Pearl Buck - Peony

“I am not thinking of you,” Peony said, “I am thinking of Kueilan.”

He felt suddenly angry with Peony. “You used to think of me!” he cried.

“Why should I any more?” Peony asked.

Her voice rang with a harshness he had never heard before and her face was smooth and cold. He was shocked. “Peony!” he said. “What has happened to you?”

She bent her head. “Nothing has happened to me,” she said. “It is you—”

“But I am just the same,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “Not now.”

He put out his hand across the table and caught hers. She tried to pull hers away.

“Let me go!” she cried.

“No!” he cried back. “Not until you have told me how she looked!” This he said to cover his confusion.

There was a long pause. He held her hand, locking his fingers into hers, and she could scarcely keep hers from trembling. She wanted to pull her hand from his and she wanted him to hold it. She was about to weep and her heart beat hard against her breast. Then she began in a small voice, not looking at him:

“She — she wore a — a fern-green—”

“Her face,” he commanded.

“But you know she is very pretty,” she said.

“Tell me how pretty,” he commanded.

So she began again. “Well — well — her mouth is small, the lower lip a little more full than the upper, red as pomegranate — such small white teeth — a small tongue — when she wrote the poem I could see her tongue like a kitten’s, touching her lip.” She paused.

“What else?” he demanded.

“Her eyes — very black — and shaped like apricots — eyebrows like willow leaves, you know — and her face more long than round, perhaps — tiny pale ears — she had a rose in her hair.”

“Go on,” David commanded.

“I leaned over her while she wrote — her breath was as sweet as a flower — and her little hand — it is even smaller than mine.”

He opened her hand upon his. “You have a small hand,” he said.

She looked at him. “Do not make her love you,” she said pleadingly.

Now he dropped her hand and she let it lie there, lonely on the table. “How do you know she thinks of me?” he asked.

Peony withdrew her hand, and folded both hands into her wide sleeves. “I know,” she said in a low voice, and drooped her head.

“Tell me!”

“That I cannot. I only feel it.”

Now silence fell between them and David rose and went to his shelves of books and stood looking at them. He was not thinking of them, she knew.

“I wish to see her again for myself,” he said, not turning.

She hid her smile behind her sleeves. “No,” she said.

He strode to the table and struck it with the palm of his hand. “Yes!” he cried.

“You are very wicked,” she declared.

“How do I know what I must do unless I see her again?” he asked.

She considered. “If I arrange it, will you promise me that you will not write her any more or ask to see her any more or do anything to break her heart any more?”

His eyelids wavered and he smiled. “I promise you this: After I have seen her I will make up my mind whether I want to write her or see her any more.”

Their eyes met, full and long. Then she rose in her graceful fashion.

“Let it be a promise between us,” she said firmly. She put her hand to the teapot, and feeling it still hot, she bade him sleep and went away, well pleased with herself.

In the midst of all that went on in his house Ezra remained in unwonted silence. He had been too shaken by Kao Lien’s story to become indifferent to it, even though his bustling cheerful days dulled the edge of memory. In a strange way his wife was his conscience, and however he rebelled, he always feared lest she might be right in some fashion that he could not discern. Where business was concerned, all was clear to him. Where God was concerned, he was in waters deeper than his soul. Naomi made him remember his Jewish father, whom he loved and feared, a sad man, gentle in all things, but incurably sorrowful, for what reason Ezra never knew. When he was a child his father’s sadness had made Ezra feel guilty, and yet somehow it was not his own guilt, but his Chinese mother’s, which he shared. Yet he heard no word of blame, and certainly his mother felt neither sin nor sadness, nor, when he was with her, did Ezra.

After his mother died, however, the old sense of guilt rested on him alone, and partly because of this he had been willing to marry the young Naomi at his father’s wish. He went very gravely for a while after his marriage, anxious to please his handsome bride; then, feeling that whatever he did he could not please her enough, he began to live as he had before, and he grew cheerful again. Cheerful he was, that is, unless the dark pool of old unexplained guilt in his soul was stirred, and Kao Lien had stirred it when he told of the massacred Jews.

Part of what went on now in his household Ezra saw, the rest his Chinese servants told him. He kept silent, comprehending everything because he was divided in himself. Thus he knew through Wang Ma’s shrewd eyes that the Rabbi was dreaming a great dream and it was that if his own son, Aaron, should fail as the leader of the Jews, David might take his place. This indeed was true. The old man could not see David, but after he had taught him for many days, he said one day, “Come here, my son, let me know your face.”

So David came near.

“My son, kneel as before the Lord,” the Rabbi commanded him.

So David knelt, and the Rabbi touched his young face with the tips of his ten fingers, each finger so knowing, so conveying, that David felt as if a light played upon him. Then the Rabbi felt his strong shoulders and his broad chest and his slender waist and narrow thighs and, bidding the young man stand, he felt the straight-ness of his knees and his firm ankles and well-knit feet. He took one of David’s hands and then the other, and felt its shape and grasp. Then he stood up and felt the top of David’s head.

“You stand higher than I do, my son,” he said wondering.

While this was going on Aaron sat sullenly looking on.

“Ah, that you were my true son!” the Rabbi murmured to David. “Then would I praise the Lord.”

At this David felt pity for the pale ugly boy who glowered at them and he said, “It is not how a man looks, I think — or so my Confucian tutor has taught me.”

“Is that man still your tutor?” the Rabbi asked jealously.

David hesitated, then he replied, “My mother sent him away when you came.”

So Madame Ezra had done without asking anyone, but David hesitated because he did not wish to tell the Rabbi that he still met his tutor. But Ezra knew, for Wang Ma told him this, too, one night, chuckling as she did so.

“The young lord, your son, meets his old teacher in the late afternoon at his own house on the Street of the Faithful Widow,” she told Ezra. It was her habit to take Ezra every night before he slept a bowl of thin rice gruel, which he drank slowly, so that she could gossip to him. In this fashion he learned much that no one thought he knew. He looked a little grave when Wang Ma told him this and she made haste to say, “Should your son not learn of our teachers, also?”

Ezra considered while he drank the hot fragrant rice, the bowl held between both hands. “I cannot decide,” he said at last. “I think he should not, in honor to his mother, lest the Confucian undo all that the Rabbi does.”

“How is it that you are so harsh?” Wang Ma exclaimed pettishly. Long ago their youthful intimacy had made her free with Ezra as she was with no other.

“Our God is a jealous God,” Ezra replied.

“Gods are what men make them,” Wang Ma retorted. “It is the Jews who have made their own God.”