Sons by Buck Pearl S

Author:Buck, Pearl S. [Buck, Pearl S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China, Classics, Fiction, Historical, Novel
ISBN: 9781453263471
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1933-01-24T03:00:00+00:00

XVIII

THE LAD WENT WINDING his way homeward, then, over the countryside. He had taken off his soldier’s garb and had put on the clothing of a farmer’s son and with these coarse blue garments and his face brown and pocked he looked nothing but a country lad, and fit grandson for Wang Lung. He rode upon his old white ass, with a ragged coat folded under him for a saddle, and he kicked the ass under the belly with his bare feet to hasten it sometimes. No one who saw him riding thus and often half asleep under the hot sun of summer would have dreamed that he carried a message that was to bring three thousand guns into that peaceful country. But when he did not sleep he sang his song of soldiers and war, for he loved to sing, and when he did this a farmer would look up at him uneasily from his work in the fields and stare after the youth, and once a farmer shouted after him,

“A curse on you to be singing a soldier’s ditty—do you want to bring the black crows around us again?”

But the youth was gay and careless and he spat here and there in the dust of the road to show how careless he was, and to show he would go on singing if he wished to sing. The truth was he did not know any other songs than these, having been so long among reckless and fighting men, and it cannot be expected that soldiers will sing the same songs that farmers sing in their quiet fields.

On the third day at noon he came to his home and as he slid off his ass at the place where the side street parted from the main street, there was his eldest cousin lounging along and he stared and stopped in a yawn he was making and said, in greeting,

“Well, and are you a general yet?”

Then the pocked lad called back quietly and wittily,

“No, but I have taken at least the first degree!”

This he said to mock his cousin a little because everyone knew how Wang the Landlord and his lady had always talked a great deal of how they would make a scholar of this son and how next season he was to go up for examination at such and such a seat of learning and so become a great man. But the season went and the year passed into another, and he never went. Now the pocked youth knew this cousin of his was on his way not to any school but to some tea house, being just up, doubtless, from his bed, and languid after the night he had had somewhere. But the son of Wang the Landlord was dainty and scornful and he surveyed his cousin and said,

“At least being a first degree general has not put a silk coat on your back!”

And he walked on without waiting to hear any answer, swaying himself as he walked

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