The Good Earth: Chapters 1-4

It was a dark, ruddy dawn, and through a small square hole of a window, where the tattered paper fluttered, a glimpse of bronze sky gleamed.

The fields needed rain for fruition.

Yesterday he had said to his father that if this brazen, glittering sunshine continued, the wheat could not fill in the ear.

They were always having to resist relatives who were more crowded—his uncle, with his endless brood of children, coaxing.

They were always having to resist relatives who were more crowded—his uncle, with his endless brood of children, coaxing.

“There is only a little rice left in the basket,” said the old man, seating himself at the table in the middle room and stirring with his chopsticks the thick yellow gruel.

His father, seeing his mutinous face, had cried out at him, “And what will we do with a pretty woman?"

“If you are buying nothing more,” he said at last with much impudence, “you will have to pay rent for the stool.”

The gateman saw his fear and cried out in great contempt, “In a house like this we feed these meats to the dogs!” and seizing the basket he thrust it behind the door and pushed Wang Lung ahead of him.

And collecting himself in great shame Wang Lung looked ahead of him, and upon a dais in the center of the room he saw a very old lady, her small fine body clothed in lustrous, pearly grey satin, and upon the low bench beside her a pipe of opium stood, burning over its little lamp.

“Raise him,” said the old lady gravely to the gateman, “these obeisances are not necessary. Has he come for the woman?”

This roused Wang Lung and he looked with indignation at the gateman.

He turned away with secret exultation.

She plodded along steadily on her big feet as though she had walked there all her life, her wide face expressionless.

They wore robes of red and gilt paper, and the god had a scant, drooping moustache of real hair.

Instead he feigned great interest in the clouds and he cried, “That cloud which hangs upon the left horn of the new moon speaks of rain. It will come not later than tomorrow night.”

But the old man came to the door and said volubly, “There is no end to the money spent in this house!”

He did not look at the woman as he spoke. It would not have been seemly.

After they had been seated about the middle room with demurring and unwillingness to take seats, for politeness, Wang Lung went into the kitchen to bid the woman serve.

That night after the guests had tarried long over their tea and had done with their jokes, the woman still lingered behind the stove, and when Wang Lung had seen the last guest away he went in and she cowered there in the straw piles asleep beside the ox.

And he began to undress himself doggedly.

The old man’s cough rose querulously out of the dusky dawn and he said to her, "Take to my father first a bowl of hot water for his lungs.”

He put his hoe upon his shoulder and he walked to his plots of land and he cultivated the rows of grain, and he yoked the ox to the plow and he ploughed the western field for garlic and onions.

But the work was luxury, for when the sun struck the zenith he could go to his house and food would be there ready for him to eat, and the dust wiped from the table, and the bowls and the chopsticks placed neatly upon it.

And she took their ragged clothes and with thread she herself spun on a bamboo spindle from a wad of cotton she mended and contrived to cover the rents in their winter clothes.

Their bedding she took into the sun on the threshold and ripped the coverings from the quilts and washed them and hung them upon a bamboo to dry, and the cotton in the quilts that had grown hard and grey from years she picked over, killing the vermin that had flourished in the hidden folds, and sunning it all.

Wang Lung, watching her move steadily and slowly about the rooms on her big feet, watching secretly the stolid, square face, the unexpressed, half-fearful look of her eyes, made nothing of her.

“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth.

Then he continued in argument, “We two men, we have no ability in childbirth. For my father it is not fitting to enter your room—for myself, I have never even seen a cow give birth. My clumsy hands might mar the child. Someone from the great house, now, where the slaves are always giving birth...”

I shall have a red coat on him and red-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes.

He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than itself—clothes upon the body of his son.

And then he said, “Do not trouble yourself yet—it will be a long time. I remember well when the first was born to me it was dawn before it was over. Ah me, to think that out of all the children I begot and your mother bore, one after the other—a score or so—I forget—only you have lived! You see why a woman must bear and bear.”

“Is it a man?” he cried importunately, forgetting the woman.

These two small, protective figures, sitting staidly under their small roof—what a power they had!

The harvests were past, and the grain they beat out upon the threshing floor which was also the dooryard to the house.

They beat it out with flails, he and the woman together.

And when the grain was flailed they winnowed it, casting it up from great flat bamboo baskets into the wind and catching the good grain as it fell, and the chaff blew away in a cloud with the wind.

And when the grain was flailed they winnowed it, casting it up from great flat bamboo baskets into the wind and catching the good grain as it fell, and the chaff blew away in a cloud with the wind.

Much of this would be sold, but Wang Lung was frugal and he did not, like many of the villagers, spend his money freely at gambling or on foods too delicate for them, and so, like them, have to sell the grain at harvest when the price was low.

Only the bamboo leaves clung to the bamboos in the sparse clump to the east of the house, and even though the wind wrenched the stems double, the leaves clung.