Peony: A Novel of China (25 page)

Waiting became more than she could bear, and she went to find out what she could, by any means. She ran on noiseless feet and hid behind a great cassia tree in Madame Ezra’s court. It leaned against the window that was open, for the morning was hot and still. Hidden there, she heard Madame Ezra’s voice speaking firmly and clearly to Leah, in these words:

“How can you say that nothing has happened between you and David? I saw you with my own eyes, once, in the peach garden. Certainly you stood very close together.”

Leah’s voice came rushing softly, full of agitation. “How can I help it, Aunt, if—if—nothing more happened? That once—well, yes, we were very near.”

“All these days you have been sitting together over the Torah,” Madame Ezra cried.

“He has scarcely spoken to me.” Leah’s voice died away in this confession.

Madame Ezra flew into sudden anger. “It is your fault, Leah! You never try—you simply wait.”

“What can I do but wait?” Leah asked.

Peony listened, her black eyes sparkling, her red lips curving. Ah, then, it was not decided! David did not love Leah! Ah—but what if he did? She slipped from behind the cassia tree and ran to David’s rooms. The sitting room was empty, and she put aside the curtain and peered into his bedroom. He lay on his bed still asleep. The noon sun poured into the room. She had drawn his bed curtains last night herself when she made the room ready for night, but he had put them back behind the heavy silver hooks. He lay there in his white silk sleeping garments, his arms flung wide and his head turned toward her on the pillow.

Her heart beat with joy. It was not too late. The Rabbi was gone, and there was no betrothal. Joy ran in her veins and curved her lips and shone in her eyes and danced in her body. It was never too late for happiness.

She stole across the room and knelt by his bed. “David!” she whispered. “David!”

He woke, smiled, and stretched out his arms to her and caught her shoulders. “How dare you wake me?” he demanded, still no more than half asleep.

“It’s noon,” she whispered. “I came to tell you something—something wonderful!”

“What is it?” he demanded.

But she delayed out of sheer joy. “The sun is shining into your eyes,” she said. “Why, they’re not black—there’s gold in the bottoms of them!”

“Is that wonderful?” he asked, and he laughed aloud and waked himself with his own laughter.

“The sun shines into your mouth,” she went on, “and it is as sweet as a pomegranate.”

“For this you waked me?” he demanded. He sat up now, wide awake.

“No,” she whispered. “David, listen to me!”

She caught his hand and held it against her breast. “David, at noon—
she
—is going to the Buddhist temple to worship and give thanks. She has been ill.”

She felt his hand grow tense. “You did not tell me,” he said.

“I did not want to tell you,” she said. “She is well again—really. David, you can see her for yourself.”

His eyes were fixed on hers, and she went on quickly. “If you get up now I will bring you something to eat, and you can enter the side gate of the temple and meet her as she goes to the Silver Kwanyin in the South Temple.”

“But she will know I came to see her,” he said shyly.

Peony laughed. “How that will please her!” she said with mischief. She put down his hand, and rose to her feet and touched her finger to her lips. “I’ll be back with hot food.”

She ran away. Ah, but this would take quickness! She stopped only to find her purse and then she ran out of the Gate of Peaceful Escape and down the alley to the house of Kung, and there she asked for Chu Ma and found her at her noon meal. The fat old woman held a huge bowl of rice to her mouth and she pushed in the mingled rice and meats and listened to Peony.

“You must persuade her to be there, mind you, in the court of the Silver Kwanyin, and he will be there within the hour.” Peony poured this all into a breath.

“But if her mother forbids?” Chu Ma asked.

“Tell your young lady to weep, to scream, to threaten anything—tell her to say she has a pain in her breast and that she wants to pray. He sends you this.”

She emptied her purse into Chu Ma’s hands, and then tore at her own ears and took off her jade earrings. “And I give you these.”

Chu Ma put the bowl on a table and nodded and Peony flew homeward again. In a few minutes she came from the kitchen with a covered porcelain vessel full of hot rice gruel, which was always on the stoves, and a manservant followed with the small meats and salt dishes for David’s breakfast. She trusted that David had loitered even more than usual in dressing himself, and this was true. When she entered his sitting room, he had still not come in.

