Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  “No,” she said again.

  “Not that either?” Kobori murmured.

  They sat in silence, feeling mutually the fearful weight of inevitable birth. She saw him stretching his soul, his heart struggling.

  “And you, my dear,” he said after a while but in the same low voice, “do you still love the American?”

  She lifted her head sharply at the question. It came from Kobori, but she had asked it many times of herself. Yes, she did love Allen, but it was with a dead love. She would always love him, but without hope. They should not have met. They were born apart, they should have lived and died on opposite sides of the world. Allen was not her mate, and she was not his. The gods had put them asunder, but they had disobeyed the eternal laws of the gods. She felt no rebellion and scarcely despair. She felt only a sorrow as deep as her life.

  “It is no use to me to love him,” she said simply.

  They sat in long silence again, each musing. He spoke at last, hesitating, and with great delicacy. “I wish to say something. I do not know how to say it. Forgive me if I should keep silent, and do not.”

  “Please speak,” she replied, not turning her head.

  He moistened his lips. “If ever you wish to return alone to Japan, please return to me.”

  The sweetness of the lilies was suddenly too much and she pushed the bowl away. She understood at once. If she did not have the child, that is, he wanted her for his wife.

  “I have the child,” she said.

  He did not meet her eyes. He looked down at his large pale hands clasped upon his knees. “I wish I could take this child,” he said. “I wish indeed that it might be so. For myself, were I alone, having no parents to consider, no ancestors, I would do so. At least, I believe I could do so.”

  He was honest, troubled, yearning to be generous and certainly to be kind. She understood all this, but her sorrow was not lightened. “I thank you,” she said. “Sometime I may remember this that you have said. I do not know.”

  She got up resolutely. One word more would be too much. Sorrow brimmed her being. She would break if another word were spoken.

  “I must make you some tea,” she said in a bright voice and she moved toward the kitchen. “At least I have tea. I am so lazy that I have not gone out to buy sweetmeats.”

  He let her make the tea, watching her through the open door. It did not occur to him to help her, for he was used to being served, and she did not expect him to be otherwise. She brought in the lacquered teapot and two bowls of fresh green tea, a small luxury which she kept in the house for herself. Green tea, the Japanese tea, was rich with vitamins and she drank much of it. She drank now when she had served him, holding the black and gold bowl in the curve of her hand.

  “Tell me about my parents,” she said. “They have not written to me, though I have twice sent letters to them.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I called upon your father before I sailed and be told me he is still bitter. He does not believe that you should have disobeyed him.”

  She set down the bowl. “Please,” she said bravely, “please tell him he is right.”

  He was amazed. “Josui, you who are so proud!”

  “I am proud no more,” she said humbly. “I cannot fight against the law of America. It is in the hearts of the people here. It is a feeling. They make their laws from their hearts, and they have such feelings. What can I do? Where shall I go that the child may be born? He has nowhere to lay his head.”

  Oh, when she said this, she suddenly lost all her pride and all her control. The dead calm in which she had spent these days broke away from her heart and she began to weep aloud, and terribly, holding her hands to her face and rocking back and forth.

  Kobori was distressed to agitation. He put down his bowl and he stood alone here, wringing his hands. It did not occur to him to touch her. “Now,” he said, “now this is very dangerous for you. Please, Josui, for your sake, this is so bad.”

  He waited, sighing and murmuring, until suddenly she stopped, ashamed. She wiped her eyes on her sleeves and spoke rationally, to his great relief. “You are staying here in America?”

  “For several months,” he replied, relieved. “I shall stay now, of course, until you know what you should do. Please tell me what you do. I beg this, at least. Here is my address. If I go away it is only to some neighboring city for a few days for business, and I shall leave the name of the city, so that you can reach me.”

  She took his card and set it under a small empty box on the end table. “If you do not hear from me,” she said, “it means that I have no need to write.”

  “But indeed you must let me know,” he insisted.

  So she promised, seeing that he would not leave until she did. “Very well, Kobori. I will write to you what I decide. It may not be soon.”

  “I have your promise,” he replied.

  He went away then, careful of his hat, his gloves, his cane. They bowed deeply to each other at the door, and she waited at the door until the elevator came for him and they bowed deeply again and again while the elevator man stared. Then she went back into the room and locked the door. It was now perfectly clear to her what she must do, entirely for Lennie’s sake. There was really no place for him in the world.

  Josui had said, her face flushing with shyness, “Allenn, I do not write to you while you are at home.”

  He had been about to put his clean dress shirt into the suitcase. “Now why not?”

  “I think it is disobedient to your mother,” she had said. “It is to enter secretly the house she forbids.”

  He protested. “You are being absurd. You aren’t angry because I am going?”

  “Oh, no, Allenn. Just I don’t write, for being polite to your mother. I wish to obey her.”

  So he did not expect a letter. At first he had not thought of it. When he entered the great welcoming hall he felt the old childish excitement, the relief, the conviction that here all was well. In the old days when he came home at Christmas from the military school in Lexington, he remembered this easing of the spirit, this blessed relaxation of the mind. Here was peace, here approval, here he was the beloved.

