Pearl Buck - Peony

She raised wet and humble eyes to his. “You mean—” She faltered.

He nodded. “I mean the pretty child he loves, the daughter of Kung Chen. I will go to the father and we will set the day and we will bring joy into the house again.”

“But Leah—” Madame Ezra began.

Ezra spoke quickly, as though he had already decided everything. “She will be buried tomorrow, and we will allow a month’s mourning. By then David will be well.”

Madame Ezra could not answer this. A month! She bowed her head and drew away her hand.

Ezra stood for a moment longer. “Are you willing, my wife?” he asked in a full strong voice.

Madame Ezra nodded. “Yes, I am willing.” Her voice was weary and she no longer rebelled, and Ezra bent and kissed her cheek and went away without another word.

Upon the day of Leah’s burial it rained and Ezra forbade David to leave his bed. This made grief, for David had sworn himself able to get up. Leah dead had laid hold on his thoughts as Leah alive had not been able to do. He felt guilt in himself that he could not fathom. He said to himself that had he been more patient that last day she would never have lost her reason so wholly and he might have saved her. Now it seemed to him that he must follow her body to the grave.

But Ezra would not hear to it, and David was astonished by the strength in his father’s face and voice and by the power of his determination. Moreover, his mother did not speak to differ. David looked to her to take his part, but what she said astonished him still more.

“My son, obey your father,” she said.

With the two of them thus united against him, David could not contend further, and so he only rose and went to the room where Leah’s closed coffin lay. There he stood leaning on a manservant and Peony was beside him to watch lest he faint, and he stood and waited until he was left behind. The bearers lifted the heavy coffin and the few mourners followed. The Rabbi was there, wondering and smiling, but Aaron was not. Until this day Aaron had not been found, and Ezra said that he must have run away from the city.

“When all our trouble is over, I will find him and bring him back,” he told Madame Ezra. “As it is, who misses him? The Rabbi has forgotten everything, and Leah is gone.”

David stood watching and sorrowful while the little procession went through the court and out of the gate, and then he turned and went back to his bed again. There he lay with his eyes closed and Peony was too wise to speak to him. She sat beside him, letting him feel her presence in silence. David did not speak and Peony did not rouse him. She knew that sorrow must be spent before joy can take its place, but well she knew that sorrow passes, too.

Outside the city, in the lot of ground upon a hill that was the resting place of the Jews, Leah was put into the earth beside her mother. The Rabbi, her father, stood between Ezra and Madame Ezra, smiling and blind in the cool autumn sunshine. But when Ezra spoke, unexpectedly he obeyed.

“Pray, Father,” Ezra commanded in a loud voice at his ear.

The old Rabbi lifted his face to the sky. “How warm is the sun,” he murmured. And then after an instant he began thus to pray:

“Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of Thy holiness and Thy glory! Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledges us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father. Thy name is from everlasting. We are thine …” And then the Rabbi imagined that he was in the synagogue, and from habit he spread out his hands and cried out. “The Lord God, Jehovah, the One True God!”

Around them passers-by had stopped in curiosity to watch and stare, and the Chinese coffin bearers stood wondering in the strange presence of this old man.

Thus unwittingly did the Rabbi pray over his dead child’s grave. Ezra saw Madame Ezra weep, and he stepped between them and supported them both, and when the grave was filled and the sod packed hard upon the earth, he led them away and took them home.

IN THE NINTH MOON month, at a time when heat was gone and cold not yet come, the day of David’s marriage was set. It was the thirty-third day after Leah’s death, and the sod upon her grave was still green.

Thus David saw it when he first went to look upon that grave. He had acquiesced by silence when his father told him that the wedding had been decided upon and he had been silent when he heard that exchange of gifts had been made.

“Does this please you, my son?” Ezra had asked at last.

“Yes, Father, if it pleases you and my mother,” David had answered. He had recovered from his wound, but it had left a scar across his forehead that would be there until his skull was dust. Though his flesh was healed, his spirit had not recovered. He was listless for many hours of the day, and at night he slept ill, and his old healthy greediness for good food had not returned. All this Peony saw, but she said nothing. She tended him now as she had tended him in the old days when he was a child, and Madame Ezra did not forbid her any more.

“Tell me what will please you, my son,” Ezra said anxiously. He put his big hot hand on David’s thin one and David shrank from his father’s touch. He felt his father too eager and too pressing, overanxious and excessively hearty. His strength was not equal yet to meet his father’s love.

“I must marry, I know,” David said.

“You need not — you need not,” Ezra said. But his face fell.

“Yes, I must,” David said.

“Not if you do not love this daughter of Kung,” Ezra said.

“I do not love anyone yet, perhaps,” David said with a small smile.

Ezra was perturbed indeed. He sat back and put his hands on his knees. “I thought you were writing her poems!” he exclaimed.

“I was — but—” So David said.

“Did you leave off before—” Ezra asked, and could not go on to mention Leah.

“Before Leah died?” David said for him. “No — yes, I left a poem unfinished. That was because I met Leah — in the peach garden.”

“Do you mourn her?” Ezra demanded.

David considered long before he spoke. They were sitting in his father’s room, for Ezra had sent for him to tell him that the betrothal was completed.

“No,” David said at last. “I do not mourn. I wish she had not died — as she did. If she had lived—” He paused again.

Ezra’s hair prickled on his scalp and along his arms and legs. “Would you have wed her?” he demanded when David paused too long.

David shook his head slowly. When he did so he felt the scar upon his head ache. “No,” he said, and then with more vigor he said again, “No, Father, of that be sure. But had Leah lived I would have wed this other one with more joy. Can you understand that?”

Ezra’s jaw dropped and he stared back at his son and shook his head. It was beyond him.

“Poor Father,” David said tenderly. “Why should I trouble you? I will marry, and I will have sons and daughters, and I will do well with my life. After the wedding I will come back to the shop and everything will go as before, but better — much better.”

He rose, put a smile on his face, and bowed to his father and went away. Behind him Ezra sat doubtful for a long time, sighed, and then went to his shop, his underlip thrust out for the rest of the day and his temper bad.

As for David, he was restless and he was so irritable with Peony that she gave up trying to please him and she sat quietly and did her sewing. This was usually embroidery of some sort, but today she was not working on silks. She had a piece of fine white linen in her hands, shaped to the sole of a foot.

David watched her little fingers moving in and out of the cloth, drawing the needle up and down and through, and at last he asked her what she did.