Peony: A Novel of China

by Pearl S. Buck

  So he ate and afterward he made himself fresh again, washing his hands in a basin of perfumed water and brushing his hair, without haste, and all so slowly that Peony was half beside herself. “She will have gone, you will not see her!” she wailed. “Oh, when will there be so good a chance again!”

  He teased her a while with his slowness and he pretended that he was still hungry and at last she seized the dishes and would not let him have more and he so relished laughing and playfulness again that he set off in good humor, and left Peony to take away the dishes.

  Now Peony had reason enough out of love to do all she had done, but what happened next gave her hate for a reason, too.

  After Rachel had spoken with Madame Ezra she went to the room that the Rabbi had used, having inquired of the way from the servants, and there she found Aaron still half asleep and barely stirring out of his bed. She told him that his father bade him come home at once, and as she did so she said to herself that it was a shame this was the Rabbi’s only son, this gangling splayfooted boy with his long narrow head and his thin crooked face and mean yellowish eyes.

  Aaron heard his father’s command and he was too timid to say he would not come. Instead he asked, “Is Leah coming home, too?”

  “Not today,” Rachel replied.

  Then because this made him angry he muttered that his father always treated Leah softly, and he screamed at Rachel. “Get away, you old slut! Why do you stand there and stare at me?”

  At this she grew angry and she said plainly, “As for me, I hope you do not come home. It will be hard work to cook food to keep you alive.”

  With this she went away, and Aaron, left alone, began to pity himself and wept a little. He was loath to leave this rich house where the best of food had been given him for his father’s sake, and where no servant refused his bidding. He was angry to think he must go back to his narrow life and his lonely room. He loved neither his father nor Leah, but he feared them because they were good and he was not.

  So pitying himself and angry at all, he rose, and in great sulkiness he dressed, and then he went out to the hall where the men ate, to look for his breakfast. As it chanced, his path crossed Peony’s at the court where the fish pool was. He saw her before she saw him, and she made a pretty sight in the morning sunshine. Her hair was shining black and her cheeks pink and she wore coat and trousers of pale yellow silk and she had thrust a white gardenia in her hair.

  He looked right and left. No one was near. She walked with downcast head and smiled as she went. Then she felt his presence as she might have felt a snake near her foot. She lifted her head, startled, and at that moment he ran toward her, seized her in his arms, and pressed his mouth upon hers.

  Never had any mouth been pressed upon Peony’s. Now she felt Aaron’s loathsome trembling hot mouth and she was faint and sick. Her head swirled and she screamed, but so great was her sickness that the scream was too small to hear. Then she felt his hand at her breast. The sickness passed, her strength returned with anger, and she fell upon Aaron with all the fury of her being. She scratched his face and tore his hair and jerked his ears and kicked him when he tried to run, and she held him by his hair with one hand and pushed his face with her other hand, clenched into a fist, all the time silent except for her hard breaths. She did not want anyone to know that the shame of his touch had fallen upon her.

  At last, quite spent, she snarled at him, “Dare to touch me again, you cursed son of a hare, and I will kill you with the sword and you will die as your turtle ancestors died!”

  Now Peony spoke of the sword that David had chosen out of the caravan and had hung on the wall in his own room. This sword had an exceedingly fine sharp edge, and at this moment Aaron believed that Peony could do what she said. She could not have chosen a keener threat. All the old fear and the weakness handed down to him from his fathers, and bound indeed into the Torah itself, now fell upon him. The old Rabbi was a strong man and he could enjoy the thunderings of Jehovah, but Aaron was a weak worm, and from his pitiful weak childhood he had feared and hated Jehovah, and he longed to be anything except what he was, the son of the Rabbi. When Peony called upon his ancestors he gathered his garments about him and slunk away.

  Peony threw him a long look of scorn. Then she walked with firm swift footsteps to her room, and there she washed and scrubbed herself from head to foot and changed her garments and brushed her hair and perfumed herself and put on her best jewels and thrust a fresh flower in her hair. But her anger still burned in her. Now indeed she would rid the house of all who belonged to Aaron. When she was clean again she went to David’s rooms and waited, making the pretext of cleaning and dusting and mending a sandalwood fan he had broken.

  Her cheeks were still pink with anger when in an hour or two David came back. She sat at the table, mending the delicate fan with a feather dipped in glue. She knew when she looked at him that he had seen Kueilan. He came in, debonair and satisfied with himself. When she saw him, she thought to herself, how smug a man looks who thinks himself beloved! But this she knew was the bitterness of her own hidden love, and she put it aside. She laid the fan carefully down and clothing herself in docility she rose to her feet. His eyes met hers in the old gaiety that she had so missed.

  “Tell me,” she coaxed, knowing that he wanted to tell her every thing.

  “What?” he teased.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Did you not tell me she would be there?” he replied.

  “But she was there?”

  “Suppose she wasn’t?”

  To his surprise Peony suddenly began to sob.

  “Now what is wrong with you?” he asked.

  She shook her head and could not speak.

  He came closer. “Tell me,” he urged. “Has someone hurt you?”

  She nodded, still sobbing and wiping her eyes on her sleeves.

