Peony: A Novel of China

by Pearl S. Buck

  Then he thought of Peony. Did David know Peony’s heart? In his own youth it had been different. He was the one who had declared his love to the father. Now it was the girl Peony who spoke first. It mattered even less. He went briskly on bare feet through the cool moonlit corridors to David’s room.

  Peony had gone straight to the peach garden. It was impossible to sleep after what her master had said. Was it decided that David was to marry Leah? Was this why David was sad? If the father had accepted it, then there was no one left to be convinced. Madame Ezra had won.

  She felt panic at her heart. Would Leah allow her to stay in the house when she was the young mistress? Madame Ezra might rule for her lifetime but Leah would be the real queen. She would declare to David, and David would command his mother. Yes, Madame Ezra would allow her son everything if he yielded in her one great command upon him, that he marry the one she had chosen for him.

  “Oh,” Peony moaned softly, “oh, pity me, my mother.”

  So she cried to the mother she could not remember. Then it came to her that this same mother had sold her, and could she hear, living or dead?

  I have no one but myself, Peony thought. I will cry to myself. So she cried softly to herself, half laughing, half in heartbreak, Help me, Peony—help your poor self! Pity yourself, little one—do everything you can for me.

  Then she went out into the peach-tree garden, and there she saw Leah sitting on a bench under the trees. She wore a long white gown, girdled at the waist with gold, and her dark unbound hair was held back with a band of gold. The moonlight shone down on her, and Peony saw in all humility that she had no prettiness to equal Leah’s beauty.

  “Are you here, Lady?” Peony said in her most childish voice.

  “I cannot sleep,” Leah replied.

  “The moon woke me, too,” Peony replied. She came near to Leah and looked through the trees at the full moon. Then she pointed her little forefinger. “See Old Chang up there in the moon?”

  “Old Chang?” Leah repeated, looking up.

  “He lives in the moon and he gives sweet dreams,” Peony went on in the same gay voice. “What dreams will you ask of him, Lady?”

  Leah stood tall above her, and Peony looked up to her pure and exquisite face with a sad pleasure. She was too generous a little creature to hate Leah for her beauty, but it made her want to cry again.

  “Only God can grant me my dream,” Leah said. Her voice was deep and soft.

  Peony laughed. “Then we will see who is stronger, Old Chang or your god!”

  And in mischief she dropped to her knees and bent her forehead to the earth and then lifted her head and she cried to the moon, “Give me my dream, Old Chang!”

  When she rose Leah stood watching her gravely.

  “Shall we tell each other our dreams?” Peony inquired saucily.

  Leah shook her head. “No,” she replied. “I cannot tell mine—to anyone. But when it is given me, I will tell you.”

  Still they looked at one another. Peony longed to cry out, “But I know your dream—it is to be David’s wife!”

  To have this spoken between them, to tell Leah that she too loved David and in her fashion she would work to win him away, even for his own sake—ah, what an ease for her heart! But she kept silent. To know a thing and not to tell it was to make it a weapon.

  “Good night, Lady,” she said after a moment.

  “Good night,” Leah replied.

  They parted, and looking back from the door, Peony saw Leah pacing to and fro under the peach trees.

  Now when David had left the synagogue that morning without the Rabbi, he had wept for a few minutes. Then he looked about. No one was near and no one had seen him weeping. The brief yielding had done him good. He was still sad, but he felt relieved. He was committed to no new thing—God had not spoken to him. He was as he had been. He was himself and this seemed good to him. He wanted to see neither the Chinese nor the Rabbi, but only to be alone, and he folded his cap and thrust it inside the bosom of his robe, and alone he went into the streets and wandered about, seeing everything and caring for nothing, and yet aware that his soul was being slowly restored. Thus he went to the court of the Confucian temple, where every strange and curious sight was to be found, the magicians and the jugglers and the dancing bears and the talking blackbirds; but all these things, which usually gave him joy, now gave him none. He looked and he did not laugh. He saw delicate food hot in the vendors’ stalls and he bought and tasted and was not hungry and gave what he had bought to beggars. He wanted no friends and he was lonely. Yet in this quiet sadness and loneliness he felt healing.

