Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  While she mused upon this the screen slid back and the maid Yumi stood there, stolid in her blue cotton kimono. She stared at Josui before the mirror.

  She said loudly, “Your father asks you to come. He is in the pines.”

  Josui closed the mirror set in the lid that covered the top of the small chest. “Tell him I am coming.”

  Dr. Sakai was walking in the garden under the pines when Yumi came to report. The green moss lay deep and soft under his feet and the air was tinged with the clean smell of the fresh resin, heated by the day’s sun. “The honorable daughter is coming,” Yumi said with her slight bow.

  “What was she doing?” Dr. Sakai asked.

  “She was looking at her face in the mirror,” Yumi replied.

  She went away and Dr. Sakai stopped still. Josui, looking at her face in the mirror! Was this not significant? Could it have been that she saw the American, too? There might have been an acquaintance this morning, some slight word spoken. The American soldiers thought nothing of speaking to any girl they saw, and Josui was very pretty—too pretty. He must find out. There must be no secrets. Americans could not be trusted where women were concerned. Josui, his daughter, must not be taken for a geisha or a street girl.

  Thus Josui, walking very slowly indeed toward her father, met his dark piercing eyes. His eyebrows were tilted sharply upward. He was frowning, a knot between the brows, from which the two black lines sprang upward like wings of a bird, or of a butterfly, but who could imagine a butterfly poised above the black eyes of her father?

  He began impetuously, unable to restrain himself, “I feel you are hiding something from me!”

  She was so unused to this sudden attack that she was startled. In America he had been a man of high temper, often angry, quickly repentant, and yet unable to control his anger when he was annoyed. Only in these years since the return had he grown into the silent and restrained man, striving through meditation for self-control.

  She lifted her head. “What do I hide from you?”

  “I am not stupid,” he declared violently. “I am more than a physician, I am also a psychologist. Your mood has changed. You are not the girl you were even yesterday. Something has happened to you.”

  He was proceeding on instinct but she was amazed at his insight. Did she so easily snow show herself to him?

  “Nothing has really happened,” she said. “Yet perhaps you are right. The sight of the Americans today has made me remember much that I thought I had forgotten. Father, I spent fifteen years of my life there, and only five here.”

  He jerked his head to signify that she must walk beside him. He felt irritable, overspent, too restless to sit down. She understood and they paced together under the pines. It was late twilight, and the afterglow of sunset caught the green of the moss and made it almost phosphorescent.

  “You can trust me,” her father said. “Indeed, you must trust me. In a sense you are all I have, and even all I ever have had. Your mother has been a good wife, an excellent mother. What more does a man ask? But your mind is like mine. You are also a companion. Your brother was like his mother, but you are like me.”

  “I am very different,” she said with instant rebellion.

  “You are more different now than you will be later,” he agreed. “The difference in the generations is now most acute in you. Later, when your life is arranged and you do not need to rebel against me in order to show your independence, then you will discover how like you are to me.”

  She felt the strong gossamer of his love wrap her too closely. She pulled away with all her strength and yet in his superior way he enfolded her the more closely. There lay in her bosom the small weapon, the little knife which could cut the net, though it seemed no harsher than a cloud as he drew it about her. She put her hand into her bosom and took out the narrow card. She held it out to him, not saying a word. He bent to peer at the name, and then knowing instantly what it was, he put his hand into his own bosom and took out another exactly like it.

  “Where did you get that?” she cried, undone by surprise.

  “I may also ask the same question of you,” he replied gravely.

  “Someone—gave it to me,” she said.

  “He came here while I was away, and he gave this to your mother,” he said, still more gravely.

  They looked at each other, he bending the ferocious eyebrows down upon her and she gazing up at him, determined not to be afraid.

  “Ah, Josui,” he said in his deepest voice.

  She drooped, and without a word she put the narrow card into his hand. He took it and put both of the cards into his bosom. “You see, I was right.” He spoke tenderly and sadly. “Now tell me, my child, what has happened to you?”

