Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  During the long ceremony and the feast there had been no conversation which was troubling. When it was over, however, and the sun was about to set, the friends rose and making the proper bows of thanks to their host, they left the teahouse and went out into the waiting room. There they could talk as they wished, and there Mr. Matsui joined them after a few minutes.

  This talk, among men who had never left their country and were intent now upon preserving the culture of their people throughout the years of foreign occupation, was deeply satisfying to Dr. Sakai. He had emptied himself of America. Heart and soul were empty, and the long quiet conversations about the old Japan, the ancient ways, the evil and the good, created a new man within him.

  Thus he understood how it was that the people of Japan had allowed themselves to be tricked into ways of life which were not their own. “Every people has its evil spirits,” Mr. Tanaka explained today as they sat in the waiting hall. “Into every country there are born some rude souls who cannot be taught. They are wild from birth, doomed doubtless by some crime in a former existence. They cannot be controlled. They distress parents and family, they are a menace to their communities, and they draw to them the weak and the restless. These among us, more than a century ago, seized upon the evil mood of the times; they declared to our people that the western powers who were dividing up Asia for themselves would also take Japan. It may be that they were right—who knows? At least our people grew afraid and out of this fear the wild ones were allowed their way. Thus they built up army and navy, they seized Manchuria, they hoped to make an empire for their own protection. This was the beginning of the great change. Had we dared to reject fear, perhaps we would have remained invulnerable. Fear is the beginning of all weakness.”

  Mr. Tanaka was old, a small withered man who had lived through seventy years of the great change. He had never worn western dress and in his house there was not a chair or a western bed. He had inherited a moderate wealth and he had lived upon it, though with increasing difficulty. He had lost all his sons in the recent war, and his own father had been killed in the first war with China, many decades ago. He himself abhorred all war and in his revulsion he had become a Buddhist, refusing to follow Shinto, because it insisted upon a patriotism which he denied. He declared himself a humanist, a lover of all men, and he was scrupulous even toward the Americans.

  “There has been so much cruelty in the years in which I have lived,” Mr. Tanaka said thoughtfully. No one interrupted him. He sat, a small folded figure, facing the open door into the garden, now filled with the yellow light from the setting sun. “When the atomic bomb fell upon Nagasaki, I went there to see what it had done. You know that Nagasaki is the home of my family. The old house is gone, and it was the tomb of my oldest relatives, six of them, who had lived there all their lives. Since my visit, I have not been able to tolerate the smallest cruelty. I cannot, for example, push my way into the tram car, however crowded. Such a small cruelty, even to push someone for a moment, and being so old, it may be said that I cannot hurt anyone by a slight push. Nevertheless, I cannot perform it. It would add, for me, the final last cruelty which would make the world too much for me. I cannot crush an ant or kill a fly, or allow a child to weep. Any cruelty, more than has been done, not only here but everywhere in the world, you understand, would be too much for me. No more, O Buddha God!” He lifted his thin old face and closed his eyes, and Dr. Sakai bowed his head. He felt deep in his breast a wrenching sadness that was somehow strengthening.

  When at last they rose to make their final farewells, he had seen no opportunity to talk with Mr. Matsui about son and daughter and he had no wish to make the opportunity now. The afternoon had been pure. He had bathed his soul in the past and he had learned still more of what it was to be a Japanese. He did not want to think of the young or of tomorrow. There was time enough.

  He walked home slowly and at peace.

  In the main room of the house Mrs. Sakai awaited her husband. How would she tell him what had happened this afternoon in his absence? She was afraid of him because she admired him above all human beings and had she dared, she would have loved him wholly. But it was impossible to love anyone whom she admired so much. So intelligent a mind as his saw every flaw and she was humble. Moreover, she carried within the silences of her heart a secret sin which she could never confess. She did not like Japan. She had not wanted to leave America. She would have preferred even the concentration camp, where all her friends had lived. It was uncomfortable, of course. She knew all the hardships because he told her of them. Nevertheless, she would have been with her friends, and they could have done their cooking and washing together, and there would have been plenty of time to talk. She would have had more time than ever before, because there was no need to earn their food. Food, however poor, was provided. Also the weather in the desert was dry and warm. Here in Kyoto the climate was damp and the house cold, even now. The water in the garden, the fogs from the sea and the mountains made the house damp.

  She sat properly on her folded legs, wearing her second-best purple kimono, the neck band of white silk very clean, waiting for her husband. Upon her feet were snow-white socks of cotton cloth, the soles double and stitched. She made the socks herself. She knew how to do everything properly because she had been reared in Japan, her family poor, and living upon a tiny mountainous farm in the high hills above Nagasaki and near Unzen, near enough to the hot springs there so that sometimes in the spring or the autumn when they took a holiday to see the flowers or the coloring trees, they had stopped to cook their fish in the steam rising between the rocks.