  It was so exactly like the old days that when his mother came with her swift grace through the opened doors of the long living room, he turned toward her with the old compulsive love. She came with arms outstretched, the thin draperies of her silver-gray chiffon gown floating from her arms and foaming about her feet.

  “My dear, dear boy!”

  Her arms were about him, and the familiar fragrance enchanted his nostrils again.

  “Well, Mother—” his hearty man’s voice showed no trace of the quivering boy soul within.

  “Welcome home, darling—”

  “How did you know I was coming? I thought it was to be a surprise.”

  She held him off, laughing, her pretty face, so young under the silvery curls, all alive with triumphant laughter.

  “Your father can’t pretend, not for a moment, not with me. Oh, I knew! What—at Christmas? Darling!”

  The gray chiffon enveloped him again like soft cobwebs. He felt her strong thin fingers twining and holding his right hand. “Come in to the fire. We have not finished the tree. You must reach to the top for the star just as you used to do. I didn’t have a star there all the years you were away. Cynthia’s here for tea.”

  She tossed out Cynthia’s name lightly, leaving him no time to suppose a reason. Cynthia’s here for tea. “Cynthia, here he is. I told you he was coming. I knew!”

  Cynthia was wearing a holly-red jersey with her black suit and she had holly berries in her blonde hair. As usual they met exactly as though they had been together until ten minutes ago.

  “Sit down,” Cynthia said. “I’ve been pouring the tea. Your mother has one of her lazy fits today.”

  “That’s because I’m so happy,” his mother cried.

  They heard the creak of the heavy library door, the shuffle of leather slippers and his father came in. “W
ho said tea? Watery stuff! Tell Harry to mix me a martini. Allen, you’ll have one with me? Leave tea to the ladies.”

  “Very well, Dad.” They clasped hands strongly and parted quickly.

  Harry came in so soon that he must have had the martinis ready and he greeted his young master softly, “Howdy, Marse Allen, it’s good to see you home again. Merry Christmas, suh—”

  Well, such perfection still existed in this little town just beyond Richmond in the state of Virginia, and with all his strength, Allen thought, he would preserve the perfection in a wholly imperfect world. Perfection was rare, it was precious, it must not be lost, island in a stormy sea, safety in the whirl of disaster. He was suddenly acutely perceptive of every beauty in the room, the yellow roses, greenhouse roses that his mother grew in a world where the atomic bomb was also made, the dull-blue draperies drawn away from the western window to show the last of the winter sunset, the fire leaping up from wood laid across bright brass andirons, the satin-covered chairs and sofas, the polished floors and deep carpets, room opening into room, and all shining and clean, apparently without work or effort or cost to any one, though he knew well the cost. But he had the right to his inheritance, unless he chose to throw it away. Folly!

  And Cynthia sat there by the small inlaid rosewood table whereupon was set the silver tea tray that was an heirloom, his to inherit with all else, and she would look like that, whatever her age, for she was blessed, too, with beauty, and here she belonged. The law was here, the protecting forbidding law, and he could take shelter behind it if he must.

  The days passed in the traditional stately march of the days. He set the star aloft and he played child again. They hung their stockings under the white marble mantelpiece that his great-great-grandfather had brought from a house in France long ago, and they laughed on Christmas morning at the freakish gifts, the toy monkey, the tiny bear from Berne, but in the toe of his stocking he found the black pearl tiepin which had been his grandfather’s and this was treasure.

  His mother met his reproachful eyes with a smile.

  “Sometime, so why not now? I don’t believe in heaping everything at once. I’ve told your father that I want to settle on you now what I have to give you, darling. We’ll talk about that one of these days.”

  One of these days was always the next day and the next, and finally delayed because the family lawyer had gone to Miami for Christmas and could not be back until after the New Year, And New Year’s Eve, surely, his mother said, was really as important as Christmas, because of the dance. Cynthia was holding many dances free.

  So it was while he was dancing with Cynthia that this conversation took place.

  “We’ve managed not to talk at all,” Cynthia said.

  “I’ve managed not even to think,” he retorted.

  “Still no plans?”

  “None.”

  “While your mother weaves her webs?”

  “Is she weaving?”

  “Of course! When a woman loves a man, even if he is a son—only of course your mother loves you because you are her son, and she loves you much more than she ever loved anybody—a woman weaves her webs.”

  “Are you a weaver, too?”

  “I try never to be,” she replied almost brusquely.

  He imagined a strange hostility in her blue eyes, she looked at him fearlessly and without evasion, but her eyes were not soft.

  He ought, he told himself as they danced with all the old familiar ease, he ought, of course, to have gone back to New York, certainly not to have waited for an inheritance except that he had some greedy private notion that if he had more money now it would be easier to insist upon his marriage with Josui, easier, perhaps, to build his own house somewhere, change his roots, grow into his own created world. This justified delay, but he wrote to Josui after the dance that night, honestly troubled because he had felt stirred by the nearness of Cynthia, tempted perhaps by her unusual reserve, her steadfast attitude carefully maintained that of course he was married and therefore safe.

