“Elder Brother was not in school today.”
Wang Lung was angry at his eldest son then and he shouted at him,
“And am I to spend good silver for nothing?”
And in his anger he fell upon the boy with a bamboo and beat him until O-lan, the boy’s mother, heard it and rushed in from the kitchen and stood between her son and his father so that the blows rained upon her in spite of Wang Lung’s turning this way and that to get at the boy. Now the strange thing was that whereas the boy might burst into weeping at a chance rebuke, he stood these beatings under the bamboo without a sound, his face carven and pale as an image. And Wang Lung could make nothing of it, although he thought of it night and day.
He thought of it one evening thus after he had eaten his night’s food, because on that day he had beaten his eldest son for not going to the school, and while he thought, O-lan came into the room. She came in silently and she stood before Wang Lung and he saw she had that which she wished to say. So he said,
“Say on. What is it, mother of my son?”
And she said, “It is useless for you to beat the lad as you do. 1 have seen this thing come upon the young lords in the courts of the great house, and it came on them melancholy, and when it came the Old Lord found slaves for them if they had not found any for themselves and the thing passed easily.”
“Now and it need not be so,” answered Wang Lung in argument. “When I was a lad I had no such melancholy and no such weepings and tempers, and no slaves, either.”
O-lan waited and then she answered slowly, “I have not indeed seen it thus except with young lords. You worked on the land. But he is like a young lord and he is idle in the house.”
Wang Lung was surprised, after he had pondered a while, for he saw truth in what she said. It was true that when he himself was a lad there was no time for melancholy, for he had to be up at dawn for the ox and out with the plow and the hoe and at harvest he must needs work until his back broke, and if he wept he could weep for no one heard him, and he could not run away as his son ran away from school, for if he did there was nothing for him to eat on return, and so he was compelled to labor. He remembered all this and he said to himself,
“But my son is not thus. He is more delicate than I was, and his father is rich and mine was poor, and there is no need for his labor, for I have labor in my fields, and besides, one cannot take a scholar such as my son is and set him to the plow.”
And he was secretly proud that he had a son like this and so he said to O-lan, “Well, and if he is like a young lord it is another matter. But I cannot buy a slave for him. I will betroth him and we will marry him early, and there is that to be done.”
Then he rose and went in to the inner court.
23
Now lotus, seeing Wang Lung distraught in her presence, and thinking of things other than her beauty, pouted and said,
“If I had known that in a short year you could look at me and not see me, I would have stayed in the tea house.” And she turned her head away as she spoke and looked at him out of the corner of her eyes so that he laughed and seized her hand and he put it against his face and smelled of its fragrance and he answered,
“Well, and a man cannot always think of the jewel he has sewn on his coat, but if it were lost he could not bear it. These days I think of my eldest son and of how his blood is restless with desire and he must be wed and I do not know how to find the one he should wed. I am not willing that he marry any of the daughters of the village farmers, nor is it meet, seeing that we bear the common name of Wang. Yet I do not know one in the town well enough to say to him, ‘Here is my son and there is your daughter,’ and I am loath to go to a professional matchmaker, lest there be some bargain she has made with a man who has a daughter deformed or idiot.”
Now Lotus, since the eldest son had grown tall and graceful with young manhood, looked on the lad with favor and she was diverted with what Wang Lung said to her and she replied, musing,
“There was a man who used to come in to me at the great tea house, and he often spoke of his daughter, because he said she was such an one as I, small and fine, but still only a child, and he said, ‘And I love you with a strange unease as though you were my daughter; you are too like her, and it troubles me for it is not lawful,’ and for this reason, although he loved me best, he went to a great red girl called Pomegranate Flower.”
“What sort of man was this?” asked Wang Lung.
“He was a good man and his silver was ready and he did not promise without paying. We all wished him well, for he was not begrudging, and if a girl was weary sometimes he did not bawl out as some did that he had been cheated, but he always said courteously as a prince might, or some might from a learned and noble house, ‘Well, and here is the silver, and rest, my child, until love blooms again.’ He spoke very prettily to us.” And Lotus mused until Wang Lung said hastily to waken her for he did not like her to think on her old life,
“What was his business, then, with all this silver?”
And she answered, “Now and I do not know but I think he was master of a grain market, but I will ask Cuckoo who knows everything about men and their money.”
Then she clapped her hands and Cuckoo ran in from the kitchen, her high cheeks and nose flushed with the fire, and Lotus asked her,
“Who was that great, large, goodly man who came to me and then to Pomegranate Flower, because I was like his little daughter, so that it troubled him, although he ever loved me best?”
And Cuckoo answered at once, “Ah, and that was Liu, the grain dealer. Ah, he was a good man! He left silver in my palm whenever he saw me.”
“Where is his market?” asked Wang Lung, although idly, because it was woman’s talk and likely to come to nothing.
“In the street of the Stone Bridge,” said Cuckoo.
Then before she finished the words Wang Lung struck his hands together in delight and he said,
“Now then, that is where I sell my grain, and it is a propitious thing and surely it can be done,” and for the first time his interest was awake, because it seemed to him a lucky thing to wed his son to the daughter of the man who bought his grain.
When there was a thing to be done, Cuckoo smelled the money in it as a rat smells tallow, and she wiped her hands upon her apron and she said quickly,
“I am ready to serve the master.”
Wang Lung was doubtful, and doubting, he looked at her crafty face, but Lotus said gaily,
“And that is true, and Cuckoo shall go and ask the man Liu, and he knows her well and the thing can be done, for Cuckoo is clever enough, and she shall have the matchmaker’s fee, if it is well done.”
“That will I do!” said Cuckoo heartily and she laughed as she thought of the fee of good silver on her palm, and she untied her apron from her waist and she said busily, “Now and at once will I go, for the meat is ready except for the moment of cooking and the vegetables are washed.”
But Wang Lung had not pondered the matter sufficiently and it was not to be decided so quickly as this and he called out,
“No, and I have decided nothing. I must think of the matter for some days and I will tell you what I think.”
The women were impatient, Cuckoo for the silver and Lotus because it was a new thing and she would hear something new to amuse her, but Wang Lung went out, saying,
“No, it is my son and I will wait.”
And so he might have waited for many days, thinking of this and that, had not one early morning, the lad, his eldest son, come home in the dawn with his face hot and red with wine drinking, and his breath was fetid and his feet unsteady. Wang Lung heard him stumbling in the court and he ran out to see who it was, and the lad was sick and vomited before him, for he was unaccustomed to more than the pale mild wine they made from their own rice fermented, and he fell and lay on the ground in his vomit like a dog.