“I just picked up the towel as I came through the bathroom,” Cynthia said. “But then maybe I did take it because it was green. Anyway, I wouldn’t have chosen blue, let’s say. Maybe it was conscious.”
“Fully conscious as usual,” Allen suggested, still teasing.
“Maybe.”
He lifted himself to his elbows. “How foolishly we talk!”
“We always have,” Cynthia agreed. “I remember when you were about ten I used to think you were the silliest boy I knew.”
“But you liked me?”
She hesitated, always wary. “Sometimes maybe I did.”
The wariness irritated him and he seized it suddenly, determined to grasp it, to crush it as one does a thistle if one must.
“Look here, Cynthia, it’s about time we came to grips.”
She rubbed her blonde short hair furiously without answer.
“Cynthia, put down that damned towel,” he commanded, and leaning toward her he seized one end of it and jerked it from her hands. She caught it and held it and they tugged.
“Silly again!” she cried.
He let go his end abruptly. “All right, but I am tired of the way you behave toward me. You know perfectly well what I want to say and you won’t let me say it. You can’t fool me—I know you too well.”
She threw down the towel. “All right—say it. Let’s get it over.”
“Cynthia!”
Her blue eyes were burning, her lips were pressed together, and he felt vaguely frightened. Had he been too sure?
“Say it,” she commanded.
“Damn you, I will,” he said, suddenly angry. “I want you to marry me. You know that. You’ve known it a long time.”
“All right, I don’t want to marry you. It’s time you knew.”
She flung the words at him and he could not receive them, he heard and he could not believe. He had counted on her, he had thought for weeks now that she would marry him. Because of him, he thought, she refused all other lovers.
“I cannot think you mean what you say.” He was suddenly dignified, he sat up and brushed the bits of grass from his bare legs.
Cynthia stayed the drying of her hair, she let the green towel fall, and looking down at him sorrowfully, she wondered indeed why the very possibility of love was gone. She was not articulate even when she was alone, she did not examine her motives, she was a creature of attractions and repulsions, and she had not for months found him attractive. The old habit of companionship held but the pleasure was gone. There was no more excitement in his presence.
“I am afraid I mean it,” she said wistfully. “I wish I didn’t.”
He knew then that she did not love him, impossible though this was, made for each other as they were, so his mother had always said and his mother was right.
“I cannot accept it,” he said gravely. “I realize now that our marriage is what I have lived for all these years. If you are thinking of Josui—”
“I am thinking of her,” Cynthia said.
“You need not,” he told her. “It is over. It is as though it never was. I wonder that I ever let myself be caught. I was away from home so long and though this may not mean anything to you, Cynthia, yet I hope it will—I never went about with other Japanese women as some or most of the men did.”
He could not be sure she was listening. Her hair drying in little curls about her face gave her an air of fresh almost childish grace. She stood as still as a statue, the green towel trailing from her hand.
She said, gazing across the lawns, “I think I know why Josui left you. I think she found she was going to have a baby.”
“No!” he cried. “No, that at least is not true. She would have told me.”
“I don’t think she would tell you,” Cynthia said, almost dreamily. “I think she just wanted to get away and be alone somewhere because she must have known that if your mother didn’t want her, she wouldn’t want the baby.”
“Stop blaming my mother!” he cried passionately. “It wasn’t her fault and you know it. You know there is a law—”
“Oh, pish!” She threw down the towel and leaning against the sycamore tree she folded her arms. “As if Virginia were the only state in the Union!”
“My home is here,” he said.
“Oh, pish,” she cried again but the tears came to her eyes.
He got up when he saw the tears and went over to her with his arms outstretched. “Cynthia, darling—”
She drew back, she cried out against him. “Don’t touch me—I can’t bear it!” And stooping she caught up the green towel and ran across the lawn to the gate in the low stone wall which opened to the grounds of her father’s house.
He stood watching her flying across the grass, such a desolation in him as he had never dreamed of. Now actually his world had come to an end. When he left the apartment that day months ago he had been wretched enough, his head aching so that he was barely conscious enough to drag himself homeward for healing. Cynthia, that was what he had thought, Cynthia was at home, waiting for him. Given a decent interval, a time for wooing, weeks in which to forget and to persuade himself that he had not really loved Josui at all, he would take up his life again and be whole. Now he could never be whole. How could they go on living, she on the other side of the stone wall, and he on this?
It was not to be endured. He walked slowly across the grass to the house and nearly ran into Harry, bringing a silver tray of cold tall glasses. He suspected the hand of his mother and he ordered the old man sharply, “Take those back into the house, Harry. Miss Cynthia has gone home.”
He strode ahead, and found his mother at the door, hovering, anxious, he could see. Better to have it all over with at once!
“Mother, I want you to know once and for all and then please don’t speak of it, I have asked Cynthia to marry me and she has refused.”
“Allen!” she cried in a whisper. “Why?”
“She gave no reason.” He made a thin smile. “Perhaps I am not attractive to her.”
He stood looking down upon her, tall, handsome enough to break his mother’s heart, she thought, and behind his pride she saw his agony. “I think I’ll go back to the army. Mother,” he said uncertainly.
“Oh, darling,” she sobbed and put out her hands.
“Please,” he said, and refusing her he turned away and mounted the stairs to his own room.
Dr. Steiner sat with a huge white bath towel across her knees. “Now,” she commanded. “Lift him up, Mrs. Markey. Sit him here upon my knees. I dry him, I put the powder on him—so.”
