Read The Good Earth for Free Online Page A

lose if he played. He usually ended by spending his spare hours in the town at the storyteller’s booth, where one may listen to an old tale and pay no more than a penny into his bowl when it was passed about.
    “You had better take the other piece,” he said, lighting his pipe between the words, blowing quickly at the paper spill to set it aflame. “You may as well make his coat of a small remnant of silk. After all, he is the first.”
    She did not at once take the money, but she stood looking at it, her face motionless. Then she said in a half-whisper,
    “It is the first time I have had silver money in my hand.”
    Suddenly she took it and clenched it in her hand and hurried into the bedroom.
    Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of his earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from this earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But now for the first time such giving was not pain. 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 this strange woman of his, who worked about, saying nothing, seeming to see nothing, she had first seen the child thus clothed!
    She would have no one with her when the hour came. It came one night, early, when the sun was scarcely set; She was working beside him in the harvest field. The wheat had borne and been cut and the field flooded and the young rice set, and now the rice bore harvest, and the ears were ripe and full after the summer rains and the warm ripening sun of early autumn. Together they cut the sheaves all day, bending and cutting with short-handled scythes. She had stooped stiffly, because of the burden she bore, and she moved more slowly than he, so that they cut unevenly, his row ahead, and hers behind. She began to cut more and more slowly as noon wore on to afternoon and evening, and he turned to look at her with impatience. She stopped and stood up then, her scythe dropped. On her face was a new sweat, the sweat of a new agony.
    “It is come,” she said. “I will go into the house. Do not come into the room until I call. Only bring me a newly peeled reed, and slit it, that I may cut the child’s life from mine.”
    She went across the fields toward the house as though there were nothing to come, and after he had watched her he went to the edge of the pond in the outer field and chose a slim green reed and peeled it carefully and slit it on the edge of his scythe. The quick autumn darkness was falling then and he shouldered his scythe and went home.
    When he reached the house he found his supper hot on the table and the old man eating. She had stopped in her labor to prepare them food! He said to himself that she was a woman such as is not commonly found. Then he went to the door of their room and he called out,
    “Here is the reed!”
    He waited, expecting that she would call out to him to bring it in to her. But she did not. She came to the door and through the crack her hand reached out and took the reed. She said no word, but he heard her panting as an animal pants which has run for a long way.
    The old man looked up from his bowl to say,
    “Eat, or all will be cold.” 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.” And then he said again, as though he had just thought of it newly, “By this time tomorrow I may be grandfather to a man