But Wang Lung was indulgent and he said to Lotus,
“Let us see first what else can be done, and let me buy for you another slave if you will, or what you will, but let me see what can be done.”
Then Lotus, who had long been minded for a foreign clock and a new ruby ring, was suddenly silent and Wang Lung said to Cuckoo,
“Go and tell my cousin the girl has a vile and incurable disease, but if he will have her with that, then well enough and she shall come to him, but if he fears it as we all do, then tell him we have another and a sound one.”
And he cast his eyes over the slaves who stood about and they turned away their faces and giggled and made as if they were ashamed, all except one stout wench, who was already twenty or so, and she said with her face red and laughing,
“Well, and I have heard enough of this thing and I have a mind to try it, if he will have me, and he is not so hideous a man as some.”
Then Wang Lung answered in relief,
“Well, go then!”
And Cuckoo said,
“Follow close behind me, for it will happen, I know, that he will seize the fruit nearest to him.” And they went out.
But the little maid still clung to Wang Lung’s feet, only now she ceased her weeping and lay listening to what took place. And Lotus was still angry with her, and she rose and went into her room without a word. Then Wang Lung raised the maid gently and she stood before him, drooping and pale, and he saw that she had a little, soft, oval face, egg-shaped, exceedingly delicate and pale, and a little pale red mouth. And he said kindly,
“Now keep away from your mistress for a day or two, my child, until she is past her anger, and when that other one comes in, hide, lest he desire you again.”
And she lifted her eyes and looked at him full and passionately, and she passed him, silent as a shadow, and was gone.
The cousin lived there for a moon and a half and he had the wench when he would and she conceived by him and boasted in the courts of it. Then suddenly the war called and the horde went away quickly as chaff caught and driven by the wind, and there was nothing left except the filth and destruction they had wrought. And Wang Lung’s cousin girded his knife to his waist and he stood before them with his gun over his shoulder and he said mockingly,
“Well, and if I come not back to you I have left you my second self and a grandson for my mother, and it is not every man who can leave a son where he stops for a moon or two, and it is one of the benefits of the soldier’s life—his seed springs up behind him and others must tend it!”
And laughing at them all, he went his way with the others.
32
When the soldiers were gone Wang Lung and his two elder sons for once agreed and it was that all trace of what had just passed must be wiped away, and they called in carpenters and masons again, and the men servants cleaned the courts, and the carpenters mended cunningly the broken carvings and tables, and the pools were emptied of their filth and clean fresh water put in, and again the elder son bought flecked and golden fish and he planted once more the flowering trees and he trimmed the broken branches of the trees that were left. And within a year the place was fresh and flowering again and each son had moved again into his own court and there was order once more everywhere.
The slave who had conceived by the son of Wang Lung’s uncle he commanded to wait upon his uncle’s wife as long as she lived, which could not be long now, and to put her into the coffin when she died. And it was a matter for joy to Wang Lung that this slave gave birth only to a girl, for if it had been a boy she would have been proud and have claimed a place in the family, but being a girl it was only slave bearing slave, and she was no more than before.
Nevertheless, Wang Lung was just to her as to all, and he said to her that she might have the old woman’s room for her own if she liked when the old one was dead, and she could have the bed also, and one room and one bed would not be missed from the sixty rooms in the house. And he gave the slave a little silver, and the woman was content enough except for one thing, and this she told to Wang Lung when he gave her the silver.
“Hold the silver as dowry for me, my master,” she said, “and if it is not a trouble to you, wed me to a farmer or to a good poor man. It will be merit to you, and having lived with a man, it is hardship to me to go back to my bed alone.”
Then Wang Lung promised easily, and when he promised he was struck with a thought and it was this. Here was he promising a woman to a poor man, and once he had been a poor man come into these very courts for his woman. And he had not for half a lifetime thought of O-lan, and now he thought of her with sadness that was not sorrow but only heaviness of memory and things long gone, so far distant was he from her now. And he said heavily,
“When the old opium dreamer dies, I will find a man for you, then, and it cannot be long.”
And Wang Lung did as he said. The woman came to him one morning and said,
“Now redeem your promise, my master, for the old one died in the early morning without waking at all, and I have put her in her coffin.”
And Wang Lung thought what man he knew now on his land and he remembered the blubbering lad who had caused Ching’s death, and the one whose teeth were a shelf over his lower lip, and he said,
“Well, and he did not mean the thing he did, and he is as good as any and the only one I can think of now.”
So he sent for the lad and he came, and he was a man grown now, but still he was rude and still his teeth were as they were. And it was Wang Lung’s whim to sit on the raised dais in the great hall and to call the two before him and he said slowly, that he might taste the whole flavor of the strange moment,
“Here, fellow, is this woman, and she is yours if you will have her, and none has known her except the son of my own uncle.”
And the man took her gratefully, for she was a stout wench and good-natured, and he was a man too poor to wed except to such an one.
And Wang Lung came down off the dais and it seemed to him that now his life was rounded off and he had done all that he said he would in his life and more than he could ever have dreamed he could, and he did not know himself how it had all come about. Only now it seemed to him that peace could truly come to him and he could sleep in the sun. It was time for it, also, for he was close to sixty-five years of his age and his grandsons were like young bamboos about him, three the sons of his eldest son, and the eldest of these nearly ten years old, and two the sons of his second son. Well, and there was the third son to wed one day soon, and with that over there was nothing left to trouble him in his life, and he could be at peace.
But there was no peace. It seemed as though the coming of the soldiers had been like the coming of a swarm of wild bees that leave behind them stings wherever they can. The wife of the eldest son and the wife of the second son who had been courteous enough to each other until they lived in one court together, now had learned to hate each other with a great hatred. It was born in a hundred small quarrels, the quarrels of women whose children must live and play together and fight each other like cats and dogs. Each mother flew to the defense of her child, and cuffed the other’s children heartily but spared her own, and her own had always the right in any quarrel, and so the two women were hostile.
And then on that day when the cousin had commended the country wife and laughed at the city wife, that had passed which could not be forgiven. The wife of the elder son lifted her head haughtily when she passed her sister-in-law and she said aloud one day to her husband as she passed,
“It is a heavy thing to have a woman bold and ill-bred in the family, so that a man may call her red meat and she laughs in his face.”