  Thus thinking of everyone he knew and not wanting to see anyone, in the middle of the afternoon he suddenly thought of Kao Lien with some longing to see him and talk with him. Kao Lien would be at his father’s shop, but his father would in likelihood not be there, for it was Ezra’s habit to go early to the shop in the morning and leave early, whereas Kao Lien did not like to rise until noon, and so he stayed late. To him, therefore, David went.

  His father’s shop was a very large one. It opened full upon the street, and above the doors long silken banners waved in the wind. Upon these were Chinese letters announcing that foreign goods of all sorts were sold within, both retail and wholesale. When Kung Chen and Ezra made the contract for which Ezra hoped, then these banners would announce both their names. But now there was only the name of “Ezra and Son.”

  When David came in the clerks all knew him and bowed, and he asked for Kao Lien, and immediately one led him into the back of the shop, and there Kao Lien sat in a large cool room of his own, behind a high desk, brushing Chinese characters upon a ledger. He rose when he saw David, and since David had never come here alone before, he could not hide surprise and some fear. “Is your father not well?” he inquired. “I saw him only an hour ago.”

  “I have not seen him today,” David answered. “I must talk with you, if you please, Uncle.”

  “Sit down,” Kao Lien said gravely. So they sat down and Kao Lien looked at David and waited in such kind silence that everything came out of David at once.

  “Ever since you told me about our people being killed I have been wretched,” David declared. “I feel I ought to do something—to be some sort of man that I am not. I feel I have no right merely to be happy here, to enjoy myself and my life.”

  “You feel you should be miserable?” Kao Lien inquired with a wry smile.

  “I know that would be useless,” David said honestly. “But I think it is wrong for me to live as though our people were not dying as you told us they were.”

  “The Rabbi has been teaching you, too,” Kao Lien said quietly, “and your mother has been telling you that you must marry Leah.”

  “Then you came and told us that evil news,” David said, “and it has made me feel that I must obey the Rabbi and my mother.”

  “And can you atone by such obedience for the death of our people?” Kao Lien inquired.

  “No, no,” David answered. Then he beat his breast with clenched fists. “But I can ease myself here!”

  “Ah,” Kao Lien observed, “then it is for yourself that you would obey the Rabbi and marry Leah. Why not, then?”

  “Because I am not sure I want to do that, either!” David cried. “I want to be as I was before—when I did not know about our people.”

  David sat upon a low cushioned stool, lower than the chair where Kao Lien sat, and when Kao Lien looked down upon his young face, his heart was troubled. “Ah, but you do know,” he said, “and you must know. Who of us can escape knowing the truth?”

  “What is the truth?” David asked.

  Now Kao Lien knew very well the house in which this young man had been reared. He knew the warm, hothearted, pleasure-loving father that Ezra was, in whose blood a strain of Chinese blood mingled, as it did in his own veins. He knew the mother, Madame Ezra, proud of her pure blood, preserving in herself all the ancient traditions of a free people once powerful, once having their
own nation, but now no longer free and subject to every nation where they were scattered without home or land of their own. Into her son Madame Ezra poured all her pride, and she was jealous of his very soul.

  “The truth is this,” Kao Lien said. “You yourself must understand what you are and you yourself must decide what you will be. Your mother looks at the whole world from the center of herself.”

  “But she only wants me to learn the Torah from the Rabbi,” David broke in.

  Kao Lien went on, “Then you will look at all the world and all humanity through its narrow window.”

  David moved restlessly. “Kao Lien, you too are a Jew!”

  “Mixed,” Kao Lien said dryly. There was a look of humor in his long face. Then he was grave again. “It is true that I felt my marrow cold when I saw the bodies of the dead in the streets of those western cities. But it was because they were dead, not only because they were Jews. I said to myself, Why should these or any men die this death? Why are they so hated?”

