The Mother

by Pearl S. Buck

  Then the mother knew the girl was blind indeed, or good as blind, for the trinkets lay bright and plain not two feet from the girl’s face, and she groaned in herself and she said, “You are right, too, child, and it is a bit of silver I had in a ring and I cannot wear now, and so I change it into coin we can use.”

  And in this new sorrow come upon her the woman gave no single thought to the trinkets when they were gone or thought of what they meant. No, she only thought of this, that with all their silvery shining her child could not see them, and the old man took them and hung them in his little case where he kept bracelets and rings and chains for children’s necks and such pretty things, and she forgot all they had meant to her except, now, a shining thing her blind child could not see.

  Yet was there one thing more to do, and she knew that she must do, if so be the child was to be truly blind. Holding the girl’s hand she went along, shielding her from those who passed, for by now the streets were thronged and many came to buy and sell, farmers and gardeners setting their baskets of green and fresh vegetables along the sides of the streets, and fishermen setting out their tubs of fish there too. But the mother went until she came to a certain shop and she left the girl beside the door and went in alone, and when a clerk came forward to know what she would have, she pointed at a thing and said, “That,” and it was the small brass gong and the little wooden hammer tied to it that the blind use when they walk to warn others they are blind. The clerk struck it once or twice to show its worth before he wrapped it, and hearing that sound the young girl lifted her head quickly and called, “Mother, there is a blind man here, for I hear a sound clear as a bell.”

  The clerk laughed loudly then, for well he saw the maid was blind, and he burst out, “There be none but—”

  But the mother scowled at him so sourly that he left his words hanging as they were and gave the thing to her quickly and stood and stared like any fool at her while she went away, not knowing what to make of it.

  They went home then and the young girl was contented to go home, for as the morning wore on the town grew full of noise and bustle and frightening sounds she was not used to hear and loud voices bawling in a bargain and rude thrusts against her from those she could not see, and she put her little foot here and there, feeling in her delicate way as she went, smiling unconsciously in her pain. But the mother grieved most bitterly in secret and she held hard in her other hand the thing she had bought, which is the sign of those who are blind.

  Yet though she had this little gong, she could not give it to the girl. She could not take it that the girl’s eyes were wholly sightless. She waited through the summer and they reaped the grain again, and it was measured to the new agent that the landlord sent, an old man this time, some poor cousin or distant kin, and autumn came, but still the mother could not give the girl the sign. No, there was a thing yet she must do, a prayer to make. For seeing daily her blind child, the mother remembered what the apothecary had said that day, “Some sin her parents did, perhaps—who knows the heart?”

  She told herself that she would set forth to a temple that she knew—not to that wayside shrine nor ever to those gods whose faces she had covered—but to a temple far away, a whole ten miles and more, where she had heard there was a kind and potent goddess who heard women when they prayed bitterly. The mother told her two sons why she went and they were grave and awed to think what had befallen their sister. The elder said in his old man’s way, “I have been long afraid there was a thing wrong with her.” But the younger lad cried out astonished, “As for me, I never dreamed there was aught wrong with her eyes I am so used to her as she is!”

  And the mother told the maid too and she said, “Daughter, I go to the temple to the south where there is that living goddess, and it is the selfsame one who gave the son to Li the Sixth’s wife when she had gone barren all her life long and she was nearing the end of her time to bear, and her man grew impatient and would have taken a concubine he was so angry with her barrenness, and she went and prayed and there came that fine good son she has.”

  And the maid answered, “Well I remember it, mother, and she made two silken shoes for the goddess and gave them when the boy was born. Aye, mother, go quickly, for she is a true good goddess.”

  So the mother set forth alone, and all day she struggled against the wind which blew unceasing through this month, blowing down the cold with it as it came out of the desert north, so that the leaves shriveled on the trees and the wayside grass turned crisp and sere and all things came to blight and death. But heavier than the wind, more bitter, was the fear of the mother now and she feared that her own sin had come upon the child. When at last she came into the temple she did not see at all how great and fine it was, its walls painted rosy red and the gods gilded and many people coming to and fro for worship. No, she went quickly in, searching out that one goddess that she knew, and she bought a bit of incense at the door where it was sold, and she said to the first gray priest she saw, “Where is the living goddess?”

  Then he, supposing her from her common looks to be but one of those many women who came each day to ask for sons, pointed with his pursed mouth to a dark corner where a small old dingy goddess sat between two lesser figures who attended her. There the mother went and stood and waited while an old bent woman muttered her prayers for a son who could not move and had lain these many years, she told the goddess, on his bed, so stricken he could not even beget a son again, and the old woman prayed and said, “If there be a sin in our house for which we have not atoned, then tell me, lady goddess, if this is why he lies there, and I will atone—I will atone!”

  Then the old woman rose and coughing and sighing she went her way and the mother knelt and said her wish, too. But she could not forget what the old woman had said, and to the mother it seemed the goddess looked down harshly, and that the smooth golden face stared down fixed and unmoved by the sinful soul who prayed, whose sin was not atoned.