“Young Master!” she called.

“Shall I wear red or blue?” he called back.

“The wine red!” she replied. Blue was the color he wore to the synagogue and nothing must remind him of that now. She knew the subtle influence of colors, how gray can subdue a man’s spirit, how blue uplifts it and sends it wandering, how red, the wine red, holds it to the earth.

Soon he came out, looking so beautiful that she could have wept. His dark head was bare; above the white lining of his robe his face showed brown and red and full of health.

But she subdued herself. “Come,” she said, “there is too little time.” She uncovered the bowls as she spoke, and he sat down. He ate in silence and he pondered. Had it not been for all that happened to him yesterday he could not have yielded to Peony now. For it was not with great desire that he longed again to see Kueilan. He remembered the pretty Chinese girl with warm pleasure but not with urgency. No, he wanted to see her today at least for his own defense against himself. He knew that Leah was here, and he thought the Rabbi was still here, and he knew his mother was as strong as ever. He needed time against them, time to make up his mind, to be himself before all else. Last night on the lake had calmed him and taken the soreness from his soul. This morning he felt rested and strong and alone.

So he ate and afterward he made himself fresh again, washing his hands in a basin of perfumed water and brushing his hair, without haste, and all so slowly that Peony was half beside herself. “She will have gone, you will not see her!” she wailed. “Oh, when will there be so good a chance again!”

He teased her a while with his slowness and he pretended that he was still hungry and at last she seized the dishes and would not let him have more and he so relished laughing and playfulness again that he set off in good humor, and left Peony to take away the dishes.

Now Peony had reason enough out of love to do all she had done, but what happened next gave her hate for a reason, too.

After Rachel had spoken with Madame Ezra she went to the room that the Rabbi had used, having inquired of the way from the servants, and there she found Aaron still half asleep and barely stirring out of his bed. She told him that his father bade him come home at once, and as she did so she said to herself that it was a shame this was the Rabbi’s only son, this gangling splayfooted boy with his long narrow head and his thin crooked face and mean yellowish eyes.

Aaron heard his father’s command and he was too timid to say he would not come. Instead he asked, “Is Leah coming home, too?”

“Not today,” Rachel replied.

Then because this made him angry he muttered that his father always treated Leah softly, and he screamed at Rachel. “Get away, you old slut! Why do you stand there and stare at me?”

At this she grew angry and she said plainly, “As for me, I hope you do not come home. It will be hard work to cook food to keep you alive.”

With this she went away, and Aaron, left alone, began to pity himself and wept a little. He was loath to leave this rich house where the best of food had been given him for his father’s sake, and where no servant refused his bidding. He was angry to think he must go back to his narrow life and his lonely room. He loved neither his father nor Leah, but he feared them because they were good and he was not.

So pitying himself and angry at all, he rose, and in great sulkiness he dressed, and then he went out to the hall where the men ate, to look for his breakfast. As it chanced, his path crossed Peony’s at the court where the fish pool was. He saw her before she saw him, and she made a pretty sight in the morning sunshine. Her hair was shining black and her cheeks pink and she wore coat and trousers of pale yellow silk and she had thrust a white gardenia in her hair.

He looked right and left. No one was near. She walked with downcast head and smiled as she went. Then she felt his presence as she might have felt a snake near her foot. She lifted her head, startled, and at that moment he ran toward her, seized her in his arms, and pressed his mouth upon hers.

Never had any mouth been pressed upon Peony’s. Now she felt Aaron’s loathsome trembling hot mouth and she was faint and sick. Her head swirled and she screamed, but so great was her sickness that the scream was too small to hear. Then she felt his hand at her breast. The sickness passed, her strength returned with anger, and she fell upon Aaron with all the fury of her being. She scratched his face and tore his hair and jerked his ears and kicked him when he tried to run, and she held him by his hair with one hand and pushed his face with her other hand, clenched into a fist, all the time silent except for her hard breaths. She did not want anyone to know that the shame of his touch had fallen upon her.

At last, quite spent, she snarled at him, “Dare to touch me again, you cursed son of a hare, and I will kill you with the sword and you will die as your turtle ancestors died!”

