Peony: A Novel of China (26 page)

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I saw her. I had forgotten how beautiful she is.”

“She is too small?” Peony prodded.

“A little thing,” David said, “not taller than you. But I like small women.”

“Her eyes—they are as big as mine?”

Now Peony’s chief beauty was her eyes. They were apricot-shaped, the lashes were straight and soft and long, and the color of the iris was a deep warm brown, not quite black. Looking into these eyes, David was constrained to remember Kueilan’s eyes, and since he had passed very near her, he said, “Hers are the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.”

At this Peony dimpled and she put her handkerchief to her face to hide her quickening smile—and her tears. “Did you speak to her?” she asked next.

“Yes,” David said. “When she passed to go into the inner temple, she saw me.”

“And you said?” Peony hinted.

“Only that I hoped she would forgive me because I had come to see her.”

This David said very fervently and he sat down beside the table and put away all mischief. “Peony,” he said gravely, “you know I cannot marry as ordinary men do. If I choose her for my bride and not Leah, I must wound my mother and the Rabbi and perhaps even my father.”

“Your father thinks only of you,” Peony put in.

“Ah, but among our people the women are stronger than the men,” David said, “and what my mother will do, I do not know.”

“Does Leah know—of this other one?” Peony asked.

“No,” David replied. He looked rueful. “And I have given her reason to think—” He shook his head.

Peony, who had been standing all this time, now sat down opposite him at the table.

“You have let Leah think you—love her?” So Peony asked in a small frightened voice. Then she hurried on. “How can that be true? You have not spoken to her while you were learning the book. The old teacher sat between you.”

“Once, in the peach garden—” David said, blushing heartily.

“In the peach garden?” Peony echoed. “What did you do?”

“It was the day after the caravan came,” David said unwillingly. “We were all somehow excited.”

“She came to you in the peach garden?” Peony exclaimed. Her divining mind ran ahead. “And do you think she would be so bold as to come to you of her own will? Surely it was your mother who bade her come.”

David stared at her, suddenly perceiving that indeed this might be true. “If Mother—” He struck the table with his fists and Peony cried out and drew away the mended fan.

David leaned back, his eyes full of fury. “I shall tell my mother—”

But Peony looked at him over the carved fan, which she held to her face because she loved the scent of sandalwood. “Why need you say anything?” she coaxed. “Let me go to your father and tell him what you feel. Come, I will be the marriage maker for you!”

But David shook his head again. “Nevertheless, it is not honorable for me to allow Leah to remain confused,” he said. “I must think of what to say to her.”

“Say nothing,” Peony pleaded. “What is not said need never be unsaid. If it is put into words, then all is hard and fast. Oh, and she will be very bitter against you.”

“Leah bitter?” David repeated. “Ah, there you are wrong! That is what hurts me. She is so good. For her own sake—not my mother’s—I wish with all my heart that I could love her.” He broke off again, hesitated, and went on, half talking to himself, “I could have loved her, perhaps—had she simply been a woman. But she is much more.”

He thought Peony too childlike to understand what he meant, but Peony did understand and she was shrewd enough to keep silent. Leah was more than a woman—she was a people and a tradition and a past, and did David marry her he espoused the whole, and to that he must return. He could not be himself or free, were he to return, for then must he become part of the ancient whole and bear upon himself the weight of their old sorrows. But Peony did not tell him this. Instead she skipped her feet and clapped her hands and pretended to her usual childishness.

“Let me tell your father!” she begged.

And David, his young face shadowed with vague pain, smiled a little sadly. “What can my father do for me?” he inquired. “He was caught as I am now.”

“Ah, but he had no one to save him,” Peony said gently. “There was no orchid flower in his youth. Think of that little one who sits thinking of you now. Do you know she thinks of you? Ah, yes, you do! Let me tell your father!”

At last, listening to her soft voice, he nodded, and she went quickly lest he call her back. Be sure she went straight to Ezra, and she found him sleeping in his reed chair, his fan resting on his stomach and his legs outstretched. He was snoring and for a while nothing she could do would waken him. She coughed, she sang, she called in a soft voice, careful not to wake him too suddenly, lest his soul be wandering and not come back to his body. At last she spied a cricket on the stones and she picked it up by its jointed legs and put it in Ezra’s beard. There it was so dismayed that it began to squeak dolefully, and Ezra woke and rolled his head and then combed his beard with his fingers and found the cricket and threw it out.

