“Now I never pay more than this, and there is no use in complaint.” And with this he turned away and went into the temple.
Wang Lung had not thought to complain for he had not seen this coin before, and he did not know for how many pence it could be changed. He went to a rice shop near by where money is changed, and the changer gave him for the coin twenty-six pence, and Wang Lung marvelled at the ease with which money comes in the south. But another ricksha puller stood near and leaned over as he counted and he said to Wang Lung,
“Only twenty-six. How far did you pull that old head?” And when Wang told him, the man cried out, “Now there is a small-hearted old man! He gave you only half the proper fare. How much did you argue for before you started?”
“I did not argue,” said Wang Lung. “He said ‘Come’ and I came.”
The other man looked at Wang Lung pityingly.
“Now there is a country lout for you, pigtail and all!” he called out to the bystanders. “Someone says come and he comes, and he never asks, this idiot born of idiots, ‘How much will you give me if I come!’ Know this, idiot, only white foreigners can be taken without argument! Their tempers are like quick lime, but when they say ‘Come’ you may come and trust them, for they are such fools they do not know the proper price of anything, but let the silver run out of their pockets like water.” And everyone listening, laughed.
Wang Lung said nothing. It was true that he felt very humble and ignorant in all this crowd of city people, and he pulled his vehicle away without a word in answer.
“Nevertheless, this will feed my children tomorrow,” he said to himself stubbornly, and then he remembered that he had the rent of the vehicle to pay at night and that indeed there was not yet half enough to do that.
He had one more passenger during the morning and with this one he argued and agreed upon a price and in the afternoon two more called to him. But at night, when he counted out all his money in his hand he had only a penny above the rent of the ricksha, and he went back to his hut in great bitterness, saying to himself that for labor greater than the labor of a day in a harvest field he had earned only one copper penny. Then there came flooding over him the memory of his land. He had not remembered it once during this strange day, but now the thought of it lying back there, far away, it is true, but waiting and his own, filled him with peace, and so he came to his hut.
When he entered there he found that O-lan had for her day’s begging received forty small cash, which is less man five pence, and of the boys, the elder had eight cash and the younger thirteen, and with these put together there was enough to pay for the rice in the morning. Only when they put the younger boy’s in with all, he howled for his own, and he loved the money he had begged, and slept with it that night in his hand and they could not take it from him until he gave it himself for his own rice.
But the old man had received nothing at all. All day long he had sat by the roadside obediently enough, but he did not beg. He slept and woke and stared at what passed him, and when he grew weary he slept again. And being of the older generation, he could not be reproved. When he saw that his hands were empty he said merely,
“I have plowed and I have sown seed and I have reaped harvest and thus have I filled my rice bowl. And I have beyond this begotten a son and son’s sons.”
And with this he trusted like a child that now he would be fed, seeing that he had a son and grandsons.
12
Now after the first sharpness of Wang Lung’s hunger was over and he saw that his children daily had something to eat, and he knew there was every morning rice to be had, and of his day’s labor and of O-lan’s begging there was enough to pay for it, the strangeness of his life passed, and he began to feel what this city was, to whose fringes he clung. Running about the streets every day and all day long he learned to know the city after a fashion, and he saw this and that of its secret parts. He learned that in the morning the people he drew in his vehicle, if they were women, went to the market, and if they were men, they went to the schools and to the houses of business. But what sort of schools these were he had no way of knowing, beyond the fact that they were called such names as “The Great School of Western Learning” or as “The Great School of China,” for he never went beyond the gates, and if he had gone in well he knew someone would have come to ask him what he did out of his place. And what houses of business they were to which he drew men he did not know, since when he was paid it was all he knew.
And at night he knew that he drew men to big tea houses and to places of pleasure, the pleasure that is open and streams out upon the streets in the sound of music and of gaming with pieces of ivory and bamboo upon a wooden table, and the pleasure that is secret and silent and hidden behind walls. But none of these pleasures did Wang Lung know for himself, since his feet crossed no threshold except that of his own hut, and his road was always ended at a gate. He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man’s house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.
So it was that, although a hundred miles are not so far as a thousand, and land road never so far as water road, yet Wang Lung and his wife and children were like foreigners in this southern city. It is true that the people who went about the streets had black hair and eyes as Wang Lung and all his family had, and as all did in the country where Wang Lung was born, and it is true that if one listened to the language of these southerners it could be understood, if with difficulty.
But Anhwei is not Kiangsu. In Anhwei, where Wang Lung was born, the language is slow and deep and it wells from the throat. But in the Kiangsu city where they now lived the people spoke in syllables which splintered from their lips and from the ends of their tongues. And where Wang Lung’s fields spread out in slow and leisurely harvest twice a year of wheat and rice and a bit of corn and beans and garlic, here in the farms about the city men urged their land with perpetual stinking fertilizing of human wastes to force the land to a hurried bearing of this vegetable and that besides their rice.
In Wang Lung’s country a man, if he had a roll of good wheat bread and a sprig of garlic in it, had a good meal and needed no more. But here the people dabbled with pork balls and bamboo sprouts and chestnuts stewed with chicken and goose giblets and this and that of vegetables, and when an honest man came by smelling of yesterday’s garlic, they lifted their noses and cried out, “Now here is a reeking, pig-tailed northerner!” The smell of the garlic would make the very shopkeepers in the cloth shops raise the price of blue cotton cloth as they might raise the price for a foreigner.
But then the little village of sheds clinging to the wall never became a part of the city or of the countryside which stretched beyond, and once when Wang Lung heard a young man haranguing a crowd at the corner of the Confucian temple, where any man may stand, if he has the courage to speak out, and the young man said that China must have a revolution and must rise against the hated foreigners, Wang Lung was alarmed and slunk away, feeling that he was the foreigner against whom the young man spoke with such passion. And when on another day he heard another young man speaking—for this city was full of young men speaking—and he said at his street corner that the people of China must unite and must educate themselves in these times, it did not occur to Wang Lung that anyone was speaking to him.
It was only one day when he was on the street of the silk markets looking for a passenger that he learned better than he had known, and that there were those who were more foreign than he in this city. He happened on this day to pass by the door of a shop from whence ladies sometimes came after purchasing silks within, and sometimes thus he secured one who paid him better than most. And on this day someone did come out on him suddenly, a creature the like of whom he had never seen before. He had no idea of whether it was male or female, but it was tall and dressed in a straight black robe of some rough harsh material and there was the skin of a dead animal wrapped about its neck. As he passed, the person, whether male or female, motioned to him sharply to lower the shafts and he did so, and when he stood erect again, dazed at what had befallen him, the person in broken accents directed that he was to go to the Street of Bridges. He began to run hurriedly, scarcely knowing what he did, and once he called to another puller whom he knew casually in the day’s work,