Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  He stood for an instant, and then turning he led the way to the altar, where Allen, guided by gestures, placed sticks of incense in the ashes of the urn before the gods bending above them, and Josui touched the burning spill to the sweet-smelling incense.

  And the Hosshu, standing beneath the great gilt Buddha that towered above the lesser gods, spoke thus; “The blessed Buddha said, ‘Support father and mother, cherish wife and child, follow a peaceful calling. This is the greatest blessing.’”

  These words he spoke to Allen, and then, the ceremony being completed, he turned and faced the gods, and four priests fell in behind him, making a human screen.

  To the Buddha the Hosshu spoke alone now in a voice so low that what he said could not be heard. It was explanation, plea for forgiveness, prayer for blessing if this were possible; if not, then a safe return of the young woman to her own country and her own people.

  The Buddha, gilded until the image looked like solid gold, stood immobile as always, the hands in a gesture of eternal and universal blessing, the eyes unmoving and unmoved.

  Strange unreality, Allen thought, his head not bowed. He looked at the robed and stooping figures of the Hosshu and the priests, and above them the image. The solid presence made the Buddha no more actual than the unseen deity in a Christian church, and yet no less actual. For the temple air was somehow sacred, not with gods but with the prayers and sorrows of those who came to plead, to beg, to search for what was not to be found. The atmosphere of humanity was here, reaching into the unreachable beyond, asking for the answer never given. Here he stood, too, with Josui, and slowly at last he bent his head. Long ago he had ceased prayer and belief. Yet when he was at home he went to church with his parents, he sang the childhood hymns, and he bowed his head. Today, prayer rose of its own accord out of his personal need. He trembled with its urgency, and in that wordless prayer the son, the world child, came nearer to his life and birth.

  In the room where Josui had spent her girlhood Allen lay beside her as her husband. The parents had withdrawn. They had returned after the ceremony at the temple, and in a short speech of welcome Dr. Sakai made it known to Allen that he was now accepted in this house. There would be no further denial. Let him come and go as he would.

  Before Allen could thank him he went away. Mrs. Sakai was not seen, Yumi had served dinner to the bride and groom alone in Josui’s room, and after the meal, still in utter silence and without a smile, she had spread the silken quilts upon the floor mat to make their bed. Then she bowed deeply to each and drew the screens close and put out the lights in the corridors. So they were alone at last and no one stood between them.

  They were not thinking of the child that night. Lovers do not think. They only feel their love, beginning so huge, so vague, pervading every part of the world, and all they see is love and all they feel is love. Then that which is pervading and formless takes form, but it is their own form, the shape of man and woman, the shape of themselves, narrowing and gaining in power and rhythm, in the roar of blood, in the demand of the body alone. The child waiting in the outer air was drawn into being, but they did not know it. The mother was young and a virgin, and it is not every virgin who can conceive so easily as do the mothers of gods. The first visitation is not always enough. Or perhaps the trouble is in the father. Not all fathers are gods. These two did not dream of the child’s soul, a nebula moving closer each instant to a fixed point, a shape of permanence.

  The parents were unaware of the waiting child, this world child. They were aware only of each other, of trembling hands, and of quivering bodies until they fulfilled the revelation of love.

  So far as could be seen, they continued alone in the house. It was a big house and doubtless somewhere in the screened rooms the elders were living apart. But go where they would, Allen saw no one except the silent maid.

  “It is rather wonderful of your parents,” he told Josui the next day, “but I don’t want them to feel they must. You and I could go to an inn.”

  “Oh, no,” she exclaimed. “A strange place? No, since we have no house it is my parents’ wish. We must thank them in some way in the future.”

  Neither of them spoke of children. There must not, of course, be children. He had to go away in a few more hours, she would be left alone.

  “Not for long, sweetheart,” he told her. “Perhaps only a few weeks.”

