Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [133]
"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."
And the second son's wife did not wait but she answered back loudly,
"Now my sister-in-law is jealous because a man called her only a piece of cold fish!"
And so the two fell to angry looks and hatred, although the elder, being proud of her correctness, would deal only in silent scorn, careful to ignore the other's very presence. But when her children would go out of their own court she called out,
"I would have you stay away from ill-bred children!"
This she called out in the presence of her sister-in-law who stood within sight in the next court, and that one would call out to her own children,
"Do not play with snakes or you will be bitten!"
So the two women hated each other increasingly, and the thing was the more bitter because the two brothers did not love each other well, the elder always being fearful lest his birth and his family seem lowly in the eyes of his wife who was town bred and better born than he, and the younger fearful lest his brother's desire for expenditure and place lead