Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [139]
"Now I will go for a soldier---I will go for a soldier---"
But he did not look at the girl, only at his father, and Wang Lung, who had not been afraid at all of his eldest son and his second son, was suddenly afraid of this one, whom he had scarcely considered from his birth up.
And Wang Lung stammered and muttered, and would have spoken, but when he took his pipe from his mouth, no sound came, and he stared at his son. And his son repeated again and again,
"Now I will go---now I will go---"
Suddenly he turned and looked at the girl once, and she looked back at him, shrinking, and she took her two hands and put them over her face so that she could not see him. Then the young man tore his eyes from her and he went in a leap from the room and Wang Lung looked out into the square of the darkness of the door, open into the black summer night, and he was gone and there was silence everywhere.
At last he turned to the girl and he said humbly and gently and with a great sadness and all his pride gone.
"I am too old for you, my heart, and well I know it I am an old, old man."
But the girl dropped her hands from her face and she cried more passionately than he had ever heard her cry,
"Young men are so cruel---I like old men best!"
When the morning came of the next day Wang Lung's youngest son was gone and where he was gone no one knew.
Next to Chapter 34
THEN AS AUTUMN FLARES with the false heat of summer before it dies into the winter, so with the quick love Wang Lung had for Pear Blossom. The brief heat of it passed and passion died out of him; he was fond of her, but passionless.
With the passing of the flame out of him he was suddenly cold with an age and he was an old man. Nevertheless, he was fond of her, and it was a comfort to him that she was in his court and she served him faithfully and with a patience beyond her years, and he was always kind to her with a perfect kindness, and more and more his love for her was the love of father for daughter.
And for his sake she was even kind to his poor fool and this was comfort to him, so that one day he told her what had long been in his mind. Now Wang Lung had thought many times of what would come to his poor fool when he was dead and there was not another one except himself who cared whether she lived or starved, and so he had bought a little bundle of white poisonous stuff at the medicine shop, and he had said to himself that he would give it to his fool to eat when he saw his own death was near. But still he dreaded this more than the hour of his own death, and it was a comfort to him now when he saw Pear Blossom was faithful.
So he called her to him one day and he said,
"There is none other but you to whom I can leave this poor fool of mine when I am gone, and she will live on and on after me, seeing that her mind has no troubles of its own, and she has nothing to kill her and no trouble to worry her. And well I know that no one will trouble when I am gone to feed her or to bring her out of the rain and the cold of winter or to set her in the summer sun, and she will be sent out to wander on the street, perhaps---this poor thing who has had care all her life from her mother and from me. Now here is a gate of safety for her in this packet, and when I die, after I am dead, you are to mix it in her rice and let her eat it, that she may follow me where I am. And so shall I be at ease."
But Pear Blossom shrank from the thing he held in his hand and she said in her soft way,
"I can scarcely kill an insect and how could I take this life? No, my lord, but I will take this poor fool