Sons by Pearl S. Buck

  As for his lady, Wang the Landlord could never persuade her that there was less silver in the house than there had once been and if he said when she wanted a sum of him, “But I have not so much to give you and I can only give you fifty pieces now,” she would cry out, “I have promised it to the temple for a new roof over a certain god, and if I do not give it I shall lose my dignity. Indeed you have it, for I know you spend money like water on wining and gaming and on all those low women I know you have and I am the only one in this whole house who looks to the things of the soul and to gods. Some day I may have to pray your soul out of hell, and you will be sorry I had not the silver then!”

  So Wang the Landlord had somehow to find the silver, although he hated it very much to see his good money going into the hands of the smooth and secret priests whom he hated and did not trust, and of whom he heard certain very evil things. Yet he could never be sure, either, that they had not some knowledge of magic and he could never be sure, although he pretended disbelief in gods as things fit only for women, that there was not some power in them too, and this was another confusion in him.

  The truth was that this lady of his was so deep now in her intimacy with gods and temples and all such things that she grew very holy and she spent many hours in going to this god and that, and it gave her the greatest pleasure to pass into a temple gate leaning as a great lady does upon her maids, and as she came in to see the priests of the temple and even the abbot came to her obsequious and bowing and full of flattery and full of talk that she was a favorite of the gods and a lay nun, and very near the Way.

  When they talked thus she simpered and smiled and cast her eyes down and deprecated, but before she well knew what she did oftentimes she had promised them this and that and a sum of money more than she really wished to give. But the priests took care to give her full praise and they put her name up in many places as an example to all devout persons, and one temple even presented her with a wooden ensign painted vermilion red and there were gilt letters on it signifying how this lady was so devout and good a follower of the gods. This ensign was hung in a lesser hall of the temple, but where many might see it. After this she was the more proud and holy and devout in her looks, and she studied to sit calmly always and to fold her hands and often she went holding her rosary and muttering the syllables of her prayer while others gossiped or talked idly. Therefore being so holy she was very hard with her husband and she would have what silver she needed to keep up the name she had.

  When Wang the Landlord’s younger wife saw what the lady had she wanted her little share, too, not for the gods, although the girl learned to prate of them to please the lady, but still she wanted her silver. And Wang the Landlord could not think what she did with it, because she did not dress herself in fine flowered silks or buy jewels and gold things for her dress and hair. Yet the money went from her quickly, too, and Wang the Landlord did not complain lest the girl go and weep before the lady, and the lady reproach him that since he had taken such an one he ought to pay her something. For these two women liked each other in some strange cool way, and they stood together against their husband if they wanted something for themselves.

  One day Wang the Landlord did find out the truth, however, for he saw his younger wife slip out to a side gate and take something from her bosom and give it to one who stood there, and Wang the Landlord peered and he saw the man was her old father. Then was Wang the Landlord very bitter and he thought to himself,

  “So I am feeding that old rascal and his family, too!”

  And he went into his own room and sat and sighed and was very bitter for a while and he groaned to himself. But it was no use, and he could do nothing for if she chose to give what she had from her husband to her father and not to spend it on sweetmeats and clothing and such things as most women love, she had this right, except that a woman ought to cleave first to the house of her husband. But Wang the Landlord did not feel he could contend with her and he let it pass.

  And Wang the Landlord was the more torn in himself, for he could not control his own desires, even though he did now honestly try for the first time in his life when he was nearly fifty years old, to spend less for his love of women. But he had his weakness with him yet, and he could not bear to be thought a niggard among them when his fancy fixed itself. Besides these two women in his house, he had the singing girl established as a transient wife by common agreement in another part of the city. But she was a pretty leech, and although he had finished with her soon, she held him by her threats of killing herself and of loving him above all the world, and she cried on his bosom and fixed her little sharp fingers into the deep flesh on his neck and she hung to him so that he did not know what to do with her.

  With her she had her old mother also, a vile hag, and she in her turn screeched out,

  “How can you cast off my daughter who has given you all? How would she live now, seeing that she has not been in a playhouse all these years you have had her and her voice is gone and others have taken her place? No, I will defend her and I will take her case to the magistrate if you cast her off!”

  This frightened Wang the Landlord very much, for he feared the laughter of the town against him if they heard all this old woman’s ribald talk that she would vent against him in court if she could, so that he fumbled hastily for what silver he had. When the two women saw he was afraid, they plotted and made every opportunity they could for storm and weeping, knowing that when they did, he would pay them in haste. And the strangest thing of all was that with so many troubles, this great fat weak man still could not keep himself free, but must still be overcome with his desires at a feast somewhere and pay a new little singing girl he saw, even though when he came home and was himself on the next day, he groaned at his own folly and cursed his own fulsome heart.