  But weeks are years when there are only a few hours, a day or two, for love. She wept in the night, the second night, the last night, and love waited upon comfort. She was filled with strange foreboding, premonitions that she would never see him again, that he would be lost at sea, or that the plane would crash against a mountain, or that someone at his home would separate them. This, this was their whole life together and there would be no other, she felt it so.

  He held her in his arms, she curled against him small and crying upon his bare breast. There was no way to make her believe his promises. She was consumed with fear. The separation of the inevitable tomorrow could continue, she insisted. They were to be cut asunder, never again to be joined. She knew it.

  “But how can you, Josui?” he demanded at last in some vexation. “Why should I, of all the other hundreds and thousands crossing the ocean in planes, be chosen to drown, or I be the one to crash against mountains? And how can you suspect my family when you don’t know them, or suspect me, for that matter when you do know me?”

  He had to be even cruel at last. “Josui, do you think it has been easy for me? If I did not love you, would I be here now?”

  There was only one answer to these fears and questions. They renewed their love again and again, flesh to flesh and heart to heart, while the child waited.

  The next day the dreadful parting took place. He would not let her come to the train, nor did she dare trust herself to go. The father and mother appeared for a few minutes, they bowed, the men shook hands, and then the parents went away again, leaving the two alone. He would have sworn that his flesh bled when he tore himself away from her. He felt the pain of raw wounds when he loosed his hands from hers.

  “I will write every day,” he promised.

  “And I, too,” she whispered, her face broken and wet with tears.

  “We will tell each other everything,” he promised. “Think of me, darling, hurrying day and night to get you to America. Now a smile, sweetheart—just for the last minute! Think of last night. Ah, that is my sweet.”

  He rushed away, turned his head to see her standing half fainting in the doorway, rushed to her again, and gripped her hard once more.

  “I mustn’t look back,” he gasped.

  He forced himself to look ahead and caught the train by an inch as it moved out of the station.

  PART II

  MRS. KENNEDY WAS PREPARED for her son’s homecoming. The Colonel’s wife, whom she had never met, had written her fully.

  “Let me write to his mother,” the Colonel’s wife had said to him. “If you write she’ll think I’ve been having an affair with him and that you want to get rid of him.”

  So she had written as one old enough herself to be Allen’s mother, she told Mrs. Kennedy, and doing only as she would like to have been done by, had she been Allen’s mother. He was a brilliant young officer, she declared, her husband’s right-hand man, and one to be saved at any cost. It was difficult to spare him for leave at this moment when so many new policies were being attempted under the changed high directives, but her husband was prepared to make sacrifices.

  Your son is so far above the average [she wrote Mrs. Kennedy] that the usual methods will not do. It is no use just talking about week ends or shackups or any of the ordinary sort of thing. Your son is a Southern gentleman and he thinks even of a Japanese girl with chivalry. Of course he believes that she is a superior girl who would not consider anything but marriage. But I doubt whether he has proposed anything else and of course Japanese are all mad to get to the States. They think it is heaven on earth and I suppose it is, in comparison.

>   Mrs. Kennedy was a woman with reserves and she had answered the letter with proper gratitude but with entire confidence in her son’s good taste and judgment. It was a noncommittal letter and the Colonel’s wife, who had no reserves and was perhaps not even a lady, read it in Tokyo with amazement. She tossed it across the dinner table to the Colonel. “Take a look at that,” she commanded. “Does she or does she not want a Japanese daughter-in-law?”

  The Colonel read it carefully. “Damned if I know. You’d better drop the whole matter. Kennedy said something about not coming back, anyway. I’m going to replace him.”

  Mrs. Kennedy showed the letter from the Colonel’s wife to her husband and then to Cynthia, secretly, because Mr. Kennedy had told her not to show it to anybody. “This town is as leaky as a sieve,” he declared. “For God’s sake, Sugar, let’s keep our family affairs inside this house. Besides, we haven’t heard the boy’s side.”