  But she could not tell him. The tears spilled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. They began to walk again and she lifted the sleeves of her kimono and wiped her eyes.

  “I beg of you not to hide yourself from your parents,” he said after a long silence. “I will not forbid you anything which is for your good. I think now it will break my heart if you leave us, but doubtless it will not. My heart has been broken before.”

  She lifted her head. “Because Kensan is dead?”

  “No. Long before you or Kensan were born. When I was a young man I—never mind. It does not matter any more.”

  It did not indeed matter. He was nearly fifty years old, and what had happened when he was young, Josui thought, could not matter now. She shrank from knowing what it was. Her father, she felt, could only have been the man she had always known, imperious, fiercely tender, obstinate, controlling everybody around him. She would think of herself.

  “Tell me why you kept the card?” her father was saying, almost coaxingly.

  His kindness moved her and she began to sob and talk at the same time, trying to stifle her sobs with her sleeves at her mouth.

  “How do I know? There is nothing to tell. He stopped me under the wisteria and asked me my name. I—I—told him. That is all.”

  “How many times have you seen him?”

  “Only the once—today—I promise you. He saw me this morning and he came back. There were so many—I did not see him—the first time they passed.”

  Her father was kind now that he had the truth. “I do not blame you for what he did. Perhaps you might have refused your name. Nevertheless, as you say, you were too many years in America.”

  “I did not say so!”

  “Many years, then,” he conceded. “But we will never return. We shall stay here always. Your life is here, my child. You will marry here. I shall not force you to marry, I promise you. You may take your time, except, speaking psychologically again,” he was trying to lighten his mood for her, “it is best to marry young, when the first desire comes. It is not well to wait too long, especially for a woman. The natural desire wanes, other interests take its place. I saw many women in America who had lost all natural desire. They were absorbed in careers, good enough in some ways but destructive in their effect upon their womanhood. So, let us see what we can do. If it is not to be Kobori Matsui, let us find some other. You shall choose—I am not to be considered an ogre.”

  She pitied so much his wish to pacify her, discerning behind it his unutterable love, that she had not the heart to refuse his mood. “It is only one more year until I finish at college. I should like to finish.”

  “Certainly, I agree,” he said. “Now shall we say no more? We understand each other?”

  “Yes,” she murmured, but unwillingly.

  “Then—” he paused, and while she looked, he took the cards from his bosom and tore them into fine small pieces. When this was done he stooped and lifted a piece of the deep moss, and under it, as into a little grave, he put the pieces. He covered them with the moss and stood up again. “Come,” he said. “Let us go into the house. The night has fallen.”

  It had, indeed. Under the pines the first fireflies were beginning to gleam.

  Allen Kennedy turned restlessly upon the thi
ck quilts. Japanese beds were deceptive. They seemed soft when one lay down upon them, the quilts filled with down and covered with silk, the mats beneath so deep and yielding. But when he had lain awhile the hardness of the polished wooden floor underneath mats and quilts crept through and defied a man’s bones. He was not tired enough, that was the matter. Enemy and ecstasy, desire burned in his blood. The beautiful girl had upset all his careful controls, his schemes, his habits. He loathed the coarse and casual ways of common men in wartime, and yet he felt the same lusts in himself. He would not believe that he was capable of taking a woman’s body, however refined, impatiently for his own sake, and yet of course he was. His ever present need, which he would not again try to slake in a brothel, however urgent it became, had risen against him tonight. He wanted to think of the girl as a pretty picture, but he thought of her only as a female, a creature made for taking.

