Peony: A Novel of China (38 page)

“That Chief Steward is a very devil,” the merchant agreed. “How many families in this city have suffered the loss of their daughters through him! You do well to escape.”

To his wife David also told the truth in a few simple words, and Kueilan was half frightened and yet unwilling to yield to fear. “It might be very well for Peony to be in the palace,” she reasoned. “We would have a friend there and she is so clever—who knows, she might even be a servingwoman to the Empress!”

To this David would not listen. “Peony has been in our house always, and it does not become me to sell her like a slave.” If Kueilan looked at him with suspicion he refused to see it. “Come,” he said. “Hasten yourself, Little Thing! We go tonight whether you are ready or not.”

It was a silent going. The city gate was closed and David had to bribe the gatemen well before they would open the great locks. But once they were open the carts passed through swiftly, and by morning they were well on their way to the canal.

U
PON THAT HOMEWARD JOURNEY
David said little indeed to anyone. The pleasure he had taken in the new countryside when they were going northward he scarcely felt now. The country was as beautiful as ever, and perhaps more beautiful, for every tree and field was at its ripest growth. Wheat had been harvested, and, in the north, sorghum corn stood high. This was the season for banditry, for the corn was so tall that robbers easily hid in it, and he was uneasy until they reached the canal. But good fortune was with them, for though they heard of highwaymen before them, none came near on the days when they passed.

The reason for this was that through some stupidity the robbers had not known that the governor of the province was traveling to the capital and they had taken him to be a common rich man. When his soldiers sprang at them they were so confounded that after a short battle they withdrew in dismay and hid in their caves and hills for a few days. It was held a crime to attack a governor or some high official, and the king of the bandits sent tribute quickly to the governor and cursed himself heartily for molesting so august a personage, and he promised that he would cut off the heads of those who had led the attack, and deliver them to the governor on any day he was ready to receive them. To this the governor replied that the men were to be spared. He set a punishment, nevertheless, that for a month there was to be no robbery whatever along the roads from the capital to the river. Within this month by luck David and his family went southward to the river and took a junk homeward. River pirates there were, but David bade the boatmen use the same flags that he had used before, which had on them the name of the Imperial Court, and under these they were safe.

The journey was slow, for in midsummer the winds are soft and mild, and as they went westward the current of the river was against the travelers. There was time for David to be alone with his thoughts, and he was much alone on the decks, gazing at the slowly moving countryside on either side of the junk. The sun was hot and the boatmen put up a wide awning to shade him from the sun, and beneath it he sat on cushions, in comfort as to body but much disturbed in his mind. This disturbance made him very gentle toward his children and his wife, and to them he gave more heed than usual, listening to their chatter, and courteous to any whim that Kueilan made known. He had through the years allowed the habit of impatience with her to grow upon him somewhat, but now he curbed it, and he answered her gently, even when what she said was foolish. To his sons he made endless explanations in answer to their many questions, and sometimes he even held the end of the sash around his youngest son’s waist, so that the child would not fall into the water. Altogether David was unlike his usual self.

Peony perceived all this, and then with pain she discovered that this new kindness was not given to her. David avoided her, and this she saw plainly as the days went by in the enforced closeness of the junk. He took care not to be alone with her, and if she came out on the deck in the evening, after her charges were ready for the night, David was never there, although the moonlight was splendid upon the river. Day after day went by but David never spoke to her alone, and seldom spoke to her at all except to give her a command concerning his sons or their mother. Peony was wounded to the heart at first, and she thought this change in him must be because it was for her sake he had left the capital when he would have liked to stay longer. She sighed to believe that he was like other men in this, that he loved least that one for whom he must sacrifice. She began to blame herself that she had allowed him to give up anything for her and pride crept into her with despair, and she planned that if this change stayed in him, she would keep to herself, and even perhaps leave his house. But where would she go? She had no answer to this question. I must still stay hidden in his house like the mice and the crickets, she told herself.