  “Yes—why?” David repeated. “That is what I keep asking. If I knew, I feel I would know everything.”

  Kao Lien’s small eyes grew sharp. “I will tell you what I dare not tell another soul,” he declared. “But you are young—you have the right to know. They were hated because they separated themselves from the rest of mankind. They called themselves chosen of God. Do I not know? I come of a large family, and there was one among us, my third brother, who declared himself the favorite of my parents. He boasted of it to the rest of us—‘I am the chosen one,’ he boasted. And we hated him.” Kao Lien’s thin lips grew more thin. “I hate him to this day. I would gladly see him dead. No, I would not kill him. I am civilized—I kill nothing. But if he died I would not mourn.”

  In the big, silent, shadowy room David stared at Kao Lien with horror. “Are we not the chosen of God?” he faltered.

  “Who says so, except ourselves?” Kao Lien retorted.

  “But the Torah—” David faltered.

  “Written by Jews, bitter with defeat,” Kao Lien said. He went on, “Here is the truth—I give it to you whole. We were a proud people. We lost our country. Our only hope for return was to keep ourselves a people. The only hope to keep ourselves a people was to keep our common faith in one God, a God of our own. That God has been our country and our nation. In sorrow and wailing and woe for all that we have lost has been our union. And our rabbis have so taught us, generation after generation.”

  “Nothing—except that?” David asked. His voice was strange and still.

  “For that many are willing to die,” Kao Lien said firmly.

  “Are you?” David demanded.

  “No,” Kao Lien said.

  David did not speak. His childhood was falling about him like a ruin, echoing through his memory in fragments of sacred days, his mother lighting the candles on Sabbath Eve; the sweet festival of lights, Hanukah, the beautiful Menorah, holding its eight candles at the window, reminding them of the great day when, conquered though they were, the Jews had won their fight to keep their own religion under the Syrian conquerors; Purim, the day when Jews remembered how they had fought against Haman, the ancient tyrant. And most of all he remembered his own special day, when he became a Son of the Commandment.

  “Are we to forget all that we are?” he asked Kao Lien at last, solemnly.

  “No,” Kao Lien said. “But we are to forget the past and separate ourselves no more. We are to live now, wherever we are, and we are to pour the strength of our souls into the peoples of the world.”

  He shaded his eyes with his long, narrow, thin hand, as though he prayed. They sat silent for a while and then he motioned to David to leave him. So David rose and went to the door. There Kao Lien’s voice stopped him. “I do not know whether I have done wrong,” he said, “yet what truth have I to speak except what is truth to me? Tell your father and mother what I have said, if you wish. I do not ask that it be kept secret.”

  “I asked you for the truth,” David replied, “and I thank you.”

  With these words he went home.

  When Peony left Leah in the garden, she saw David come in through the first court and she followed him to his rooms to find out if he had eaten and if there was anything he lacked. This was her duty and she did not go beyond it.

  “I have eaten,” he told her. Then he took his cap from his bosom. “Put that away for me,” he said.

  When she had obeyed him she came back again into the room where he was, and there he sat by the table, his arms folded upon it, staring at nothing.

  “Can I do nothing more for you?” she asked tenderly.

  “Nothing—except to leave me until I call,” he replied.

  He looked so stern, so grave, that she did not dare press him. There he sat, surrounded by books, opened on the table and fallen on the floor. When she stooped to pick them up he said sharply, “Leave them—I threw them there.”

  So she could only leave him, but now she was in great distress. Never had he refused to tell her what his trouble was. Yet what could she do except continue to love him? She stood a moment, uncertain whether to go or stay. Then, delicately perceiving, she felt the air cold about him. Some struggle went on in him that she did not yet understand.

  I must understand, she told herself. Yet nothing could be forced. Events alone could she use.

  “Until tomorrow,” she said softly, and when he did not answer, she went away to her own room and made ready for the night.

  At least one roof covers him and me, she thought when she lay in her little bed. Old Chang, give me my dreams! she prayed the moon. She closed her eyes, and ready to receive her dreams, she drifted into sleep.

