Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [21]
"Do they indeed!" murmured Wang Lung, spellbound.
"Then the third daughter is to be married in the spring," continued O-lan, "and her dowry is a prince's ransom and enough to buy an official seat in a big city. Her clothes she will have of nothing but the finest satins with special patterns woven in Soochow and Hangchow and she will have a tailor sent from Shanghai with his retinue of under tailors lest she find her clothes less fashionable than those of the women in foreign parts."
"Whom will she marry, then, with all this expense?" said Wang Lung, struck with admiration and horror at such pouring out of wealth.
"She is to marry the second son of a Shanghai magistrate," said the woman, and then after a long pause she added, "They must be getting poorer for the Old Mistress herself told me they wished to sell land---some of the land to the south of the house, just outside the city wall, where they have always planted rice each year because it is good land and easily flooded from the moat around the wall."
"Sell their land!" repeated Wang Lung, convinced. "Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one's flesh and blood."
He pondered for a while and suddenly a thought came to him and he smote the side of his head with his palm.
"What have I not thought of!" he cried, turning to the woman. "We will buy the land!"
They stared at each other, he in delight, she in stupefaction.
"But the land---the land---" she stammered.
"I will buy it!" he cried in a lordly voice. "I will buy it from the great House of Hwang!"
"It is too far away," she said in consternation. "We would have to walk half the morning to reach it."
"I will buy it," he repeated peevishly as he might repeat a demand to his mother who crossed him.
"It is a good thing to buy land," she said pacifically. "It is better certainly than putting money into a mud wall. But why not a piece of your uncle's land? He is clamoring to sell that strip near to the western field we now have."
"That land of my uncle's," said Wang Lung loudly, "I would not have it. He has been dragging a crop out of it in this way and that for twenty years and not a bit has he put back of manure or bean cake. The soil is like lime. No, I will buy Hwang's land."
He said "Hwang's land" as casually as he might have said "Ching's land,"---Ching, who was his farmer neighbor. He would be more than equal to these people in the foolish, great, wasteful house. He would go with the silver in his hand and he would say plainly,
"I have money. What is the price of the earth you wish to sell?" Before the Old Lord he heard himself saying and to the Old Lord's agent, "Count me as anyone else. What is the fair price? I have it in my hand."
And his wife, who had been a slave in the kitchens of that proud famfly, she would be wife to a man who owned a piece of the land that for generations had made the House of Hwang great It was as though she felt his thought for she suddenly ceased her resistance and she said,
"Let it be bought. After all, rice land is good, and it is near the moat and we can get water every year. It is sure."
And again the slow smile spread over her face, the smile that never lightened the dullness of her narrow black eyes, and after a long time she said,
"Last year this time I was slave in that house."
And they walked on, silent with the fullness of this thought.
Chapter 6
THIS PIECE OF LAND which Wang Lung now owned was a thing which greatly changed his life. At first, after he had dug the silver from the wall and taken it to the great house, after the honor of speaking as an equal to the Old Lord's equal was past, he was visited with a depression of spirit which was almost regret. When he thought of the hole in the wall now empty that had been filled with silver he need not use, he wished that he had his silver back. After all, this land, it would take hours of labor again, and as O-lan said, it was far away, more than a li which is a third of a mile. And again,