If David noticed her silence and her pride, he made no sign. The days went one after the other through the midsummer and they drew near to their home. He sent runners ahead to tell his father that if there were winds they would reach home within seven days, and if winds delayed or if a summer storm fell, it would be at most as many as seven days longer. He was anxious to get home before the late summer season of storms, when all river craft must be ready to seek harbor.

The winds were with them for a few days and they were towed the rest of the journey, and at the end of the tenth day they saw the city walls upon the plains. All were glad to see the shores they knew so well, and Ezra was at the riverbank to meet them, and so were Kung Chen and his sons, and there were mule carts and sedans and carriers.

“Well, my son!” Ezra cried with gladness. He took David into his arms and pressed his cheek against his tall son’s shoulder. “I did not expect you for another half year, but how heartily I welcome you!”

Kung Chen shook his hands clasped together and nodded his head and greeted his daughter and her children and acknowledged Peony, and so they got into carts and chairs and went homeward. The city officials had ordered firecrackers to be lighted at the city gate and at the gate of Ezra’s house. Old Wang and Wang Ma stood holding many feet of firecrackers in strings and they lit them, and thus in the midst of din and rejoicing the family was reunited.

How glad was Peony to be safe inside these gates again! “Everything is the same,” she murmured to Wang Ma when she had stepped into the courtyard.

“There has been one small death,” Wang Ma said. “Otherwise all is well.”

Now Peony had already missed the voice of Small Dog, but she had taken it that the little beast was sleeping somewhere, for she was old and lazy.

“Not Small Dog!” she exclaimed.

Wang Ma nodded. “The creature pined when you went away and would not eat. I tempted her with meat scraped fine to spare her teeth and I bought fresh pig’s liver for her, but she could eat nothing.”

“I wish I had taken her with me,” Peony cried in sorrow.

“She would have longed for home,” Wang Ma replied. “Either way she was doomed to die.”

Peony said no more but she missed Small Dog exceedingly. When she had settled her mistress and the children in their rooms she went to her own small court and the quiet was too heavy for her to bear. She felt cut off from everyone, and she sat down and wept a while softly, sighing now and then. Small Dog’s cushion was still under the table and she looked at it mournfully and asked herself if she should get another small dog. Dogs were many and could be replaced easily and no one cared whether they lived or died. Yet somehow she did not want any dog except the one she knew and had lost, and she cursed herself that she was so singlehearted.

“I am a fool,” she murmured aloud. “I love too narrowly.” She thought of Small Dog, but now her mind went on and she cursed herself that this same narrowness of heart made her cling to David when another woman would have given him up and chosen a good husband for herself and welcomed her children and been merry even though she could not have the man she loved. But all her cursing could not change her stubborn heart. I must put up with myself as I am, she thought mournfully, and when she had wept for a while she washed her face and brushed her hair and changed her garments and went out to do her duty to her mistress and the children.

David sat late that night with his father. They had dined alone together this first night and had promised to dine tomorrow with Kung Chen. Each had news to give the other. Ezra said he was well, but he looked thin, and David, seeing him freshly now, perceived that his father was growing to be an old man. Ezra’s cheeks were lined under his beard and his left eyelid drooped somewhat. He complained of stiffness in his left side and that his left foot dragged when he walked. Yet his eyes were still bold and bright, and his voice was as loud as ever.

“Did the stiffness come slowly or quickly?” David asked.

“I woke up so one morning two months ago,” Ezra answered. “For a few days my tongue was thick and I could not say my words clear. Wang Ma fetched the physician and he gave me an herb drink and I was better.”

“Father, you must let me help you more,” David said.

To this Ezra replied, “I have already done so, my son. While you were away I made you the head of the business, and from now on you are the one to say yes and no and to plan everything. Kung Chen has done the same with his eldest son. You are the partners and we two old grandfathers will stay at home unless we please to give you advice.”

David was moved and proud, and yet a vague sorrow fell on him. This was the beginning of the end of his father’s life. As he himself came into his prime his father must decline. It was the inevitable march of the generations and none could stop its course, but he told himself that from now until the day his father died he would be always gentle to him and he would defer to his wish in everything.

