Peony: A Novel of China

by Pearl S. Buck

  It was Madame Ezra who first perceived what fresh disaster had befallen. The old Rabbi came back. He sighed, a groan burst from his lips, and he struggled as though he fought some unseen spirit. Wang Ma was watching him and she ran to call Madame Ezra. When she entered the room he opened his eyes. Madame Ezra spoke very gently. “Father, I am here.”

  But the Rabbi’s sightless eyes only stared.

  Wang Ma cried out in terror, “Oh, Mistress, his soul is lost!”

  So indeed it was. For days the Rabbi did not speak at all. He lay on his couch, he took food, but he was silent. Even to pray he did not speak. When one day, without cause, he opened his mouth, it was to speak without knowledge. His soul was gone forever. He knew no one and remembered nothing except the days when Leah was a child, and her mother had been in the house with him.

  Thus the Rabbi entered into Heaven before he died, and Ezra in the great kindness of his heart said to his servants, “Prepare a place for him. I will take care of him as long as he lives.”

  He spoke without thought of his own goodness, but Madame Ezra’s heart was shaken. When the servants were gone she turned to her husband and humbled herself as she had never done before.

  “You are so good,” she sobbed. They stood side by side and she put out one hand to feel for his and covered her eyes with the other. “I wish I had been better to you, Ezra.”

  “Why, you have been very good, my dear,” he said pleasantly. He took her hand and held it.

  “No, I have often been bad-tempered with you,” she sobbed.

  “I know how often I have tried you, Naomi,” Ezra replied.

  “I shall be better,” Madame Ezra promised.

  “Do not be too good, my wife,” Ezra said, trying to make a joke for her comfort. “Else how can I be your match? I like to have a little temper sometimes.”

  “You are good—you are good,” she insisted, and knowing her intensity, he let this pass. He drew her hand through his arm and led her out of the room, talking cheerfully as they went.

  “Now, my Naomi, we must remember that our son lives, and that we have our duty to mend his life and make him happy. Little children must be born here again, and we must forget the past.”

  So he talked, pressing her heart toward the future, and she subdued herself and tried to be dutiful.

  “Yes, Ezra,” she murmured, “yes, yes—you are right.”

  He was alarmed at such submission and anxious lest she were ill. Then he reasoned with himself that it would not last. She was a hearty woman and time would bring back her temper and her health, and so he let her say what she would. But Madame Ezra’s heart was sore with sorrow and bewildered with the downfall of all her plans and the loss of all her hopes. She grew weak, for the moment at least.

  “Ezra,” she quavered when he had led her to her own rooms and had helped her into her chair, “what shall we do with our son?” This was the question that had been tearing at her thoughts ever since she saw Leah lying dead.

  Ezra stood above his weeping wife, and for the first time in their life he knew himself master of this woman whom in his fashion he had loved, and he knew that now he truly loved her. He took her plump hand in his and caressed it. “Let us think only of his happiness, my dear,” he coaxed. “Let us have the wedding as quickly as possible.”

  She raised wet and humble eyes to his. “You mean—” She faltered.

  He nodded. “I mean the pretty child he loves, the daughter of Kung Chen. I will go to the father and we will set the day and we will bring joy into the house again.”

  “But Leah—” Madame Ezra began.

  Ezra spoke quickly, as though he had already decided everything. “She will be buried tomorrow, and we will allow a month’s mourning. By then David will be well.”

  Madame Ezra could not answer this. A month! She bowed her head and drew away her hand.

  Ezra stood for a moment longer. “Are you willing, my wife?” he asked in a full strong voice.

  Madame Ezra nodded. “Yes, I am willing.” Her voice was weary and she no longer rebelled, and Ezra bent and kissed her cheek and went away without another word.

  Upon the day of Leah’s burial it rained and Ezra forbade David to leave his bed. This made grief, for David had sworn himself able to get up. Leah dead had laid hold on his thoughts as Leah alive had not been able to do. He felt guilt in himself that he could not fathom. He said to himself that had he been more patient that last day she would never have lost her reason so wholly and he might have saved her. Now it seemed to him that he must follow her body to the grave.

  But Ezra would not hear to it, and David was astonished by the strength in his father’s face and voice and by the power of his determination. Moreover, his mother did not speak to differ. David looked to her to take his part, but what she said astonished him still more.

  “My son, obey your father,” she said.

  With the two of them thus united against him, David could not contend further, and so he only rose and went to the room where Leah’s closed coffin lay. There he stood leaning on a manservant and Peony was beside him to watch lest he faint, and he stood and waited until he was left behind. The bearers lifted the heavy coffin and the few mourners followed. The Rabbi was there, wondering and smiling, but Aaron was not. Until this day Aaron had not been found, and Ezra said that he must have run away from the city.

