Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [108]
Then mourning and weeping loudly they went to the graves, the laborers and Ching following and walking and wearing white shoes. And Wang Lung stood beside the two graves. He had caused the coffin of O-lan to be brought from the temple and it was put on the ground to await the old man's burial first. And Wang Lung stood and watched and his grief was hard and dry, and he would not cry out loud as others did for there were no tears in his eyes, because it seemed to him that what had come about was come about, and there was nothing to be done more than he had done.
But when the earth was covered over and the graves smoothed, he turned away silently and he sent away the chair and he walked home alone with himself. And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.
Thus thinking heavily, he went on alone and he said to himself,
"There in that land of mine is buried the first good half of my life and more. It is as though half of me were buried there, and now it is a different life in my house."
And suddenly he wept a little, and he dried his eyes with the back of his hand, as a child does.
Chapter 27
DURING ALL THIS TIME Wang Lung had scarcely thought of what the harvests were, so busy had he been with the wedding feasts and funerals in his house, but one day Ching came to him and he said,
"Now that the joy and sorrow are over, I have that to tell you about the land."
"Say on, then," Wang Lung answered. "I have scarcely thought whether I had land or not these days except to bury my dead in."
Ching waited in silence for a few minutes in respect to Wang Lung when he spoke thus, and then he said softly,
"Now may Heaven avert it, but it looks as though there would be such a flood this year as never was, for the water is swelling up over the land, although it is not summer yet, and too early for it to come like this."
But Wang Lung said stoutly,
"I have never had any good from that old man in heaven, yet. Incense or no incense, he is the same in evil. Let us go and see the land." And as he spoke he rose.
Now Ching was a fearful and timid man and however bad the times were he did not dare as Wang Lung did to exclaim against Heaven. He only said "Heaven wills it," and he accepted flood and drought with meekness. Not so Wang Lung. He went out on his land, on this piece and that, and he saw it was as Ching said. All those pieces along the moat, along the waterways, which he had bought from the Old Lord of the House of Hwang, were wet and mucky from the full water oozing up from the bottom, so that the good wheat on this land had turned sickly and yellow.
The moat itself was like a lake and the canals were rivers, swift and curling in small eddies and whirlpools, and even a fool could see that with summer rains not yet come, there would be that year a mighty flood and men and women and children starving again. Then Wang Lung ran hastily here and there over his land and Ching came silently as a shadow behind him, and they estimated together which land could be planted to rice and which land before the young rice could be put on it would already be under water. And looking at the canals brimming already to the edge of their banks, Wang Lung cursed and said,
"Now that old man in heaven will enjoy himself, for he will look down and see people drowned and starving and that is what the accursed one likes."
This he said loudly and angrily so that Ching shivered and said,
"Even so, he is greater than anyone of us and do not talk so, my master."
But since he was rich Wang Lung