  But now, pondering all this during these weeks of his despondency he grew frightened at his own zestlessness, and he did not even care to eat so much as he had, and when he found his appetite for food waning he was frightened lest he die too soon, and he said to himself that he must rid himself of some of his troubles. And he determined that he would sell a good large share of his land and live on the silver, and he thought to himself secretly that he would spend what was his and his sons must care for themselves if there was not enough left for their lifetime. And it seemed to him suddenly that it was a vain thing for a man to stint himself for those who live on after him. He rose willfully then and he went to his second brother and he said,

  “I am not fitted for the cares of a landlord’s life, for I am a city man, a man of leisure. No, I cannot with my increasing weight and years go out at seed time and harvest, and if I do one day I shall drop dead with the heat or the cold. I have not lived with common people, either, and they cheat me before I know it and out of all my land and my labor. Now this I ask of you. Act as my agent and sell a good half of my lands for me now and let me have the money as I need it, and what I do not need put out at interest for me, and let me be free of this accursed land. The other half I will keep to leave to my sons. But there is not one of them who will help me with it now, and when I say to my eldest son that he is to go for me sometimes to the land he is always pressed with a meeting with some friend or he has a headache and we shall starve if we continue as we are now. Only the tenants grow rich from the land.”

  Then Wang the Second looked at this brother of his, and he despised him in his heart, but he said smoothly,

  “I am your brother, and I will not take any commission at all for selling it and I will sell it for you to anyone who bids highest for it. But you must say what your lowest price is for each lot.”

  But Wang the Landlord was very eager to be finished with his land and he said quickly,

  “You are my brother and sell it for what you think fair. Shall I not trust my own brother?”

  He went away then in high good humor because he was rid of half of his burden and he could go his way for a time and wait for silver to come into his hands as he longed t
o do again. But he did not tell his lady what he had done, because she might cry out against him that he had given them over into the other’s hand, and she would say that if he wished to sell, he ought to sell it himself to some among the many rich men with whom he feasted and with whom he seemed in such deep friendship, and Wang the Landlord did not wish to do this, for in his heart, for all his bluster, he trusted his brother’s wit more than he did his own. And now having done this, his heart rose again and he could eat once more, and once more his life seemed good enough to him and he thought to himself there were others more troubled than he, and he was ardent again.

  Now Wang the Second grew more content than ever for he had all in his own hands. He planned that he would buy the best of his brother’s lands for himself. It was true that he paid a fair price for them, for he was not a dishonest man as men are reckoned, and indeed he told his elder brother that he bought a little of the best land to keep it in the family. But how much of the land he bought Wang the Landlord did not know, for Wang the Second had him sign the deeds when he was somewhat drunken and he did not look to see what name was on it, but being full of the good humor of drunkenness his brother seemed excellent to him and wholly to be trusted. He would not have been willing had he known to see so much of his land pass into Wang the Second’s keeping, perhaps, and so Wang the Second made much of the poorer pieces he sold to tenants or to whom it was who wished to buy. And it was true that Wang the Second did sell much land thus. But Wang Lung had been very wise in his day and he bought far more good land than any other kind, and so when all the business was over Wang the Second had in his own personal possession and for his sons the best and the choicest of all his father’s land, for he had so bought the best of the younger brother’s inheritance also. And with all this land he planned he would supply much of the grain to his own markets and increase his stores of silver and gold, and he grew powerful in the town and in that region, and men called him Wang the Merchant.

  But unless he knew it no one would have dreamed this small meager man was so rich, for Wang the Merchant still ate the plain spare bit of food he always did and took no new wife into his house as most men will when they are rich, for show if for nothing else, and he wore the same sort of small patterned silk gown of a dark slate grey that he had always worn. In his house they added no new furniture, and in his courts there was no flower nor any waste thing, and what had been there before now was dead, for his wife was thrifty and raised flocks of fowls and these ran in and out of the rooms to pick up bits of food the children dropped, and they ran about the courts and plucked every grass blade and green leaf, so that the courts were bare except for a few old pines, and the earth grew hard and packed.

  Nor would Wang the Merchant let his sons be spendthrift nor idle. No, he planned for each one, and each had a few years of schooling to learn to read and write and to count skillfully upon the abacus. But he would not let them stay long enough to be held scholars in any wise, for scholars will not labor at anything, and he planned apprenticeships for them and they were to come into his business. The pocked one he considered his younger brother’s, and the next one he planned to make his steward on the land, but the others he apprenticed when their time came and when each was twelve years old.

