Pearl Buck - Peony

It was Wang Ma who wiped her eyes first. She sat down. “My legs are trembling,” she muttered.

Peony stood, the tears on her cheeks.

“What did he do to you?” Wang Ma asked.

Peony shook her head and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. “Nothing,” she answered in a small voice.

“So he did nothing,” Wang Ma repeated. She continued to gaze at Peony.

Peony looked at the floor. “That eunuch sent to find me again,” she said in the same small voice.

“And you being neither wife nor concubine—” Wang Ma went on.

“I have no one to protect me,” Peony agreed.

Wang Ma sighed loudly. “Is it too late for you to come back?” she asked.

“What is there for me except sorrow?” Peony replied.

“If you had only done as I did,” Wang Ma complained. “I took the man they gave me and I lived on with the family, and I served my master until he went to the Yellow Springs. Now even my old man is a comfort to me.”

How could Peony tell her that David was different from his father, and she different from Wang Ma? She smiled with her lips while her eyes were filled with tears. “Do you remember you told me once that life is sad?”

This she said in so gentle and distant a voice that Wang Ma did not reply. She groaned two or three times, her hands planted on her knees while she stared at Peony, and then she stared at the Mother Abbess.

“Will you shave her head?” she asked the Abbess.

“I will be obedient to law,” Peony said, before the Abbess could answer.

Wang Ma sighed and got up. “If your heart is set on Heaven, there is no use for me to stay,” she said sharply. “Have you no message for our master?”

Now the Mother Abbess, watching Peony, saw the story plain. A rich and lovely rose color spread over Peony’s neck and face. Her red lips quivered and the tears hung heavy on her lashes. “I may never see him again,” she murmured.

At this the Mother Abbess took pity on Peony. Long ago she had wept the nights through, thinking that she could never be free from the love and longing in her heart. Yet somehow the heart had healed, and agony was lost in the past. What she remembered now, when she remembered at all, was the sweetness of the days when her husband had been living, and the pain of her loss had faded.

“It is not necessary to say that now,” she told Peony. “We will see how the heart heals.”

Wang Ma nodded shrewdly at this and went away.

After she had gone, the Mother Abbess sat down while Peony continued to stand. These words of the Mother Abbess had been spoken very quietly but they rang in Peony’s heart like bells. She looked up. “Do you mean, Mother, that I shall cease to love him?”

The Mother Abbess smiled. “Love changes,” she replied. “When the flame dies, the glow remains, but it no longer centers upon one human creature and it warms the whole soul. Then the soul looks at all human creatures with love diffused.”

Peony listened to this and was silent. She stood there, her robes flowing away from her, and the Mother Abbess felt her pity rise and surround this younger woman.

“Shall I tell you why I came here?” Peony asked after a while.

“Only if it comforts you to do so,” the Abbess replied.

“There is no law that I must tell why I escaped?” Peony asked.

“None,” the Abbess answered. “We are all here for some sorrow or other. What was our life became monstrous, and we found refuge. The only thing that I must have known was whether you had a husband’s power over you, so that I might have bargained for your freedom from him.”

“I have said truly that I have no husband,” Peony replied.

“Then live here in peace,” the Abbess said. “Heaven is above and earth is beneath us all.”

So saying she rose and went away. Peony stood for a long time more, feeling neither weariness nor pain. A deep stillness stole into her being.

For three years Peony lived behind the gate of the cloisters. So long did it take for the flame in her heart to change to that glow of which the Mother Abbess had spoken. In all that time she did not see David. No man was allowed to step within the gate and she did not step outside. The very day after Wang Ma had left her she took up the life of the cloisters. When she had studied the sacred books, had learned the ritual of prayers, had taken her share of labor in caring for the gods, in tending the garden, and in serving in the kitchen, when the older nuns cut off her long black hair and shaved her head, she ended her life as a novice. She took the vows and she became a nun. The secret life of her heart was over. The Mother Abbess gave her a new name, Ching An, or Clear Peace.

But during these three years Kueilan had come often to see Peony. In the first year she had come only twice. Peony had sat almost silent while Kueilan, her usual self, had chattered, lively and curious about all she saw and telling Peony the gossip in her own house. Thus Peony heard that Wang Ma and Old Wang had returned to their village and lived now with their sons. Thus she knew, too, that Aaron after Ezra’s death had gone back to his old idle ways until David in anger had bade Kao Lien’s sons take him away when they traveled with the caravan, now that Kao Lien was too old. This they had done, and they had left him in some country west of the mountains, where there were Jewish people living who could teach him to mend his heart, and he was never heard of any more.

But after the first year Kueilan came often. She had borne another child, a fourth son, and when he was a month old she brought him for Peony to see. Kueilan was proud that she had so many sons, but when the nuns went away and left her alone with Peony, she poured out her dislike of this new child.

“Look at him!” she exclaimed as the nurse stood and swayed with him in her arms. “Is he my child, Peony?”

Never could Kueilan remember to call her anything except this old name.

“You bore him,” Peony said, smiling. Heaven had made her Kueilan’s equal now, and she needed no more to call her Mistress.

Kueilan pouted. “He looks like his foreign grandmother.”

Peony could not but laugh. Indeed the tiny boy did look strangely like Madame Ezra. His big strong features did not fit his small face. She motioned to the nurse to let her hold the child. When he was on her lap she looked at his feet and hands. They were big, too. “He will be a big man,” she declared. “Look at his ears, how long the lobes are — that means boldness and wisdom. This son is a lucky one.”

So she consoled Kueilan, and Kueilan, feeling warm toward Peony, coaxed her thus: “Come and visit us again — why not? The maids do not listen to me as well as they did to you, Peony. My eldest son is lazy at his books and his father beat him for it yesterday and I cried and then he was angry with me. If you come, they will all listen to you, Peony, as they always did.”

But Peony, still smiling, shook her head and gave the baby back to his nurse.

“You are the same Peony, even if your head is shaven,” Kueilan coaxed.

Peony was startled. Did these words uncover her heart? Was it because she was shaven and a nun that she did not want David to see her? She grew grave, and by her silence Kueilan thought she had won her way. When she went home that day she told David that she had persuaded Peony to come and visit them for a day, and then he turned grave, too, and silent.

In her cell again, Peony cruelly examined her heart. It is true, she thought. I dread his eyes upon me.

There was no mirror in any nun’s room, but she filled her basin with clear water and she bent over it in the faint sunlight at the end of that day and she saw herself dimly. For the first time she saw her hair gone, and she thought herself ugly. Nothing else could she see, not her dark quiet eyes or her red lips or the smooth outlines of her young face. Her whole beauty, it seemed to her now, had been in her hair, in the braid she used to knot over one ear, in the flowers she had loved to wear in it. For one long moment she looked at herself. Then she lifted the basin and poured the water out of the open window upon a bed of lilies that grew beside the wall.