Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [123]
Then Wang Lung looked at his son standing there in his handsome raiment and he shut his eyes and drew hard on his pipe and he growled forth,
"Well, and what now and what again?"
The young man saw his father was weary of him but he said stubbornly, and he made his voice a little louder,
"I say we should have the outer courts also and we should have what befits a family with so much money as we have and good land as we have."
Then Wang Lung muttered into his pipe,
"Well, and the land is mine and you have never put your hand to it."
"Well, and my father," the young man cried out at this, "it was you who would have me a scholar and when I try to be a fitting son to a man of land you scorn me and would make a hind of me and my wife." And the young man turned himself away stormily and made as though he would knock his brains out against a twisted pine tree that stood there in the court.
Wang Lung was frightened at this, lest the young man do himself an injury, since he had been fiery always, and so he called out,
"Do as you like---do as you like---only do not trouble me with it!"
Hearing this, the son went away quickly lest his father change and he went well pleased. As quickly as he was able, then, he bought tables and chairs from Soochow, carved and wrought, and he bought curtains of red silk to hang in the doorways and he bought vases large and small and he bought scrolls to hang on the wall and as many as he could of beautiful women, and he bought curious rocks to make rockeries in the courts such as he had seen hi southern parts, and thus he busied himself for many days.
With all this coming and going he had to pass many times through the outer courts, even every day, and he could not pass among the common people without sticking his nose up and he could not bear them, so that the people who lived there laughed at him after he had passed and they said,
"He has forgotten the smell of the manure in the dooryard on his father's farm!"
But still none dared to speak thus as he passed, for he was a rich man's son. When the feast came when rents are decided upon these common people found that the rent for the rooms and the courts where they lived had been greatly raised, because another would pay that much for them, and they had to move away. Then they knew it was Wang Lung's eldest son who had done this, although he was clever and said nothing and did it all by letters to the son of the old Lord Hwang in foreign parts, and this son of the Old Lord cared for nothing except where and how he could get the most money for the old house.
The common people had to move, then, and they moved complaining and cursing because a rich man could do as he would and they packed their tattered possessions and went away swelling with anger and muttering that one day they would come back even as the poor do come back when the rich are too rich.
But all this Wang Lung did not hear, since he was in the inner courts and seldom came forth, since he slept and ate and took his ease as his age came on, and he left the thing in the hands of his eldest son. And his son called carpenters and clever masons and they repaired the rooms and the moon gates between the courts that the common people had ruined with their coarse ways of living, and he built again the pools and he bought flecked and golden fish to put in them. And after it was all finished and made beautiful as far as he knew beauty, he planted lotus and lilies in the pools, and the scarlet-berried bamboo of India and everything he could remember he had seen in southern parts. And his wife