Pearl Buck - Peony

Ezra seemed scarcely to hear him. He leaned back and his thick hands clutched the arms of his chair. “I think about our life together, hers and mine,” he went on. “It was not an easy marriage, my son. She was unyielding — until I learned to know her. I could never deal with her twice the same way. She was a woman of many changes. Sometimes I met anger with anger, and sometimes I met anger with love and again with laughter — I had to choose my weapon. I had to be new to meet her newness. Yet underneath all her change there was a purity unexcelled. The heart of her was goodness. I could trust her. God she never betrayed, and me she could not betray. She was a true wife.”

David did not speak. To him his parents had been merely parents, but now dimly he began to see them as man and woman. He was abashed to think of them thus, to contemplate these two from whom he had sprung as separate from him and leading between them the vigorous and private life of a man and a woman.

“She was never stupid,” Ezra began again. “Well, sometimes that was almost too much, for I saw in how many ways she was more clever than I! When I was young this roused my spleen sometimes, but as I grew older I saw how fortunate I was. Look at Kung Chen! A lonely man, eh, my son? He never speaks to me of his children’s mother, but the few times I have seen her — a bit stupid, eh, David? And he is a fastidious man — he cannot go out and pluck wild flowers along the road. No more could I. When a man has known a woman like your mother — body and soul—” Ezra broke off, sighed, and went on again. “While you were gone, my son, and when Kao Lien left me to go westward with the caravans, I had time to myself, and I remembered all my life with your mother. Much comfort she took away with her when she left me, but here is something strange: I have never been devout, as you well know, David, but while she was in the house I felt all was well with my house before God. She was my conscience — which pricked me sometimes and against which I kicked, but which I valued. Now I feel lost. God is far from me — if there is a God?”

He put this as a question and David did not know how to answer it. He kept his silence.

When he did not speak, Ezra began to speak again. “You and I cannot answer that question. By that much we are no longer Jews, my son. I made my choice, you made yours. Would I go back? Ah, but I am what I am, and did I go back I would make the same choice, and so would you.”

“I am not so sure as you are,” David said now. “I could have been one man — or another. Had Leah lived—” He broke off.

“Had Leah lived,” Ezra repeated. He turned this over in his mind. Then he said, “Had Leah lived, perhaps your mother would be living too. Everything would have been different. But first we would have had to be different.”

“We would not have been here,” David said.

Ezra looked across the table at him surprised. “You mean—”

“We cannot live here among these people and remain separate, Father,” David argued. “In the countries of Europe, yes, for there the peoples force us to be separate from them by persecution. We cling to our own people there because none other will accept us, and we are martyred and glorified by our martyrdom. We have no other country than sorrow. But here, where all are friends to us and receive us eagerly into their blood, what is the reward for remaining apart?”

“Indeed — indeed, it is so,” Ezra said. “All that has happened to us is inevitable.”

“Inevitable,” David agreed.

“And your sons, my grandsons, will proceed still further into this mingling,” Ezra went on.

“It will be so,” David said.

Ezra pondered. “Shall we then disappear?”

David did not reply. It was inevitable, as he himself had said, when people were kind and just to one another, that the walls between them fell and they became one humanity. Yet he could not contemplate the far future when his descendants knew him no more, when perhaps they would have forgotten the very name of Ezra, and when indeed they would be as lost as a handful of sand thrown into the desert or a cupful of water cast into the sea. He gazed down the long line of those who would come from his loins and the loins of his sons and his sons’ sons. He saw the faces turning toward him, and they were the faces of Chinese.

“We grow too mournful,” Ezra said suddenly. “What has been has been, and cannot be avoided. Tell me about your journey, my son.”

So David roused himself and he told his father everything, the beauty of the great northern capital, and how the people looked and how noble their nature was, and what he had eaten and drunk and what all the gaieties were that he had enjoyed and how he had been given an audience before the Western Empress, and he told of the rumors about her, and so telling all he came at last to the reason why they had left the city so suddenly by night, for Peony’s sake.

Ezra listened closely, laughing sometimes and his eyes shining sometimes, and shrewd and careful when David spoke of business. When he heard of Peony, he grew very grave indeed. “What misfortune!” he exclaimed. “The long arm of the Chief Steward can reach anywhere, and we must tell Kung Chen this tomorrow.”

“I could not have done otherwise, Father,” David said.

“No — no.” Ezra hesitated, then he said firmly, “No, my son, no! To be sure, had she been like other women and had she welcomed the chance to go into the palace — well — hm — then, ah, it would have been fortunate for our house. We would have had a friend in the highest quarters. But being what she is — no, certainly not. Yet we must take every opportunity to ward off evil results. It would be a great sacrifice to make only for a woman, if our business were spoiled because of spite at the court. Your mother always said we made too much of Peony.”

At this David felt some sort of heat rise in him, mingled with anger, and to defend himself he spoke coolly. “Well, my father, if I have done unwisely, I must make amends in some other way, for Peony has been like my sister, and I could not put her into that evil steward’s palm at any price. That much I know.”

“As long as she is no more to you than a sister I will not complain,” Ezra said.

This speech was so plain that David was confounded by it. It probed him too deeply, beyond what he himself was willing to know, and he did not answer it. He looked at the candles and saw them guttering and he made excuse to rise and use the snuffers on them.

“It is late!” he exclaimed. “Tomorrow I must be early at the shops, Father, and so I will say good night.”

Wang Ma had been waiting outside the door, and when she heard this she came in with the fresh tea and the rice gruel that Ezra drank before he slept, and so the day was over.

But for David there was no sleep. He did not go to his wife. Instead he stayed in his room, finding there every sign of Peony’s thought for him, the bedquilt folded, the curtains drawn, the teapot hot, his pipe prepared, the candles trimmed. But she herself had gone.

He made himself ready for bed and he put out the candles and parted the curtains and laid himself down. Still he could not sleep. His father’s talk had stirred afresh all that had been in his mind these many weeks on the journey. His mother, Leah, Peony, Kueilan, these four women who had somehow between them shaped his life were shaping him still. He longed to be free of them all, and yet he knew that no man is ever free of the women who have made him what he is. He sighed and tossed and wished for the day when he could return to the shops and the men there who had nothing to do with his heart and his soul.

Peony, too, was restless that night. David had been long with his father, she knew, for Wang Ma told her that the two were talking gravely hour after hour and she dared not go in, even though it was long past midnight. She had waited with Wang Ma, outwardly to keep her company but secretly because she hoped to see David’s face at least as he passed. Yet he had not seen her, and she had not dared to call him. She sat in the dark court outside the range of the mild candlelight flowing through the open door and beyond, hearing their voices, and he passed her so closely that she could have touched him, but she did not put out her hand. Doubtless he had told his father why they had left Peking, and perhaps Ezra had reproached him. Well she knew that danger of trouble from the Chief Steward was not past, even here, and she shrank from being the cause of it.