  So the mother rose at last and sighed most heavily, not knowing what her prayer was worth, and she lit her incense and went away again. When she had walked the ten miles and come to her own door once more, cold and weary, she sank upon the stool and she said sadly when the children asked her how the goddess heard her prayer, “How do I know what heaven wills? I could but say my prayer and it must be as heaven wills and we can only wait and see how it will be.”

  But with all her secret heart she wished she had not sinned her sin. The more she wished the more she wondered how she could have done it, and all her gorge rose against that smooth-faced man and she loathed him for her sin’s sake and because she could not now in any way undo what had been done. At that hour of deep loathing she was healed of all her heat and youth, and she was young no more. For her there was no man left in the world for man’s own sake, and there were only these three her children, and one blind.

  XIII

  NOW THE MOTHER WAS no longer young. She was in her forty and third year, and when she counted on her fingers sometimes in the night how many years her children’s father had been gone, she used the fingers of her two hands and two more over again, and even the years that she had let the hamlet think him dead were more than all the fingers on one hand.

  Yet she walked straight and slight as ever, and no flesh grew on her frame. Others might begin to shrivel or grow fat as the cousin’s wife did each year, and the old gossip, too, yet this woman stayed lean and strong as she had been when she was young. But her breasts grew small and dry, and in the strong sunlight where one saw her face full, there were lines about the eyes from working in the bright hard sunshine, and the skin was dark with the burning of the many years in the fields. She moved somewhat more slowly than she did, too, without the old lightness, for she had never been as she was before she tore that wild life out of her. When she was called for childbirth in the hamlet as she often was now, seeing she was widowed and counted as among the ones not young, she found it hard to move so quickly as she must sometimes, and once or twice a young mo
ther caught the child herself, and once she even let a newborn babe fall to the brick floor and bruise its head, and it was a boy, too, but still no harm was done in the end most luckily, for the lad grew up sturdy and with all his senses in him.

  As her children grew, to them their mother seemed old. The eldest was forever urging her to rest herself and not to heave so at the hard great clods when the land was ploughed but let him do it, for he did it easily now in the strength of his young manhood, and he strove to have her do the lesser lighter things, and nothing pleased him better than to see her sit quietly upon her stool in the shade on a summer’s day sewing, and let him go to the land alone.

  Yet the truth was she was not after all as old as her son would have her. She ever loved the field work better than any and she loved to work there on the land and then come home, her body wet with her clean sweat and the wind blowing cool on that wetness, and her flesh weary but sweetly so. Her eyes were used to fields and hills and great things, and they did not narrow easily to small fine things like needles.

  Indeed, in that house they sorely missed a woman young and with sound eyes, for they all knew now the girl’s eyes were blind. She knew, too, poor maid; ever since that day when she had gone to town with her mother she knew it secretly, even as her mother did, and neither had any great faith in the goddess, somehow, the mother from what she feared of that old sin of hers, and the maid because her blindness seemed to her a destiny.

  One day the mother cried, “Have you used that stuff all gone from the goose quill?” and the girl answered quietly from the doorstep where she sat, for there was this one good she had, the light hurt her no more because she could not see it, and she said, “I have used it to the end long since.”

  And the mother said again, “I must buy you more—why did you not say it sooner?”

  But the young girl shook her head, and the mother’s heart stopped to see her look, and then these words came wildly from those gentle lips, “Oh, mother, I am blind—well I know I am blind! I cannot see your face at all now, and if I went out from our own dooryard across the threshing-floor, I could not see the way to go. Do you not see I never go away from the house now, not even to the field?” And she fell to weeping, wincing and biting her lips, for it was still painful to her to weep, and she would not unless she could not help herself.

  The mother answered nothing. What was there to answer to her blind child? … But after a while she rose and went into the room and from the drawer where once the trinkets lay she fetched out the little gong she bought and she said to the girl, going to her, “Child, I bought this thing against the day—” She could not finish but she pressed the thing into the girl’s hand and the girl took it, feeling quickly what it was, and she held it fast and said in her plaintive way, quiet again, “Yes, I need it, mother.”

  When the elder son came home that evening his mother bade him cut a staff from some hard tree and smooth it to his sister’s hand, so that with her little sounding signal in one hand and in the other the staff she might move about more freely and with something less of fear, as the blind do, and so if any harm came to her, or one pushed against her carelessly or knocked her so she fell, the mother would not be blamed because she had set the sign of blindness plain upon the maid for all to see.

  Thereafter the young girl carried with her when she went outside the door at all these two things, her staff and her small gong, and she learned to tinkle the gong softly and clearly and she moved in a quiet sure way, a pretty maid enough, her face small and plaintive and on it that still look that blindness sets upon a face.

