But Wang Lung saw her hand outstretched as she denied, and into it he poured the good silver and he counted it well spent.
Then he bought pork and beef and mandarin fish and bamboo sprouts and chestnuts, and he bought a snarl of dried birds’ nests from the south to brew for soup, and he bought dried shark’s fins and every delicacy he knew he bought and then he waited, if that burning, restless impatience within him could be called a waiting.
On a shining glittering fiery day in the eighth moon, which is the last end of summer, she came to his house. From afar Wang Lung saw her coming. She rode in a closed sedan chair of bamboo borne upon men’s shoulders and he watched the sedan moving this way and that upon the narrow paths skirting the fields, and behind it followed the figure of Cuckoo. Then for an instant he knew fear and he said to himself,
“What am I taking into my house?”
And scarcely knowing what he did he went quickly into the room where he had slept for these many years with his wife and he shut the door and there in the darkness of the room he waited in confusion until he heard his uncle’s wife calling loudly for him to come out, for one was at the gate.
Then abashed and as though he had never seen the girl before he went slowly out, hanging his head over his fine clothes, and his eyes looking here and there, but never ahead. But Cuckoo hailed him merrily,
“Well, and I did not know we would be doing business like this!”
Then she went to the chair which the men had set down and she lifted the curtain and clucked her tongue and she said,
“Come out, my Lotus Flower, here is your house and here your lord.”
And Wang Lung was in an agony because he saw upon the faces of the chair men wide grins of laughter and he thought to himself,
“Now these are loafers from the town streets and they are worthless fellows,” and he was angry that he felt his face hot and red and so he would not speak aloud at all.
Then the curtain was lifted and before he knew what he did he looked and he saw sitting in the shadowy recess of the chair, painted and cool as a lily, the girl Lotus. He forgot everything, even his anger against the grinning fellows from the town, everything but that he had bought this woman for his own and she had come to his house forever, and he stood stiff and trembling, watching as she rose, graceful as though a wind had passed over a flower. Then as he watched and could not take his eyes away, she took Cuckoo’s hand and stepped out, keeping her head bowed and her eyelids drooped as she walked, tottering and swaying upon her little feet, and leaning upon Cuckoo. And as she passed him she did not speak to him, but she whispered only to Cuckoo, faintly,
“Where is my apartment?”
Then his uncle’s wife came forward to her other side and between them they led the girl into the court and into the new rooms that Wang Lung had built for her. And of all Wang Lung’s house there was none to see her pass, for he had sent the laborers and Ching away for the day to work on a distant field, and O-lan had gone somewhere he knew not and had taken the two little ones with her and the boys were in school and the old man slept against the wall and heard and saw nothing, and as for the poor fool, she saw no one who came and went and knew no face except her father’s and her mother’s. But when Lotus had gone in Cuckoo drew the curtains after her.
Then after a time Wang Lung’s uncle’s wife came out, laughing a little maliciously, and she dusted her hands together as though to free them of something that clung to them.
“She reeks of perfume and paint, that one,” she said sti laughing. “Like a regular bad one she smells.” And then she said with a deeper malice, “She is not so young as she looks, my nephew! I will dare to say this, that if she had not been on the edge of an age when men will cease soon to look at her, it is doubtful whether jade in her ears and gold on her fingers and even silk and satin would have tempted her to the house of a farmer, and even a well-to-do farmer.” And then seeing the anger on Wang Lung’s face at this too plain speaking she added hastily, “But beautiful she is and I have never seen another more beautiful and it will be as sweet as the eight-jeweled rice at a feast after your years with the thick-boned slave from the House of Hwang.”
But Wang Lung answered nothing, only he moved here and there through the house and he listened and he could not be still. At last he dared to lift the red curtain and to go into the court he had built for Lotus and then into the darkened room where she was and there he was beside her for the whole day until night.