Sons by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online

of my youth and Cuckoo will tell you how great a beauty I was so that you may know it is true, and I gave it all to him. I lived in his old earthen house and never saw the town until he was rich enough to come here and to buy this house. And I did not complain; no, I held myself ready for his pleasure at any moment, and yet all this was not enough for him. As soon as I was old at all he took to himself a slave of my own, a poor pale thing I kept out of pity for she was so weak she was little use to me, and now that he is dead I have only these few paltry bits of silver for my pains!”
    Then this old lady or that would commiserate her, and each pretended she did not know that Lotus had been only a singing girl out of a tea house, and one would cry out,
    “Ah, so it is with all men, and as soon as our beauty is gone they look about for another, even though they used our beauty heedlessly until it was gone! So it is with us all!”
    And they all agreed upon these two things, that all men were wicked and selfish and they themselves were most to be pitied of all women because they had sacrificed themselves so wholly, and when they were agreed upon these things and each had shown how her lord was the worst, they fell with relish to their eating and then with zest to their gaming, and so Lotus spent her life. And since it is a servant’s due to have what her mistress earns at gaming, or else a share in it, Cuckoo was zealous to urge her on to such a life.
    But still Lotus longed for the days of her mourning to be over so she could take off her cotton robes and wear silks again and forget that Wang Lung had lived. Yes, except for the certain times when she must for decency’s sake go to his grave and weep and when the family went to burn paper and incense to his shade, she did not think of him except when she must draw on these mourning robes in the morning and take them off at night, and she longed to be rid of this so she need not think of him at all.
    There was only Pear Blossom who was in no haste, and she went as she always did and mourned by that grave in the land. When no one was by to see her she went and mourned there.
    Now while the two brothers waited they must live on together in this great house, they and their wives and children, and it was not easy living because of the hostility of their wives to each other. The wives of Wang the Eldest and Wang the Second hated each other so heartily that the two men were distracted by them, for the two women could not keep their anger to themselves, but each must pour it forth to her husband, when she had him alone.
    The wife of Wang the Eldest said to him in her proper, pompous way, “It is a strange thing I can never have the decent respect which is my due in this house to which you brought me. I thought while the old man lived I must endure it because he was so coarse and ignorant a person that I was shamed before my sons when they saw what they had for a grandfather. Yet I bore it all because it was right for me so to do. But now he is dead and you are the head of the family, and if he did not see what your brother’s wife is and how she treats me, and he did not see it because he was so ignorant and unlearned, you are the head and you see it and still you do nothing to teach that woman her place. I am set at naught by her every day, a coarse, country woman and irreligious, too.”
    Then Wang the Eldest groaned in himself and he said with what patience he could muster,
    “What does she say to you?”
    “It is not only in what she says,” the lady replied in her chill way, and when she talked her lips scarcely moved and her voice did not rise or fall. “It is in all she does and is. When I come into a room where she is she pretends to be at some task from which she cannot rise and give me place, and she is so red and loud I cannot bear her if she speaks at all, no, not even if I see her pass, even.”
    “Well, and I can scarcely go to my brother and say, “Your wife is