  He sat up abruptly and wrapped his long arms about his legs and bent his head on his knees. He wished that he were not so confused, that he did not at least so confuse love and desire. Some delicacy instilled in him, he supposed, by his mother, that small and dainty creature of immense will nevertheless, had made love and desire inseparable for him. Confronted with a harlot, as he had several times chosen to be, he was impotent. It was so. He was compelled to love before desire could be fulfilled. Here was cause for shame. He envied heartily the coarse louts who went in thirsting and came out boasting. He envied them most of all because they did not know they were louts. The army was full of them and they lived a fine life. But he was made as he was. Ariel could not become Caliban.

  He got up, too restless to pretend that he needed sleep. He wrapped about himself the bedroom robe which every Japanese hotel provided for its guests. Good taste was invincible in Japan and it perhaps was why he loved this country. The cheap cotton garment was beautifully designed in blue and white. It was only when they tried to be Western that the good taste faltered. His mother, if she let herself, would enjoy the exquisite pottery, the fine prints, the delicate silks, above all the houses. Mrs. Sakai had not let him come in this afternoon but he had seen behind her bowed head vista upon vista of rooms, lit by the pearly sunlight falling through paper lattices. The vistas ended in a garden. He had seen the silver streak of a waterfall. He had had no opportunity to know educated Japanese. The rules were strict against bringing any Japanese into the quarters Americans occupied. Even on trains they were not allowed to mix. He did not care to mix on the lowest levels. A low-down Japanese, especially female, was for him a degree lower than the low-down American.

  But the lovely girl under the wisterias belonged in just such a house. And her name, Josui—he would not have known how to pronounce unless she had spoken it for him. Her face he could not forget, so pure, so pretty, the great eyes, the full lower lip. He had learned to like Oriental eyes. And she spoke English like an American, though not easily. Her accent was good and her voice was soft. She was well bred, and that, too, was unusual. The well-bred girls hid themselves and gave the Americans no opportunity for meeting them. But Josui had been in America and she knew better than that. All the same, she was shy. He would not have liked it had she not been shy.

  He stood at the door, open to a tiny corner garden, no more than a curve in the outer wall of the hotel. Still, there was a pool, basin size, and a dwarf tree or two. He had better ask himself what he wanted of this girl Josui. Suppose he allowed his desire to grow—put it, rather, that he did not suppress it utterly and immediately—what would be the end? It would be an embarrassing and even heartbreaking affair. It could be nothing else. She was no Madame Butterfly, he thought, to be loved and left.

  The night was dark and still. The faint outlines of the mountains, darker even than the sky, rose beyond the low wall. He had come to Kyoto to see historic beauty and he had seen nothing. Why not let it be as he had planned? There was no need to decide anything now in the small hours of the night, a bad time, as he well knew, to decide anything, a depressing melancholy time of the night, the worst in the twenty-four hours, when the worst in him, too, rose up to make him doubt his own soul. He shrugged his shoulders. Tomorrow he would get up and study his guidebook and make a plan. He would stay as long as necessary to see Kyoto and then he would go back to Tokyo. If he were busy he might forget the girl. Or she might hide herself as the others did.

  He felt better as soon as he had made up his mind. He lay down again upon the quilts and closed his eyes. His muscles relaxed, his bones no longer resisted the bottom hardness, and the down quilts were light and warm. He had got quite cold, standing in the open door.

  Had the next day been rainy it would have been easy to stay at home. Josui had only one class, mathematics, which she disliked. She had even a little cold, or she could imagine that she had, for she had been restless in her sleep and when she woke before dawn the quilts had slipped away. She slept with a soft pillow. Had she used a hard Japanese pillow, her neck would have been firmly placed, so that she could not turn. Other girls learned to sleep thus held, but she had not. This was her trouble, that she did not make up her mind to accept life whole as it was here. Her father and mother were both more brave than she. That is, her father insisted and her mother obeyed. For this reason she had kept her small rebellions, of which the pillow was one. She rebelled also for her mother’s sake.

