Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [141]
Then they laughed with clear young scorn at a man so old as this and they said,
"No, grandfather, and no one studies the Four Books since the Revolution."
And he answered, musing,
"Ah, I have heard of a Revolution, but I have been too busy in my life to attend to it. There was always the land."
But the lads snickered at this, and at last Wang Lung rose, feeling himself after all but a guest in his sons' courts.
Then after a time he went no more to see his sons, but sometimes he would ask Cuckoo,
"And are my two daughters-in-law at peace after all these years?"
And Cuckoo spat upon the ground and she said,
"Those? They are at peace like two cats eyeing each other. But the eldest son wearies of his wife's complaints of this and that---too proper a woman for a man, she is, and always talking of what they did in the house of her father, and she wearies a man. There is talk of his taking another. He goes often to the tea shops."
"Ah?" said Wang Lung.
But when he would have thought of it his interest in the matter waned and before he knew it he was thinking of his tea and that the young spring wind smote cold upon his shoulders.
And another time he said to Cuckoo,
"Does any ever hear from that youngest son of mine where he is gone this long time?"
And Cuckoo answered, for there was nothing she did not know in these courts,
"Well, and he does not write a letter, but now and then one comes from the south and it is said he is a military official and great enough in a thing they call a Revolution there, but what it is I do not know---perhaps some sort of business."
And again Wang Lung said, "Ah?"
And he would have thought of ft, but the evening was falling and his bones ached in the air left raw and chill when the sun withdrew. For his mind now went where it would and he could not hold it long to any one thing. And the needs of his old body for food and for hot tea were more keen than for anything. But at night when he was cold, Pear Blossom lay warm and young against him and he was comforted in his age with her warmth in his bed.
THUS SPRING wore on again and again and vaguely and more vaguely as these years passed he felt it coming. But still one thing remained to him and it was his love for his land. He had gone away from it and he had set up his house in a town and he was rich. But his roots were in his land and although he forgot it for many months together, when spring came each year he must go out on to the land; and now although he could no longer hold a plow or do anything but see another drive the plow through the earth, still he must needs go and he went. Sometimes he took a servant and his bed and he slept again in the old earthen house and in the old bed where he had begotten children and where O-lan had died. When he woke in the dawn he went out and with his trembling hands he reached and plucked a bit of budding willow and a spray of peach bloom and held them all day in his hand.
Thus he wandered one day in a late spring, near summer, and he went over his fields a little way and he came to the enclosed place upon a low hill where he had buried his dead. He stood trembling on his staff and he looked at the graves and he remembered them every one. They were more clear to him now than the sons who lived in his own house, more clear to him than anyone except his poor fool and except Pear Blossom. And his mind went back many years and he saw it all clearly, even his little second daughter of whom he had heard nothing for longer than he could remember, and he saw her a pretty maid as she had been in his house, her lips as thin and red as a shred of silk---and she was to him like these who lay here in the land. Then he mused and he thought suddenly,
"Well, and I shall be the next"
Then he went into the enclosure and he looked carefully and he saw the place where he would lie below his father and his uncle and above Ching and not far from O-lan. And he stared at the bit of earth where he was to lie and he saw himself in it and back in his own land forever. And he muttered,
"I must see to the coffin."