Wang Lung drew back from the death-like head which Ching had thrust forward as he spoke. With the man’s eyes close like this, he was horrible. Wang Lung was suddenly afraid with fear he did not understand. He rose quickly as though to cast off some entangling danger.
“We will leave this place,” he said loudly. “We will go south! There are everywhere in this great land people who starve. Heaven, however wicked, will not at once wipe out the sons of Han.”
His neighbor looked at him patiently. “Ah, you are young,” he said sadly. “I am older than you and my wife is old and we have nothing except one daughter. We can die well enough.”
“You are more fortunate than I,” said Wang Lung. “I have my old father and these three small mouths and another about to be born. We must go lest we forget our nature and eat each other as the wild dogs do.”
And then it seemed to him suddenly that what he said was very right, and he called aloud to O-lan, who lay upon the bed day after day without speech, now that there was no food for the stove and no fuel for the oven.
“Come, woman, we will go south!”
There was cheer in his voice such as none had heard in many moons, and the children looked up and the old man hobbled out from his room and O-lan rose feebly from her bed and came to the door of their room and clinging to the door frame she said,
“It is a good thing to do. One can at least die walking.”
The child in her body hung from her lean loins like a knotty fruit and from her face every particle of flesh was gone, so that the jagged bones stood forth rock-like under her skin. “Only wait until tomorrow,” she said. “I shall have given birth by then. I can tell by this thing’s movements in me.”
“Tomorrow, then,” answered Wang Lung, and then he saw his wife’s face and he was moved with a pity greater than any he had had for himself. This poor creature was dragging forth yet another!
“How shall you walk, you poor creature!” he muttered, and he said unwillingly to his neighbor Ching, who still leaned against the house by the door, “If you have any food left, for a good heart’s sake give me a handful to save the life of the mother of my sons, and I will forget that I saw you in my house as a robber.”
Ching looked at him ashamed and he answered humbly,
“I have never thought of you with peace since that hour. It was that dog, your uncle, who enticed me, saying that you had good harvests stored up. Before this cruel heaven I promise you that I have only a little handful of dried red beans buried beneath the stone of my doorway. This I and my wife placed there for our last hour, for our child and ourselves, that we might die with a little food in our stomachs. But some of it I will give to you, and tomorrow go south, if you can. I stay, I and my house. I am older than you and I have no son, and it does not matter whether I live or die.”
And he went away and in a little while he came back, bringing tied in a cotton kerchief a double handful of small red beans, mouldy with the soil. The children clambered about at the sight of the food, and even the old man’s eyes glistened, but Wang Lung pushed them away for once and he took the food in to his wife as she lay and she ate a little of it, bean by bean, unwilling except that her hour was upon her and she knew that if she had not any food she would die in the clutches of her pain.
Only a few of the beans did Wang Lung bide in his own hand and these he put into his own mouth and he chewed them into a soft pulp and then putting his lips to the lips of his daughter he pushed into her mouth the food, and watching her small lips move, he felt himself fed.
That night he stayed in the middle room. The two boys were in the old man’s room and in the third room O-lan gave birth alone. He sat there as he had sat during the birth of his firstborn son and listened. She would not even yet have him near her at her hour. She would give birth alone, squatting over the old tub she kept for the purpose, creeping about the room afterwards to remove the traces of what had been, hiding as an animal does the birth stains of its young.
He listened intently for the small sharp cry he knew so well, and he listened with despair. Male or female, it mattered nothing to him now—there was only another mouth coming which must be fed.
“It would be merciful if there were no breath,” he muttered, and then he heard the feeble cry—how feeble a cry!—hang for an instant upon the stillness. “But there is no mercy of any kind in these days,” he finished bitterly, and he sat listening.
There was no second cry, and over the house the stillness became impenetrable. But for many days there had been stillness everywhere, the stillness of inactivity and of people, each in his own house, waiting to die. This house was filler with such stillness. Suddenly Wang Lung could not bear it. He was afraid. He rose and went to the door of the room where O-lan was and he called into the crack and the sound of his own voice heartened him a little.
“You are safe?” he called to the woman. He listened. Suppose she had died as he sat there! But he could hear a slight rustling. She was moving about and at last she answered, her voice a sigh,
“Come!”
He went in, then, and she lay there upon the bed, her body scarcely raising the cover. She lay alone.
“Where is the child?” he asked.
She made a slight movement of her hand upon the bed and he saw upon the floor the child’s body.
“Dead!” he exclaimed.
“Dead,” she whispered.
He stooped and examined the handful of its body—a wisp of bone and skin—a girl. He was about to say, “But I heard it crying—alive—” and then he looked at the woman’s face. Her eyes were closed and the color of her flesh was the color of ashes and her bones stuck up under the skin—a poor silent face that lay there, having endured to the utmost, and there was nothing he could say. After all, during these months he had had only his own body to drag about. What agony of starvation this woman had endured, with the starved creature gnawing at her from within, desperate for its own life!
He said nothing, but he took the dead child into the other room and laid it upon the earthen floor and searched until he found a bit of broken mat and this he wrapped about it. The round head dropped this way and that and upon the neck he saw two dark, bruised spots, but he finished what he had to do. Then he took the roll of matting, and going as far from the house as he had strength, he laid the burden against the hollowed side of an old grave. This grave stood among many others, worn down and no longer known or cared for, on a hillside just at the border of Wang Lung’s western field. He had scarcely put the burden down before a famished, wolfish dog hovered almost at once behind him, so famished that although he took up a small stone and threw it and hit its lean flank with a thud, the animal would not stir away more than a few feet. At last Wang Lung felt his legs sinking beneath him and covering his face with his hands he went away.
“It is better as it is,” he muttered to himself, and for the first time was wholly filled with despair.
The next morning when the sun rose unchanging in its sky of varnished blue it seemed to him a dream that he could ever have thought of leaving his house with these helpless children and this weakened woman and this old man. How could they drag their bodies over a hundred miles, even to plenty? And who knew whether or not even in the south there was food? One would say there was no end to this brazen sky. Perhaps they would wear out all their last strength only to find more starving people and these strangers to them as well. Far better to stay where they could die in their beds. He sat desponding on the threshold of the door and gazed bleakly over the dried and hardened fields from which every particle of anything which could be called food or fuel had been plucked.