Peony: A Novel of China (5 page)

In the silence of the great hall the two elders sat. Wang Ma sighed and filled the tea bowls again. Ezra’s face was grave and Madame Ezra touched her eyes with her handkerchief. After a moment Ezra spoke, and his voice was very gentle. “Naomi, we waited a long time for this only child.”

But she was not to be moved. “I had rather he had never been born than to see him lost to our people,” she said heavily.

Ezra sighed, got to his feet, prepared to go. But he could not leave her so easily. He knew her heart after all these years, the great stubborn hot heart of a Jewish wife and mother. “Ah, Naomi,” he said sadly. “If only you women could let us be what we are!”

She did not reply. She turned her face from him and held her handkerchief to her eyes, and he motioned to Wang Ma. “Take care of her,” he murmured, and went away.

When he had gone Madame Ezra broke into loud sobs, as though she were alone. As though, too, it were the habit of years, Wang Ma moved to her side and took her hand and patted it softly, massaging the fingers and the wrist, pinching the firm flesh gently. One hand and the other she so comforted, and then she pressed Madame Ezra’s temples again and again between her palms, and Madame Ezra was quieted and she leaned back against her chair and closed her eyes. Thus was she soothed.

But under her fingers Wang Ma felt the busy stubborn brain still working. “Ah, Lady,” she murmured. “Let men have their way! What does it matter to women? To sleep—to eat—to enjoy our own lives—that is best.”

They were the wrong words and instantly she regretted them. Madame Ezra’s fiery black eyes sprang open. She sat up and turned on her serving woman. “You Chinese!” she said with bitter contempt. “You Chinese!” She rose as she spoke, and pushed aside Wang Ma’s hands and left the room with imperious speed.

Wang Ma stood watching, then she felt the teapot and found it hot. She filled the bowl from which Ezra had drunk, and taking it in both hands she went and sat down on the high doorsill. There, warmed by the hot sun, she continued to sit, drinking the tea slowly and gazing reflectively into the sunlit court.

P
EONY FACED DAVID. “YOU!”
she cried with soft ferocity. “Not to tell me!” He was fleeter of foot than she, and wile had to get her first to the gate. Once he had looked back and had seen her, and instantly she seemed to give up the chase and had slipped into a side alley of the immense compound. He looked behind him again, and not seeing her, he had smiled triumphantly and had slowed his steps. Then suddenly she was ahead of him in a passageway, and he knew he was outwitted. She stood, her hands outspread to catch him and hold him. He stopped just short of her, folded his arms, and looked down into her reproachful eyes.

“I am not bound to you!” he declared.

Her small lovely face quivered, flushed, and wilted before his gaze like a smitten flower. “No,” she said in a little voice. “It is only I who am bound to you. And—and—you are quite right. You need not tell me—anything.”

He was instantly remorseful. “Now, Peony,” he argued. “I will tell you—but only if I am not forced.”

“It is wrong of me,” she agreed. “I will never do it again. See—you are free!”

She locked her hands behind her back. He put out his arms but she evaded them and stepped aside, and then turned and ran from him. Now it was he who pursued and she who fled … How she loved to run! It was her luck to be bondmaid in this house of foreigners. Had she been in a Chinese house her feet would have been bound small as soon as it was sure she was to be pretty, so that if a son of the house were to love her and want her for a concubine, she would not shame the family by having feet like a servant’s. She ran on, laughing at the sound of him running behind her. He was laughing, too, but they muted their laughter in the secret way of their childhood. He caught her, as he always did, as she knew he would, and she pushed him and twisted herself free—almost, but not quite. His arms were strong. Then her acute ear, quick to hear footsteps and voices, warned her that they were seen.

“Young Master,” she cried loudly. “You must not take your life!”

He dropped his arms, but it was too late. Madame Ezra had seen them.

“Peony!” she said sharply. “You forget yourself!”

“I was holding him lest he throw himself into the well,” she faltered.

“Nonsense!” Madame Ezra retorted. But she wavered. Did the girl lie or was she indeed holding him against death?

David laughed “She’s lying, Mother,” he said robustly. “We were only playing a game.”

