The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Page B

wall.”
    “Sell their land!” repeated Wang Lung, convinced. “Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one’s flesh and blood.”
    He pondered for a while and suddenly a thought came to him and he smote the side of his head with his palm.
    “What have I not thought of!” he cried, turning to the woman. “We will buy the land!”
    They stared at each other, he in delight, she in stupefaction.
    “But the land—the land—” she stammered.
    “I will buy it!” he cried in a lordly voice. “I will buy it from the great House of Hwang!”
    “It is too far away,” she said in consternation. “We would have to walk half the morning to reach it.”
    “I will buy it,” he repeated peevishly as he might repeat a demand to his mother who crossed him.
    “It is a good thing to buy land,” she said pacifically. “It is better certainly than putting money into a mud wall. But why not a piece of your uncle’s land? He is clamoring to sell that strip near to the western field we now have.”
    “That land of my uncle’s,” said Wang Lung loudly, “I would not have it. He has been dragging a crop out of it in this way and that for twenty years and not a bit has he put back of manure or bean cake. The soil is like lime. No, I will buy Hwang’s land.”
    He said “Hwang’s land” as casually as he might have said “Ching’s land”—Ching, who was his farmer neighbor. He would be more than equal to these people in the foolish, great, wasteful house. He would go with the silver in his hand and he would say plainly,
    “I have money. What is the price of the earth you wish to sell?” Before the Old Lord he heard himself saying and to the Old Lord’s agent, “Count me as anyone else. What is the fair price? I have it in my hand.”
    And his wife, who had been a slave in the kitchens of that proud family, she would be wife to a man who owned a piece of the land that for generations had made the House of Hwang great. It was as though she felt his thought for she suddenly ceased her resistance and she said,
    “Let it be bought. After all, rice land is good, and it is near the moat and we can get water every year. It is sure.”
    And again the slow smile spread over her face, the smile that never lightened the dullness of her narrow black eyes, and after a long time she said,
    “Last year this time I was slave in that house.”
    And they walked on, silent with the fullness of this thought.

6
    T HIS PIECE OF LAND which Wang Lung now owned was a thing which greatly changed his life. At first, after he had dug the silver from the wall and taken it to the great house, after the honor of speaking as an equal to the Old Lord’s equal was past, he was visited with a depression of spirit which was almost regret. When he thought of the hole in the wall now empty that had been filled with silver he need not use, he wished that he had his silver back. After all, this land, it would take hours of labor again, and as O-lan said, it was far away, more than a li which is a third of a mile. And again, the buying of it had not been quite so filled with glory as he had anticipated. He had gone too early to the great house and the Old Lord was still sleeping. True, it was noon, but when he said in a loud voice,
    “Tell his Old Honor I have important business—tell him money is concerned!” the gateman had answered positively,
    “All the money in the world would not tempt me to wake the old tiger. He sleeps with his new concubine, Peach Blossom, whom he has had but three days. It is not worth my life to waken him.” And then he added somewhat maliciously, pulling at the hairs on his mole, “And do not think that silver will waken him—he has had silver under his hand since he was born.”
    In the end, then, it had had to be managed with the Old Lord’s agent, an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them in passing. So it seemed sometimes to Wang Lung that after all the silver was more valuable