Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [47]
"There is nothing to sell except the girl," she answered slowly.
Wang Lung's breath caught.
"Now, I would not sell a child!" he said loudly.
"I was sold," she answered very slowly. "I was sold to a great house so that my parents could return to their home."
"And would you sell the child, therefore?"
"If it were only I, she would be killed before she was sold... the slave of slaves was I! But a dead girl brings nothing. I would sell this girl for you---to take you back to the land."
"Never would I," said Wang Lung stoutly, "not though I spent my life in this wilderness."
But when he had gone out again the thought, which never alone would have come to him, tempted him against his will. He looked at the small girl, staggering persistently at the end of the loop her grandfather held. She had grown greatly on the food given her each day, and although she had as yet said no word at all, still she was plump as a child will be on slight care enough. Her lips that had been like an old woman's were smiling and red, and as of old she grew merry when he looked at her and she smiled.
"I might have done it," he mused, "if she had not lain in my bosom and smiled like that."
And then he thought again of his land and he cried out passionately.
"Shall I never see it again! With all this labor and begging there is never enough to do more than feed us today."
Then out of the dusk there answered him a voice, a deep burly voice,
"You are not the only one. There are a hundred hundred like you in this city."
The man came up, smoking a short bamboo pipe, and it was the father of the family in the hut next but two to Wang Lung's hut. He was a man seldom seen in the daylight, for he slept all day and worked at night pulling heavy wagons of merchandise which were too large for the streets by day when other vehicles must continually pass each other. But sometimes Wang Lung saw him come creeping home at dawn, panting and spent, and his great knotty shoulders drooping. Wang Lung passed him thus at dawn as he went out to his own ricksha pulling, and sometimes at dusk before the night's work the man came out and stood with the other men who were about to go into their hovels to sleep.
"Well, and is it forever?" asked Wang Lung bitterly.
The man puffed at his pipe thrice and then spat upon the ground. Then he said,
"No, and not forever. When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways. Last winter we sold two girls and endured, and this winter, if this one my woman bears is a girl, we will sell again. One slave I have kept---the first. The others it is better to sell than to kill, although there are those who prefer to kill them before they draw breath. This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon." He nodded and pointed the stem of his pipe to the wall behind them. "Have you seen inside that wall?"
Wang Lung shook his head, staring. The man continued,
"I took one of my slaves in there to sell and I saw it. You would not believe it if I told you how money comes and goes in that house. I will tell you this---even the servants eat with chopsticks of ivory bound with silver, and even the slave women hang jade and pearls in their ears and sew pearls upon their shoes, and when the shoes have a bit of mud upon them or a small rent comes such as you and I would not call a rent, they throw them away, pearls and all!"
The man drew hard on his pipe and Wang Lung listened, his mouth ajar. Over this wall, then, there were indeed such things!
"There is a way when men are too rich," said the man, and he was silent for a time and then as though he had said nothing he added indifferently,
"Well, work again," and was gone into the night.
But Wang Lung that night could not sleep for thinking of silver and gold and pearls on the other side of this wall against which his body rested, his body clad in what he wore day after day, because there was no quilt to cover him and only a mat