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But there is not that about three rooms and two meals a day to keep a woman busy who has been a slave in a great house and who has worked from dawn until midnight. One day when Wang Lung was hard pressed with the swelling wheat and was cultivating it with his hoe, day after day, until his back throbbed with weariness, her shadow fell across the furrow over which he bent himself, and there she stood, with a hoe across her shoulder.
“There is nothing in the house until nightfall,” she said briefly, and without speech she took the furrow to the left of him and fell into steady hoeing.
The sun beat upon them, for it was early summer, and her face was soon dripping with her sweat. Wang Lung had his coat off and his back bare, but she worked with her thin garment covering her shoulders and it grew wet and clung to her like skin. Moving together in perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning the earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together—together—producing the fruit of this earth—speechless in their movement together.
When the sun had set he straightened his back slowly and looked at the woman. Her face was wet and streaked with the earth. She was as brown as the very soil itself. Her wet, dark garments clung to her square body. She smoothed a last furrow slowly. Then in her usual plain way she said, straight out, her voice flat and more usually plain in the silent evening air, “I am with child.”
Wang Lung stood still. What was there to say to this thing, then! She stooped to pick up a bit of broken brick and threw it out of the furrow. It was as though she had said, “I have brought you tea,” or as though she had said, “We can eat.” It seemed as ordinary as that to her! But to him—he could not say what it was to him. His heart swelled and stopped as though it met sudden confines. Well, it was their turn at this earth!
He took the hoe suddenly from her hand and he said, his voice thick in his throat, “Let be for now. It is a day’s end. We will tell the old man.”
They walked home, then, she a half a dozen paces behind him as befitted a woman. The old man stood at the door, hungry for his evening food, which, now that the woman was in the house, he would never prepare for himself. He was impatient and he called out, “I am too old to wait for my food like this.”
But Wang Lung, passing him into the room, said, “She is with child already.”
He tried to say it easily as one might say, “I have planted the seeds in the western field today,” but he could not. Although he spoke in a low voice it was to him as though he had shouted the words out louder than he would.
The old man blinked for a moment and then comprehended, and cackled with laughter.
“Heh-heh-heh-“ he called out to his daughter-in-law as she came, “so the harvest is in sight!”
Her face he could not see in the dusk, but she answered evenly, “I shall prepare food now.”
“Yes—yes—food—“ said the old man eagerly, following her into the kitchen like a child. Just as the thought of a grandson had made him forget his meal, so now the thought of food freshly before him made him forget the child.
But Wang Lung sat upon a bench by the table in the darkness and put his head upon his folded arms. Out of this body of his, out of his own loins, life!
