Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [81]
But it seemed that O-lan, when she saw Cuckoo, grew angry with a deep and sullen anger that Wang Lung had never seen and did not know was in her. Cuckoo was willing enough to be friends, since she had her pay from Wang Lung, albeit she did not forget that in the great house she had been in the lord's chamber and O-lan a kitchen slave and one of many. Nevertheless, she called out to O-lan well enough when first she saw her,
"Well, and my old friend, here we are in a house together again, and you mistress and first wife---my mother---and how things are changed!"
But O-lan stared at her and when it came into her understanding who it was and what she was, she answered nothing but she put down the jar of water she carried and she went into the middle room where Wang Lung sat between his times of love, and she said to him plainly,
"What is this slave woman doing in our house?"
Wang Lung looked east and west. He would have liked to speak out to say in a surly voice of master, "Well, and it is my house and whoever I say may come in, she shall come in, and who are you to ask?" But he could not because of some shame in him when O-lan was there before him, and his shame made him angry, because when he reasoned it, there was no need for shame and he had done no more than any man may do who has silver to spare.
Still, he could not speak out, and he only looked east and west and feigned to have mislaid his pipe in his garments, and he fumbled in his girdle. But O-lan stood there solidly on her big feet and waited and when he said nothing she asked again plainly in the same words,
"What is this slave woman doing in our house?"
Then Wang Lung seeing she would have an answer, said feebly,
"And what is it to you?"
And O-lan said,
"I bore her haughty looks all during my youth in the great house and her running into the kitchen a score of times a day and crying out 'now tea for the lord'---'now food for the lord'---and it was always this is too hot and that is too cold, and that is badly cooked, and I was too ugly and too slow and too this and too that..."
But still Wang Lung did not answer, for he did not know what to say.
Then O-lan waited and when he did not speak, the hot, scanty tears welled slowly into her eyes, and she winked them to hold back the tears, and at last she took the corner of her blue apron and wiped her eyes and she said at last,
"It is a bitter thing in my house, and I have no mother's house to go back to anywhere."
And when Wang Lung was still silent and answered nothing at all, but he sat down to his pipe and lit it, and he said nothing still, she looked at him piteously and sadly out of her strange dumb eyes that were like a beast's eyes that cannot speak, and then she went away, creeping and feeling for the door because of her tears that blinded her.
Wang Lung watched her as she went and he was glad to be alone, but still he was ashamed and he was still angry that he was ashamed and he said to himself and he muttered the words aloud and restlessly, as though he quarreled with someone,
"Well, and other men are so and I have been good enough to her and there are men worse than I." And he said at last that O-lan must bear it.
But O-lan was not finished with it, and she went her way silently. In the morning she heated water and presented it to old man, and to Wang Lung if he were not in the inner court she presented tea, but when Cuckoo went to find hot water for her mistress the cauldron was empty and not all her loud questionings would stir any response from O-lan. Then there was nothing but that Cuckoo must herself boil water for her mistress if she would have it. But then it was time to stir the morning gruel and there was not space in the cauldron for more water and