Pearl Buck - Peony

“Your feet are tender from lying in bed,” she replied calmly. “I know that the socks the sewing maids make are painful for you. These I am sewing with flat seams, so that there is no seam inside to tear your skin.”

He did not reply to this but he continued to lounge in his chair and look at her idly. “I am to be married, Peony,” he said suddenly.

She lifted her eyes to look at him, and then her eyelids dropped again to the sewing. “I know,” she said.

“Are you pleased with me now?” he demanded.

“It is not for me to be pleased or displeased,” she said gently.

“You shall stay here, Peony, exactly as you have always,” he went on.

“Thank you,” she said. Then she added, “Young Master.”

He paid no heed to this. “I suppose you will want to marry, too, one day,” he said abruptly.

“When I do, I will tell you,” she replied. All this time her fingers were flying very fast, the needle piercing in and out. He was not thinking of her and well she knew it. His mind was wandering round itself. But she was not prepared for what came next from him.

“I want to go and see where Leah is buried,” he said.

She laid the cloth down upon her knees and looked at him, exasperated with love. “And why on this day do you want to go?” she inquired. “It is ill fortune to link death with life.”

“If I go and see her grave, I shall know she is dead,” he said strangely.

Peony looked at him with concern. “But you know Leah is dead,” she reasoned.

“I keep seeing her,” he replied.

They sat in the room where Leah had died, and Peony remembered this, but she did not wish to recall it to his mind. She had thought many times that David’s rooms should be moved elsewhere in the house, but first he had been too ill to be moved and then when she spoke of it he refused, saying that these had been his rooms since his childhood and he liked them best. Now in the secret place of her thought Peony made up her mind that she would tell Madame Ezra that indeed he must have his married life in other rooms, in larger courts, and these rooms should be sealed or given to visitors.

She folded the cloth and put it into a box inlaid with ivory where she kept her sewing things. “If you wish to go and see that grave I will go with you,” she said.

“Now?” he asked.

“Now,” she agreed.

So it happened that on this day, a mild still day in the autumn, David rode in his mule cart outside the city wall to the place where Leah was buried. It was a quiet place not far from the riverbank, and not far too from the synagogue. He knew it well, for here his grandparents and his ancestors were buried among many others of the Jews who had died during the centuries of their sojourn here. The graves were tall, like Chinese graves, and the marking stones were small.

To Leah’s grave Peony led him, for she knew where it was. She had not come here to the funeral, since she had stayed behind with David, but Wang Ma had told her that Leah’s grave lay to the east, away from the river and beside her mother’s grave.

There they went and David sat down upon the coat that Peony folded on the grass. The place was still, the air damp and cool under a gray sky. Around them the tall tombs stood, but David gazed at Leah’s grave. The earth was fresh beneath the sod that had been placed over it, and the sod had taken good root. A few wild asters of a pale purple were blooming in the grass.

“I cannot feel she is there,” David said at last.

“She is there,” Peony said firmly.

“Do you believe in the spirit?” David asked her.

“I do not think about spirits,” Peony replied. She stood beside him but now she stooped and pressed her palm against his cheek. “Are you chill?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Leave me alone a while,” he commanded.

“I will not,” Peony replied. “It is my duty to stay with you, or I shall be blamed for any ill you have.”

So she stood there beside him, a small straight figure, her face to the grave. But her eyes went beyond it. Over the low wall she saw fields and villages, and beyond them the flat bright surface of the river, and the sail of a boat hanging against a mast. What was in David’s mind she did not know, but she would not yield him up to Leah’s spirit. She did believe deeply in spirits, and she knew that the spirit of the dead clings always to the living. With all the strength of her inner being she now opposed Leah’s spirit.

Stay in your grave, she said silently, and she opposed her will to Leah’s will. You have lost him and you shall not harm him any more.

So she held herself hard against every memory of Leah and all that Leah had meant, and at last David sighed and rose to his feet.

“She is dead,” he said sadly.

“Let me put this coat on you,” Peony said. “Your flesh is cold.”

He shivered. “I am cold — let us go home quickly.”

“Yes — yes,” she agreed, and she hastened him to the mule cart, and when they were driven over the rough cobblestone road to the gate she hurried him out of the cart and into his rooms and she made him go to bed and she fetched a hot stone for his feet and hot broth for him to drink and she sat beside him until he slept. Then she went to Madame Ezra and told her faithfully what had happened. Madame Ezra listened, her dark and tragic eyes fixed on Peony’s face, and Peony braced herself, prepared herself for temper. But Madame Ezra was not angry. She heard, she sighed, and then she said quietly, “Now that he has seen the grave, we will forget the past and prepare for the future.”

It was the first time in all her life that Peony had heard such words from Madame Ezra, to whom the past had always been most dear, and she pitied this older woman and felt a new love for her. “My dear mistress,” she said gently, “I promise you that the future will be happy for you, too.”

Madame Ezra shook her head and two tears fell out of her eyes. “If God wills,” she murmured.

Peony bowed and did not answer this, but as she went away to her own bed she thought to herself that gods had little indeed to do with mortal happiness.

The day of David’s wedding dawned clear and cold. The day stood alone in the calendar of early winter. It was near no feast day, and there were no memories about it. It was simply a day chosen by the geomancer under Kung Chen’s direction, a lucky day when the horoscopes of the man and woman met under a fortunate star.

Since David was young, since his strength and health had returned to him fully, since his heart was restless and eager to live again, he rose with some excitement and even with joy. He had allowed himself to become possessed gradually with the thought of the pretty girl coming now to be his wife. It was inevitable, he told himself. Even had his mother wished to put another daughter of their people in Leah’s place, there was no other. Among their people the poor were more than the rich, and there was no family to match the House of Ezra. With all her zeal, he knew his mother was too prudent to bring into the house a daughter-in-law with many poor and greedy kinsfolk. If not a Leah, then why not the pretty girl he had seen and knew he could love?

Thus thinking, David loosed the cords that had bound his heart and he welcomed his marriage day.

Never had Peony found him so fanciful and so willful. He rose early and he washed himself in three baths, the last perfumed, and he was dissatisfied with the way his hair curled, and she must brush it as straight as she could with scented oils. He had wanted every garment new, and these new garments had been made of a clear yellow silk, and now he wished them pale green. The yellow, he said, made him look too dark.

Peony lost her patience at last. “But you yourself ordered the yellow!” she cried.