Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  To him, however, a kiss was mere introduction, a query made sometimes even to a stranger, an invitation, leading on to further exploration in the quest. He kissed her again and yet again, each time more closely and more intimately, one arm crushing her waist, the other holding her chin. Then reaching the end of kissing, and uncontrollably compelled to what must follow, he lifted her from the path and laid her down upon the mossy bank beneath the pines that covered them. He sank down beside her, half over her, his hands trembling, audacious.

  In one instant she divined the reason for his haste. She reached up her hands and pushed his face away strongly.

  “Stop!” she whispered. “This is not the way. Allenn Ken-neddy! No!”

  The reproach in her voice was overpowering. His conscience, made sensitive by a long and happy childhood in a big white house in Virginia, quickened against his will. The toughening of the war years was not deep. He had tried to cultivate a proper cynicism, the brave callow cynicism of the young today who must face life and death at the same time. But his cynicism was a shallow surface. The years had been too few to harden it. Desire cooled at the sound of her sorrowful voice, he hid his face in her bosom and lay still.

  She lay motionless for several minutes, allowing the weight of his head upon her breast. Then she moved gently away, and as she had done yesterday she sat up while he lay on his back, gazing up into the trees. It was she who resolutely began to speak.

  “I do not know what I am exactly, whether more Japanese or American. I think I am more than anything my father’s daughter only. I am a Sakai. We are not common people. We are something better. It is necessary that you and I examine how we love each other. We must decide. Shall we say good-by? Or—”

  She could not go on. She could not bear to imagine what would happen to her if he should say, “Let us say good-by.” She must think of her father. Let her remember her father’s stern good face and gain strength for herself through Sakai pride. Rather than the disgrace of the concentration camp her father had chosen Japan.

  “Must we decide everything today?” he asked.

  She nodded vigorously. “We must!”

  “Why?”

  She hesitated and then said firmly, “Because whenever we are alone together you attack me.”

  He was horrified by this boldness. “Oh, come, Josui!”

  “Is it not attack?” she demanded. She turned the light of her large clear eyes upon his face.

  “I suppose, if you want to put it in plain words,” he said grudgingly.

  “I will not excuse myself also,” she said swiftly. “If I allow myself to be alone with you, I must accept responsibility.”

  “What long words they taught you in California!”

  “I don’t learn this in California. I learn it here, in Japan, from my father.”

  “A fierce father?”

  “Perhaps.”

  When he said nothing to this she added, “Perhaps, also, that is good—for a girl.” She clasped her arms around her knees and bent her head.

  The nape of her neck was creamy pale. A few straight soft hairs escaped from the knot at the back of her head and trembled in the pine scented air. Her head sat prettily on her shoulders. Her arms were white and round, the sleeves of her dress only reaching her elbows, and her hands were pretty, too. Most Japanese girls did not have pretty hands or feet. She wore white socks and sandals and he could not see her feet.

  “Take off your shoes,” he said suddenly. “Let me see your little feet. Are they as pretty as your hands?”

  To his astonishment she flushed a quick red. She sprang up, and drew away from him. “Now I cannot stay with you,” she said almost violently. “I will not! You insult me too lightly, Allenn Ken-neddy! I respect myself at least. It is enough for me. I know now how you are feeling. Love! What is it? I do not want such love.”

  She began to walk away, and he jumped up and ran after her and caught her hand. “Josui, what did I say? Why are you offended, darling? Is there something I cannot understand?” He took her by the shoulders. “Josui, answer me!”

  She flamed at him, eyes burning, cheeks scarlet, lips shaped to wrath. “You do not answer me, Allenn Ken-neddy! I said, ‘What shall we do?’ You say, ‘Show me your’—”

  She faltered, turned away her head, and tears came from under her lashes.

  He was moved to tenderness and compelled to truthfulness. “Darling, if I didn’t answer, it is because I don’t know how to answer.”

  “If you don’t know, then you shouldn’t—touch me at all.”

  His hands dropped. “You are right.”

  She went on. “If you don’t know, then please go back today to Tokyo, to America, to your home. Forget, please, that you have seen me, and let me forget—”

  “Can you, Josui?”

  “Yes, now I still can. Later—I don’t know.”

  He stood looking at her slender drooping figure. And she, after his silence, said brokenly. “I want to go home.”

  So they took the next train back to Kyoto, and at the station they parted because she insisted that it must be so.

  “I shan’t forget you, though, Josui.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “If I can’t—may I write to you?”

  “You will not write.”

  She left him, not saying good-by, giving him instead a long inscrutable look, and then, though he stood watching until he lost her among the people in the street, she did not once look back.

  As for him, he returned to the hotel and packed his bags and took the next train for Tokyo. He wanted no more holidays. The sooner he got back to work the better for him.

  “Kobori is better,” her father said. “He has a clean good body and he has responded well to the new drugs.”

  “I am glad,” Josui said listlessly.

  He knew that something was wrong with her, and he had consulted with his wife only this morning as to what it might be.

  “She has told me nothing,” Mrs. Sakai had replied. “If I ask her why she is sad she gets angry with me. She declares she is not sad.”

