Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [96]
"Well, and why do you not with the silver I have to spare, hire a servant or buy a slave?"
It did not occur to him that there was any need of this, although he hired laborers for his fields and to help with the oxen and asses and with the pigs he had, and in the summers when the river flooded, he hired men for the time to herd the ducks and geese he fed upon the waters.
On this evening, then, when he sat alone with only the red candles in the pewter stands alight, she stood before him and looked this way and that, and at last she said,
"I have something to say."
Then he stared at her in surprise and he answered,
"Well, and say on."
And he stared at her and at the shadowed hollows of her face and he thought again how there was no beauty in her and how for many years had he not desired her,
Then she said in a harsh whisper,
"The eldest son goes too often into the inner courts. When you are away he goes."
Now Wang Lung could not at first grasp what she said thus whispering and he leaned forward with his mouth agape and he said,
"What, woman?"
She pointed mutely to her son's room and pursed her thick dry lips at the door of the inner court. But Wang Lung stared at her, robust and unbelieving.
"You dream!" he said finally.
She shook her head at this, and, the difficult speech halting on her lips, she said further,
"Well, and my lord, come home unexpectedly." And again, after a silence, "It is better to send him away, even to the south." And then she went to the table and took his bowl of tea and felt of it and spilled the cool tea on the brick floor and filled the bowl again from the hot pot, and as she came she went, silent, and left him sitting there agape.
Well, and this woman, she was jealous he said to himself. Well, and he would not trouble about this, with his lad content and reading every day in his own room, and he rose and laughed and put it away from him, laughing at the small thoughts of women.
But when he went in that night to lie beside Lotus and when he turned upon the bed she complained and was petulant and she pushed him away saying,
"It is hot and you stink and I wish you would wash yourself before you come to lie beside me."
She sat up, then, and pushed her hair fretfully back from her face and she shrugged her shoulders when he would have drawn her to him, and she would not yield to his coaxing. Then he lay still and he remembered that she had yielded unwillingly these many nights, and he had thought it her whim and the heavy hot air of departing summer that depressed her, but now the words of O-lan stood out sharply and he rose up roughly and said,
"Well, and sleep alone then, and cut my throat if I care!"
He flung himself out of the room and strode into the middle room of his own house and he put two chairs together and stretched himself on them. But he could not sleep and he rose and went out of his gate and he walked among the bamboos beside the house wall, and there he felt the cool night wind upon his hot flesh, and there was the coolness of coming autumn in it.
Then he remembered this, that Lotus had known of his son's desire to go away, and how had she known? And he remembered that of late his son had said nothing of going away but had been content, and why was he content? And Wang Lung said to his heart, fiercely,
"I will see the thing for myself!"
And he watched the dawn come ruddy out of a mist over his land.
When the dawn was come and the sun showed a gold rim lover the edge of the fields, he went in and he ate, and then he went out to oversee his men as his custom was in times of iharvest and planting, and he went here and there over his land, and at last he shouted loudly, so that anyone in his house might hear,
"Now I am going to the piece by the moat of the town and I shall not be back early," and he set his face to the town.
But when he had