  Cynthia said very little. She read the letter carefully, and handed it back to Mrs. Kennedy. “Aren’t Colonel’s wives supposed to be—” she paused.

  “What?” Mrs. Kennedy asked.

  “Gossipy.” Cynthia said at last, trying to find the right word and not quite doing it.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Kennedy agreed. “On the other hand, Allen is a man. He was the sweetest little boy. I used to think he would always be different. But he wasn’t. He is just like his father. And he has been cut off from normal society. I wish you would help me, Cynthia.”

  Cynthia opened her blue eyes very wide. “Why, of course I will, Mrs. Kennedy. I’d do anything for Allen,”

  Mrs. Kennedy gave her a quick kiss, standing on tiptoe to do so. When the girl was gone she went about the vast and beautiful house, seeing that every touch was perfected. Allen’s rooms, a bedroom and sitting room on the second floor, she would have had redecorated, had there been time. But there was not time. She could only see that the linen sheets were aired, that the blankets were fresh, that bowls of small bright chrysanthemums stood on the mantel and the desk. At the last moment she picked a yellow rose and put it in a small silver vase on his chest of drawers. Atmosphere was what she wanted, the family atmosphere, tradition heavy and sweet, love expecting everything of the only son and heir. She knew of old that to cross him, to forbid him, would be to lose. His anger must not be roused. She did not mention the Japanese girl again even to her husband. She would forget. The girl did not exist.

  When Allen was there at last she stood in the hall in her silver-gray chiffon tea gown, and held out her arms. He was in them at once, his long young arms were about her, and his face was against her cheek. How he had to stoop, this tall son of hers!

  “I do believe you’ve grown,” she said, half laughing, pushing him off ever so little.

  “You smell as sweet as ever,” he declared. They were never serious with each other, thank God. She made fun of everything, her touch was as light as a hummingbird’s wings.

  “Oh, your face,” she exclaimed rubbing her cheek. “You haven’t shaved since you left Japan.”

  It was true that the delicate skin of her cheek was pink where he had rubbed it. “Give me five minutes,” he cried and went bounding up the stairs. His father was just coming down and they met with a mighty embrace. His father had never let him outgrow that expression of love.

  “Mother’s sending me up to shave,” Allen said. “It makes me feel at home.”

  “I’ll not stop you then,” his father said mildly. That was the way it was. When he came home, however long he had been gone, they were just the same. It was as though he had never left. He dashed into his rooms and stood looking at the beloved vista, this, his private sitting room, there his big bedroom with the glorious window toward the west, and beyond the marvelous bathroom. He and Josui could live in their own home within the home. Perhaps his father had been wise just to choose to live here without toil or worry. He had never seen his father unhappy. In a wretched world this place was as near heaven as could be made and there was no reason why he and Josui should not live in it.

  “Darling,” he wrote to Josui that night. “I am sitting in my own room, the room you will share with me. Let me describe it so that it will be home to you when I lift you over the threshold. Do you know that superstition, I wonder?” So he described the rooms, the house, how his parents had looked, how the view from the window near his desk rolled over hills and valleys even in the moonlight. There were chrysanthemums on his desk, not the big ones of Japan, but small gay tight little flowers. He had dined alone with his parents except for Cynthia, he told her, Cynthia Levering, his old childhood friend, as nearly a sister as she could be and not bear the family name. She was an only child, too, now, for her brothers had been killed in the war, one in the Pacific and one in Germany. “She will be your good friend,” he told Josui. “She is above all else a very kind person. She is only two or three years older than you.”

  He had been surprised to see how handsome Cynthia had grown. Beauty had come to her late. He remembered her as gawky and pallid, her blonde hair straight, her expression timid and humble with the humility of the young girl too tall for her friends. She was not timid any more and the humility had changed to a sweet modesty. Her hair was shining in short curls, her skin perfected, her mouth soft and not too red. She was slender and graceful, she had learned to live with herself as she was, and she held her head high. It was pleasant, too, to see that she was glad to see him, really glad and not afraid to show him. He wanted to tell her at once about Josui, but he had not told his parents and it did not seem fair to tell her first. Besides, she made no effort to see him alone and it would have been pointed for him to arrange it.