“I saw the naughty mite leap into your beard, Master,” Peony said sweetly, “but I was afraid to wake you.”

“I never had this happen before,” Ezra said in surprise. He sat up, stretched himself, yawned, and shook his head to stir his brain. “Does it have a meaning? I must ask a geomancer.”

“It means good luck, Master,” Peony said. “Crickets come only to a safe, rich house.”

She poured a bowl of tea from the pot on the table, and this she now handed him with both hands, and then, picking up the fan from the floor where it had fallen, she began to fan him. When he seemed himself she began her news.

“Master, I must confess a fault.”

“Another one?” he asked. He yawned, rubbed the crown of his head, and smiled.

“My young master—your son, sir—” Here she paused.

Ezra was instantly alarmed. She looked too happy. Could it be possible that David had been so foolish as to return her love? It would throw the house into turmoil. A bondmaid! What would Madame Ezra do?

Peony caught the terror in his eyes and tried to smile. Well she knew what he was thinking and her heart quivered. No one, not even this good master of hers, whom she loved as the only father she knew, thought of her as more than a gentle servant, one fit for usefulness and pleasure but no more.

“Do not fear,” she said sweetly. “It is not I whom your son loves.”

This she said, knowing very well that it was within her reach to make David love her. His heart had denied Leah, and he had not yet accepted Kueilan, and into that emptiness she might have stepped, and his heart might have enclosed her. But she was too wise. Never would she be given the place of a wife, and even if she were, David’s life could have no peace. She loved him too well to see him wretched, and she had been reared in obedience to those above. None could be happy if the proportions were ignored. It was not her fate to be the daughter-in-law in this house. No, she was like the little mouse that came out of its hiding place and danced solitary in the sun. So must she find her joy alone, sheltered under the vast roof.

“Then whom does my son love?” Ezra asked sternly.

Peony lifted her head and looked at him straightly with soft eyes that seemed as honest as a child’s when she made them so.

“He still loves that little third lady in the house of Kung,” she said.

Ezra looked away from her and he did not answer. He sat pulling his beard and sighing and fingering his lips and thinking this way and that and seeing no light anywhere. He discovered only this longing inside himself, that his son might marry whom he pleased and for his happiness.

Have I not been happy with my Naomi? he inquired of his own heart.

He had been happy. If he had not loved Naomi when they were married, neither had he greatly loved any other woman. No, he had not loved Flower of Jade—not enough to give up his parents’ favor for her sake. Had David said he loved Peony, he would have chided and forbade, as his father had done in his own youth. But a daughter of the great Chinese house of Kung could not be despised. She was David’s equal in all—except in faith. Yet many Jews had married Chinese wives and they had not ceased altogether to be Jews. He would put it so to Naomi.

Now Ezra was a man who had to do a thing as soon as he thought of it, and forgetting Peony he got impetuously to his feet and went in search of his son’s mother, leaving Peony to stand and wonder how much she had done. She followed him at a little distance and took her place behind the cassia tree. As for Ezra, he found his wife in her own rooms and in a very ill humor. This he saw as soon as he came to the door, but he supposed that her mood was because of some household matter. Madame Ezra was a very shrewd good manager in her own house and she could be downcast over the theft of an egg or the breaking of a dish. She looked at Ezra coldly when he came in.

“You did not go to the shop today,” she said.

He tried to smile as he came in and sat down on the chair opposite her and across the table. “No, for I came in very late last night,” he confessed. “Kung Chen invited me to see the moon. He brought his two sons and David went with me.”

“How you look!” she exclaimed. “You are yellow as sulphur!”

“Come, come,” he retorted. “I am not so bad.”

“Blear-eyed,” she went on severely, “your hair a crow’s nest! Did David drink too much?”

“I have not seen him this morning,” Ezra said.

She pursed her lips. “I have been talking to Leah,” she said.