  Josui did not reply, but he did not expect a reply. He would join her in a few days, at most. The New Year passed in exchanged visits, house upon house, friends in and out, and he dashing hither and yon between visits to make calls of his own, and never, not once, in any house was there any question asked concerning Josui, or his living away from home, no questions, and only the old sweet welcoming acceptance; the accustomed rapturous cries—“Why Allen, you precious old thing, it’s been ages!” all the high feminine cries, tinkling silver bells, meaning nothing because they pealed for every corner and meaning so much because they spoke a warmth of heart that was true.

  It was a way of life, his way of life, and he could not be exiled from it, even by love. Yet what could he do to be saved?

  In the night, when after another day still no letter had come from Josui, and still he had not telephoned her which he might have done, except she had said that this, too, was disobedience, in the night lying alone upon his boyhood bed, he considered desperately what he might do. It was of no avail now to beseech his mother or goad his father. The law was there, inexorable, beyond them all, sheltering his mother. Upon the law she could and would throw all her guilt and unwillingness. He could see her lovely eyes widen. “Why, Allen darling,” he could even hear her voice. “It’s not my fault, darling! I didn’t make the law.” But others like her had made it.

  He took the only refuge he knew, and this was to stop thinking. He sank back into the comfort and the beauty of the solid and ancient house.

  When Mr. Haynes, the lawyer, came back from Miami he was summoned to the library, and there he heard what his mother had done. She sat tense at the end of the long mahogany table, the winter sunshine falling across the room through the gold velvet curtains that hung from ceiling to floor.

  Mr. Haynes nibbled the air when he talked, a small tight-faced old man, red nosed, and just now peeling from Florida sunshine.

  “Allen, your mother has done a generous thing. She has put the house into your name. It belongs now to you.”

  He was dazed, he stammered out something, “But I thought the house was yours. Dad—”

  His father sat in a chair near one of the tall windows. He said dryly, a dry gray figure in the glowing room, “I gave this house to your mother when we were married. We both understood, of course, that it would go to our eldest son, as it had come to me from my father. I felt that a woman ought to have a house. It is her safeguard against life.”

  “You’ll leave me my corner, darling,” his mother said. “I trust you for that.”

  “I don’t approve of this,” his father said.

  “I don’t want it,” Allen said.

  “Please, darling,” his mother pleaded with him. “I want it to be so.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said again. But he did like it. He looked about the great room that now belonged to him. He might have suspected her of weaving her web, except that the law stood as it had stood before, whatever she did, sheltering her from good and from evil.

  “I can’t live here,” he said abruptly.

  “Perhaps someday you can,” his mother said gaily.

  So, he still unwilling and his father not approving, it was done as so much had been done all his life because his mother wished it. And when it was done he had a strange revolting sense of possession. It would have been his anyway, he told himself, trying not to exult. It was now his only a little sooner. Even if he had built himself a house somewhere, this would have been his, and then he would have had to decide finally and forever where he would live.

  He left that afternoon for New York. It was night when he reached the city, night when his taxi drew up in front of the apartment house. A strange elevator man took him up, a man he had never seen before, someone newly engaged, he supposed, and he did not speak to him. He rang the bell of his apartment, expecting Josui to open the door instantly, and his remorseful heart quickened. Oh, he had a great deal to make up to her somehow.

  Bu
t the door did not open. He rang again, for she might be asleep. She had a kittenlike way of sleeping at any time, curling up on the couch, or even among cushions on the floor. But the door did not open. He had at last to fumble among the keys in his pocket and find his own key and open the door himself. The apartment was dark. The air was close and dry with steam heat. The silence was absolute.

  “Josui!” he called loudly.

  There was no answer. He had turned on the light as he stepped in and now he ran into the bedroom. She was not there. The bed was neatly made, the floor was clean. He flung open the closet door and saw only his own garments hanging there. She was gone.

  The conviction fell upon him with terrifying weight. She was gone! How could he find her? He knew so well the possibilities of despair in her Japanese heart. She had reached some ultimate unknown, hidden from him under her careful pleasantness, her dutiful sweetness. What she had seen, how much she had comprehended, he would never know. He sank down upon the edge of the bed, suddenly faint, overcome with grief and self-reproach. Then he hid his face in his hands and cursed himself in his heart, not because she was gone but because, in the midst of remorse and consternation and shame, he knew that he was glad she was gone.

  PART IV

  JOSUI WALKED DOWN THE street quietly. Every day now while she waited for Lennie to be born she took long quiet walks, speaking to no one, and none speaking to her. She remembered this street. It was surprising how much she remembered of Los Angeles, how all came back to her. It was familiar and yet it was not home, for more vivid than anything else, she discovered, was the violent departure, the anger and fury of her father when he knew that they must leave the city. She had walked once to see the house she remembered so well, it was occupied now by a cleanly placid Negro family. She did not go in, but she saw the children playing in the small yard where she had used to play with Kensan. Even their old swing was there; her father had used metal ropes, and they were as good as ever. The little dark children were screaming with joy, crowding the swing.