  “She does not know what is wrong with her,” Dr. Sakai said, with his usual decision. “She is biologically upset. It is time for her to marry and she does not know it. I shall take matters into my own hands.”

  At any other time Mrs. Sakai would have urged patience. This morning, however, she had only replied, “Doubtless you are right.”

  “Kobori,” Dr. Sakai said, continuing with Josui later in the day, “may be called a perfect young Japanese man. Yet he is modern. He goes to no extremes. He respects his father but he will go further than his father. Someday Kobori will be a very important man. I wish you could have seen the healthiness of his flesh. When I made the incision his blood was such a clear pure red.”

  “But his appendix was infected, nevertheless?” Josui reminded him somewhat cruelly.

  Dr. Sakai was indignant. “The appendix is a vestige of early man. It is no longer needed. For this Kobori can scarcely be blamed. Now he will have no more trouble.”

  She wanted to avoid the thought of Kobori and yet some instinct to punish herself, even to hurry toward her fate, compelled her to go on. “Father, why don’t you say what you are thinking?” she asked recklessly. “You want me to marry Kobori. Why don’t you say it?”

  Dr. Sakai lost his temper completely. “You are a stubborn troublesome daughter!” he shouted. “You know very well why I don’t dare to speak to you truthfully. You are like American girls. If you know what I hope, you will destroy my hope!”

  He was dismayed at his anger and now prepared for her return attack. All was lost, doubtless. She would never yield. To his surprise, she was mild.

  “Father, I am beginning to change. I have been thinking a great deal. I feel now I had better marry a Japanese, as you have often advised me to do. I have thought sometimes I would like to go to America again but now I shall never go. I belong here. So it may as well be Kobori as anyone. As you say, he is good. I w
ant above all a good man.”

  She spoke so thoughtfully, almost meditatively, even sadly, that he could scarcely believe it was she who spoke. He stammered, his anger gone, “Josui, my child—such wisdom—I feel taken aback. Shall I—do you wish me to speak to Kobori’s father? Tell me, what do you want me to do for you?”

  She looked at him with large sad eyes. “Whatever you wish, Father.”

  This alarmed him indeed. “You are not ill, child?”

  “No, Father. I am really very well, better than I have been for a long time.” Then seeing him frightened she tried to smile. “I am growing up, at last. Do you know I am twenty?”

  He was pleased but still somewhat uneasy. “Be sure I shall not hurry you,” he said solemnly; “I shall not allow even Kobori to hurry you.”

  “Thank you, Father,” she said.

  She left him then with a little bow and went into the garden to arrange some stones in the pool. She collected stones, smooth and round, twisted and water carved, keeping at no time more than twenty or so and throwing away the less beautiful ones as she found better ones. Under the clear water the colors glowed clearly. Sometimes a stone which looked dull in the air shone under water. She moved the stones so delicately that her reflection in the water was scarcely disturbed.

  Allen had not written to her once. Now a month had gone by since they parted and he had not written to her. She was glad that she did not know his address, so that she could not write to him. For there had been hours in sleepless nights when she would have written to him out of her weakness and her despair, and she might have begged him to come back, or even to let her come to him. Had she so written and had he answered, it would have been the end for them sometime or other, however many years hence, for her pride would have risen again, prostrate though it now was. And so at the core of their love would have been the seed of rot.

  Gradually through the waiting weeks, one sleepless night conquered and then another, the future had become plain to her, the simple future, the inevitable way of a woman’s life in Japan, marriage, husband, children, home. All the talk of modern women did not and could not change the inevitable. So, as she had said to her father, why not Kobori? Gradually she was accustoming herself to the thought of him. She remembered his face, pale, rather large, the features slightly heavy but their expression kind and easy-going. His voice, too, she could remember quite clearly, a pleasant, slow voice, slurring words, perhaps with a slight lisp. He could scarcely speak English. “I am stupid at language,” he had explained to her once, without seeming to care that he was. He was not repulsive, at least. He was not aggressive. He would not press himself upon her. So, in time, she could probably love him well enough. At least she could respect him. What she wanted, above all else, was simple goodness, which he had more than any man she had ever seen.

  She polished a round greenish stone with the soft palm of her hand and let it sink into the water. The green grew clear, a mild and pleasant color, without hint of violence, sparkle, or glitter.

  The summer was hot in Tokyo. The streets of modern asphalt burned with stored heat, and time and again the electric plant broke down so that the fans stopped, usually at the hottest time of day or night. The only way to tolerate the intolerable was to blind himself with work.

  “Lieutenant Kennedy, sir!”

  A private stood at the door with mail. “Homeside mail, sir.”

  “Throw it there on the small table. I have to finish this report first.”

  “Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted, put carefully on the table a bundle of ten or twelve letters and went away.

  His family! Father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, they wrote to him devotedly, making a martyrdom out of his having to stay in so remote and heathen a country as Japan. “Darling, when will they let you come home?” Thus plaintively his mother’s letters always began.