Ezra threw her a shrewd tender look from under his bushy brows. “Ah, Naomi,” he sighed, “why not let the boy alone?”

“I do not know what you mean,” she said angrily.

“He does not love Leah,” Ezra went on. “If he marries her it is only to please you, and what happiness can there be for either of them?”

Madame Ezra’s handsome face grew red. “David knows nothing about women,” she declared. “He is as silly as you were when I married you.”

“I was much more silly,” Ezra said gently. “I was clay in your hands, my dear.”

She was unwilling to let her anger go down. “Besides, Leah loves him,” she said.

“Then I pity her,” Ezra replied.

“Why?” she turned her head quickly to look at him again. “Why should you pity her?”

Ezra said, “I did not—love anyone else—exactly.”

Their eyes met and each looked away. There had been an hour years ago, in this very room, when she, a proud young woman, exceedingly beautiful and stern of faith, had accused him of stealing into a bondmaid’s room. Both would have said they had forgotten it, but neither had forgotten.

“If you mean Peony—” Madame Ezra said thickly.

Ezra shook his head. “No, I do not mean the bondmaid. I mean the daughter of Kung Chen.”

Madame Ezra rose as once long ago she had risen, and she looked down upon him. “No,” she cried, “never! I will not allow it. Why do you speak of her again?”

But Ezra was not now that young peace-loving amiable man. He had grown stout and strong, and after these years of living with her, and learning to love her at last, he could hold his own with her.

“Ah, Naomi,” he said gently and cruelly, “when will you ever learn that life does not wait for your allowance?”

With these words he turned away and left her. Peony, behind the cassia tree, pondered what she had heard. Should she return to David and tell him? But what had she heard except the old quarrel between these two elders? Better, then, would it be for her to wait until the quarrel was resolved, as Heaven might will.

She slipped from behind the tree and returned to her own room.

Madame Ezra had goaded Leah to despair. She had not meant to do so, but in the exasperation of her own fear she had harried and blamed and driven until Leah was terrified. This house, which had promised such shelter, was not secure, after all her hope! Her mother’s friend, the one nearest to her mother, was angry with her. What would happen to her if Madame Ezra sent her away? She saw the dreariness of her life stretching ahead in her father’s little house. When he died, she would be alone, with nothing except Madame Ezra’s angry charity. No, she would be worse than alone. Aaron would be there. In fear and despair she gave over trying to defend herself and she ended by utter silence. Whatever Madame Ezra said she did not answer. She stood, her head bowed while Madame Ezra talked on and on. Her hands clasped before her were so cold that they seemed frozen together. Her whole body felt bruised and heavy and her mind was numb.

When Madame Ezra shouted at her at last, “Leave me—and do not let me see your face again for a while!” Leah had turned and walked away without knowing where she was going.

She had no anger against Madame Ezra. She understood too well the agony of heart that had made the warm good woman fall into such fury. Madame Ezra was in despair, too. It was only despair that made her so cruel—despair and love. Madame Ezra loved David better than she loved anyone, better even than she loved God, and for this reason she wanted to keep her son, to keep him in the faith of her people. Here in this heathen land David would be lost to her if he were not kept in her faith. In her dreams he was the leader who might one day lead them all home again. All this Leah knew, and she saw into Madame Ezra’s heart clearly and nothing she saw made her angry because she understood all.

No, it was not Madame Ezra who had been wrong, but she herself, Leah, who had failed. She had not been able to make David love her and want her for his wife. How could she blame David, either, she asked herself humbly? She had done nothing in her life except tend a house for two men. She lifted her hands and looked at them. Wang Ma had taught her how to rub oil in them and she had tried to do it faithfully, but work and poverty had made them big and it was too late to change that. She had tried to learn the Torah, but she kept thinking and dreaming of David, as he sat there. Not once had he looked at her or showed a single sign of remembering the one day when she had moved his heart, the day the caravan came, when God helped her. But afterward she had done nothing—she had not even sought God’s help. Instead she had dreamed away the days, foolishly believing. Now, walking blindly along passageways and verandas and through courtyards, seeing nothing, she began to pray half aloud, “O Jehovah, our God, the One True God, hear me—and help me.”