Now Peony spoke of the sword that David had chosen out of the caravan and had hung on the wall in his own room. This sword had an exceedingly fine sharp edge, and at this moment Aaron believed that Peony could do what she said. She could not have chosen a keener threat. All the old fear and the weakness handed down to him from his fathers, and bound indeed into the Torah itself, now fell upon him. The old Rabbi was a strong man and he could enjoy the thunderings of Jehovah, but Aaron was a weak worm, and from his pitiful weak childhood he had feared and hated Jehovah, and he longed to be anything except what he was, the son of the Rabbi. When Peony called upon his ancestors he gathered his garments about him and slunk away.

Peony threw him a long look of scorn. Then she walked with firm swift footsteps to her room, and there she washed and scrubbed herself from head to foot and changed her garments and brushed her hair and perfumed herself and put on her best jewels and thrust a fresh flower in her hair. But her anger still burned in her. Now indeed she would rid the house of all who belonged to Aaron. When she was clean again she went to David’s rooms and waited, making the pretext of cleaning and dusting and mending a sandalwood fan he had broken.

Her cheeks were still pink with anger when in an hour or two David came back. She sat at the table, mending the delicate fan with a feather dipped in glue. She knew when she looked at him that he had seen Kueilan. He came in, debonair and satisfied with himself. When she saw him, she thought to herself, how smug a man looks who thinks himself beloved! But this she knew was the bitterness of her own hidden love, and she put it aside. She laid the fan carefully down and clothing herself in docility she rose to her feet. His eyes met hers in the old gaiety that she had so missed.

“Tell me,” she coaxed, knowing that he wanted to tell her every thing.

“What?” he teased.

“Did you see her?”

“Did you not tell me she would be there?” he replied.

“But she was there?”

“Suppose she wasn’t?”

To his surprise Peony suddenly began to sob.

“Now what is wrong with you?” he asked.

She shook her head and could not speak.

He came closer. “Tell me,” he urged. “Has someone hurt you?”

She nodded, still sobbing and wiping her eyes on her sleeves.

“My mother?” he asked angrily.

“It was—it was—oh, I cannot say his name!” She shook her head. She cried in a small heartbroken voice.

“A man!” David exclaimed.

She nodded. “The Rabbi’s son,” she whispered.

David stared at her for a second. Then he turned abruptly and strode toward the door of the court. But Peony ran after him. “No, no,” she cried. “Never let him know you know. It is too much shame for me.”

“What did he do?” David demanded.

“I—cannot tell you,” she faltered.

“He did not—” David began, and now the red was flaming in his cheeks.

“Oh, no, oh, no!” she cried. Then lest he think matters worse than they were, she laughed through her tears. “I beat him,” she confessed. “I took him by the hair and—and I smacked his face.”

David laughed with fierce pleasure. “I wish I had seen you! Did you bruise him, Peony? Let me go and see!”

“No, wait,” she coaxed. “Please, what I say is true. He did—he did put his mouth on mine—”

“Curse his mother!” David said suddenly.

Peony laid the little forefinger of her right hand across his lips, and tears brimmed her beautiful eyes. “I am defiled,” she whispered.

How could David refuse her comfort? He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked at her soft red lips, and she let her fingers slide away and she said in the softest voice, “Touch my lips—and make them clean!”

She swayed a little toward him, and he bent his head, trying to laugh and make a play of it, and he bent his head still lower until indeed his lips were upon hers. Never had his lips touched a woman’s mouth. This was only Peony, only his little same Peony whom he knew so well, but suddenly her lips were sweet and strange.

She drew back and her voice was quick and clear. “Thank you,” she said daintily. “Now I can forget. Tell me, Young Master, did you truly see the pretty third daughter of Kung?”

So swift was her change that he scarcely knew how to speak. All was confusion in him. The sweet new warmth that Peony had called up in him she now turned swiftly toward another. Without knowing that he was being stirred, beguiled, led to do what Peony wanted, he let his mind go back to the temple, and to the moment when he had been hidden behind the great Guardian God of the West. He saw Kueilan come in, the embroidered edge of her long skirt of soft apple-green silk sweeping the tiled floor. An old serving woman held her hand, and beside the stout strong figure the young girl had looked like a little willow tree in spring. Then he remembered her face.