Pearl Buck - East Wind - West Wind

But when I saw this my spirit was ill at ease. Evidently the pain was habitual, since the opium pipe was kept prepared and the lamp burning. When I sought to speak of it, however, my mother forbade me, saying sharply,

“It is nothing. Do not annoy me.”

She would say nothing more than that, and after remaining a little while beside her, I bowed and came away. When I passed through the servants’ court I asked Wang Da Ma concerning my mother, and she shook her head.

“The First Lady suffers this way each day more times in number than the fingers on both my hands. The pain has been occasional for many years, yet you know she will never speak of her own affairs. But under the sorrows of this year the pain has become constant. I am always about her person, and I see the grayness pass over her face. I see her face broken with pain at early dawn when I take in the tea. But some hope has sustained her of late until the last few days. Now she has dropped like a tree whose last root has been chopped away.”

She took up the corner of her blue apron and wiped each eye in turn and sighed.

Ah, I know the hope which has sustained my mother! I said nothing, but I returned to my home, and I wept, and I told my husband. I begged him to go with me to see her, but he counsels me to wait. He says,

“If she is forced or angered, she will be worse. When the opportune time comes, implore her to see a physician. Further than this you have no responsibility with an elder.”

I know he is always right. But I cannot cast aside my sense of portending evil.

It seems my father is pleased that the foreign one is to bear a child. He cried when he heard of it,

“Ah ha! Now we will have a little foreigner to play with! Hai-ya! A new toy, indeed! We will call him Little Clown, and he shall amuse us!”

My brother muttered at these words. He begins to hate our father in his heart. I can see it.

As for the foreign one, she has given up her mournfulness. When I went to see her to congratulate her she was singing a weird, harsh, foreign tune. When I inquired its meaning, she said it was a song of sleep for a child. I marvel that any child could rest, hearing it. She seems to have forgotten that she ever uncovered her unhappiness to me that day. She and my brother have renewed their love, and she has room for nothing else in her mind, now that the child is coming.

In my heart I am anxious to see this foreign child. He cannot be beautiful as my son is beautiful. It may even be a girl, and perhaps she will have the fire-yellow hair of her mother. Ah, my poor brother!

He is unhappy, my brother! Now that a child is to be born, he is more than ever anxious to establish his wife’s legal position. He hints of the matter daily to our father, but our father puts him off with smiling, leisurely talk of other things.

At the next feast day my brother says he will press the matter before the clan, even in the ancestral hall before the sacred tablets of the ancestors, so that the child may be born legally as his eldest son. Of course if it is a girl, it will not matter. But we can discern nothing of the future.

It is now the eleventh moon of the year. Snow lies upon the ground, and the bamboos are heavy with it in the garden, so that they are a frothing sea of white waves when the wind stirs them gently. My brother’s wife grows great with child. At my mother’s house there is a heavy sense of waiting. For what? I ask myself daily.

This day when I rose from my bed I saw the trees bare and blackened against a gray and wintry sky. I waked suddenly and in fear, as from an evil dream; yet when I examined my memory, I had dreamed of nothing. What is the meaning of our life? It is in the hands of the gods, and we know nothing except fear.

I have tried to discover why I am afraid. Is it for my son? But he is a young lion for strength. He talks now like a king, commanding the world. Only his father dares to disobey him with laughter. As for me, I am his slave, and he knows it. He knows everything, the rogue! No, it is not my son.

But however I reason of the matter, I cannot cast aside my restlessness, my instinct of future evil about to descend on us from heaven. I am waiting for the gods to make it known. I am certain of their malevolent purpose. Can it be after all for my son? I am half-fearful still about the casting away of the ring.

His father laughs. It is true that the child is sound from head to foot. His appetite is enough to astonish me. He thrusts aside my breast now, and he demands rice and chopsticks thrice daily. I have weaned him, and he is a man. Ah, no, it is never anyone so strong as my son!

My mother grows more feeble. I wish that my father had not gone away. When my brother became importunate concerning his wife, my father found business in Tientsin, and he has been absent for many moons. But now when evil hangs over his house he should return. Careful as he ever has been of his own pleasure only, still he should remember that he is the representative of his family before Heaven.

Yet I dare not write him, I, a mere woman and ridden by a woman’s fears. It may all be nothing. But if it is nothing, then why does day follow day, in this rigid expectancy?

I have taken incense and burned it before Kwan-yin secretly, dreading my husband’s laughter. It is all very well not to believe in the gods when there is no trouble approaching. But when sorrow hangs over a house, to whom shall we appeal? I prayed to her before my son was born and she heard me.

This day ushers in the twelfth moon. My mother lies motionless upon her bed and I begin to fear that she will never rise from it. I have besought her to call physicians, and at last she was willing, being, I fear, weary of me. She has invited Chang, that famous doctor and astrologer, to attend her. She has paid him forty ounces of silver, and he promises her recovery. I have been comforted since he says this, for everyone knows he is wise.

But I wonder when the hour of relief will begin. She smokes the opium pipe incessantly now, to dull the pain in her vitals, and she is too drowsy for speech. Her face is dull yellow, and the skin is stretched over the bones until it is dry and paper thin to the touch.

I have begged her to see my husband that he may try the western medicines, but she will not. She mutters that she has been young and now she is old, but she will never endure the ways of the barbarians. As for my husband, he shakes his head when I speak to him of my mother. I can see that he thinks she is about to enter upon the Terrace of Night.

O my mother — my mother!

My brother says nothing from morning until night. He broods. He sits in his own apartment, staring and frowning, and when he moves out of himself it is only to express a frenzy of tenderness towards his wife. They have gone together into an existence of their own, a world where they dwell alone with their unborn child.

He has caused a screen to be woven of bamboos and placed over the moon-gate so that the idle women can no longer peer in at her.

When I speak to him of our mother he is deaf. He says over and over like an angry child,

“I can never forgive her — I can never forgive her!”

Never in his life before has he been refused anything, and now he cannot forgive his mother!

For many weeks, one after the other, he did not go to see her. But yesterday he was moved a little at last by my fears and my beseechings, and he went with me and stood beside her bed. He stood in stubborn silence, refusing to greet her. He looked at her, and she opened her eyes and looked at him steadily without a word.

Nevertheless when we withdrew from her presence together, although he would not speak then of her even to me, yet I could see that he was shaken by her sick face. He had suspected that some bitter determination against him kept her in her own room, but now he saw that she was mortally ill. Therefore, once each day after that, Wang Da Ma said, he took a bowl of tea in his two hands and presented it himself to his mother, without words.