  “When all our trouble is over, I will find him and bring him back,” he told Madame Ezra. “As it is, who misses him? The Rabbi has forgotten everything, and Leah is gone.”

  David stood watching and sorrowful while the little procession went through the court and out of the gate, and then he turned and went back to his bed again. There he lay with his eyes closed and Peony was too wise to speak to him. She sat beside him, letting him feel her presence in silence. David did not speak and Peony did not rouse him. She knew that sorrow must be spent before joy can take its place, but well she knew that sorrow passes, too.

  Outside the city, in the lot of ground upon a hill that was the resting place of the Jews, Leah was put into the earth beside her mother. The Rabbi, her father, stood between Ezra and Madame Ezra, smiling and blind in the cool autumn sunshine. But when Ezra spoke, unexpectedly he obeyed.

  “Pray, Father,” Ezra commanded in a loud voice at his ear.

  The old Rabbi lifted his face to the sky. “How warm is the sun,” he murmured. And then after an instant he began thus to pray:

  “Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of Thy holiness and Thy glory! Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledges us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father. Thy name is from everlasting. We are thine …” And then the Rabbi imagined that he was in the synagogue, and from habit he spread out his hands and cried out. “The Lord God, Jehovah, the One True God!”

  Around them passers-by had stopped in curiosity to watch and stare, and the Chinese coffin bearers stood wondering in the strange presence of this old man.

  Thus unwittingly did the Rabbi pray over his dead child’s grave. Ezra saw Madame Ezra weep, and he stepped between them and supported them both, and when the grave was filled and the sod packed hard upon the earth, he led them away and took them home.

  IX

  IN THE NINTH MOON month, at a time when heat was gone and cold not yet come, the day of David’s marriage was set. It was the thirty-third day after Leah’s death, and the sod upon her grave was still green.

  Thus David saw it when he first went to look upon that grave. He had acquiesced by silence when his father told him that the wedding had been decided upon and he had been silent when he heard that exchange of gifts had been made.

  “Does this please you, my son?” Ezra had asked at last.

  “Yes, Father, if it pleases you and my mother,” David had answered. He had recovered from his wound, but it had left a scar across his forehead that would be there until his skull was dust. Though his flesh was healed, his spirit had not recovered. He was lis
tless for many hours of the day, and at night he slept ill, and his old healthy greediness for good food had not returned. All this Peony saw, but she said nothing. She tended him now as she had tended him in the old days when he was a child, and Madame Ezra did not forbid her any more.

  “Tell me what will please you, my son,” Ezra said anxiously. He put his big hot hand on David’s thin one and David shrank from his father’s touch. He felt his father too eager and too pressing, overanxious and excessively hearty. His strength was not equal yet to meet his father’s love.

  “I must marry, I know,” David said.

  “You need not—you need not,” Ezra said. But his face fell.

  “Yes, I must,” David said.

  “Not if you do not love this daughter of Kung,” Ezra said.

  “I do not love anyone yet, perhaps,” David said with a small smile.

  Ezra was perturbed indeed. He sat back and put his hands on his knees. “I thought you were writing her poems!” he exclaimed.

  “I was—but—” So David said.

  “Did you leave off before—” Ezra asked, and could not go on to mention Leah.

  “Before Leah died?” David said for him. “No—yes, I left a poem unfinished. That was because I met Leah—in the peach garden.”

  “Do you mourn her?” Ezra demanded.

  David considered long before he spoke. They were sitting in his father’s room, for Ezra had sent for him to tell him that the betrothal was completed.

  “No,” David said at last. “I do not mourn. I wish she had not died—as she did. If she had lived—” He paused again.

  Ezra’s hair prickled on his scalp and along his arms and legs. “Would you have wed her?” he demanded when David paused too long.

  David shook his head slowly. When he did so he felt the scar upon his head ache. “No,” he said, and then with more vigor he said again, “No, Father, of that be sure. But had Leah lived I would have wed this other one with more joy. Can you understand that?”

  Ezra’s jaw dropped and he stared back at his son and shook his head. It was beyond him.

  “Poor Father,” David said tenderly. “Why should I trouble you? I will marry, and I will have sons and daughters, and I will do well with my life. After the wedding I will come back to the shop and everything will go as before, but better—much better.”

  He rose, put a smile on his face, and bowed to his father and went away. Behind him Ezra sat doubtful for a long time, sighed, and then went to his shop, his underlip thrust out for the rest of the day and his temper bad.

  As for David, he was restless and he was so irritable with Peony that she gave up trying to please him and she sat quietly and did her sewing. This was usually embroidery of some sort, but today she was not working on silks. She had a piece of fine white linen in her hands, shaped to the sole of a foot.

  David watched her little fingers moving in and out of the cloth, drawing the needle up and down and through, and at last he asked her what she did.

  “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?