  In the earthen house Pear Blossom lived on with the two children and every day of her life was like the one before it, and she asked no more than that it should be so always. She grieved no more for the land, for if she did not see the elder she saw the younger son of her dead lord come out before harvest time to estimate the growth of grain and to see the seed weighed off and all such things. Yes, and she heard, too, how Wang the Merchant, for all he was a townsman, was sharper as landlord than his brother even, for he knew to a ten catty weight what a field still standing in green grain would give, and his narrow little eyes were always sharp to see if a tenant pressed his foot secretly against the side of a load to weigh it down or if he poured water into the rice or the wheat to make it swell. His years in the grain market had taught him everything that country people do to cheat the merchant and the townsman, for they are enemies by nature. But if Pear Blossom asked whether any ever saw him angry when he found out a trick, the answer always came with unwilling admiration that he was never angry. No, he was only implacable and calm and more clever than any of them, and the nickname he had in that whole countryside was this, “He Who Wins in Every Bargain.”

  It was a scornful name and full of hatred, and all the country people hated Wang the Merchant very heartily. But he did not care and he was even pleased to know what they called him, and he knew because an angry farm wife shouted it at him once with curses when he saw her sink a great round stone into the heart of a basket of grain about to be weighed, and she had done it when she thought his back was turned.

  More than a time or two did a farm woman curse him, for a bitter-tongued woman is bolder than any man, and if a man were discovered in a trick he looked sullen or sheepish as his nature was, but a woman would curse and she would cry out after him,

  “How is it that in one generation you forget how your father and your mother toiled on the land even as we do and they starved too, as we must, when you grind our blood and bones as you do now?”

  Wang the Landlord had grown afraid sometimes when the people grew bitter, for he knew the rich may well fear the poor, who seem so patient and humble and who can be so bold and ruthless when they turn to rend whom they hate. But Wang the Merchant feared nothing, and it was nothing to him even when one day Pear Blossom saw him pass and she called to him and came out and said,

  “If so be, sir, my lord’s son, that you can be a little less exact with the people, I should be glad. They labor very hard and they are poor and like children in ignorance, oftentimes. It goes against my heart to hear the cruel things they say, sometimes, about my lord’s sons.”

  But Wang the Merchant only smiled and went his way. It was nothing to him what any said or did, so long as he had his full profits. His was the power and he feared nothing, for he felt himself secure in his riches.

  XVI

  NOW THE WINTER WORE on very long and cold in those parts and in the time of bitter winds and in the fury of wind-driven snows Wang the Tiger could but stay on in the magistrate’s courts in the place that was now his and wait for the spring to come. He entrenched himself in his place and he steadily demanded from the magistrate this tax and that for his eight thousand soldiers. Yes, there was even a tax put on all land for his benefit and it was called the tax for the protection of the people by the state soldiery, but this soldiery was really Wang the Tiger’s own private army, and he taught them and trained them and made them ready to enlarge his power for him when he saw the moment was come. Every farmer in that whole region paid something on every field he had and he paid it out for Wang the Tiger; and because the robbers were gone and the lair burned and they need not fear the Leopard any more, the common folk were full of praise for Wang the Tiger and they were ready to pay him well, but still they did not know how well this was.

  There were other taxes also that Wang the Tiger had the magistrate lay for him, some on shops and markets, and every traveller who came through that town, which was a pass between north and south, paid a tax and every merchant paid a tax on the goods he took back and forth for sale and barter, and so the money poured steadily and secretly into Wang the Tiger’s stores. He was sharp enough, too, to see that it did not touch too many hands in passing, knowing that no hand in this world will readily release as much silver as it grasps. He appointed his own trusty men to see to the collecting of it and although these spoke smoothly to all and he commanded them so to speak, yet he gave them the power over anyone they found taking more than his share, and he told each trusty man that he would punish them himself if they failed him. He was safer than most from treachery for everyone feared him for a ruthless man. Yet they knew him to be just, too, and they knew he did not kill any man carelessly or for mere pleasure.

  But as Wang the Tiger wa
ited for the winter to be gone he chafed very much in spite of his success, for this life in the magistrate’s courtyards did not suit him. No, and there were none who could be his friends, for he would not bring himself to intimacy with any, knowing that as long as people feared him he could hold his place the more easily among them; besides, he was one who did not by nature love to take part in feasting and friendship, and he lived alone except for his pocked nephew whom he kept near him always lest he need something, and his trusty harelipped man who was his chief guard.

  The truth was that now the magistrate was so old and given to his opium pipe, everything ran slackly about him and his courts were filled with cliques and jealousies and crowded with underlings and underlings’ relatives who sought an easy way to live. This man turned against that, and there were deep angers and revenges and quarrels continually. But if these were brought to the old magistrate’s ears he turned himself to his opium or he thought of something else, for well he knew he could not settle everything, and he lived alone with his old wife in an inner court and he only came out when he must. But he tried to do his state duty still, and every audience day at dawn he rose and put on his official robes and he went into his audience hall and ascended the dais there and sat down in the chair from whence he heard his cases.