  “My mother?” he asked angrily.

  “It was—it was—oh, I cannot say his name!” She shook her head. She cried in a small heartbroken voice.

  “A man!” David exclaimed.

  She nodded. “The Rabbi’s son,” she whispered.

  David stared at her for a second. Then he turned abruptly and strode toward the door of the court. But Peony ran after him. “No, no,” she cried. “Never let him know you know. It is too much shame for me.”

  “What did he do?” David demanded.

  “I—cannot tell you,” she faltered.

  “He did not—” David began, and now the red was flaming in his cheeks.

  “Oh, no, oh, no!” she cried. Then lest he think matters worse than they were, she laughed through her tears. “I beat him,” she confessed. “I took him by the hair and—and I smacked his face.”

  David laughed with fierce pleasure. “I wish I had seen you! Did you bruise him, Peony? Let me go and see!”

  “No, wait,” she coaxed. “Please, what I say is true. He did—he did put his mouth on mine—”

  “Curse his mother!” David said suddenly.

  Peony laid the little forefinger of her right hand across his lips, and tears brimmed her beautiful eyes. “I am defiled,” she whispered.

  How could David refuse her comfort? He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked at her soft red lips, and she let her fingers slide away and she said in the softest voice, “Touch my lips—and make them clean!”

  She swayed a little toward him, and he bent his head, trying to laugh and make a play of it, and he bent his head still lower until indeed his lips were upon hers. Never had his lips touched a woman’s mouth. This was only Peony, only his little same Peony whom he knew so well, but suddenly her lips were sweet and strange.

  She drew back and her voice was quick and clear. “Thank you,” she said daintily. “Now I can forget. Tell me, Young Master, did you truly see the pretty third daughter of Kung?”

  So swift was her change that he scarcely knew how to speak. All was confusion in him. The sweet new warmth that Peony had called up in him she now turned
swiftly toward another. Without knowing that he was being stirred, beguiled, led to do what Peony wanted, he let his mind go back to the temple, and to the moment when he had been hidden behind the great Guardian God of the West. He saw Kueilan come in, the embroidered edge of her long skirt of soft apple-green silk sweeping the tiled floor. An old serving woman held her hand, and beside the stout strong figure the young girl had looked like a little willow tree in spring. Then he remembered her face.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “I saw her. I had forgotten how beautiful she is.”

  “She is too small?” Peony prodded.

  “A little thing,” David said, “not taller than you. But I like small women.”

  “Her eyes—they are as big as mine?”

  Now Peony’s chief beauty was her eyes. They were apricot-shaped, the lashes were straight and soft and long, and the color of the iris was a deep warm brown, not quite black. Looking into these eyes, David was constrained to remember Kueilan’s eyes, and since he had passed very near her, he said, “Hers are the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.”

  At this Peony dimpled and she put her handkerchief to her face to hide her quickening smile—and her tears. “Did you speak to her?” she asked next.

  “Yes,” David said. “When she passed to go into the inner temple, she saw me.”

  “And you said?” Peony hinted.

  “Only that I hoped she would forgive me because I had come to see her.”

  This David said very fervently and he sat down beside the table and put away all mischief. “Peony,” he said gravely, “you know I cannot marry as ordinary men do. If I choose her for my bride and not Leah, I must wound my mother and the Rabbi and perhaps even my father.”

  “Your father thinks only of you,” Peony put in.

  “Ah, but among our people the women are stronger than the men,” David said, “and what my mother will do, I do not know.”

  “Does Leah know—of this other one?” Peony asked.

  “No,” David replied. He looked rueful. “And I have given her reason to think—” He shook his head.

  Peony, who had been standing all this time, now sat down opposite him at the table.

  “You have let Leah think you—love her?” So Peony asked in a small frightened voice. Then she hurried on. “How can that be true? You have not spoken to her while you were learning the book. The old teacher sat between you.”

  “Once, in the peach garden—” David said, blushing heartily.

  “In the peach garden?” Peony echoed. “What did you do?”

  “It was the day after the caravan came,” David said unwillingly. “We were all somehow excited.”

  “She came to you in the peach garden?” Peony exclaimed. Her divining mind ran ahead. “And do you think she would be so bold as to come to you of her own will? Surely it was your mother who bade her come.”

  David stared at her, suddenly perceiving that indeed this might be true. “If Mother—” He struck the table with his fists and Peony cried out and drew away the mended fan.

  David leaned back, his eyes full of fury. “I shall tell my mother—”

  But Peony looked at him over the carved fan, which she held to her face because she loved the scent of sandalwood. “Why need you say anything?” she coaxed. “Let me go to your father and tell him what you feel. Come, I will be the marriage maker for you!”

  But David shook his head again. “Nevertheless, it is not honorable for me to allow Leah to remain confused,” he said. “I must think of what to say to her.”

  “Say nothing,” Peony pleaded. “What is not said need never be unsaid. If it is put into words, then all is hard and fast. Oh, and she will be very bitter against you.”

  “Leah bitter?” David repeated. “Ah, there you are wrong! That is what hurts me. She is so good. For her own sake—not my mother’s—I wish with all my heart that I could love her.” He broke off again, hesitated, and went on, half talking to himself, “I could have loved her, perhaps—had she simply been a woman. But she is much more.”