  Yet this blind maid was wonderfully clever, too, in her own way about the house. There she needed no sign or staff, and she could wash the rice and cook it, save that her mother would not let her light the fire any more, but she could sweep the room and the threshing-floor, and she could draw water from the pool, and search for eggs if the fowls laid them in some usual place, and she knew by scent and sound where the beasts were and how to set their food before them, and almost everything she could do, except to sew and work in the fields, and for labor in the fields she was not strong enough, for her suffering from babyhood had seemed to stunt her and hold back her growth.

  Seeing the young girl move thus about the house the mother’s heart would melt within her and she suffered for what fate might befall this young thing when she must wed her somewhere. For wed she must be somehow, lest after the mother died there be not one to care for the maid nor one to whom she truly could belong, since a woman belongs first to the husband’s house and not to that house where she was born. Often and often the mother thought of this and she wondered who would have a maid who was blind, and if none would have her then what would happen to her in the end. If ever she spoke this matter out the elder lad would answer, “I will care for her, mother, as long as she will do her share,” and this would comfort the mother somewhat and yet she knew a man cannot be fully known until it is seen what his wife is, and she would think to herself, “I must find him such a wife as will take good heed of my blind maid and be kind to her. When I go looking for his wife I must find one who will take heed of two, her husband and his sister.”

  It was time, too, the mother found a wife for this elder son of hers. Nineteen years old he had got to be and almost without her knowing it. Yet he had never asked her for a wife nor shown her his need of one. Ever he had been the best and mildest son a mother could have, working hard and never asking anything and if he went to the teashop sometimes or rarely on a holiday in town, although that he never did unless he had some business to put with it, he never took share in any ribaldry, nor even in a game of chance except to watch it from afar, and he was always silent where his elders were.

  A very perfect son he was and with but one fault left now that he had passed the little faults of childhood and it was that he would not spare his younger brother. No, it was the strangest thing, but this elder son of hers, who was so even and gentle with all the world and even with the beasts, so silent he would scarcely say what color he would have the next new coat his mother bought him, when he was brother he was hard upon the younger lad and railed against the boy if he grew slack and played, and he held the boy bitterly to every sort of labor on the land. The house was full of quarreling, the younger lad noisy and full of angry words, and the elder brother holding himself silent until he could bear no more and then he fell upon his brother with whatever he had by him or with his bare hands and he beat the boy until he ran blubbering and dodging in and out among the trees and seeking refuge in his cousin’s house. And truly it came to such a pass as this, that the whole hamlet blamed the elder brother for his hardness and ran to save the younger lad, and so encouraged, the lad grew bold and ran away from work and lived mostly at his cousin’s house, lost there among the many lads and maids who grew there as they would, and he came home freely only when he saw his brother gone to work.

  But sometimes the elder brother grew so bitter in his heart he came home out of time and found his younger brother and then he caught the lad’s head beneath his arm and cuffed him until the mother would come running and she cried, “Now let be—let be—shame on you, son, to strike your little brother so, and frighten your sister!”

  But the young man answered bitterly, “Shall I not chastise him, being older brother to him and his father gone? He is an idle lazy lout, gaming already every time he can, and well you know it, mother, but you have ever loved him best!”

  It was true the mother did love this youngest son the best, and he moved her heart as neither of the others did. The eldest son grew man so soon, it seemed to her, and silent and with naught to say to anyone, and she did not know this was because he was so often weary and that she thought him surly when he was only very weary. As for the girl, the mother loved her well but always with pain, for there the blind eyes were always for a reproach and she never could forget that the goddess had not heard her prayer nor had the mother ever heart to pray again, fearing now that it was her own sin come
down in some way worse than she could bear because it fell upon her child. So it was that while her heart was ever soft with pity still the maid was never any joy to her. Even when the maid came loving and near and smiling and sat to listen to her mother’s voice, the mother rose with some excuse and busied herself somehow, because she could not bear to see those closed and empty eyes.

  Only this youngest son was sound and whole and merry and oftentimes he seemed his father over again, and more and more the mother loved him, and all the love she ever had for the man now turned itself upon this son. She loved him and often stood between him and the elder brother so that when the young man seized the boy she rushed between them and caught the blows and forced her son to cease for shame because he might strike his mother, and then the lad would slip away.

  It came to be that after a while the lad slipped often thus away and from his hiding in his cousin’s house he went to wandering here and there and even to the town and he would be gone perhaps a day or two, and then he would run back to his cousin’s house and come out as if he had been there all the time, his eyes upon his elder brother’s mood that day. And if he did not come, the mother would wait until the elder son was gone and she went to the cousin’s house and coaxed him home with some dainty she had made. But she half feared her elder son too these days and sometimes she would start with him to the field or leave soon and come and give the lad his meal first before his brother came, and he picked the best from every dish and she let him, for she loved him so well. She loved him for his merry words and ways and for his smooth round face and for the same supple, lissome body that his father had. The elder lad went bent already with his labor, his hand hard and slow, but this lad was quick and brown and smooth-skinned everywhere and light upon his feet as a young male cat, and the mother loved him.