  As Ezra came near to his son’s room he saw that a single candle burned, and without letting David see him, he peered through the lattice. He was appalled by what he saw. David sat in thought and his young face looked so pale, so sad, that Ezra was frightened. This was what came of letting old men and women have their way! What if he lost this darling only child, his one son, his heart’s core, the hope of his life and his business?

  He burst into David’s room like a bear. Peony had not smoothed his hair after she had healed his head, and he had forgotten to put on his little cap. His curly hair stood out in a circle and he had pulled at his beard while he meditated until it was like a broom. He was barefoot and his garments awry because he had a habit of scratching himself here and there while he pondered and ruminated, and David looked at him in astonishment.

  But Ezra had already made up his mind what to do. “On such a night, with such a moon, I cannot sleep,” he declared. “I shall send Old Wang to see if Kung Chen is awake and if he too is sleepless. Let us invite him and his sons to meet us on the lake. I owe him a feast and tonight I will pay my debt. Old Wang shall hire a boat and we will order wine, supper, and musicians. Come—come—you and I—”

  He pulled at David’s hand, beaming at him through his beard and flying hair and thick eyebrows. When he saw David hesitate and waver he wrapped his arms about him. “Come, my dear son,” he muttered. “You are young—you are young—time enough for grief when you are old.”

  His father’s warm breath, his rich loving voice, his strong hot embrace, moved David’s heart. He flung himself into his father’s arms and burst into sobs, and now he was not ashamed. This kind father would know how he felt. Ezra held his son tightly against his breast. Tears came into his own eyes but they were tears of anger, and he gnashed his teeth and muttered through them.

  “Torture—that’s it—they torture themselves and everybody else. But now it’s the children. I won’t have you tortured—what’s it for? To be young is not a sin. Besides, how do we know God? These old rabbis—”

  Hearing this angry roar in his father’s lungs, David laughed suddenly in the midst of his sobs. Ezra held him off and looked at him. “That’s right, my son—you laugh! Why not? Who knows? Perhaps God likes laughter, eh? Now get on your best clothes and let’s go. Softly, so nobody wakes! I will wa
ke only Old Wang. We will meet at the gate.” He went away, heaving sighs of relief.

  David went into his bedroom. He wondered now at the strange release of his heart. The sad quiet of the day had suddenly lightened to joy. No sin was in him, only a vast relief that his father had loosed him somehow from sorrow. He washed himself and brushed back his hair and left his head uncovered. He put on a long robe of bright blue Chinese silk and girdled it with a wide piece of soft red silk. On his feet he put white socks and black velvet Chinese shoes. In a very few minutes he was ready and he went to the gate, where Ezra was.

  Ezra looked at his son with overwhelming love. He felt ready to defy anyone to protect his life—yes, even God Himself. His son was his own and he would not yield him up.

  “I am not Abraham,” he said suddenly. “I will not sacrifice you, O my son!”

  He put his arm around David’s shoulders and together they went out into the moonlit courts, through the gates, and into the street. On foot they went together toward the lake. The hour was late, but not too late for merrymaking. All sober souls were in bed and asleep, but the young and the old who were lovers of life were making the most of the moon. Summer was nearly gone, the autumn was near, and the lotus flowers floating upon the water would die, the pods be split, and the seed scattered. It was the hour to seize joy with both hands.

  Thus Ezra walked with David through the streets, quiet except for a few women still sitting on doorsteps and reluctant to go into their houses. They sat suckling their children and dreaming in the moonlight. So they came to the lake, two men, father and son, and there Kung Chen met them with his own two eldest sons, debonair young men eager for pleasure. The older son looked like his father. He had the same broad face and small kindly eyes and smooth lips. The younger son was slight and pretty, and he reminded David of his sister Kueilan. That little one! Her face rose in his memory, and his blood quickened. The two brothers shouted with lively pleasure to David and clasped his hands and argued with boatmen, while the two elder men stood on the bank waiting.