  So poor had her father been, with so many daughters, that one day when he read in a newspaper that brides were wanted for young Japanese men in America, he had sent her picture and registered her name. That was how she had gone to America. Dr. Sakai’s mother had chosen her and he had approved her gentle face. She had as a young girl a very pleasant face, though not pretty. It had not occurred to her that she would be sent to a man who was a doctor and who therefore disliked her bowed legs and short thick feet and hands. He had inquired into her diet, which had always been rice and fish and a few vegetables. Sotan Sakai was very easily in a temper when the children were born and she was not careful to feed them exactly as he said, although in the boy’s case, none of it had mattered, since he was killed. How she had forced him to drink the abomination of cow’s milk and how he had cried! She wished that she had not made him do anything he did not like, for it was no use now. She could never see even his grave. As usual when she thought of Kensan, her son, the tears came. She wiped her eyes cautiously on the inside lining of her wide sleeves, and blew her nose on one of the bits of paper tissue she kept in the bottom of her left sleeve. Then she wadded the tissue and dropped it into a waste jar near by. She had taken up many American ways but not the dirty one of cloth handkerchiefs.

  At this moment she heard her husband’s footsteps and the maid hurrying to meet him and take off his shoes. She rose and went toward the entrance and bowed. He nodded at her and made the sound of greeting which was not quite her name, in the presence of the maid. She followed him then into the room where she had been waiting and when he sat down, she knelt and put her hand on the teapot in its padded cover. The pot was hot and she was about to pour him a bowl of the tea. But he put up his hand.

  “No tea now. I have drunk of the best.”

  For one thing she was grateful to Japan. The kimono hid her crooked legs. In America she had worn cotton house dresses as the other women did and she was always conscious of those legs, exposed to his disfavor, though he never spoke of them any more. He had merely looked away, and this was more cruel than speech.

  How would she tell him what had happened this afternoon? She coughed behind her hand.

  He looked up sharply. “What is the matter, Hariko?” he asked.

  “I scarcely know how to tell you,” she replied. She looked at him and he saw her eyes were troubled. She was still a pleasant-looking woman; that is,
she had a gentle face, and her eyes were round and childlike. Round eyes were not considered the most beautiful in a Japanese woman’s face, but he liked them.

  “Is the Sung vase broken?” he asked in alarm.

  “Oh, not so dreadful,” she said quickly,

  “The big carp is not dead?”

  “Oh, no,” she said again. “Nothing is dead.”

  “Come, come,” he said. “I will not kill you or even beat you.”

  This was good humor and she was encouraged. “A young man came here this afternoon asking for you,” she said with much caution.

  “A patient?”

  “Not a patient,” she hesitated, and then said it all at once. “An American soldier.”

  Dr. Sakai’s thin, handsome face lost all expression.

  “I do not know any American.”

  “He did not say he knew you,” she replied. “He only wishes to know you.”

  “How did he know my name?”

  “It was given to him, he said, by a friend.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said you were out. Then he wished to wait, but I would not allow it. I feared that Josui would come in at any moment. It would not have been well.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I told him that I would tell you and he said he would come again. He asked at what hour are you at home? I said it is best to go to your office at the hospital at ten o’clock in the morning, I said you do not receive unknown persons here at home.”

  “Very right,” he paused and pursed his lips. “An American! Probably someone over there gave him my name.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. She felt her heart lighten. She had done well, she had told him, he did not feel angry with her. It was wicked to think of anger, for he never spoke to her one angry word, and yet she was so sensitive to his disapproval that she felt the slightest shadow of its darkness over his spirit. His self-control was absolute but it concealed nothing from her. She rose gracefully in spite of her short legs.

  “I will now excuse myself. There are things to be done.”

  He nodded without reply. He did not wish to lose the mood of the afternoon spent with his friends. He sat facing the garden after she had left the room, motionless, and deliberately he put out of his mind the thought of the intruding American. The gardener had sprinkled the stones with water and had wet the rocks and the shrubs.

  Mrs. Sakai, watching him, slid the latticed screens softly behind her. He had not asked her what sort of a man the American was and she had not told him, and this, it now occurred to her, might be a sort of deception. She had liked the young man. She used to see rich young men in California, although when she asked him he said he did not come from there. She had asked him almost at once, “Do you come from California?”

  “You speak English?” he had exclaimed.

  “A little,” she said, trying not to smile because of her bad teeth. Americans liked nice white teeth but the same lack that bowed her legs, it seemed, had also spoiled her teeth. It had not seemed important to anybody when she was young because countrywomen blackened their teeth anyway when they were married. Her own mother had black teeth, as black as lacquer.

  “You come from California, too?” she had asked again.

  “Why, too?” he had asked. “Are you from California?”

  “We came from there,” she said.

  “I am from Virginia,” he said. “It’s a nice place.”

  “I do not know,” she replied.

  Then she had checked this informal conversation. She was always too friendly with Americans. She became cold. Still she liked him. He was so young, so fresh looking. His name, written down upon a card, which he had handed to her, was Allen Kennedy. He spoke it for her and she repeated it. She had never learned to read English.