“I miss your mother, my son,” Ezra said suddenly.

He looked at David and his eyes watered and he brushed his tears away with his fist. The hour was late, the house was still, and the great candles flickered in the summer wind blowing through doors open to the soft darkness in the court.

“We all miss her,” David said quietly. “The house has never been the same house since she went away—for any of us.”

Ezra seemed scarcely to hear him. He leaned back and his thick hands clutched the arms of his chair. “I think about our life together, hers and mine,” he went on. “It was not an easy marriage, my son. She was unyielding—until I learned to know her. I could never deal with her twice the same way. She was a woman of many changes. Sometimes I met anger with anger, and sometimes I met anger with love and again with laughter—I had to choose my weapon. I had to be new to meet her newness. Yet underneath all her change there was a purity unexcelled. The heart of her was goodness. I could trust her. God she never betrayed, and me she could not betray. She was a true wife.”

David did not speak. To him his parents had been merely parents, but now dimly he began to see them as man and woman. He was abashed to think of them thus, to contemplate these two from whom he had sprung as separate from him and leading between them the vigorous and private life of a man and a woman.

“She was never stupid,” Ezra began again. “Well, sometimes that was almost too much, for I saw in how many ways she was more clever than I! When I was young this roused my spleen sometimes, but as I grew older I saw how fortunate I was. Look at Kung Chen! A lonely man, eh, my son? He never speaks to me of his children’s mother, but the few times I have seen her—a bit stupid, eh, David? And he is a fastidious man—he cannot go out and pluck wild flowers along the road. No more could I. When a man has known a woman like your mother—body and soul—” Ezra broke off, sighed, and went on again. “While you were gone, my son, and when Kao Lien left me to go westward with the caravans, I had time to myself, and I remembered all my life with your mother. Much comfort she took away with her when she left me, but here is something strange: I have never been devout, as you well know, David, but while she was in the house I felt all was well with my house before God. She was my conscience—which pricked me sometimes and against which I kicked, but which I valued. Now I feel lost. God is far from me—if there is a God?”

He put this as a question and David did not know how to answer it. He kept his silence.

When he did not speak, Ezra began to speak again. “You and I cannot answer that question. By that much we are no longer Jews, my son. I made my choice, you made yours. Would I go back? Ah, but I am what I am, and did I go back I would make the same choice, and so would you.”

“I am not so sure as you are,” David said now. “I could have been one man—or another. Had Leah lived—” He broke off.

“Had Leah lived,” Ezra repeated. He turned this over in his mind. Then he said, “Had Leah lived, perhaps your mother would be living too. Everything would have been different. But first we would have had to be different.”

“We would not have been here,” David said.

Ezra looked across the table at him surprised. “You mean—”

“We cannot live here among these people and remain separate, Father,” David argued. “In the countries of Europe, yes, for there the peoples force us to be separate from them by persecution. We cling to our own people there because none other will accept us, and we are martyred and glorified by our martyrdom. We have no other country than sorrow. But here, where all are friends to us and receive us eagerly into their blood, what is the reward for remaining apart?”

“Indeed—indeed, it is so,” Ezra said. “All that has happened to us is inevitable.”

“Inevitable,” David agreed.

“And your sons, my grandsons, will proceed still further into this mingling,” Ezra went on.

“It will be so,” David said.

Ezra pondered. “Shall we then disappear?”

David did not reply. It was inevitable, as he himself had said, when people were kind and just to one another, that the walls between them fell and they became one humanity. Yet he could not contemplate the far future when his descendants knew him no more, when perhaps they would have forgotten the very name of Ezra, and when indeed they would be as lost as a handful of sand thrown into the desert or a cupful of water cast into the sea. He gazed down the long line of those who would come from his loins and the loins of his sons and his sons’ sons. He saw the faces turning toward him, and they were the faces of Chinese.