Mrs. Markey, a thin elderly woman in a neat gray calico dress sprigged with small white flowers, lifted Lennie carefully from his bath and set him upon the expanse of the waiting lap. He sat as erect as he could and smiled at Dr. Steiner bravely, though uncertainly. Unless he was in pain, which was never unless one of these two awkward and loving women stabbed him with a pin or delayed his bottle, he smiled at either or both of the faces. His Asian eyes, large and softly black, the slightest slant enhancing their size, were fringed with those extravagantly long and curled-up lashes, never seen on Asian eyes before. His sturdy upright body, small but fat, his square shoulders, his exquisite petaled hands, his little face amiable and gay, his mobile mouth and turned-up nose, sent ecstasy through Dr. Steiner’s blocky frame. She paused in her meticulous and scientific drying of the beloved child.
“Mrs. Markey,” she said in her lecturing voice, “observe, please, Lennie’s hands. See how the fingers assume such positions. The first and the fourth fingers outspread with the thumb, the second and third folded, it is the movement of the dance in Burma, also in Siam, from there translated to other countries, doubtless also Japan. That is to say, the creators of the Asian dance forms took the first movements of the living child as the primary expression of the human hand.”
Mrs. Markey was an unlearned woman, but she looked respectfully at Lennie’s hands. They were flying free as birds, he was all but dancing upon the secure
bottom of his seat, trying, it seemed, to rise into the air if he could, He was bright with dimples and smiles, as vivid as flowing water and sunlight, different, as she well knew, from her own somewhat stodgy babies, one of whom, grown to manhood, lay moldering and undiscovered in an island jungle. Neighbors, when she boasted of Lennie, said to her, “How can you be so crazy about a Japanese baby?”
“Lennie ain’t Japanese,” she retorted. “He’s different from any baby I ever did see.”
“Especially,” they said cruelly, “when your son was killed by a Jap.”
She still bled at heart when her Sam was mentioned but she said, “It wasn’t Lennie that did it, for sure.”
But how could stupid neighbors understand how she felt?
An alarming change now came over Lennie. One minute he was as bright as the morning and then suddenly a look of consternation spread over his small intelligent face. He looked reproachfully at Dr. Steiner whom already he recognized as the central figure in his world. His rose-red mouth quivered, large tears hung on his lashes—a new gift, this accomplishment of tears.
“Quick,” Dr. Steiner shouted in agitation. “He grows hungry. We waste too much time. Yes, yes, my wonderling! The bottle, Mrs. Markey!”
Mrs. Markey ran for the bottle. Dr. Steiner felt it carefully when it was in her hand. It was not cold, not hot. She set it down and slipped a small short-sleeved shirt over Lennie’s head and pinned a diaper about his fat and compact thighs. He barely endured the delay, exerting the greatest effort of will, his feet and hands in a fury of flight.
“Now, now,” Dr. Steiner said in apology; “I am too slow, I know it. Here is the bottle.”
He stretched out his hands, far too early for his age, as she noted, he grasped the nourishing shape and inserted it into his mouth, where now was concentrated all the pain and ache of his hunger. He lay back upon the pillow of Dr. Steiner’s large forearm, his body stilled in fulfillment, and he gazed contemplatively at her kind big face, bent above him. Small noises which he ignored were simply Mrs. Markey emptying the bath and removing the remnants of the daily ritual of cleaning, while Dr. Steiner, as usual when all was at peace, discoursed on Lennie.
“I have yesterday completed the tests, you understand, Mrs. Markey?”
“Did you, now,” Mrs. Markey murmured rebelliously. She considered it cruel and even wicked to test so tiny and perfect a creature, as if Lennie needed testing, as if anybody couldn’t believe that he was the finest child anybody ever saw.
“I finished all tests, including neurological,” Dr. Steiner said in her loud decisive voice. “His intelligence quotient, I like to tell you, is the highest I have ever found in a human being this age, wonderful high, indeed.”
“I wish you wouldn’t just call Lennie a human being,” Mrs. Markey said sharply.
Dr. Steiner stared at her. “Why not?” she demanded.
“It sounds like he was just ordinary,” Mrs. Markey said. “He ain’t only a human being. He’s the cutest little baby, the darlingest little boy.”
Lennie, hearing her voice, slanted his eyes toward her, and she became maudlin with love,
Dr. Steiner rumbled out laughter from her abdomen. “Markey, you don’t like him.”
Mrs. Markey put her hand in front of her mouth to hide her broken teeth when she felt compelled to smile. “I dunno why it is—I dunno, with all the children I’ve had, too, and one of them gone forever, and still when this here little Lennie looks at me, I feel like meltin’ ice inside.”
Lennie pushed away the bottle, milk ran down his chin, he smiled the smile of an angel in heaven and turned with interest to the big woman. What would she say to this?
Dr. Steiner looked down into his laughing face. She thought suddenly of little dead babies, starved, killed, bayoneted, tossed into heaps, babies who died because of what their parents were: Jews, Catholics, rebels, the hated, the feared, the despised. She could not bear to know that Lennie saw these memories even in her eyes. He was so sensitive, so wise, in his brain were garnered the gifts of all the world. She lifted him against her shoulder and felt his soft red-brown hair against her cheek. Already this baby was strong, calm, humorous, intelligent. She recognized him for what he was and she humbled herself before what he was to be, she the chosen one, weird old virgin that she was. Ignorance could not discern him, the ignorance of the narrow in mind, the small in heart, but she, she could know. Among all who were lost, this child she had saved.
“What flowering,” she muttered, “what flowering is here!”
And she sat, triumphant, rocking to and fro, gently patting Lennie’s back.
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning
to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
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