  Now she pattered noiselessly down a narrow corridor to the room in which they slept. It could be thrown into the house by drawing back the screens which were its walls, but she usually kept them closed, so that she had a place for retirement. She had nothing really to do, since Sotan had told her not to prepare a night meal. Josui ate bread at night and some foreign jam and tinned milk in her tea. She herself drank a bowl of rice gruel before she went to sleep. She drew out a chest of drawers so small that it could be set upon a low table, and kneeling she slowly rearranged the contents, bits of jewelry and ribbon, some photographs of Kensan, a picture of their house in Los Angeles which was no longer theirs. Negroes lived in it now.

  The screen slid back a few inches and she saw Josui smiling at her.

  “Mamma-san, here you are.”

  “Have you seen your father?”

  “No.”

  Josui came into the room. Her mother saw at once that something had happened to her, something pleasant. The long widely opened eyes, too large for Japanese eyes, were bright with secret joy. Josui had not yet learned to hide herself behind a calm face.

  “You look happy,” Mrs. Sakai said. “Something nice has come.”

  Josui shook her head. “Only the spring, Mother.”

  But could the spring alone curve into tenderness every line of that soft and pretty face? Mrs. Sakai doubted. She continued to gaze at her daughter pensively, trying to remember how she had felt the spring when she was twenty. At that age she had worked as hard as a man upon her father’s farm and spring meant plowing and dragging the heavy harrow and scattering the seed. When early summer came the fields were flooded for rice and standing deep in the muddy water she had helped to plant the seedlings. No, she could remember nothing about the spring.

  She did not press her daughter. Josui belonged to her father, and it was Kensan who had belonged to her. Had her son lived she would now have had grandchildren, dear little ones looking American, which she would not have minded at all. In America the women had washing machines and electric stoves.

  Josui was standing beside her and she picked up the pictures of Kensan. There were several of them, some taken when he was a little boy. There was one of him with Setsu, his fiancée, her hair freshly cut and curled.

  “I wish my father would let me cut my hair,” Josui said in sudden discontent. She wore her hair straight and long, brushed back from her face and rolled into a round heavy knot on her neck. She could never curl this long hair.

  “He will not,” her mother said. She, too, was looking at Setsu. “I suppose she has children by now.”

  “Born in the concentration camp,” Josui reminded her.

  “Yes,” her mother said. But still had Kensan lived and had they all stayed together it might have been pleasant to have the children though in camp. The Americans did not kill anybody. It was not like Germany. There was enough to eat. “I think the camp was not too had.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Josui sighed restlessly. She frowned and the light went out of her face, in spite of the spring.

  Her mother pondered the sigh. Should she tell Josui about the American caller? It was better not to do so, even as interesting news. She began putting back the trinkets and the pictures, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper.

  “I am going to change my clothes,” Josui said.

  She went away and pulled the screen shut again. Mrs. Sakai was glad that she had said nothing at all. It was indeed better never to speak.

  In the particular corner which was her own in the wide-spreading house Josui was looking at herself in the mirror. She knelt facing the garden, the late sunlight falling full upon her. The mirror stood on a low Chinese chest of drawers, not more than a foot high and made of polished blackwood. She had changed her school clothes for a pale-pink kimono, across the skirt of which was embroidered a branch of peach blossom in a deeper pink.

  What did Americans call pretty? At least she was fair, her skin as white as almond kernels. Her lower lip was perhaps too full. She was perhaps too healthy looking. Her cheeks were as pink as the peach blossoms, pinker than the silk of her kimono. Her eyes were Japanese, and perhaps he would think them ugly, although they were
double lidded, as many Japanese eyes were not. Certainly her nose was too low, that an American would say. If she were in America now, would she have made friends again? Everyone was out of the camps at last. They said the Americans were kind to them once more. There was no trouble, or very little. A great many newspapers had printed stories of Kensan’s battalion in Italy, telling how brave they were. Some had told about Kensan himself. He had been among the first to attack the hill they had been ordered to take. He had led the others, and so he was killed. “It is better not to be too brave,” her mother had said, weeping, as she looked at his picture in the American papers that they had received.

  If tomorrow the American met her again, what should she do? She should not have told him her name. Yet not to do so would have seemed too rude. She drew from her bosom the little narrow card he had given her and she spoke his name softly—Allenn Ken-neddy. At home he would be called Allenn. What did the name mean? She did not know. The family name, Ken-neddy, must also have some meaning. And Virginia? She knew it was far from California. It was a distant state, in the eastern part of America. She could not remember anything else from her schoolbooks. Tomorrow she would find it in the college atlas. She put the card into her bosom and looked into the mirror again. She saw the curve of her lips, and the droop of her eyelids. She put her palms to her cheeks. They felt hot. Her hands were small and cool. She had always cold hands. If he should want to touch her hand, shaking her hand in greeting as the Americans did, she would not let him. The palm of a girl’s hand is a private place. It is not to be touched carelessly or by a stranger. Only her husband is allowed to stroke the palm of her hand.