Pearl Buck - Peony

“I have forgotten you, Small Dog,” Peony murmured. She rose and found a bamboo brush, and she knelt on the floor and brushed Small Dog’s long golden hair. The stiff bamboo was pleasant to the dog and she stood motionless, her bulbous eyes half closed, while Peony lifted each ear and brushed it smooth and carefully brushed the hair about the upturned black nose. Had she been a cat Small Dog would have purred. Being a dog, she could only move her plumy tail slowly to and fro.

Yet Peony did not make the mistake of considering Small Dog more than a little dog. When her task was done she rose from her knees and washed her hands, and sitting down again, she resumed her thoughts. Small Dog lay on the stone threshold and rolled her round eyes a few times, snapped at a fly, and went to sleep.

Peony gazed at her thoughtfully. In this house Small Dog, too, was entirely happy and everyone accepted her being. Even a dog could be part of the whole. So Peony pondered, and no one came to call her. On another day, any day, she would have been called many times, and this silence gave her further warning that something new and strange was happening in the house, something in which she had no share. Whatever it was, she had to live with it and within it, yielding to it, accepting it, becoming part of it. Whatever David was, wherever he was, she would be there. If he spoke to her sometimes, if he let her serve him, if she did no more than tend his garments, she would make it enough, a life for herself.

So motionless she sat, so many were the minutes passing, that at last the small creatures who hide behind furniture and curtains and doors began to stir. A cricket sang a long thin note from a cranny in the roof, and into a beam of late sunlight that fell across the tile floor a kangaroo mouse crept out, and standing on its hind feet, it began a small solitary dance. Peony watched, and then in sudden delight she laughed aloud. The little creature darted back into its hiding place again, and she sat on, smiling now instead of grave. There were these small pleasures to be had! Here in this house little lives went gaily on, hidden from the great ones. Let her life be one of these! Into her came some spirit too gentle to be force, too quiet to be energy.

Nevertheless, it revived her. She rose, smoothed back her hair, looked into her mirror; and seeing herself pale, she touched her lips with red. Then, after a moment’s contemplation, she wound her braid again over her ear and thrust into it a jade hairpin. She had duties and she must do them. This was the day before the Sabbath and the usual evening meal must be served with special care. She must polish the silver candlesticks and the vessel for the wine, and she must place the loaves of braided bread upon the table. Then she sat down again, and sat on, knowing all that remained to be done and yet not moving. After a moment more she took brush and ink and some plain white rice paper from the drawer of the table, and quickly she wrote four lines of a poem. They had not anything to do with herself. They were in reply to the poem that she had taken to the house of Kung, and they had to do with the consuming warmth of the sun that drank the dew it found upon the flowers at sunrise.

This poem being finished, she put it in her bosom. Then only did she proceed to perform her duties for the Sabbath.

In the great hall Peony had not been seen. The three elders, Madame Ezra, Ezra, and Kao Lien, had gazed with different feelings upon David and Leah as the beautiful girl bent her head to kiss the shining scabbard of the sword. To Madame Ezra the act meant that Leah had dedicated herself to the task she had been given. Kao Lien, his narrow eyes on Madame Ezra’s face, perceived by its expression of joy and devotion that some secret hope of her heart was about to be fulfilled, and he guessed easily what it was and grieved for David, whom he loved. That Leah was handsome to look upon he could see as well as any man, but he discerned in her that quality of spirit which he had so often seen in Jewish women, and which, or so he thought, had driven and compelled their men to the separatism that he feared and deplored. For a woman to love God too much was not well, he now told himself. She must not love God more than man, for then she made herself man’s conscience, and he was the pursued.

Ezra was the most disturbed. More than ever now he longed to hide himself and all that he was in this rich and tolerant land to which his ancestors had come. He feared Leah and all her beauty, and he was afraid lest David yield to the spiritual quality it possessed. That his son was more the son of his mother than of himself Ezra well knew. David had not the consolation that he himself had had, of a rosy, warm little Chinese mother, ready to laugh at God and man, and judging all in life by her own sense of pleasure. No, although this small creature lurked in David’s blood, the main stream of his being was from his own mother, and her sternly loving eyes had been always upon him.

Ezra stirred in his chair, coughed, pulled his beard, and in all his manner he showed his displeasure. “Come now,” he cried loudly, “Leah, my dear — that dirty old sword! Has it not been in the hands of soldiers, who are the scum of any nation?”

His harsh practical voice bewildered Leah. She stepped back shyly and put her hands to her cheeks. “Oh — I took no thought,” she faltered.

“Leah did right to kiss the sword,” Madame Ezra announced. “The Lord moved her.”

Now David spoke, repelled as usual by his mother and hiding behind his rebellion his unwilling and instinctive sympathy with her. “I shall hang the sword on the wall behind my desk,” he declared half carelessly. “It will be a decoration.”

“A good thought,” Kao Lien said. “May it never again be wielded against a human life!”

Ezra rose. “Let these stuffs be gathered and put away,” he commanded Kao Lien. He took up the comb he had put aside for Peony. He ignored Leah purposely and turned to Madame Ezra. “Wife, I am hungry. Let the evening meal be early.” With this he left the room abruptly.

Leah stood, half awkwardly, half shyly. David, too, seemed to have forgotten her. He was testing the keenness of the sword’s blade upon the coarse wrappings of the bales. So sharp was the damascene metal that the blade melted through the cloth.

“Look at this, Kao Lien!” he called in delight.

Kao Lien, about to summon the men, paused to look.

“Never test it against your hand, I beg,” he said quietly. “Without half your strength it can cut through a human body. I saw it done.”

He went out, and Leah stood irresolute, now looking at Madame Ezra, now at David. But Madame Ezra looked in silence only at her son, and he, feeling that deep grave look, continued willfully to cut the cloth.

“Leah,” Madame Ezra said at last, still watching David, “you may go to your room.”

Before she could move, David raised his head. “I will go, too, Mother, and hang my sword,” he said, and quickly he left the room by the nearest door.

“Shall I still go, Aunt?” Leah asked timidly. She longed to cry out and ask what wrong she had done but she dared not, and she could only stand, tall and drooping, and wait for Madame Ezra’s command.

“Go — go!” Madame Ezra said, not unkindly, but as though she wanted to be alone.

What could Leah do but go?

On the morning of the Sabbath David sat alone in his room. He had waked late from a strange exhaustion after yesterday.

For the first time in his life it seemed to him that he understood his mother and all that she had tried to teach him and all that had made her what she was. He lay now upon his bed in the silken dimness of the curtains, and in the solitude it came to him that he was not what he had supposed he was, a young man free to be himself, to live as he liked, to take his pleasure, to be only his father’s son. He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.