Madame Ezra was not pleased. “It is time you stopped playing games with Peony,” she said coldly. She was less pleased than usual to see how beautiful her son looked at this moment. The high color and bold bearing in which she took her secret delight now alarmed her. And Peony, too, was growing dangerously pretty.

“Make yourself ready,” she said shortly to the girl. “You must accompany me to the house of the Rabbi. And you, David, should be at your books.”

She walked firmly down the passageway toward her own rooms. David made a grimace and shrugged his shoulders, and Peony answered with lifted eyebrows and a sigh. Then her little face took on its look of sweetest coaxing. She glanced at Madame Ezra’s back and lingered to put a small hand, flower light, upon David’s arm.

“You will tell me all about her?”

He smiled gloriously, and she smiled back, a tender smile, the same smile, or so it seemed, that he had seen so often upon her face when she looked up at him.

“Everything,” he promised.

They parted and Peony went to her room to prepare for the duty of going with Madame Ezra. It was a small room, set in a tiny court of its own, but opening into Wang Ma’s court, which in turn opened upon a dim mossy passage into Madame Ezra’s own rooms. This little room in which Peony lived had once belonged to a concubine, three generations back, a secret love, scarcely acknowledged, of Ezra’s own great-grandfather. Here, too, Wang Ma herself had lived before she was married to Old Wang by Ezra’s own father. The room had stood empty while Peony was a child, too young to be alone, but when she was fifteen it had been given her. It was a pretty little room, the walls whitewashed and the gray tiles of the floor scrubbed silvery clean. Upon the facing walls on either side of her bed Peony had hung two pairs of scrolls, pictured with the flowers of spring and summer, the bright leaves of autumn, and the snowy pines of winter. These she had painted herself. She had sat in the schoolroom with David and his tutor for many years, her duty to fetch them hot tea and to clean their brushes and grind ink, and she had learned to read and write. This learning, added to her own graceful talent, had made her able to turn a verse as well as David could himself. Thus on the scroll for spring she had written in two long lines of brushed tracery:

          
The peach flowers bloom upon the trees,

          
Not knowing whether the frosts will kill them.

Upon the mimosa branches of the summer scroll she wrote:

          
The hot sun burns, the thunder

          
drums across the sky.

          
The cicadas sing endlessly, unheeding.

Under the scarlet maple leaves she wrote:

          
The red leaves fall, and all the court is still.

          
I tread the leaves and under my feet they die.

Beneath the snow-covered pines she wrote two more lines:

          
Snow covers the living and the dead,

          
The green pine tree, the perished flowers
.

These four poems she read very often, wondering how she could improve them. Whether she would ever be able to make them better she did not know. But at present they reached to the bottom of her heart and made her want to cry.

She moved now in haste to put on a plain dark coat and trousers, to take the peach blossoms from her hair, to put off her gold bracelets. She looked into the small old mirror of her dressing case and rubbed a little rice powder into her skin and touched her lips faintly with red cream. Her hair she made always in a long braid, as all bondmaids wore their hair, signifying that they were not daughters of the house, but at home she kept the braid twisted into a knot over her ear. Now she let it down and brushed the straight black fringe above her eyebrows.

This done, she made haste through the passageways until she came to Madame Ezra’s court. Wang Ma was putting the last touch upon Madame Ezra’s costume. It was rich and individual, and Madame Ezra thought it was entirely Jewish. She did not know that in the generations during which her family had lived in China touches of embroidery at sleeve and throat, folds in the skirt, the twist of buttons and braid, had crept into the costume of her grandmothers.

Peony paused at the door and gave a slight cough and prepared her smile. Madame Ezra did not turn. Usually she was voluble and kindly to her serving maids, but in the last few days, while her mind had been busy with the Passover and all her being was renewed in the faith of her ancestors, she had not been pleased with the intimacy she perceived between Peony and David. True, the girl had been bought as a companion as well as a servant for the solitary little boy he had been, but the years had passed too quickly. She reproached herself that she had not taken heed earlier that they were now grown, her son a man, and Peony a woman. She was inclined at this moment to feel aggrieved and to be harsh toward Peony, who should have understood the change by instinct.