  He finished the long letter to Josui and sat with closed eyes for a while, remembering and imagining her. Oh, it was right to have taken her before he left! She was his now and she would come to him here and no one could separate them. He thought of her stealing about this big house, wearing her little Japanese kimonos if she liked, the darling, for she was such a picture in them. He did not want her to be altogether American. He would keep her what she was, an Oriental treasure, someone who could share that part of his life that he could share with no one else in this house.

  He went to the long French doors that opened upon the balcony, and stood looking out into the moonlit night. There were whole years of his life he could not talk about, the war years, when he had been so young and so cruelly separated from life. Scenes were engraved upon his brain, experiences which had shaped him so profoundly that he could never escape from them. He could feel now the miasma of wet jungles, the horrible life of serpents and insects, the constant danger of death not only from the enemy but from disease, and the rottenness of places where the sun never shone. But the memory most fearful was still that of the blade piercing the slight toughness of human skin and then melting into the vital softness beneath. Here where death had never come, still he could not forget.

  He wheeled abruptly and went into the bathroom and turned on the hot and cold water together and let the water roar into the huge tub. He would soak himself clean, and he would sleep.

  “How do you think he looks?” Mrs. Kennedy inquired of her husband.

  “Perfectly well, perfectly happy,” he replied.

  They were going to bed, she in her own big room, he in his. She stood in the open door between, a lace jacket thrown over her silk nightgown. He was tying the belt of his pajamas around his waist.

  “I shan’t say one word,” Mrs. Kennedy declared. “Let him think I don’t know anything.”

  “Very wise,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I have never believed in talk.”

  He went to the door and kissed her nicely. “Better go to bed,” he advised. “You’ve had an exciting day.”

  She lingered. “He is very handsome,” she mused “You know when he was a little boy I didn’t think he would be. I’m glad he looks like you.”

  “Go on,” her husband retorted. “He doesn’t look like me. I look like my mother and the Lambert s
ide. He looks like my father.”

  They kissed once more and went to their separate beds, the door open between. Sometime in the night she would wake and steal across the floor and close it. He never knew when she did. But in the morning it was always closed. What that meant he had never inquired. He did not believe in talking if he could help it.

  “They know,” Cynthia said.

  She had met Allen quite by accident the next morning when she was shopping for her mother, who always forgot the essential article necessary for the day’s work. Cynthia had from childhood made the extra trip to town to get it. It was not very far. Fifteen minutes of walking down a tree-shaded street brought her to the stores. Even after she had her own car she still walked. It gave her the chance to speak to people. So she had met Allen and they walked together, speaking to everybody as they went. She was still not quite as tall as he was.

  Then he had told her about Josui. He had to tell someone. He could not think about her continually, write to her every night and then tell no one. Sooner or later his parents must be told, but it must be properly done, at the strategic time. His mother, he persuaded himself, would not easily welcome his wife, whoever she might have been. There was no reason to think that Josui would be less welcome than another, once his mother understood that he was already married to her, but there was also no reason to think that she would be more welcome for that.

  What he would not acknowledge even to himself was that he wanted Cynthia to know for her own sake. He despised men who imagined that women were in love with them, and yet his sensitive mind told him that had he never seen Josui it might have been easy to think of coming home to Cynthia. Her pleasant and entirely genuine sweetness of manner toward him might mean nothing or anything. He had never cared to discover its depth. It was possible that she was the same to everyone.

  He stopped. “They know?” he repeated, unbelieving.

  “The Colonel’s wife wrote to your mother,” Cynthia said in her calm sweet voice with its slight Southern drawl. She had struggled to overcome the drawl but it was born in her.