Free The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Page A

was causing all this trouble in his uncle’s house. Now a girl had been born into his house as well.
    He went without reply then to the wall and felt for the roughness which was the mark of the hiding place and he removed the clod of earth. Behind it he fumbled among the little heap of silver and he counted out nine pieces.
    “Why are you taking the silver out?” said his wife suddenly in the darkness.
    “I am compelled to lend it to my uncle,” he replied shortly.
    His wife answered nothing at first and then she said in her plain, heavy way,
    “It is better not to say lend. There is no lending in that house. There is only giving.”
    “Well I know that,” replied Wang Lung with bitterness. “It is cutting my flesh out to give to him and for nothing except that we are of a blood.”
    Then going out into the threshold he thrust the money at his uncle and he walked quickly back to the field and there he fell to working as though he would tear the earth from its foundations. He thought for the time only of the silver; he saw it poured out carelessly upon a gambling table, saw it swept up by some idle hand—his silver, the silver he had so painfully collected from the fruits of his fields, to turn it back again for more earth for his own.
    It was evening before his anger was spent and he straightened himself and remembered his home and his food. And then he thought of that new mouth come that day into his house and it struck him, with heaviness, that the birth of daughters had begun for him, daughters who do not belong to their parents, but are born and reared for other families. He had not even thought, in his anger at his uncle, to stop and see the face of this small, new creature.
    He stood leaning upon his hoe and he was seized with sadness. It would be another harvest before he could buy that land now, a piece adjoining the one he had, and there was this new mouth in the house. Across the pale, oyster-colored sky of twilight a flock of crows flew, sharply black, and whirred over him, cawing loudly. He watched them disappear like a cloud into the trees about his house, and he ran at them, shouting and shaking his hoe. They rose again slowly, circling and re-circling over his head, mocking him with their cries, and they flew at last into the darkening sky.
    He groaned aloud. It was an evil omen.

8
    I T SEEMED AS THOUGH once the gods turn against a man they will not consider him again. The rains, which should have come in early summer, withheld themselves, and day after day the skies shone with fresh and careless brilliance. The parched and starving earth was nothing to them. From dawn to dawn there was not a cloud, and at night the stars hung out of the sky, golden and cruel in their beauty.
    The fields, although Wang Lung cultivated them desperately, dried and cracked, and the young wheat stalks, which had sprung up courageously with the coming of spring and had prepared their heads for the grain, when they found nothing coming from the soil or the sky for them, ceased their growing and stood motionless at first under the sun and at last dwindled and yellowed into a barren harvest. The young rice beds which Wang Lung sowed at first were squares of jade upon the brown earth. He carried water to them day after day after he had given up the wheat, the heavy wooden buckets slung upon a bamboo pole across his shoulders. But though a furrow grew upon his flesh and a callus formed there as large as a bowl, no rain came.
    At last the water in the pond dried into a cake of clay and the water even in the well sunk so low that O-lan said to him,
    “If the children must drink and the old man have his hot water the plants must go dry.”
    Wang Lung answered with anger that broke into a sob,
    “Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve.” It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth.
    Only the piece of land by the moat bore harvest, and this because at last when summer wore away without rain, Wang Lung