  He thought Peony too childlike to understand what he meant, but Peony did understand and she was shrewd enough to keep silent. Leah was more than a woman—she was a people and a tradition and a past, and did David marry her he espoused the whole, and to that he must return. He could not be himself or free, were he to return, for then must he become part of the ancient whole and bear upon himself the weight of their old sorrows. But Peony did not tell him this. Instead she skipped her feet and clapped her hands and pretended to her usual childishness.

  “Let me tell your father!” she begged.

  And David, his young face shadowed with vague pain, smiled a little sadly. “What can my father do for me?” he inquired. “He was caught as I am now.”

  “Ah, but he had no one to save him,” Peony said gently. “There was no orchid flower in his youth. Think of that little one who sits thinking of you now. Do you know she thinks of you? Ah, yes, you do! Let me tell your father!”

  At last, listening to her soft voice, he nodded, and she went quickly lest he call her back. Be sure she went straight to Ezra, and she found him sleeping in his reed chair, his fan resting on his stomach and his legs outstretched. He was snoring and for a while nothing she could do would waken him. She coughed, she sang, she called in a soft voice, careful not to wake him too suddenly, lest his soul be wandering and not come back to his body. At last she spied a cricket on the stones and she picked it up by its jointed legs and put it in Ezra’s beard. There it was so dismayed that it began to squeak dolefully, and Ezra woke and rolled his head and then combed his beard with his fingers and found the cricket and threw it out.

  “I saw the naughty mite leap into your beard, Master,” Peony said sweetly, “but I was afraid to wake you.”

  “I never had this happen before,” Ezra said in surprise. He sat up, stretched himself, yawned, and shook his head to stir his brain. “Does it have a meaning? I must ask a geomancer.”

  “It means good luck, Master,” Peony said. “Crickets come only to a safe, rich house.”

  She poured a bowl of tea from the pot on the table, and this she now handed him with both hands, and then, picking up the fan from the floor where it had fallen, she began to fan him. When he seemed himself she began her news.

  “Master, I must confess a fault.”

  “Another one?” he asked. He yawned, rubbed the crown of his head, and smiled.

  “My young master—your son, sir—” Here she paused.

  Ezra was instantly alarmed. She looked too happy. Could it be possible that David had been so foolish as to return her love? It would throw the house into turmoil. A bondmaid! What would Madame Ezra do?

  Peony caught the terror in his eyes and tried to smile. Well she knew what he was thinking and her heart quivered. No one, not even this good master of hers, whom she loved as the only father she knew, thought of her as more than a gentle servant, one fit for usefulness and pleasure but no more.

  “Do not fear,” she said sweetly. “It is not I whom your son loves.”

  This she said, knowing very well that it was within her reach to make David love her. His heart had denied Leah, and he had not yet accepted Kueilan, and into that emptiness she might have stepped, and his heart might have enclosed her. But she was too wise. Never would she be given the place of a wife, and even if she were, David’s life could have no peace. She loved him too well to see him wretched, and she had been reared in obedience to those above. None could be happy if the proportions were ignored. It was not her fate to be the daughter-in-law in this house. No, she was like the little mouse that came out of its hiding place and danced solitary in the sun. So must she find her joy alone, sheltered under the vast roof.

  “Then whom does my son love?” Ezra asked sternly.

  Peony lifted her head and looked at him straightly with soft eyes that seemed as honest as a child’s when she made them so.

  “He still loves that little third lady in the house of Ku
ng,” she said.

  Ezra looked away from her and he did not answer. He sat pulling his beard and sighing and fingering his lips and thinking this way and that and seeing no light anywhere. He discovered only this longing inside himself, that his son might marry whom he pleased and for his happiness.

  Have I not been happy with my Naomi? he inquired of his own heart.

  He had been happy. If he had not loved Naomi when they were married, neither had he greatly loved any other woman. No, he had not loved Flower of Jade—not enough to give up his parents’ favor for her sake. Had David said he loved Peony, he would have chided and forbade, as his father had done in his own youth. But a daughter of the great Chinese house of Kung could not be despised. She was David’s equal in all—except in faith. Yet many Jews had married Chinese wives and they had not ceased altogether to be Jews. He would put it so to Naomi.

  Now Ezra was a man who had to do a thing as soon as he thought of it, and forgetting Peony he got impetuously to his feet and went in search of his son’s mother, leaving Peony to stand and wonder how much she had done. She followed him at a little distance and took her place behind the cassia tree. As for Ezra, he found his wife in her own rooms and in a very ill humor. This he saw as soon as he came to the door, but he supposed that her mood was because of some household matter. Madame Ezra was a very shrewd good manager in her own house and she could be downcast over the theft of an egg or the breaking of a dish. She looked at Ezra coldly when he came in.

  “You did not go to the shop today,” she said.

  He tried to smile as he came in and sat down on the chair opposite her and across the table. “No, for I came in very late last night,” he confessed. “Kung Chen invited me to see the moon. He brought his two sons and David went with me.”