  But the day was fine. The sun rose from a cloudless sky and only upon the mountains was there a wreath of gossamer, soon to melt before the sun. She was compelled to get up, and because the day was so fair she felt compelled also to put on a fresh dress of pale yellow. She would for some wayward reason have liked to wear a kimono today, but her fellow students would have been surprised. Life was clearly divided.

  The yellow dress was soft, however, and there were no hard white buttons. A narrow collar of white embroidery made it pleasant with her black hair. She put no oil on her hair, and this too made her different from the others. Small soft hairs were at her temples, not curled but not quite straight.

  Her father looked at her when she came to breakfast and sharply.

  “I will not go to college at the usual time today,” she said. “I am going very early so that I may study my geometry for an hour.”

  He understood that this meant she would avoid any possible meeting with the American. If the foreigner sought her it would be at the hour when he had seen her yesterday.

  “It will be cooler if you start early,” he replied. “Today will be warmer than yesterday.”

  The meal was eaten in silence, her mother saying not one word. In silence they rose and immediately afterward Josui went into the back garden to find flowers, branches, leaves, whatever the season might bring, for the tokonoma. This was a pleasure as well as a task. Her father criticized what she did, sparing in praise so that when he gave it, it was a treasure to remember. Today, wandering in the large garden, she searched for suitable plants. The season was spring, therefore she must not use many flowers. Flowers were abundant only in summer, and the arrangement must always suggest the season. She decided for the informal arrangement of moribana, she decided against water plants. These must never be combined with flowers that grow in dry earth. Searching she found what she wanted, blue myrtle, blooming upon its glossy vine, half hidden by a drooping scarlet maple. She cut a branch of the maple, careful that it would not be missed, and then she cut the vine in two lengths. With these she had enough, and for half an hour she stood at a table on the porch by the kitchen, making her arrangement. As she had been taught, she stood exactly in front of the low oblong bowl of green pottery she had chosen for the day, this that she might arrange the branches, the vine, the flowers as though they were facing the sun, toward which all growing plants turn by nature. The arrangement was in three, the maple branch taller and spreading behind the vine, the blue flowers lower on one side than the other. She was absorbed in what she did, unaware that she was watched by her father from the room of meditation, where he sat for a space before he went to his office in th
e hospital, and by her mother, lingering in the kitchen. Satisfied suddenly by the turn the smaller vine took as though of its own will, Josui carried the bowl carefully into the alcove and set it a little to one side. She would not change the scroll. It was of willows in a mist. But she changed the ornament. She chose a piece of uneven jade, set into a rosewood stand. Then she stepped back to survey what she had done.

  “Very good,” her father’s voice said.

  She turned to smile. He stood there in his western clothes, ready to leave the house. He looked well in the harsh garments, his felt hat in his hand, his stick, his gloves, his carefully pressed suit all correct. But he was not quite Japanese. No Japanese could wear the garments so easily. It was he who had kept alive in her the memory of America, but these were words not to be spoken and she did not speak them.

  “Very pleasant,” her father said. “I am not quite sure that the blue of the myrtle “and the red of the maple—but it will do. It is original. And the jade unites them with the willows in the mist.”

  He nodded, smiled slightly and left the room.

  So the day began and so it went on. She would not allow to herself that she searched the streets as she entered one after the other, but at least she did not change her usual way. She came early to the school and she went to the girls’ day room and to her desk and began diligently to study. Geometry was useful to occupy the mind. She drew the circles carefully, she studied the triangles within, she computed the angles. It was formal, it was cold, in its own way beautiful, but lifeless. Crystals thus composed were lifeless, the fossils of what once had been, symmetrical shapes from which the spirit had departed, cooling nevertheless to the quickened imagination, the excited heart. She worked steadily, not looking up except to answer a greeting, and the day went on. She went to classes, she came away, she felt distant, detached, uncaring. At the end of the day, a little earlier than usual, she went home again. The streets were quite empty. Doubtless today, she told herself, he had gone to Nara to join his comrades. There was no reason why he should not. Doubtless she would never see him again.