  He went on writing, tapping swiftly on the portable typewriter. Lieutenant was a convenient title covering many duties, especially those his superior officers did not care to perform, or were too incompetent to perform. He had known even generals who could not spell—or speak correctly, for that matter. When they found that he had graduated from the university they heaped tiresome written work on him. He took a warped pleasure in making of such a dull report as this one, for example, upon certain civilian organizations of the Japanese under the Occupation, a minor masterpiece of style. Not, of course, that anyone who read it would know! Yet he found himself taking an interest in what he wrote about the Japanese now, and this, he acknowledged to himself, was because of Josui. Through her he had come into some sort of reality of relationship with these people, though she still remained for him someone special, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She had courage as well as beauty. For she had loved him, it was hard for her to resist him, and yet she had done so.

  As usual when she crept into his thoughts, as she did twenty times a day, and in the night how often, he pondered the possibility. Suppose the end had been different, suppose he had asked her to marry him, as certainly he would have done had she been an American girl whom he had loved as well—what then? He became lost in a maze of thought, his fingers idle on the keys. They could live here in Japan. Would he be willing to spend his life in Japan? Or they could live in America. There were many places in America where he could live with her very happily, their children—well, their children! Must they have children? She would want them probably but then so did he. He had always supposed that someday he would marry and have children, not just one solitary child growing up as he did, pampered in the big house which should have been full of children. He had taken it for granted that his children would live in that home. Had it not been for the war, he would by now have been married to some girl or other, quite happily, doubtless, for he would never have seen Josui. He might have married Cynthia Levering, who his mother said again and again was like a daughter to her, “a dear daughter,” she clamored, with peculiar emphasis when she said it in his presence.

  “Don’t throw Cynthia at my head, Mother,” he said teasingly. “I might really want to marry her someday, on my own.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” his mother said in her sweet gay voice, “You’re real mean since you’ve grown up, I do declare!”

  There was probably a letter from Cynthia now in that pile. She did not write often, just often enough, and usually long pleasant letters full of small home-town news. Cynthia lived at home, not far down the wide quiet street from his own house. He had known her all his life. Indeed, three generations earlier, his ancestors and hers had intermarried.

  “How far back?” he had once inquired idly of his mother.

  “Far enough back to be safe,” she had said with quick mischief.

  He reached out a long arm and took the letters and ruffled them. His mother, the minister of the Episcopal church where his family had seated themselves on Sundays for generations, two he did not recognize, and yes, a big envelope from Cynthia. There was nothing small about Cynthia except her graceful waist. She was tall and well proportioned, generous and large in mind and heart. Someday he supposed he would fall in love with her. Just now he wished, incongruously, that he could tell her about Josui.

  “I’ll bet she could understand,” he muttered.

  He cut open the envelope, the creamy paper too thick to tear, and took out three double sheets, folded and covered with her blue-black handwriting, the letters large but not sprawling.

  “Darling Allen,” so her letters always began. They had written to each other desultorily for years, she away at finishing school when he was at the university. “Darling Allen, there has never been such a spring. Maybe I have never really seen the spring before. This year I seem to have time.”

  He read on slowly, seeing the home town, the familiar streets, the well-known faces of neighbors and relatives. Yet they were all as far from him, sitting alone here in Tokyo, as though they lived in another world. That was it. They lived in another world, and they could not possibly understand th
is one, whose capital was Tokyo, Japan. No matter how much he explained, no matter what he did or even what he did not do, they would not understand. There was no way of making them understand. His only choice was which world he wanted to live in—and with whom.

  He folded the letters carefully and put each back in its envelope and then sat looking at the bleakness of his typewriter.

  Only his father had not written. His father seldom wrote, as he seldom spoke. As long as he could remember he could not recall that his father ever said anything much, nothing certainly to remember, the least that had to be said about anything, sometimes during a whole meal nothing more than, “Please pass the butter, son,” or more expansively, “These biscuits are better than usual, Sugar.” Sugar was his mother, whose real name was Josephine, a name which his father declared impossible to any man except a Napoleon in France.

  “I declare, Mr. Kennedy,” his mother replied with spirit, “as if we didn’t always have the best beaten biscuit!”

  “So we do, Sugar, and that’s why I remark on these being even better.”

  Twitted often on his lazy silences his father smiled amiably and murmured that Sugar talked enough for two, and was always interesting, much more than he could be.

  He did not pretend to understand his father, nor had it ever occurred to him that it was necessary to do so. Now vaguely he wished that he did know his father better so that he could write to him about Josui, and ask him—

  What?

  There was only one question and that had to be asked by himself and of himself. Did he love her enough to marry her? Was what he felt, this undying longing night and day, was this true love? He had never been in love, that he now knew. But was he in love now?

  He put the letters into his desk drawer and then bathed and dressed himself carefully. He had an invitation to dinner with the Colonel and his wife, a decent couple who clearly did not know what to do with the joyous reckless desperadoes who were the privates under the Colonel’s command. “They aren’t serious about anything,” the Colonel’s wife complained when last he had dined at their house. “They act as though they were living in the days of Madame Butterfly.”