All of this Peony perfectly comprehended, and she stood with patient grace, silent until Madame Ezra might choose to speak. When a gold hairpin slipped from Wang Ma’s fingers she sprang forward as lithely as a kitten, picked it up, and herself put it into Madame Ezra’s hair. In so doing she caught her mistress’s eye in the mirror and smiled. Madame Ezra gazed severely into the wide black eyes of the little bondmaid, and then after a second or two she yielded her own smile.

“You are a naughty child,” she said. “I am very angry with you.”

“Ah, why, Mistress?” Peony asked sadly. Then with her quick frankness she went on, “No, do not tell me—I know! But you are quite wrong, Old Mistress. I know my place in this house. I want only to serve you, my lady. What you bid me do, I will do. What home have I except this house? Can I dare to disobey you?”

She was so pretty, so pleading, so yielding, that Madame Ezra could not but be mollified. It was true that Peony was entirely dependent upon her, and though she knew as well as ever that underneath all the gentleness and sweetness there was something hard and prudent, yet, she reasoned, Peony could scarcely destroy her own welfare. If indeed there were a youthful attachment between the bondmaid and David, Peony would not yield to it if it meant the loss of everything else—as it would, Madame Ezra said firmly to herself. If ever she saw proof that there was more between David and Peony than there should be between a young man and a serving maid, that day she would marry Peony to a farmer.

As well as though she had spoken, Peony knew the thoughts inside Madame Ezra’s handsome head. She had learned so thoroughly the habit of such discovery that she had only to be still, to empty her own mind, to wait, and to receive, and soon into her brain would come on little creeping mouse feet the thoughts of others. To be married to a farmer was the common fate of bondmaids who went beyond their station. She had even less hope in this house than in a Chinese home. The Jews did not take concubines, Madame Ezra had often declared—not the good Jews, at least. Their god, Jehovah, forbade it.

When Madame Ezra did not answer her, she slipped back quickly, and then followed her mistress to the gate. A few minutes later she was in her plain sedan, riding along the street behind Madame Ezra’s own satin-curtained one. She looked through the little pane set into the front curtain and saw a small square block of the street straight ahead. The street was as it had always been, through her life and through the centuries before she was born. It was a wide street, but however wide it might be, it was always crowded with people. On both sides low buildings of brick and stone stood open. They were shops of many kinds, but behind them were homes where men and women and their children lived together, happily or not, but in security. The street was shadowy and cool, for the shopkeepers had stretched mats over their thresholds woven of slit reeds over a framework of bamboo. Water carriers had slopped their wooden buckets as they went, and the wet stones of the cobbled street threw off coolness. Children ran and crawled everywhere, weaving between the people. Housewives bargained with vendors of fresh vegetables and lifted live fish from great tubs, and men went their way to teashops and business. Everywhere there was life, good common life, but she had no part in it, Peony thought sadly.

While her eyes watched the scene she knew so well, her thoughts were busy with herself. The years had passed too quickly, even for her. They had been happy years and good ones, and she had dreaded womanhood and change. She had felt almost a daughter in the house, but not quite, and in the last few days, during the strange foreign feast, she had realized she was alien to this family that had bought her. Compel her mind as she might, she could not remember her own mother’s face or her father’s voice. A castaway child, stolen perhaps from her home, or sold, she had been sold again.

“Who sold me to you, Lady?” she had once asked Madame Ezra.

“A dealer in children,” Madame Ezra had replied.

“Had he many like me?” she had asked next.

“He had twenty little girls, and two boys,” Wang Ma had put in. “I wonder, Lady, that you did not get a boy for our young master.”

“My son’s father wanted the girl,” Madame Ezra had replied. “I believe he took a fancy to Peony because she had such big eyes. You were very thin, child. I remember you ate until we were frightened.”

Riding along in the crowded street, high on men’s shoulders, Peony considered her fate. Outside the house of Ezra she knew no one, she had not a friend. All were strangers to her as were these passers on the street. Tears brimmed her eyes. Where could she ever go to find friends or family? Therefore must she stay where she was and cling to the only house she knew.