Pearl Buck - Sons

So Wang the Tiger came to his father’s house and he came in triumph and not so much as youngest son and youngest brother, but as a man in his own right by what he had achieved and by the son he had begotten. And they all felt his achievement, and his brothers met him and welcomed him very nearly as though he were a guest, and his brothers’ wives contended with each other as to who should be most voluble and ready in her welcome.

The truth of it was that the lady of Wang the Landlord and the wife of Wang the Merchant had struggled with each other as to who should house Wang the Tiger and his family. The lady took it as a matter of course and her right that they should come to her lord’s house, for now as Wang the Tiger’s fame began to be known she felt it would be an honorable thing to have him as guest and she said,

“It will be fitting, for we chose his wife for him, a very learned and pleasant lady, and she can scarcely be at home with your brother’s wife, who is so ignorant. Let her keep the lesser wife if she wishes, but we must have our brother and his lady here. He may be moved by one of our sons or he may be able to do us some great good. At the very least he will not be subject to her hints and desires!”

But the wife of Wang the Merchant said to him importunately and often, and she would not give up her wish at-all,

“How can our brother’s woman know how to feed such a number, and she only used to feeding nuns and priests with their poor vegetable stuffs?”

There came to be such anger that these two women quarreled face to face over the matter, and, seeing the coming and the going and hearing the loud talk that grew more loud as the festival day drew near, and seeing that nothing could be decided and that each wife for pride’s sake would not give up a smallest point, the two husbands met together in their old trysting place in the tea house, for they were united as they never could have been otherwise by the enmity of their two wives. There they consulted together and Wang the Merchant, who had made his plan, said to his brother,

“Let it be as you say, but what do you think if we put our brother and his retinue into that court our father left empty? True, it belongs to his wife Lotus, but she is so very old now and uses it not at all since she has given up gaming, and if we put them there we can divide the expense between us, and this we can use as a reason to our two ladies and so have peace again.”

Now once Wang the Landlord would have wished to use some way he had thought of alone, but as he grew older and so monstrous in his girth he grew exceedingly slothful and he was drowsy much of the day, and he would do anything to avoid trouble. This plan then seemed very good to him, and he wanted to have his powerful younger brother’s favor, but still he did not care so much if his second brother did not have more than he. In his growing indolence he had passed the time when he loved guests as he once did, and he was glad not to have those in his house now to whom he must be courteous in season and out of season and so weary himself. He agreed willingly, therefore, and each man went home to his wife and told her the plan. It was a very good compromise for all, for none lost her way altogether, and each determined secretly to seem to be the one responsible for their comfort, and yet each was pleased that the vast cost of wines and feasts and bounty for serving men and women would be halved, and to all of them this was a sound reason enough.

Then those old courts where Wang Lung had lived in the years of his later middle life were swept and garnished and made clean. It was true that Lotus never went into them, and the serving maids sat in them sometimes but that was all. Lotus was grown very huge and old now, and Cuckoo was her only companion except her slaves, for as she grew old Lotus’s eyes were filmed and she could not even see at last the cast dice in gaming or to see what the numbers were in any of the games of chance she loved. One by one the old crones who had used to come to her died, or were bedridden, and only Lotus lived on, alone with those who served her.

Her slaves she used very bitterly, and as her eyes failed her tongue grew cruelly sharp, so that the brothers had to pay maid servants very high wages or they could not bear her tongue. As for the slaves who were bought and could not leave if they liked, two of them killed themselves, one of them swallowing her poor glass earrings and the other hanging herself on a beam in one of the kitchens where she worked, rather than endure longer Lotus’s cruelties. For Lotus would not only wield her tongue coarsely, shrieking out such words as maids cannot bear to hear, but she would nip them cruelly. Her fat old fingers, that were so useless in the strange beauty they still kept and they were smooth and beautiful when all other beauty had faded from her, those old fingers could nip and pinch a young girl’s arm until the blood came purple under the skin, and sometimes when this did not satisfy her, Lotus would take the coals out of her pipe and press them into tender young flesh. There was not one whom she did not treat thus if she could except Cuckoo, and she feared Cuckoo, and leaned upon her for everything.

For Cuckoo was what she ever was. In her age, and she was very old now also, she seemed to grow more thin and dry and withered and yet she had a strength in her old frame that was almost what it had been in youth. Her eyes were sharp and her tongue harsh and her face, although wrinkled all over, was still red. She was greedy, too, as ever she had been, and if she guarded her mistress against the thievery of other serving women, she herself thieved most hardily from Lotus. Now that Lotus’s eyes were filmed, Cuckoo took what she liked from Lotus and she swelled her own private store, and Lotus, being so old, forgot what jewels she had and what fur garments and what garments of satin and silk, and so she did not know what Cuckoo took. If by chance she remembered and cried out for something of a sudden, Cuckoo diverted her if she could, and if Lotus was perverse and would not forget, Cuckoo went and fetched the thing from her own boxes and gave it to Lotus. But when, after fingering it a time or two Lotus forgot again, Cuckoo took it and kept it once more.

Nor did a slave or serving woman dare complain, for Cuckoo was the real mistress there, and even the brothers deferred to her, for they knew they could find no one to take her place and they dared not anger her. When therefore Cuckoo said Lotus had given her this or that, the maids were silent, for they knew well that if they complained, Cuckoo was so bitter and evil she could have put poison into a bowl of food and thought nothing of it, and sometimes she would boast of all the skill she had in poisoning to keep them afraid, As for Lotus, she leaned on Cuckoo for everything, as she grew blind, and now because of the mighty weight of her flesh she walked no more except from her bed to the great chair of carved black wood where she sat a little while after noon and then back to her bed again. Even so she must be supported by four slaves and more, for those pretty little feet of hers which had once been Wang Lung’s pride and pleasure were nothing but stumps beneath the great and monstrous body which in other days had been slender as a bamboo and passionately beloved by Wang Lung.

When one day Lotus heard the commotion in the courts next hers and when she asked and heard that Wang the Tiger was coming with his women and children to pass the feast day and worship at his father’s grave with his brothers, she grew petulant and she said,

“I cannot have brats here! I have always hated brats!”

This was true for she was a childless woman and had always some strange hatred against little children, and especially when she passed her time of such fruitage. Then Wang the Landlord who had come in with his brother, soothed her and he said,