Pearl Buck: The Mother

Even when the robe was done at last, and she was long in making it because there was the rice to be set and planted, even when it was done she said nothing of how it looked upon him. She gave it to him and he put it on and he shined his ring with bits of broken stone and he smoothed his hair with oil he poured from the kitchen bottle and he went swaggering down the street.

Yet even when this one and that cried out to him how fine he was and how fine his robe, he took no full sweet pleasure in himself as he might have done. She had said no word to him. No, when he had lingered at the door an instant she went on with her task, bending to the short-handled broom and sweeping about the house and never looking up to ask if the robe fitted him or if his body was suited to its shape, as she was wont to do if she had made him even so much as a pair of new shoes. At last he had even said, half shy, “It seems to me you have sewed this robe better than any robe I ever had, and it fits me as a townsman’s does.”

But still she would not look up. She set the broom in its corner and went and fetched a roll of cotton wool and set herself to spinning it to thread, since she had used her store in the making of the blue robe. At last she answered bitterly, “At the cost it was to me it should look like an emperor’s robe.”

But she would not look at him, no, not even when he flung himself down the street. She would not even look at him secretly when his back was turned because she was so bitter against him, although her heart knew the blue robe suited him well.

THROUGH THAT DAY LONG the mother watched for the man to come home. It was a day when the fields could be left to their own growing, for the rice was planted in its pools, and in the shallow water and in the warm sunlight the green young plants waved their newly forming heads in the slight winds. There was no need to go out to the land that day.

So the mother sat under the willow tree spinning and the old woman came to sit beside her, glad of one to listen to what she said, and while she talked she unfastened her coat and stretched her thin old withered arms in the hot sun and felt the good heat in her bones, and the children ran naked in the sunshine too. But the mother sat silently on, twisting the spindle with a sure movement between her thumb and the finger she wet on her tongue, and the thread came out close spun and white, and when she had made a length of it she wound it about a bit of bamboo polished smooth to make a spool. She spun as she did all things, firmly and well, and the thread was strong and hard.

Slowly the sun climbed to noon and she put her spinning down and rose.

“He will be coming home soon and hungry for all his blue robe,” she said dryly, and the old woman answered, cackling with her ready, feeble laughter, “Oh, aye, what is on a man’s belly is not the same as what is in it—”

The mother went then and dipped rice with a gourd from the basket where they kept it stored, and she leveled the gourd with her other hand so not a grain was spilled, and she poured the rice into a basket made of finely split bamboo and went along the path to the pond’s edge, and as she went she looked down the street. But she saw no glimpse of new blue. She stepped carefully down the bank and began to wash the rice, dipping the basket into the water and scrubbing the grain with her brown strong hands, dipping it again and again until the rice shone clean and white as wet pearls. On her way back she stooped to pull a head of cabbage where it grew, and threw a handful of grass to the water buffalo tethered under a tree, and so she came again to the house. Now the elder boy came home from the street leading his sister by the hand, and the mother asked him quietly, “Saw you your father on the street or in the inn or at anyone’s door?”

“He sat a while at the inn drinking tea this morning,” the boy replied, wondering. “And I saw his robe, new and blue, and it was pretty and our cousin when he knew how much it cost said it had cost my father very dear.”

“Aye, it cost him dear, I swear!” said the mother, suddenly, her voice hard.

And the girl piped up, echoing her brother, “Yes, his robe was blue — even I could see that it was blue.”

But the mother said no more. The babe began to weep where he lay sleeping in a winnowing basket and she went and picked him up and opened her coat and held him to her breast, and she suckled him as she went to cook the meal. But first she called to the old woman, “Turn yourself where you sit, old mother, and watch and tell me if you see the new blue of his robe, and I will put the meal on the table.”

“I will, then, daughter,” called the old dame cheerfully.

Yet when the rice was cooked and flaked, white and dry as the man loved it, still he did not come. When the cabbage was tender and the woman had even made a bit of sweet and sour sauce to pour upon its heart, as he loved it, he did not come.

They waited a while and the old woman grew hungry and faint with the smell of the food in her nostrils and she cried out, in a sudden small anger, being so hungry, “Wait no more for that son of mine! The water is leaking out of my mouth and my belly is as empty as a drum and still he is not here!”

So the mother gave the old woman her bowl then and she fed the children too and even let them eat of the cabbage, only she saved the heart of it for him. She ate also after this, but sparingly for she seemed less zestful in her hunger today, somehow, so there was still much rice left and a good bowlful of the cabbage and this she put carefully away where the wind would catch it and keep it fresh. It would be as good at night as it was now if she heated it again. Then she gave suck to the babe, and he drank his fill and slept, a round, fat, sturdy child, sleeping in the strong sun and brown and red with its heat, and the two children stretched in the shade of the willow tree and slept and the old woman nodded on her bench, and over the whole small hamlet the peace of sleep and the silence of the heat of noonday fell, so that even the beasts stood with drooping, drowsy heads.

Only the mother did not sleep. She took up her spindle and she sat herself in the shade of the willow tree that cast its shadow on the western part of the threshing-floor and she twisted the thread and wound it. But after a while she could not work. Through the morning she had worked steadily and smoothly, twisting and turning and spinning, but now she could not be still. It was as though some strange anxiety gathered like a power in her body. She had never known the man not to come home for his food. She murmured to herself, “It must be he has gone into the town to game or for something or other.”

This she had not thought of, but the more she thought upon it the more it seemed true that so he had done. And after a while her cousin-neighbor came out to go to his fields and after a while his wife awoke from where she had sat sleeping by a tree, and she called, “Has your man gone for the day somewhere?”

The mother answered easily, “Aye, he has gone to the town on some business of his own,” and the cousin searching slowly among his hoes and spades for what he wanted called in his thin voice, “Aye, I saw him gay in his new blue robe and set for town!”

“Aye,” said the woman.

Now her heart eased itself somewhat, and she fell to spinning again with more zeal, since the cousin had seen him set for town. He had gone for a day’s pleasure, doubtless, flinging himself off for the day to revenge himself on her. It was what he would do with his new gown and that brass ring of his scrubbed bright and clean and his hair covered with oil. She nursed her anger somewhat at the thought. But her anger was dead, and she could not make it live again, because it was mingled with some strange anxiety still, for all the cousin’s words.